Gavagai manages his personal GULAG

[Bacchus]

And wow, that tundra really is tundra, I only just noticed. I spy some jungle in the north too, definitely a fun map. Our capital is now in a much better position to exert cultural influence over our core, I should say, the original placement would have been annoyingly peripheral. Generally I like the move, even if it might force us to reassess the original plan.

The original plan is, for the lurkers' benefit, keeping with theme, to chop and whip us a really expensive monument in the second city.

[Gavagai]

What, already?

[Gavagai]

FUCK. My fears, exactly.

[Bacchus]

12 tiles between us and Boudica of Japan?

[Bacchus]

Orphaned fish situation: meh. Slightly sad, but that's it. Will teach us to wander on tailored maps (or won't).

Neighbour situation: If this is what the land division is like on this map, I think we need to shelve the wonder and invest into staking out territory with Skirmishers. Not necessarily directly choking opponents lands, but dissuading them from expanding in our direction. This is very, very tight — if we see a Japanese city on that hill 1N of our scout, we are pretty much done for. At least moving our capital really helps in staking out territory in this direction and gives us a quiet "backline" where the Settler originally started. But none of this is particularly fun.

[GermanJoey]

well, at least your unique unit isn't the Navy Seal...

and as nasty as Boudica is, at least Grimace rejected Gilgamesh!

[Bacchus]

Some current thoughts:

The wonder-boosting resourcing seem too far to settle quickly by anybody who settled in place (that is, everyone but REM and us). By contrast, we can grab stone first ring by sharing a food resource with the capital. +50% from stone and +50% from Ind let us 1T Stonehenge purely from overflow on a Worker or Granary. The city position would be just right for the cultural pressure, albeit the saving on monument hammers is probably irrelevant. Shrine is good but need religion. Can likely take religion, as we have no need in Fishing or Sailing.

The turd in the hamper: Boudica of Japan a max of 12 tiles away. It both forces us to build on stone and wonderwhore asap, AND makes it difficult to do so efficiently. Agg is just awful for messing around in the early game -- even C1 warriors are annoying, and the barracks culture is awful. Open shock axes AND get culture pressure off pretty much a single chop? Not nice. And then the Charisseum Samurai will come: C1, Shock/Formation and 3-4 first strikes. Don't even think about these.

To make things worse, we have no use for Hunting. No use besides unlocking Archery that is. But we are going Agri -> BW, thinking that BFC copper is a thing. BFC Copper makes Skirms pretty useless, incidentally. Gavagai is currently microing for 2 Warriors to stake out the stone settling spot, but who knows, we might have to push Archery up. At least we get graphs nice and early.

Original start with forested Sugar and Sheep -- I would have gone to active Skirmisher production. Mapmakers did right to change that Sheep to Corn. It also made wandering more lucrative, however.

Who is on our other side? I think it might be no-one actually, not for a while. That sort of placement gives both a safe expanse for settling, but also a way to place players so there is some confrontation nice and early from the start. I also don't understand how land count per player works out in a balanced way, if we have another close neighbour. God knows Joey had enough PB25 not to disregard the seriousness of being surrounded.

Let's just hope we can plant as desired and our early cottages carry us to a safe-ish midgame. The stone city is strategically placed to kill any advancing land-stack on a flat, so we'll be ok. Also, HA/Cats would have to be primary means of defense, turtling would be suicide.

[Gavagai]

Actually... we may even put our second city 1E from the northern Wheat.

[Gavagai]

So, current plan is to settle our second city 1SE from Marble. We will try to get a religion there and also a wonder. It will give us an early second border pop and provide with a pretty secure long-term northern border.
Thinking about the wonder we want there we alternated between Temple of Artemis and Stonehendge. Surprisingly, we decided that ToA is a better option. The reason is that we don't actually need the effect of Stonehendge: we already have our first four cities planned and none of them requires fast border pop (except the northern one but in this case the border will be popped by different means). On the other hand, ToA gives more culture (important for our purposes), more GPP and has less competition which would allow us to build it within comfortable schedule.
A more general gameplan is to get early organized religion and early metal casting with cheap forges. Then spam wonders.

[Bacchus]

ToA gives same culture as Henge, 8.