[spoilers]Casually, Commodore: Isabella of Sumer

[BRickAstley]

Play hard mode, don't explore, fortify warrior in your cap.

[Commodore]

Where you going to move the warrior?

I've rolled a half dozen Mirrorland starts, they will sometimes start you non-coastal with seafood. 1SE to ensure no seafood gets orphaned.

[Krill]

Commodore, can I call you a noob yet?

[Commodore]

Commodore, can I call you a noob yet?

I dunno, maybe? I moved the warrior to check out the lake, all settings seemed normal enough. Lake crabs are nice and all, but it's a foody enough area in general. Enjoy the start, folks! No exp bonus, no agriculture warranted, BW and thus Spi's free swap delayed! Still, it's Mirrorland, REXY, and, rivers are nice.


You can noob me for my SIP. I should have moved 1E to pick up the crabs and the free silk +2c plant, but as it is, we have an awesome capital, and talk about your ideal sharing locations...plains hill 3N shares deer and gets a free trade connection...grass hill 2N of crab is another fast, instant TR, expansion site. All share the cottage. :P


Meh start for Izzy of Sumer. Good map to be Izzy of Sumer.

[SevenSpirits]

Agri+Wheel is perfect for a start like this, where you can do something like Hunting-AH-Pottery. I certainly wouldn't prefer any other starting techs.

Spiritual is at its best supporting a LATE bronze working. Early BW is a way to mitigate the damage of the revolt by doing it when as large a percent of your empire is unaffected as possible. For example if you revolt with one city, one worker and one settler, you have 105fh worth of infrastructure that's unaffected by the revolt, and only the one city that is. So one advantage of spiritual is that you can delay BW until later without having to revolt a greater portion of your empire.

I will agree that you miss out on the expansive first worker bonus, so that's too bad.

[Krill]

Only point I'd make is that with EXP kinda likes getting BW to make better use of the cheap granaries, either via chops or a cheap whip to get it. So you could argue there is some anti-synergy there, but that's dependent on food type. If this start had been irrigated corn and rice then no one would have batted an eyelid at going Mining>BW>Pottery

[Commodore]

Or heck, even just irrigated corn. But it's a mirror map, no real fundamental complaints, and as I said above, I'm extremely happy with my leader and civ for this map. And this capital really is just amazing; I mean seriously, look at the food. Hammers are decent, too, looking at a couple mines and a lovely plains cow.


Demos (with research changed to Hunting, no worries). Everyone settled turn 1, which is particularly surprising to me in Dazed/Nicolae's shoes, given lake is less sucky for Fin and silk is actually a +3c plant. Land area shows nobody settled 1NE, so I'm going to say we all SIP.


Hilary went southeast, finding peaks and another river. I'm happy thus far about the ICS-grid-encouraging start area, I've seen some Mirrorland results really favor Creative, but we can probably not push too hard for early religion. Which, given lack of Creative on anyone, means we can probably write off Buddhism/Hinduism, but we want Monotheism earlyish anyway.


Pottery earlier was certainly a possibility, but I don't think the return happens fast enough on a blisteringly early granary. I'll think about it more once AH comes in, though.

[Krill]

[Commodore]

Southeast we go, I guess. It's hard to predict if the circle or the straight-line is better generally, but in these Mirrorland maps I like to head outwards in a line, as I'm really exploring my northwest at the same time. Those pigs are freshwater, by the way, so it's another lake. Nice to see furs for happy.


Borders popped at EoT, and yowza. A couple thoughts: Can't share the sheep it turns out, but a city on the plains hill 2S of the wheat would be nice for sea access, and the Turn 25 capital border pop will handle the food issue. In the east, that hill is looking nice for a settle, although either border popping or, again, post-turn-25 is needed. Generally, it looks like post-BW, we need to push to Priesthood stat, because a lot of close cities are going down.


Vultures probably won't see any action at all.

[Krill]

How are you going to pop borders?