[SPOILERS] Serdoas and Nobles Thread with a little bit of Gaspar sprinkled in

[Serdoa]

As an idea:

1st city: 1NE of wheat
2nd city: 2N of gold
3rd city: 1SW of sheep (needs some exploring)
4th city: 1NE of the cow where the new scout is next too

Also are those ice-floodplains with 3 food? If so, would we even be able to build a farm or cottage on those things?

[BRickAstley]

Yield-wise, ice floodplains are identical to desert floodplains. And you can build the same improvements on them.

[NobleHelium]

Course it takes forever to build said improvements...

[Gaspar]

Lotta bacon.

[NobleHelium]

All right so...

1) I assume we're sending the eastern scout to the northeast to pop that far hut we revealed. It's actually not that far, we can get there in a few turns.
2) I remain strongly unconvinced that settling OFF the plains hill is what we want to do. The extra hammer helps a LOT in getting things up to speed quickly, and I don't see the overall site as inferior. I know you like hills but getting an extra hammer without any effort is just too good! We can also help work a cottage for our future capital.
3) I definitely like between the cow and the pig as a future city site, heading towards those ice flood plains once we verify in a sandbox that they can actually be improved.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Ice flood plains can definitely be improved. They're 1t slower than desert tiles to improve iirc.

One thing that I have noticed with the mod, unless I'm not playing on the very latest update (3.0.0.4?), is that it seems you are unable to destroy your own cottages and replace them with another improvement, i.e. a workshop. Unless the cottage is out of your borders where you can pillage to eliminate it you're stuck with the cottage forever. Not sure what that's about.

[NobleHelium]

What?? If that is indeed a bug that exists then that's terrible.

Also you can normally pillage cottages inside your own borders.

[Serdoa]

Are you certain it was a cottage? Because I remember that the mod makes villages and towns unchangeable and I assumed that also included pillaging them inside your borders.

I believe that change is intended to prevent you from changing a economic city completely over to a workshopped one in the end-game when you have researched mostly everything. Though that basically means you either have some good cities that you don't use fully early on, so you can workshop them instead and then change civics accordingly when you have researched everything - or you just win by culture, funnelling your superior economy into it.

Either way, that's one of the changes I'm not very keen on, because you have to decide much earlier what to do with a city and are stuck with that decision. If that would already start with cottages, it would be even worse.

[Serdoa]

All right so...

1) I assume we're sending the eastern scout to the northeast to pop that far hut we revealed. It's actually not that far, we can get there in a few turns.

Yes. Should take another 6 turns. Also in all my testgames the first hut I popped was a tech. Either I am incredibly lucky, or there is a bug and the first hut always provides you a tech.

I'm wondering if we should send the old scout simply straight west and see whom we find? We probably can build a warrior while growing to 3 and use the one that finishes soon to explore a little bit around.

On that note: I saw our first barbarian animal this turn. Lion IIRC.

2) I remain strongly unconvinced that settling OFF the plains hill is what we want to do. The extra hammer helps a LOT in getting things up to speed quickly, and I don't see the overall site as inferior. I know you like hills but getting an extra hammer without any effort is just too good! We can also help work a cottage for our future capital.

Generally agreed, for several reasons, one being it is more secure. I still haven't tested if the plains hill actually provides an additional hammer though.

3) I definitely like between the cow and the pig as a future city site, heading towards those ice flood plains once we verify in a sandbox that they can actually be improved.

Yes. There is actually even more food close by. We could build a city with 2 grassland pigs (one the one you talk about) and a crab. 13 food-plus with just 3 pop. With a granary that city should be able to regrow from 2 to 4 in 2 turns.

[NobleHelium]

That village/town is by far the dumbest change Krill has come up with so far. If you need to do something like that then there's something fundamentally wrong with your game design.

I'm going to guess that the first hut does not always pop a tech, or else more people would have popped techs. Unless they decided to give us a bunch of huts and scarcely any to other players. I'm guessing your sandbox does not have New Random Seed on Reload.

Not sure about the other scout. We can definitely finish the second warrior easily but it will push back the settler by a turn, but it's not that bad because we can use that extra turn to either hook up the city or to start the wheat farm immediately (hooking up is probably better actually). If we hook up the cities after York is built then I think we end up with two turns of no trade routes because it doesn't recalculate until end of turn. If we don't hook it up then we go another three turns without trade routes until the second settler finishes. So I guess the tradeoff is 3f vs 6c. If we delay the city it becomes a tradeoff of 3f vs 8c, but we incur the additional 2f3h1c (-1g maintenance probably) cost of not having a second city up for a turn. And yes, York is showing 2h in the sandbox under 3.0.0.4.

If we're reasonably happy with our second city site then sending the scout to try to find someone isn't bad. Although I wouldn't be surprised if he gets eaten before he meets anybody. He might also be missing other huts near us, or he might also be able to steal other people's huts. In other words, I'm being entirely unhelpful!

Edit: I'm able to replace a cottage with a farm in 3.0.0.4. Still a very dumb change though.