Nicolae Carpathia Wrote:Not building a super early cheap EXP Granary (especially with Pottery first) feels like a waste to me.It's important not to fall into the trap of building something just because it's cheap. Yes, we have cheap Granaries, but it's still pointless to build one if we don't immediately need it. We can quite easily reach size 5 in the capital by turn 24, and thereafter we'll be at a cap for at least 20-30 turns (possibly longer). Better to build our cheap Granary in the capital later, once we're actually able to grow/whip, and use the early turns for building stuff we immediately need (Warriors/Workers/Settlers).
uberfish Wrote:The more I think about it the more SIP and locking the capital into 4 FP cottages ASAP, on a map where we're concerned about maintenance costs and have to research all ancient techs, seems correct.Though as a counter to that, we'll have a tonne of food already by settling on the Banana, and we have plenty of river on which to build grassland or plains cottages (and they only take 4 turns rather than 5). Flood plains would be superior if we're rolling in happiness, sure, but we can't necessarily count on that.
Given no other information, it seems best to go the conservative route, and expect that there's nothing particularly juicy at least in the immediate area around us. And given just how much excess food we'll have already from settling Banana and working corn + 2 flood plains cottages + deer + plains cottage (8 excess food already!), any more seems unnecessary unless we're certain to be rolling in happiness resources.
Extra food becomes a bit redundant when you're at the point where you've got a max happy cap at 5, and are already rolling in 8 surplus every turn. Consider, if we had (on some bizarre map) a start with 5 fresh water Corns - would it be best to irrigate them all and work those, assuming Financial rivers/flood plains are also available? With Emperor/Huge/Toroidal, no. Sure you'd build Workers and Settlers in record time, but you'd be crippled by maintenance.
Food's only useful up to a point if you're limited in happiness and costs are high. The difference between +8 per turn at size 5 (settling on Banana and following my sim) and +10 per turn at size 5 (settling in place and working 4 flood plains) is negligible, especially while we can't afford to whip much at all.
