[Spoilers] It's time to play the music

[taotao]

Anyone got any thoughts on how to get the most out of CRE?

Actually, I believe you shouldn't focus too much on being creative at the start (first few cities). Civ is always going to be a snowballs game. You want to expand and you want to do it fast. If that means sharing food (it very often does) then so be it.

5t to pop borders doesn't sound like much, but don't get complacent.
Eg. don't ever put yourself in the situation where you found a city working, say a forest grassland, have your worker putting down roads or something and only after pops start farming your food. That would be 10t of a big ol' nothing.
Otoh, it might be ok finishing that pasture on t7 with two workers if those first turns we're used working a hammer tile for a granary, workboat or similar.

Basically just use the land...

Speaking of which, 234 tiles per player. That is a lot! I'm not expecting the land to be quite as good as we've often seen lately [as Ceiliazul talked about having rolled lots and lots of maps (and non-torusland mapscripts tend to be less lush)], but the initial rate of expansion will probably be determined by your own civ knowledge and engagement and not so much by aggressive neighbours. (That said, one of the advantages of cre is that you should have better possibilities of planting border cities on hills to not look as appetizing).

The highlighted tile looks like it gets four floodplains and shares the wheat, so it may be a good place to move the capital to at some point since TheSwedishChef is likely to be a hammer-city rather than a commerce city.

Might be a decent commerce 2nd(??) city, but I don't think it'll have future capital promise. Floodplains are good, but it has 4 plains hills and 3(?) desert tiles. That leaves hardly any cottageable land apart from the fp's (and not even enough food to work all hills).

[taotao]

Do you get cheap libraries in this version of the mod? If yes, it makes early academy a more viable and interesting play. Unfortunately at least your capital does not really look like a beatiful bureaucracy monster.. Maybe an early key bulb? Although I can't think of anything particularly amazing..

Sadly you don't get cheap libraries here, so cre mostly just is about the quicker border pops...

[ipecac]

Anyone got any thoughts on how to get the most out of CRE?

If there are any good tiles in third ring of capital your second city can use them.

[Haram]

Anyone got any thoughts on how to get the most out of CRE?

Use the settling flexibility to design highly specialized, efficient empire.

[ipecac]

It's also an excuse to discover Drama early and spread it around

Seriously though, you can probably skip CoL for some time while relying on Zigs, Theaters and normal-priced Libraries for spec slots.

[ipecac]

@OH:

Soooo...


PB30 spoiler

you may outlast me

[Old Harry]

Anyone got any thoughts on how to get the most out of CRE?

Actually, I believe you shouldn't focus too much on being creative at the start (first few cities). Civ is always going to be a snowballs game. You want to expand and you want to do it fast. If that means sharing food (it very often does) then so be it.

Yeah. I totally agree with this.

5t to pop borders doesn't sound like much, but don't get complacent.
Eg. don't ever put yourself in the situation where you found a city working, say a forest grassland, have your worker putting down roads or something and only after pops start farming your food. That would be 10t of a big ol' nothing.
Otoh, it might be ok finishing that pasture on t7 with two workers if those first turns we're used working a hammer tile for a granary, workboat or similar.

And this. It's acceptable to work a forest or something for a turn or two, but after that you should always have improved tiles to work (but never too many improved tiles), CRE or not.

The highlighted tile looks like it gets four floodplains and shares the wheat, so it may be a good place to move the capital to at some point since TheSwedishChef is likely to be a hammer-city rather than a commerce city.

Might be a decent commerce 2nd(??) city, but I don't think it'll have future capital promise. Floodplains are good, but it has 4 plains hills and 3(?) desert tiles. That leaves hardly any cottageable land apart from the fp's (and not even enough food to work all hills).

As you said though, I don't think the quality of land is going to be amazing here so I may have to weigh up competing sub-optimal locations... TheSwedishChef can be +10 food after calendar but only has space for five or six cottages, which I don't think is enough. There may be a better commerce cap further SE, time will tell.

Anyone got any thoughts on how to get the most out of CRE?

If there are any good tiles in third ring of capital your second city can use them.

And third and fourth cities! (Four cities by t50 - you heard it here first!)

Anyone got any thoughts on how to get the most out of CRE?

Use the settling flexibility to design highly specialized, efficient empire.

This I really like - I'm a sucker for city specialisation anyway so being able to think really long-term at the dotmapping stage will be fun - although it'll probably suck up days! Just let my scout survive for a while... Are bears str3 in this version of the mod?

It's also an excuse to discover Drama early and spread it around

Seriously though, you can probably skip CoL for some time while relying on Zigs, Theaters and normal-priced Libraries for spec slots.

I'll see what I can do!

I wonder if currency becomes less important too? The last few RBmod games we've beelined Alphabet to get open borders and build wealth and get the discount on currency. If the maintenance is lower on new cities anyway then Calendar or the Asthetics line or Iron Working could be the next option.

I think I want Pottery then Priesthood before AH or Maths, but I suspect that rules me out of grabbing the Oracle. Getting Priesthood before Pottery would give more chance of a religion and/or Oracle, but it's not a race I want to come a close second in...

Anyhoo, I played t2 on my crappy laptop that can't take pictures and TBS finally settled (is it a super-cap? ), I uncovered a couple more floodplains and I'm looking forward to next turn's border pop...

Oh and Ipecac at spoilers (hadn't realised how annoying they are!)

[ipecac]

Oh and Ipecac at spoilers (hadn't realised how annoying they are!)

But yeah, PB30 never happened.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I meant to respond to the creative trait question. I think taotao has a better articulation for how to be effective with creative than Krill's explanation. Civ is all about working tiles. Whichever route leads you to working the most tiles at the earliest stage will, with few exceptions, serve you well. Spreading cities wide to grab new resources is great because it has a multiplicitive effect on the number of new tiles you can work (1 new luxury for 10 cities = 10 new tiles available to work under optimized circumstances) and this is obviously important. But if your wide dotmap abhors food sharing then your expansion will be slower than it could have been and this leads to working fewer tiles overall for a longer period of time, which weakens your play. You have to be able to strike a balance between these competing interests. Narrower city placement also supports better worker efficiency giving a possibility of getting by with less workers, so more hammers may be invested in settlers and comparatively fewer in workers. Food sharing in this setup allows for more efficient whip cycles in overlapping cities, necessitating even fewer worker turns required to get by. If you go too wide too soon these efficiencies start to break down.

My two cents. I had a good look at the trait in pb18. Of greater utility by far than being creative traited is getting creative in sandbox runs and wringing every possible benefit from your start for the first 50 turns at minimum.

Good luck!

[ipecac]

I wonder if currency becomes less important too? The last few RBmod games we've beelined Alphabet to get open borders and build wealth and get the discount on currency. If the maintenance is lower on new cities anyway then Calendar or the Asthetics line or Iron Working could be the next option.

I can't keep track of all the changes. Is this a version with workshops +++? If so maybe you could do without many cottages and Currency and go for Great Library.