Gavagai and the gods of underground

[Gavagai]

Empty post.

[Gavagai]

My start.

[Gavagai]

Want to try Gandhi...

[Gavagai]

Gave this start a thought. I have three food resources, each of them requires different tech, so tech schedule would be pretty tight at start. So, starting techs are pretty important. I will need fishing or agri in my initial pair or I won't be able to research AH in time. Need to choose fishing as it is more expansive. The other tech can be mining or agri, once again, I choose more expansive mining.
Fishing/Mining it is. There are four such civs: Portugal, England, Rome, Carthage. Of those Rome is interesting. I want to try this new praet (7 str. starred sword) and I do need a unit to shield me from attacks in classical age.

[Gavagai]

That's interesting. Apparently the game has started quite a few hours ago as it has a page on civstats and people are alre logging in. But I don't see any kind of announcement on the forum and didn't even get a PM about it. How all these guys who log in even now an IP?
I feel that I'm legt out...

EDIT: right after I wrote it I saw a PM from Suttree. Also, I found a tech thread hiding among spoiler threads.

[Gavagai]

What is this? A report! From Gavagai, of all people... Yeah, it's been a while after I wrote the previous one...



This is my land at T37. My scout wasn't Hunting-boosted and died early, hence my awareness of neighborhood is pretty limited. Nevertheless, there is something to think about...
The land around is really rich and this actually, puts me against difficult choices. My initial game-plan, of course, revolved around getting Pyramids; however, Pyramids is 500 hammers investment and without stone or industrious they almost never worth it, unless you have a some kind of a shortcut. Fortunately, philosophical trait not only synergises with Pyramids but also provides the shortcut we want: Oracle -> MC -> Forge -> GE. That was the path I was thinking about earlier.
However, the Oracle + a Forge are by themselves 270 hammers investment which should be done much earlier than if you are just going to build Pyramids straight up. And if you have land like this you want to settle it ASAP and this factor makes alternative cost of the Oracle and a Forge really high. Also, MC is cheap in this mod which makes it by itself an unattractive target for the Oracle.
My solution is to skip the Oracle and just research MC manually after I pick up all essential early techs. This way I would also delay building a Forge which would make this investment less painful. Of course, it would also delay rushing Mids (I think, I should be able to do it by about T90) but if I need to build them earlier, than they just not worth it.
This plan has other costs which are less obvious:
1) I will significantly delay all other GPs I would want to generate, in particularly, I will need to bypass any kind of early scientist play. Well, this means no early Academy / free Mathematics for me. I can live without both, especially given that early Academy is powerful only with a fin leader.
2) I will delay Caste System. Well, would I be really able to leverage it early? I don't think so.
3) I will completely give up any kind of early religion. This is, actually, the most serious drawback. If I want to run Representation with lots of specialists, happiness will quickly become a major constraint and religion will be very important. The earliest one I can reasonably expect to take is Taoism which would come pretty late. I considered researching Meditation before going for MC but ultimately decided against it: we have two civs with Mysticism in this game, this is just too risky.

[Gavagai]

Update time!



Five cities, sixth will be settled in the north next turn.

Met Gawdzak in the South some time ago:



He is considerably better than me im all demos and I expect him to claim city sign near the Corn before I'm ready to move there myself. Also, a couple turns ago Zanth's woody2 warrior came to my borders. They both have six cities.



The Pyramids plan is set in motion. ETA for Engineer is T87, ETA for the Pyramids, respectively, is T88.



My demos suck. This is most probably because I put my third and fourth cities in medicre spots to claim Ivory and Copper. Probably it wasn't the right call...

[Gavagai]

Gawdzak, you really want to settle where your worker stands, don't you? Because if you settle 1N or 1NE, I'd be really unhappy. And in a couple turns I will have a total of 2 spears, 3 axes, an archer and a warrior here, are you sure that you want to deal with that. Don't you ever screw with my dotmap, damn neighbors...

[Gavagai]

To be frank, I'm quite puzzled by this demos. I have no complaints about my land so far and doing a decent job by my own inner standards. However, "decent job" keeps me a little below average while in past games it was enough to put me into leaders pack. Can't say I understand what's going on here. Either I'm missing something or the level of competition in this game is unusually high.
I'm not particularly worried about GNP (not my focus in this game, as I'm going to run specialist economy) or MFG (not an important stat this early) but food really shouldn't be that bad.

(And yes, forgot to report: Gawdzak got this sheep city and covered it with two axes and two chariots. I decided that I'm not in a position to pick up this fight. Btw, Gawdzak has 9 cities, this is by T82. I will have 9 by T88 and in any other game I would consider it an excellent perfomance. But it appears that in this game this is just not good enough.)

[Gavagai]

Coinflip chance on Mids next turn... Also, I'll be adding two more cities.