The Antisocial Team

[Ichabod]

I think you're in FFH mode - incense is a bad tile. Often not worth working at all, and the worst calendar resource.

FFH mode really owns us when we try to play BTS. I still think slavery is a bad civic from time to time.

By the way, my gut says we will take a loooong time until teching BW. Just like Novice and Seven did in one of their games. I think we can go agri -> hunting -> AH (we'll need it for the second, third city and so forth). After that it depends on what we want to do, but I can see fishing -> pottery working, also a detour to religon (with mining thrown in somewhere).

That's because we don't have much trees to chop and our capital doesn't like the whip. I think we'll want a very high pop capital, not whipping it that much, if any at all (no good surplus of food, even if we farm the two fps, which I think we should).

That's my take without doing any sandboxes.

[Mist]

I think you're in FFH mode - incense is a bad tile. Often not worth working at all, and the worst calendar resource.

Sigh. It's that whole no food thing, right?

Anyhow, as for research - my gut says

Agri -> Hunting -> Pottery -> Mining -> Religion and then AH and BW. Agree on high pop cities and not much whip. Also, if we don't whip much production bonus from OR becomes more crucial.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Incense is only a bad tile outside the BFC. Because they naturally spawn on deserts, and the start generator turns deserts into plains and floodplains, that way you can get some pretty uber 1/1/6 tiles.

[Ichabod]

Well, sandox is ready, at least to the best of my ability.

Basic WB save:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21249278/PBEM%20...wordWBSave

Current turn:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21249278/PBEM%20...dSwordSave

[Ichabod]

So, I've played the next save, just moving the warrior to reveal our likely second city site. He didn't do a thing, but the border pop did:

Yup, that coastal plains hill is looking incredible as a second city. The second border pop of our capital will put both the corn and crab in our culture, so we don't need a monument there! Awesome!

Demographics:

[Ichabod]

The second city site keeps looking better and better!

That would have been a worthy Imperialist capital.

[Lord Parkin]

That's incredible... and only 3 tiles from your capital, so easy as pie to defend. Definitely want a very early second city in this game... won't want to wait long to get started on another Settler. Settler before second Worker might even be a reasonable decision depending on the tech rate. Worth simming out a few variations to see which build order - and which size you stop to build at (2, 3, 4) - works out best.

[Ichabod]

That's incredible... and only 3 tiles from your capital, so easy as pie to defend. Definitely want a very early second city in this game... won't want to wait long to get started on another Settler. Settler before second Worker might even be a reasonable decision depending on the tech rate. Worth simming out a few variations to see which build order - and which size you stop to build at (2, 3, 4) - works out best.

I agree. I quite liked the variation with a size 2 settler, working wheat and ivory. The plan would be worker -> settler (waiting for the wheat to be farmed working the plains hill forest for 6 production with imperialistic) -> grow with farmed wheat on a warrior -> size 2 start working on a settler.

The tech rate is quite good this way, with my limited experience. I could road the tile 1NE of the second city spot for an instant trade route when it's settled, but I think it's better to farm the shareable FP between the 2 cities. The cow pasture for the second city gets ready at almost the same time as capital grows to size 3. So the capital can then work the fp farm.

Tech should go agriculture -> hunting -> AH. Then it gets thougher. It's possible to survive quite some time with this tech + fishing, I think. So we could go for a religion, trying to land it into the second city. Bronze working can wait a bit, I think. Mining not so much (can help a third city by the clams, for instance).

But I have a lot of simming to do.

[Ichabod]

What the warrior has been revealing:

I'm still doing some sandboxes. My problem is that I have a hard time comparing between them. But I'm really liking the idea of a settler at size 2. Our position makes a low work force attempt viable, so there won't be much problems with 2 cities for only one worker.

[Lord Parkin]

The way I compare sandboxes is to play out to a specific turn sometime a while in the future (usually T30-50 at the start), and compare all the sandboxes at the exact same turn (e.g. T50). See how your growth, production and research compares between the sandboxes, and generally the best one overall wins. If you want you could use a rule of thumb something like 1 food ~= 2 hammers ~= 3 beakers, or revalue some items depending on your goals in the game.

Maybe you're already aware of all this though, and it's just a genuinely tricky decision between the different options.

What's the "WOW" sign for? Doesn't look particularly like a "wow" spot. Or was that put down earlier?