My thoughts are still pretty scattered, but I’ll try to organize them a bit here. I’ve been chatting a bit with Commodore about this here and there, and I’m starting to narrow in on what I want here. Here’s a basic list of things I’m starting to feel confident about.
- Creative is a must-pick. The culture is seriously important on Australia, and anyone who goes without will feel the squeeze early and often. The +2 culture puts you way ahead early, and the cheap libraries and theaters allows you to more easily pile it on later.
- Civilization is probably the least important of the 3 choices. I haven’t gone through the RtR changelog for civ just yet, so I may change my mind, but my feeling so far is we can make a lot of these work, whereas the leader and starting choices are more scarce.
- Philosophical sounds like a good possible trait pairing for Creative. That allows us a blazing fast Academy and easy bulbs, which would make Pericles the easy early tech leader. Charismatic is another strong interest of mine because our capitals are likely to grow as tall as possible, plus the promotion bonus is obviously nice.
- Financial and Industrious are interesting, but seem less so. Financial is pretty much because we’ll be working a lot of coast, and therefore we get commerce that way. PHI-fueled Great person bulbs sounds straight up better than on a raw science basis though. Industrious just gets a boost due to the culture and therefore map control.
- I’m starting to lean towards Starting Location 4 (Southwest, brown). I think it’s nearly as good as the Southeast spot, but with better expansion prospects. The northern capitals are weaker, but they have better island prospects. I’m having a hard time convincing myself that that’s a good tradeoff. I think the vast majority of output in this game will come from Bureaucaps, so pick a good one and worry about the rest later. Not totally certain I’m correct, but that’s where I’m leaning.
- 4th in turn order means we’re less likely to win settling races. That needs to be considered. I think that also weakens the northern spots, because the middle fish is the most obvious settling race on the map.