With that in mind I'm curious to try hunting-AH-fishing-pottery-mining-bw too now. I don't fully believe it, but pottery is a cheap tech after all. If there's anybody who can get granaries done without BW it's Exp leaders.
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[59] Miguelito and Rusten move stacks to berimbau rythms
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 (February 24th, 2021, 12:46)Rusten Wrote: Early pottery looks very promising actually. We can 3-pop whip the 3rd city settler on T48, but that's with a granary in both city #1 and city #2. City #2 can 3-pop a settler T51, possibly even T50. I should note that it's with 2 warriors and 2 workers completed. And that's only after a single playthrough, not looked in-depth yet. The granaries were completed with full regrowth on size 4 and 3 respectively. Whether it's better than earlier BW might depend on how good our 3rd city is -- how much we lose by delaying settlement, but overall I really like the look of it. And we don't need to decide which path to take until AH is completed.
February 24th, 2021, 16:23
(This post was last modified: February 24th, 2021, 16:56 by Miguelito.)
I see you're having a run there
 I have a big soft spot for variant plays, so I'm definitely interested. I'm a bit wary though - in our last game we were facing a barb spear on turn 49, and with that plan we would likely not even have our copper city planted yet. Meanwhile have my very boring BW first start:  Played very cursorily. The elephant farm most likely better be a PH mine. Just 1 worker before the settler, and chopping starts pretty late on t38 as a consequence. All kinds of awkwardness as discussed - the workboat sits idle for 2 turns (Fishing missed by 2 beakers after missing BW by 1 - but actually maybe that can be fixed by working a bit of riverside grassland instead of the FPH while on the settler; also sure it would be nice to get Hunting the next turn already to start camping that ivory). But at least the granary chop in the end checks out  - okok, it would be nicer if the chops came in with OF on the turn of researching Pottery, admitted, but at least...
Yeah I'm enjoying myself.
In my version the worker gets a cottage 1E of wheat before mining the hill, so that's another minor plus. It's completed just in time for size 3 IIRC. With ~10 food/t surplus between the 2 starting cities and 2 granaries we can 3-pop settlers non-stop. City #3 might be a little slow, but 5, 6, 7, 8 will come early. It's very high on commerce too (pastures and camp instead of farm and also the fin river cottage), so long term I'm tempted to turn that into a religious play (probably monotheism) and early monarchy for hereditary rule (revolt OR+HR). Being able to grow big early is valuable with such green land and river.
also with your posting spree we now have surpassed Ichabod in the post count race! Let's bolster this with some shameless attention seeking:
Tier list # 1 - by player strength. I'm leaving ourselves out, but lurkers are free to post their placement of us, I promise not to debate 
Admittedly the bottom third or so of that was pretty random, there are some players included (Lazteuq, Tarkeel) whom I know next to nothing about. I think there is a pretty large gap between 3 and 4 and again between 7 and 8. (February 24th, 2021, 17:40)Rusten Wrote: Yeah I'm enjoying myself. Sounds all pretty sweet, but my question remains, what do we have in terms of pre-turn 55 safety? Do you think we'll be ok? Of course we'll have at least the option to settle for horses. The neighbours should be a bit further away, but if they see us t40 or 45 without copper settled they might get ideas?
I'm not that worried about it. Neighbours need mining+BW+agriculture/hunting+wheel MINIMUM before fielding axes, and then they need to walk 10+ turns. We're not the only ones with more expensive techs -- things will be slower. And it's also supposed to be a more spacious map.
Having seen what the respective openings do I'm pretty firm in the hunting-AH camp TBH , with or without early fishing-pottery, but I'm open to be convinced otherwise.
While yours can get the granaries at around the same time you have 1 less happy to work with which hurts for growing city #2 to 6, and also the capital if whip anger is running. Furthermore you do need to properly improve both the sheep and ivory at some point so that's 8 worker turns locked in for the future. I try to consider openings in terms of tiles worked rather than number of cities, and going double granary with 2 cities scores high in that metric. The extra pop is useful if we get riverside cottages going, but of course it can't compete with wet corn or grass pigs if we find that close by. Looking into the future I can see a lot of people without economical traits burn themselves settling too many cities without good enough support. It's a longer road to currency/HR than normal, whereas the hammer output is unchanged. edit: Fish is hooked up T35 btw, not T34. I misspoke earlier.
February 25th, 2021, 06:45
(This post was last modified: February 25th, 2021, 07:37 by Miguelito.)
(February 24th, 2021, 18:58)Rusten Wrote: Having seen what the respective openings do I'm pretty firm in the hunting-AH camp TBH , with or without early fishing-pottery, but I'm open to be convinced otherwise. Well I already said that the elephant farm better be a PH mine, so the deficit is rather 4 worker turns (or 5 lost on the farm, depending on how you look at it) The camp would be the next thing to do, so the happy should come in in time? After that begin cottaging. There are 11 hammers in a worker (optionally settler) in city 2 already as well. I think a point that your opening has in its favour is that you achieve similar etas for the granaries while preserving those 3 forests that I already chopped. So that is some credit for the future. But the BW opening (which is still pretty much unpolished) does have the settler for city 3 5 turns earlier, which is not nothing. (February 24th, 2021, 17:40)Rusten Wrote: It's very high on commerce too (pastures and camp instead of farm and also the fin river cottage), so long term I'm tempted to turn that into a religious play (probably monotheism) and early monarchy for hereditary rule (revolt OR+HR). Being able to grow big early is valuable with such green land and river. I've also given some thought to how to make use of a possible early tech edge. Regarding your proposition. HR sure looks very good. The revolt would need an early GA though if we also want to convert? Which certainly can be done with a library, but may be too early for the yields. The mysticism starters get a head start. I'd also consider teching MC early, possibly right after BW (and maybe sailing). With the early granaries we could 3pop whip early forges, which would give us an edge in hammers in addition to our commerce advantage. Colossus would be a steal of course, but the two Ind leaders - Charriu with Ramesses and Amica with Roosevelt - are both rather slow starters (although they do have good techs with Greece and Ethiopia) and not top tier players either. Thinking of it, Charriu likely really wants mids, and Roosevelt is rather Mr. Lighthouse, right? Fin loves the big boy. But I think the forges could justify the beeline on their own. Otoh your argument of increased costs but same hammers makes oracling MC more powerful (not an option for us, but for the competition). Speaking of wonders, the other one that really fits us is HG. What else? I would hardly want to try more than one fwiw, if at all. I also still think that our target religion here might rather be Confu, although we might not be able to rely purely on libraries for culture for so long. |
. But PB51 wasn't that impressive imo. 
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