Dot mapping

[kjn]

The issue is, what do we do with Focal Point?

Build workers, missionaries, spies, and garrison units?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

All of those, as well as any stone wonders we want or can build for fail gold. But units chiefly, I would think. Even an awesome HE city won't produce every unit for us with this many cities to garrison and defend.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I think people have such a need to specialize that they are ignoring the obvious: a good HE city is way more valuable than the bit of commerce we sacrifice at HF and having one other not perfectly optimized city. The HE hammer difference between the two is huge in HF favor. That drowns all other concerns IMO.

[Sullla]

Alright, time for more dot mapping discussion. We have a settler due out next turn (T116), with the location for that one already picked out. It's going for the filler spot next to Tree Huggers to get that location started. This post is designed to cover the next two settlers; we have one arriving on T119, and a second one potentially coming out on T120. We need to figure out where they are going. Here are what I feel are the best possibilities.



The Tree Huggers settler is going on the tile southwest of the eastern rice. However, we have another spot in the northwest that has been planned for a very long time, this location two west of the other rice. It's an important strategic location to bridge the path over to Ditchdigger and seal off the final portion of our northern border. And with a rice tile and 13 flatland grassland tiles, this will be an amazing location down the road in the days of State Property workshop spam. The downside is that this location requires Civil Service chain irrigation to be at all effective, which is why we've delayed it until now. It also has an absurd amount of jungle tiles to cut down before it can become productive. Nevertheless, I think the near future would be a good time to get started here, in plenty of time to dejungle the northern tiles in preparation for future war with the Germans.

If we sent a settler from The Covenant over here, it would arrive around roughly T125, which is just about when I've estimated we would have an irrigation chain up to the rice tile. My suggestion is therefore to send the second of our two settlers over here, despite the somewhat long walking distance.



Here is my best attempt at a dotmap of the south. I'm assuming at this point that we are not going to find anything ground breaking down in the extreme south, like a marble resource that would dictate settling there immediately. If we do, be prepared to reassess everything.

We have the first settler coming out of Seven Tribes on T119, and I still think that we should go for the red dot location above. It's the spot that has to come first so that we can chain badly-needed irrigation down to the other locations in the south. There's a reason why we ignored this area until later on, and that's because the pickings are slim down here. Red can pick up two currently unused riverside tiles (floodplains + grassland), then use the riverside plains to chain farms down to the south (marked in blue). It will pick up the horses and wheat with a border expansion, which we can get easily by means of "Build Culture" (via Music tech) without even waiting for monument/religion to pop borders. Note that red can also borrow two cottages from Seven Tribes over the range of peaks if needed. It's the strongest city down here.

Green is the next spot on the list, basically another resource dump without too much more value. I would anticipate this being a city with lots of farms used for military production, working all of the resource tiles. We claim furs here and not much more. Green has to come after red, however, because we have no way to irrigate over here without coming down from the north, and we don't need the furs happiness so badly that we have to sacrifice just to get them ASAP. I see us settling this city around roughly T130.

Yellow is another fairly terrible city just trying to make the most of the land down there. I guess we can use it to build military or run specialists or something, I dunno. Better to have something there than nothing, and every city can at least serve as a draft camp. It's also going to need irrigation, and thus the priority level is below green with its resources. Sheep are not going to do anything for us until the industrial era health crunch. We could eventually consider backfilling in the black dot, but that's even weaker as a city unless we're willing to split off the corn from Starfall, which I do not want to do. Starfall is a much more important city, and constant whip abuse of the double food resources is integral to its development.

So I would send the first settler (Seven Tribes) to the red spot nearby, then the second one (The Covenant) to the blue spot in the far west, and plan on getting another settler for the green spot a little later on, likely after our Golden Age ends on T128. All of those locations would give us 18 cities, still without counting the yellow spot or any possibilities in the far northwest or extreme south.

Where would everyone else choose to put these cities? Now's a good time for discussion.

[novice]

I like red dot, and would probably move green dot 1W. But only red dot's location seems locked in regardless of further map info. We can also hire artists during the GA so quick border pops shouldn't be a problem.

[zakalwe]

I would maybe send the covenant settler on a long walk south instead, to settle green (or 1W of it). Then whip another settler out of tree huggers when we are ready to settle 2W of the rice.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Do we still intend to tech Music, given the recent discovery of CivFr and their lead on that part of the tech tree? Other than that, I'm in support of Sullla's plan, with novice's addition to move 1W onto the desert tile with Green Dot. I know that weakens Green by not being able to share the wheat, but I'd rather have one strongish city here than two mediocre cities. Green can get to a decent food surplus (+6 if I'm reading the tiles correctly) by farming what grass is available and then working some plains workshops. That spot would also get any GLH trade routes, should we successfully complete that in Gourmet Menu.

This looks to be about the best we can squeeze out of the bad land in our south.

[sooooo]

Red dot looks good and should be settled as Sullla says by the settler from seven tribes. Green dot and 1W of green dot is very close, let's wait until we see if there's any seafood on our south coast.

[Azoth]

I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but what about moving Blue Dot 1N to pick up the second Rice?
Yes, it would be right against German borders and it would take a while to reclaim tiles against ancient Terrace culture, but
- the Germans did the same thing with Wassezburg north of TH
- the Rice can't be worked by any other city
- we plan to invade the Germans at some point, so we shouldn't worry too much about ticking them off
- even without the Rice, 1N claims more unshared tiles, including 1 Forest

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Nah, we can still use the rice if we settle settle 2W of it. Besides, settling there is way too aggressive and telegraphs that we want to screw the Germans over.