RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Speaker]

Turn 15: Warrior moved SW onto the forest. Bronze Working comes in, revealing river copper W-W from the Sheep hill. Swap tech over to Agriculture. Greece's scout has finally found our capital, and is sitting on the forest hill N-N-N from our capital.

[Sullla]

That copper's a bit inconveniently placed, isn't it? I'll wait until we can move the warrior SW onto the hill next turn before making any further settling comments. Maybe we'll be lucky and spot another food bonus. (Grassland copper is a sign of a non-natural resource though. Hmmm.)

Speaker, did you agree with the rough outline for early worker action I outlined a couple pages back in this thread? That would have the worker moving east and chopping the forest there to start. Just want to make sure we're in agreement on this since the first worker completes next turn.

We finally got our first score increase this turn, a modest 6 points for finishing Bronze Working. We remain in last place in score, and will be there for some time to come! We're ranked in second in Soldier points now, thanks to the 8k that come with BW, so that may make us look a little more intimidating to Jowy and Yaz when they can see our bar graphs in a few turns. Obviously, this is mostly an illusion.

Score increases also from tech research on the part of DMOC's team and sunrise's team. There's a total of 2k increase in Soldier count this turn, which means one of these teams researched something worth 2k and the other didn't. Now this would be guesswork, except that DMOC's team was listed at 2k in the "Worst Rival" category last turn, and now the worst rival is at 4k count, so we can deduce that DMOC and Nakor researched Mining tech. Because it took 6t and not 5t to research their tech, sunrise would be a good candidate for Mining as well, but that can't be right or there would have been a bigger increase in Soldier count. So the only possible option for sunrise becomes Fishing tech, which does also make sense. (There is a slight chance that sunrise researched Mining and another tech had a warrior killed by a barb at the same time, but this has pretty low odds of being true.)

Not one team has gone for a religion yet, and no one shows any signs of doing so! Folks are getting too smart for us.

[Krill]

That copper's a bit inconveniently placed, isn't it?

What was it you said when I commented on the jungle in the SANCTA start? :neenernee

[Speaker]

Copper does occur naturally on grassland. I have no idea if it was placed in that spot by the mapmakers or not....but we can't say it was for sure, unless Krill admits it.

I agree mostly with your plan on worker actions. The forest directly E of our capital is on the river (I think), and would make a great first chop. Where I might suggest a change, is what to do with the 1 free turn from our 2nd worker. I don't think we'll need two mined hills this early. I don't envision a scenario where we'll work them both, as we'd rather work cottages. But we don't have pottery or even the wheel yet. So what else could we do with that worker? Maybe put 1 turn of chopping into the forest SW of the capital?

Assuming our tech path of Agriculture (60 beakers) - Animal Husbandry (100 beakers) - Wheel (60 beakers) - Pottery (80 beakers)....can you diagram which turn we'll complete each tech? Might it be better to do Agriculture - Wheel - Pottery - Animal? That will get us through the path faster, since we'll be able to work some cottages to speed up the most expensive tech of the path, Animal Husbandry.

Ottomans have such an advantage here. Starting with Agriculture and the Wheel, they can research pottery right from the start, build a worker first, farm their grain, and then put up a cottage while building a warrior to grow. Then Mining-Bronze Working will take far less time, and they can chop out a 2nd worker at size 2. Starting techs are definitely a subtle, but crucial metagame within themself.

[Dr. Nomadic]

Sorry to make too many comments, but:

It seems that going purely by starting techs, the Chinese are the best civilization here. Of course, then their UU and UB don't bring much to the table, so...whatever.

And let's see...5 civs start with agriculture and the wheel, and out of them 3 have ancient age UUs and two have musket UUs. Funny world.

Oh yeah Sulla, your planning is just all too good. I'm not even going to be playing a particular lot of Civ4, but I also enjoy planning, just not on as grand a scale.

[Speaker]

The three best starting techs (in the majority of cases) are Agriculture, the Wheel, and Mining. You could make an argument for Fishing on some maps (especially Islands or Archipelago or something similar). China, Babylon, Egypt, Ottomans, etc. Egypt and Ottomans are especially strong given their combination of UU, UB, and traits. Not that the Egyptian UB is great, but their UU is amazing. Ottomans are mostly the opposite. Babylon's UB is pretty strong also, since extra health is always nice, but their UU is fairly weak. You pretty much nailed it on China though. Their UB is only good for culture victories, and their UU is just a defensive unit, and doesn't stand up well to Horse Archers or Knights.

[Krill]

Didn't MDR used to have a nice strat for wrecking teams on medi IS with China? That must be going back a few years though

/off topic

[Dr. Nomadic]

I have fond memories of exploiting the pavilion in my last completed game on Warlords. Flipping big Viking cities, and then building spaceship parts in them. Now THAT was truly awesome. I think I had a good deal of fun in the early going thanks to the starting techs, and then later on I founded christianity and spread it to 3 nations to become friends. Well, I don't remember the "I founded" part, but it was certainly Christianity. Also Wang Kon got poorly shafted, only getting 4 cities out before all the land was taken (poor Korea!), and then us Christians all went and crusaded against the heathen Spanish, Zulu, and Koreans. The former two became vassals, but the latter exited the game! Then, sometime in the modern age, Frederick converted from Christianity to Taoism, so I got my allies Ragnar and Peter (BTW I still remember that Peter discovered astronomy on the same turn as I launched my Apollo Program! And this was on noble, honest!) to go and rough him up, and then Ragnar or Peter (forget exactly who) brought me into the war, and I took my small army and made some gains, including helping the Russians capture Berlin (fooling around with copters, too)! Funny thing is Fred completed his AP beforehand, and was building casings before the war broke out. Also the Vikings (who were badly squeezed for most of the game, they also had some cities flip to me) took a city (which had the Kremlin in it, argh), and then I think I was still at war for the rest of the game. I also rushed the Three Gorges Dam in Beijing on the last turn just for silliness.

Sorry for the big post. BTW it seems that financial leaders never do well in my games. In my first Warlords game NONE were there, in my second Wang and Ragnar failed to get much territory in the expansion phase, in my first BtS game Ragnar got Praetorian rushed by me and Willem was taken out by a joint-strike force (when he was the only one in the modern age, gah!), and then in my last game Pacal got diplomatically isolated. Here I just felt like talking about my fond moments as China. Playing as an expansive leader was cool too.

[Speaker]

Didn't MDR used to have a nice strat for wrecking teams on medi IS with China? That must be going back a few years though

/off topic

Not that I remember, and I played MDR almost every CCC in medieval. Recently, RUS has created this strategy combining Samurai, Cho-ko-Nus, and Landsknechts....which sounds nasty, but Catapults and Horse Archers/Knights make mincemeat out of it, since they avoid the first strikes. Maybe use a few War Elephants to soften up the Landsnechts first. If you have 10 Knights and 20 HA, you can just wreck that stack so easily. If you have Cataphracts, well, lol.

[Jabah]

That copper's a bit inconveniently placed, isn't it? .

While it is not perfect, it will still fit nicely in the city you wanted (NE of the one in the initial screenshot). you will have gold, sheep, cow and copper in the BFC. Is it not enough ressource for your second city ?
Of course, you need to pop borders, but just for the gold, you wanted that anyway (plus considering the popularity of religion right now, you could still have that option)

If you don't want to pop border, you could just settle where your warrior is (if you are on the forrest SW of sheep) , which is decent enough right now (edit you also gain a sugar according to your sshot) and hope there is some food around gold (and that your neighbours are accepting that settling N of gold is a fair border agrement ... )