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Japper's Vindlandsaga

Norway does sound like an interesting pick, especially if the map ends up with each player on their own small island as opposed to divided 3 and 3 on two "continent" islands.

Here are a couple general thoughts on the starting 25 turns based on what I have seen in the previous PBEM games, and observations from single player:

• I think that the barbarians appear more scary that than they actually are (especially in the early game). After the the lack of barbarians in Epic 3 I was curious about how effective the barbarians could be ... well, I did a test game on Prince difficulty, deleted the starting warrior, settled the starting settler, and just kept hitting SHIFT+ENTER to end each turn immediately. After 130 turns the city was not attacked by barbarians once! Barbarians were milling around and occasionally entering and leaving borders, but never attacked! It seems that barbarians are only a threat to units (or pillaging), which means that until you have a builder or improvements to protect they can be completely ignored. I'm going to run a test Norway game since I have never played them and see what happens if I ignore attacking barbarians in actual normal play.

• Builder first seems to be an underwhelming start for a couple reason. (1) the builder and the subsequent improvements are vulnerable to early barbarian aggression and potential snipes and pillaging by other players. Without a builder to protect, your first military can be dedicated to exploring and meeting city states. (2) Most improvements are low-yield resulting in long payback time for the investment. The only situation where the improvements provide decent payback is when there are 3 production improvement possible (mines/pastures/quaries) and only when all will be worked (i.e. no point mining a bare hill when you can already work a forest hill). The camp/plantation 1g payback is worthless, and farms aren't much better since you need the production early and don't need the irrigation boost until later. Another problem with farms is that each additional pop costs about 10 more food than the previous pop [15, 24, 34, 44, 55, 66]. Therefore marginal growing resulting from the farm gets worse with each pop growth.

• Scout first - assuming 2/2 yield on the first worked tile for 5 cpt (still getting used to calling them cogs rather than hammers lol), scout completes 2 turns faster than warrior and gets 1 additional movement. On an islands map, additional movement is likely of less value because you will run out of land on your starting island quicker. Even in the Pangaea PBEM games the combined starting scouts from all players only made a couple of additional first-to-meet contacts with city states. After the initial couple of contacts and early scouting, his snowball value decreases rapidly. He also does not fare well in barb combat, making it necessary to build a warrior anyway for escorting the first settler and defending improvements from barb pillaging.

• Slinger first - garbage on defense, once it loses 50% health it has 0 strength and automatically dies to the next attack. Doesn't do enough damage to kill barbs single-handed. Even getting in the first shot isn't enough unless sitting on very defensive terrain. One turn slower than scout, one turn quicker than warrior, worse at scouting, worse as settler escort. Worst of the options for first-turn build in my opinion.

• Warrior first - slightly slower to get out than a scout, but able escort the first settler and able to deal with any barbs that show up. 2 movement is enough to scout potential 2nd city locations and nearby city states in the opposite direction from the starting warrior.

tl;dr I believe earlier settler to be of more value than early builder. To that end, I like starting build order Warrior > Settler > Builder. One warrior can loop around to escort the settler while the 2nd can loop back around the time that the builder completes. Settler out around T18-20 depending on tiles in capital's first ring, Worker out 6-ish turns after settler.

The builder completes right about the time that culture research is ready for Craftsmanship boost, or can swap to Foreign Trade for a couple turns if you happen to find a culture city state that boosts your culture rate. Another problem with builder first is often the 3rd improvement for Craftsmanship won't even be useful this early. The capital will often work a forest hill + 2 improved tiles at size 3, so the option is to either build an improvement for the boost that won't be worked or wait until the 2nd city is complete (long after culture research would be waiting for the boost). With Settler > Builder you can put down 2 improvements at the capital and immediately proceed to put the 3rd down at the 2nd city.

After Warrior > Settler > Builder you have the flexibility to do some military if needed or wait until Agoge completes in 5-6 turns, slot in a scout for exploring, possibly sink some cogs into a monument or granary while waiting for the Agoge, or even sink the hammers into another settler. Probably would want another warrior as soon as Agoge is available, but might go halfway on a settler. By this time you  have enough gold to purchase a warrior if desperately needed, or wait a few more turns and maybe purchase a monument at the 2nd city.

Anyway, this is what I have been mulling over after watching the starts in the first couple of PBEM's
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Hmm interesting,

I was actually thinking going slinger1 (for extra scouting+Archery Eureka*)-builder (Craftmanship+other Inspirations and Eurekas)-slinger2-slinger3 (so we have three archers as soon as we hit archery) and then switch to pumping settlers like they're going out of style, preferably with Early Empire bonus to production (usually unlocked around the time you build your second settler). I've lately even experimented with an additional worker after slinger2, it seems to even out in the end due to extra housing and improvements getting the settlers out faster, losing pop at only 3 is far more noticable than it is with 5-7 pop. We're also not likely to be in a desperate race to settle since we probably have an island to ourselves initially.

*I've found early Archery essential to quickly drive out the Barbarians and deal with rushes, now granted rushes aren't as likely on this map type but early coastal aggresion with boats can be stopped with garrisoned archers too. Best case scenario there is a nearby city state to take over. I agree slingers are pathetic but with clever positioning and promote-heals they're the foundation for a strong early game army.

Scout first is hot garbage on our settings, I've tried a few starts and the scout saves a few turns initial exploration but he can't be upgraded untill way to late to matter, Galley's (or in our case Longships) are were it's at in terms of scouting on Island Plates.

I agree on not going worker first, he won't have anything to build anyways before we get mining/AH/etc.

Here is what I broughtly had in mind for the "early" game (say, first 50-100 turns, have to sim out some more games before it get's any more precise) beyond the initial turns:

We try to get at least one Holy Site out for a religion, and the State Workforce Eureka, with Feed the World we can get some nice synergy for our Stave Churches.

We kick out two longboats for our exploration, and two harbors to get some trade routes and the Eureka for Cartography (allowing us to upgrade our longships to the much better Caravels which retain the ability to pillage coastal tiles ofc.). We use our longships to get some raiding in on a player near us, or at least try and cap a CS.

Religion and boats synergize nicely tech-tree wise, and we fully utilize our nations abilities (except for zerks, but they suck alright )

Prioritizing  the naval techpath can get you to Frigates (a 55 RS Unit) in 5 techs (seriously look it up ingame, it's madness! crazyeye ) and about a hundred turns! In comparison: that's the time most people get swordsman and possibly knights. Did I mention they also don't take a penalty towards city attacks and can be upgraded into from cheap quadrimes?
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I have been slotting in the slinger right after the Warrior > Settler > Builder sequence to get the Archery eureka. The timing usually works OK since I usually go Mining + Animal husbandry first before Pottery, then research Archery until slightly below 50% until I get 3 slingers for archer upgrades and the future (Machinery??) eureka.

PBEM 3 spoiler:
I saw this interesting thought over in Ichabod's thread. Even with just Agoge and not God of the Forge, the cost difference is only 10 hammers, and it might be better to forego a 3rd early slinger and just stick with 1 or 2 (for the eureka) in favor of maybe an earlier Monument or Granary, and quicker upgrade of the first 1-2 archers.
(July 5th, 2017, 09:50)Ichabod Wrote: We don't need to gold upgrade all our archers, we can slow build them too. Slinger is 35h, archer 50h. We have 75% bonus on both, so it's not that much in actual hammer cost.

(July 5th, 2017, 15:26)pindicator Wrote: When you explain it like that, upgrading archers doesn't make a lot of sense lol

One thing I noticed playing a test Islands map is that on a snakey continent the increased number of choke points made it easier to fend off early barbs.

I also noticed that the Norway ability to ignore additional embarking costs might be of more value that I first thought! I didn't get to Ship Building to see the effect on regular units, but with Sailing the workers could some of the rough terrain between cities by just moving through the water instead. This cut off a turn here and there in getting improvements up.With military units it will enable quicker reinforcement of adjacent islands, or feint attack on one island and re-embark and land on another island while our rival is stuck wasting a turn to embark and disembark. Something to think more about once the game is a few dozen turns along.

I also had a coastal non-freshwater start in my test game, and the early settler benefit was even more pronounced due to the housing penalty to food at size 3. Food surplus essentially became a wasted resource beyond size 2 until the granary was built.
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(July 8th, 2017, 14:00)Japper007 Wrote: Religion and boats synergize nicely tech-tree wise, and we fully utilize our nations abilities (except for zerks, but they suck alright )

Prioritizing  the naval techpath can get you to Frigates (a 55 RS Unit) in 5 techs (seriously look it up ingame, it's madness! crazyeye ) and about a hundred turns! In comparison: that's the time most people get swordsman and possibly knights. Did I mention they also don't take a penalty towards city attacks and can be upgraded into from cheap quadrimes?

I didn't realize that Frigates were that close. The tech are still pretty expensive though, but since naval melee can attack cities that might be a valid alternative to focusing on land military tech. On the other hand, early Cartography negates one of the Norwegian abilities to enter ocean earlier ... plus quasi-amphibious attacks by land units are possible with the ability to ignore disembarking costs, thus increasing the value of land units for you on a water map.
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I didnt really mean going Frigates at the expense of everything else, it seems quite a risky bee-line, I meant more as a "focus" for our techpath.
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Just had an interesting test game where I went full-bore towards Square Rigging, it is only slightly slower than expected, but still blindingly fast! jive

Reached Carthography on turn 94 (that means I hit the Renaissance in 550 BC, before Greek philosophy was even a thing IRL crazyeye ), I had only about 20 science at this point but getting the two harbors (which were still very cheap at this point, due to not having many total researches, which is what scales district cost) for the Eureka dropped it's duration by a lot.

Upgrade cost for Longships into Caravels is 270 gold, for future reference. They increase city strenght to 40+, same as a sword basically.

I hit Square Rigging on turn 121, upgrading a quadrime to a frigate is just 250 (!) gold btw... not that hard to stockpile especially since the early harbors give us extra trade routes.

This was an almost perfect game though, without much interference (AI is still worthless, heh), and the only Eurekas on the path I missed were Astrology and Square Rigging (because obviously, no muskets with this strat). 

Some side notes on the test game:

I used my regular opening of 3 slingers and a worker, it allowed me to quickly clean up my island and grab some Eureka's, and left me with a solid defense force after upgrading to archers. I also managed to settle 4 cities before turn 80 so I don't really see the need to rush out a settler early.

This tech path makes the Collosus a really nice wonder to grab on the side, it get's you an extra trade route, a Great Admiral point and some gold. Not the greatest wonder in the game, but it doesn't take up a good tile at least and it isn't as contested as the Colloseum or the Pyramids.
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It sounds like there are some issues getting the map set up. In the interest of getting the game started I'm going to spoil myself in the lurker thread. Good luck! I'll still be rooting for you even though I can't comment as much smile
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turn 1:

Open up the save to the usual jumpscare:

[Image: 20170713150517_1.jpg]

not to shabby a start at all, nice production tiles, some mountains for Campuses (Campii?) and Holy Sites and one of the two seafoods nessesary for the critical Celestial Nav Eureka (not getting this can really screw my plans)


[Image: 20170713150610_1.jpg]

Even better when our warrior moves just one tile west... and spots the Piopotahi NW! yikes giving us the Eureka for Astrology, the only purely luck dependant Eureka on the way to Frigates. Also what we need for Holy Sites. dancing The tiles are also very good to work, and will allows a second city to become a monster! dancing dancing dancing

[Image: 20170713150659_1.jpg]

Rest of the turn wasnt very exciting, I picked AH as my first tech so I can get a pasture for production and Horseback Eureka and queued up a slinger to get a second exploration unit while waiting on techs to finish before getting a worker out:

[Image: 20170713150803_1.jpg]
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If you share the photo using the Direct Link option inside img tags the photos will post larger smile

Thus:

[Image: 20170713150803_1.jpg][/img]
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Thanks, I'll do that in future posts. For now everyone, just click on the pictures to enlarge...
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