Dot mapping

[mostly_harmless]

1W or 1SW of the ivory picks up more river tiles, needs less jungle chopping to get started, safeguards the ivory against pillaging by putting it behind the city.
The river offers some defense bonuses.
And it gives instant trade routes to somewhat mitigate the maintenance hit.
1SW even has the bonus of 1-movers being able to reach it from Brick by Brick in one turn (for example after unloading from a ship).

mh

[novice]

Let's not forget we also want a city somewhere east of The Covenant / northeast of Eastern Dealers, claiming wet rice and dyes.

[Ceiliazul]

Having thought about it more, I agree Ivory first. I favor settling on the resource, or else 1NE. We're ahead in demos, so an economy drag might help with diplo. What we can't afford is CivPlayers on our border with elephants.

[kalin]

I like a city 1N of the gems at ED. Since we plan to have ED as our Natl. Epic city it would not want to work the gems long term.

Regarding an ivory city, we can get ready but not settle it. We have an axe there that can act as a sentry if necessary.

EDIT: I also like the city that novice proposed in the south that can claim all 4 resources faster at the expense of 1 grassland. We can still found the proposed city to reclaim the unused FP later.

Kalin

[kjn]

I think I'd prefer a city 1NW of the rice to complement Eastern Gem Dealers. Picks up the rice first-ring (since the gems will be claimed already), and we get a dye. A city being coastal is hardly a big advantage on this map.

[kalin]

I think I'd prefer a city 1NW of the rice to complement Eastern Gem Dealers. Picks up the rice first-ring (since the gems will be claimed already), and we get a dye. A city being coastal is hardly a big advantage on this map.

1NW of gems doesn't pick the dye as far as I can tell...

EDIT: Never mind, mixing things up. I'd delete this post, but I cannot.

Kalin

[sooooo]

I think our nothern rice should be used like this:



Reasons:

It gets set up quicker than the previously suggested sites (most important reason!)
It is easy to defend.
You can set it up as a purely high-production city. Borrow the bananas and farm the rice, then mine all 6 of those hills. Once you're up to size 7, give the bananas back and rake in the production! Just build a barracks and then crank out the units.
Tree huggers can do without the bananas while this city grows because it can just work its grass cottages and the cows. We can't build the cottages fast enough here anyway.

[novice]

But... But... It leaves holes in our tile coverage. Good points though.
We could combine it with a city 2E1N of the rice, and have ourselves a real Maginot line on our german border. We need to name that river the Rhine.

[NobleHelium]

I think sooooo's spot is a good idea if:

1) We have a solid plan of how to farm/irrigate the area. That can be either planting another city to the NE as described by novice, or getting irrigation from TH's river branch (which was previously frowned upon).
2) We build the Heroic Epic there. Six mines are a lot, and it will outproduce HF and not be much harder to set up.

Otherwise I'd rather plant further out and grab that flood plain with just one city.

[kjn]

Is sooooo's spot that much better at production than Horse Feathers?

SS has five grass hills and one plains hill, requiring 7F surplus. The rice gives +5F, so we need two farmed grasslands to get us the rest of the way, probably the two tiles north of the rice. So size 8, +0F and 20H.

HF has the fish and lake for food, so +7F without any farms (though we're planning on adding a few), and can grow at +11F by borrowing the corn. Assume 5H from Moai. Iron, silk, 2 grass mines, and 1 plains mine will give us +1F 22H sustained at size 10, and two additional pop will bring in another 1H. It's also far easier to grow the city.

And getting SS up will require quite a bit of scarce worker labour. We already have four developing cities in the jungle belt, and our workers are overtasked, especially with Hanging Gardens coming up.