[SPOILERS] naufragar and Rusten get nickel-and-dimed

[Rusten]

The civ illuminati can only hold back Alex of Japan for so long. As the prophecy states; the coming of The One will herald the destruction of the meta and free us from the oppression set by knight-beelining gamebots. Once The One is picked and the game is launched he will have the power to forever change the game.

[shallow_thought]

The civ illuminati can only hold back Alex of Japan for so long. As the prophecy states; the coming of The One will herald the destruction of the meta and free us from the oppression set by knight-beelining gamebots. Once The One is picked and the game is launched he will have the power to forever change the game.

But I've only just learned how to beeline knights. Kind of. Nooo!

[naufragar]

Are you saying I can beeline knights?

I'm saying, when you're ready, you won't have to.

[naufragar]

And we're off! Password is sam, in case you want to look around. I'll add it to the first post.

Here's the result of our founding and scout move:



Almost certainly the land ends in the north. Kills me to double up scouting, but I think I'll still check it just in case there's fish or what have you.

I've started production on a work boat. We're working the flood plains and tech is set for mining. I'll make a written plan, because a couple times in PB41 I screwed up micro that I had in my head. The plan is simple so far though: Flood Plains to size 2, starve back down to 0 food in box with max hammers. Start worker after boat. Boat goes to the fish. I'll write it all down, nevertheless.

Rusten, what have you tempted me into:



In case we had doubts, flying camera confirms land two tiles west of the fish..  

More interesting is that there's land west-south-west of us.



And for good measure, here's the south. (I didn't check the north, I think.)


Two things to point out in the above picture: 1) jungle and it's very close.    2) It looks like that peak has a jungle tile on it? If so, thanks Commodore. Only you can prevent global warming.

I took demos but no point posting them until everyone has played. Superdeath and Mr. Cairo played before me. The rival best land area was 8k, so starts aren't exactly identical, but I'd bet quite a bit that everyone is coastal.

In spoilers, I've put settings. Everything looks right to me. We are Alex of Japan, and we're starting with Fishing/Wheel.

One thing that jumps out at me is that this map is candidate 6. This obviously means that Commodore rolled 5 maps and was getting so frustrated that he decided to pick the next one, balance be damned. Unless it's a reference to Patrick McGoohan's character in the Prisoner. This reminds me that I forgot to rename the cap.    Next turn. The tech thread activity caught me right in the middle of a spy thriller and I simply must know how it ends.

Edit: Unnecessary speculation but the tree types and the presence of jungle right to our south and our west makes me think we're on the equator. Further Edit: But there's tundra? Never mind me.

[Rusten]

Cheers! Excellent camera work! Pleased to see that the fish can be picked up by a real city and not just a 1-tile fishing village.

Two things to point out in the above picture: 1) jungle and it's very close.

On the bright side having both tundra and jungle means lots of possible luxury spawns, so lets hope Commodore indeed got tired of balancing and left them all in there for us. Would like some early whale and/or furs. Happiness is a major concern and we will want to settle accordingly.

I fully agree with finishing scouting the northern peninsula. NW-NW next turn and then most likely NE [end of peninsula] SE.

[naufragar]

On the bright side having both tundra and jungle means lots of possible luxury spawns.

I think we're pretty happy about turn 1 scout moves.

Demos in the spoiler. Nothing interesting I think.

Edit: Demos reading is fun for me even if its benefits are minimal. I think Superdeath is going Bronze Working first as top GNP. He is Exp/Cre with Agri/Mining, so he likely is working a hammer tile instead of a flood plains (-1c from us), is Creative (+2), and is working a tech with a pre req (so 10c*0.2, for +2 on us). Is this useful? Of course not. But nifty.

[Rusten]

Most excellent! If I can keep up such accurate predictions this game will be a breeze! Whale 1E of furs?

No real need to debate the settling spot until we scout further, but the obvious candidates are 3N of capital (site A) and 1SW of furs (site B).
Site A looks better as it has food immediately. Downside is that the furs need culture before being available, so if we elect for this over site B we need the city sooner than otherwise. I don't see that as an issue as it will be a great early booster with FP cottage, clam and grass hill mine.
We can pick up the fish with a good city on the other landmass, but this does force our hand a bit. I find it likely that it's on a different landmass and requires sailing based on the southern curvatures, but it's not certain. Either way I see sailing as a bigger priority now than on T0. It would be real nice to get an early 2 commerce trade route city that also has double fish.

Interesting that so many civs only have 1 water tile in the first ring. It'll be interesting to see the changes when the borders pop. It's likely we're on the "small" part. I'd have no complaints about that given our plans for the game.

[naufragar]

Looks like there's lots of land in the fog, which is nice.



For scouting, I'm thinking about going to the grassland hill, going 1SE, and then going North East and making a circle down to our south.


Site B is a better city site since it picks up its own food, and as you say it doesn't force us to plant on that desert hill out west. I just don't see how we can make it work in a reasonable time. It has no good tiles first ring; it doesn't even have forests to chop for granary/culture. Site A on the other hand lets us be much more efficient with worker turns plus it's super easy to found without worrying about barbs. I still need to work on micro. Will do that tonight. I really like how easy Site A would be to support. (But obviously, there's going to be a gold, pigs, and ivory spot just to our east.    )

[Rusten]

Agree with suggested scouting moves.

FWIW I'd be surprised if the spot 3N is our 2nd city. There's a big lack of power tiles for the early game and a single pig tile is already much better regardless of what else is in the fog. I hope we can find something better, but at least it's a back-up. And as you said, completely safe from barbarians. Once our capital gets the first ring there's only the 1 tile in fog, and it'll probably spawn a harmless wolf if anything at all. It will make for a great 4th or 5th city as it's immediately profitable, just not very productive from the get-go. We want that illusive 6F tile for first settler.

edit: Then again, seeing as we're going for a commerce opening (early MC) it's not completely unheard of to settle it 2nd. Both the clam and early FP cottage will make a difference. Still, I'd rather not settle it until at least 3rd. The extra trade route is big too, but we might have that anyway thanks to the river. The 2nd city helps out quite a bit with early settling, so +6 as opposed to +4 on size 1 is a big deal.

[naufragar]

Liking the map:



The sheep's no pig, but neither is it a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. I know we had both thought about that desert hill. Trade route via river, couple flood plains of its own plus shared cottages, and now food? And the sheep's on the river. Lovely.

This turn pace is ridiculously quick. I'm happy, so long as I can keep up. These are turn 4 demos, but they're unchanged from turn 3.



The creative civs got a lot of land. Looks like 2(ish) got all land tiles second ring and 1(ish) got 11. The Creative players for reference are MSCC (Kublai Khan), Superdeath (Suryavarman), Mr. Cairo (Willem of Orange). Looks like not everybody got double seafood start.

I can't really understand the dip in rival MfG average and rise in rival average Crop. I mean, yeah, obviously people switched to working the 4 yield tile in their second ring. What I can't understand is why MfG went down. Only Superdeath is Expansive. We know from GNP that people likely all had floodplains turn 0. I don't know; I'm missing something somewhere. Edit: I guess Superdeath at least may have switched from a 1f/2h tile to a 4f/1c.