Japper leads the Imperium of Man to death or glory

[Japper007]

Turn 4:

Tilepicker decided on Elephants:



Score  that means we won't have to purchase any tiles to have three tiles to improve for our first worker!

[Japper007]

Turn 5:



We're pop 2, I assigned our new citizen to the horse tile (autogovernor wanted to go for the 2/2 hill, which wouldn't speed up the Slinger and would delay growth )

Warrior moves north, and we get:



It's Crater Lake, not a bad one actually, and the fresh water it provides gives us a decent third city spot there. 



While looking at the Settler lense, I made two intriguing discoveries:



That extra fresh water there isn't from the Crater lake, so it means there's an extra river or lake up there as well, a fertile area indeed.



That sheep tile should be a legitimate settling spot, this means there's a City State down there, or (god forbid) a player. If it's a city state that's excellent news, it'd mean our entire south is blocked by mountains and the city state.

[Japper007]

Turn 6: The Limits of Paradise

Our warrior moves north and spots the end of our lush green valley, that river I spotted earlier mostly runs through a Tundra peninsula. We also see some barbs up there that are close enough to be a real nuisance, as they also have horses in range 



On a positive note, we'll finish a Slinger soon, and we finish CoL next turn (again, yey Rome!), so with a Discipline boosted Warrior and Slinger we might be able to eradicate this camp before it spawns those nasty horse-barbs...

[Ituralde]

What an awkwardly placed Crate Lake, looks more like a Lake Atoll to me.

But the surroundings of Terra look very nice. Thank you for the reports and keep them coming!

[Japper007]

Turn 7 Nailing in that sweet culture lead!

Firstly we discover CoL, score confirms that we are indeed first:




This allows us to do the following, policy-wise:



Discipline to deal with barbs, God King to get a Pantheon, if no-one meets a Religious CS we might actually get to choose out of the full selection as well!

Speaking of Culture and City States:


we meet Kumasi! A cultural CS, and the best of them imho, this is their suzerain bonus:

Every trade route to a CS provides +2 culture and +1 gold for every district in the city that sends the trade route, that makes CS trade routes very lucrative indeed!

EDIT just spend 15 minutes looking over the post for errors, ended up being a single unclosed tag FML and F Forumcodes!

[Japper007]

Turn 8:



Suprisingly Kumasi didn't attack the barb spearman with it's warrior (maybe patch changed the scripting? they always would before the patch) as I didn't want to attack across the river I intead scouted east and found a wheat that would make the tile that the barb camp is on a decent city location, with said wheat, crater lake, the horses and the tundra deer in range.

[Japper007]

Turn 9: Thinking about opening a Coffee-bar



AH is in!, I'm thinking of going Mining and Pottery next, while we wait for the Eureka on Archery.



Our warrior continues onwards and spots a nice lush area just on the edge of the tundra (a weird latitude for coffee to grow btw, though you can make some rather nasty "coffee" from acorns apparently...) A city there wouldn't have fresh water, but with Roman aquaducts that's not the end of the world. That would give us four "safe" cities below the tundra/Kumasi line and above the mountains. In pbem4 I found out that the increased scaling cost on settlers really becomes a steep drop-off after the fourth Settler, after that workers/districts and conquest become way better, as Singaboy showed us.



We grow to pop three, and the auto-gov decides to put the pop on the elephants, probably because of the extra gold there. I moved it to the forest hill though, as that speeds up growth by two turns and doesn't delay the slinger (it arrives next turn either way). We don't really need gold now, pop is far better.

[Japper007]

Turn 10: The Legion Grows



Slinger completes and gets send north, hopefully netting us the Archery Eureka on that Spearman. I queued up a Builder as the next build.

As you can see from the screenshot we now have both the lead in science and culture, this is because we are the first to 3 pop apparently, which means that either the starts aren't mirrored (didn't expect that either way) or that that the other players value production over food.
We also lead in total score for now with 12 (8 empire, 2 civic, 2 tech), though I expect that to change once the others catch up in pop.

[Mikeforall]

I have given most of my opinions to Jasper at university already, but let me state some of the major ones here.
 
First of all, I agree with your planning-pointers for the first and second city.
However, in your cap you forgot a pointer for barracks (or so I assume at least?). Since Barracks are quite a neat thing in general, let alone when playing a nation like Rome on a Pangea, they should not be overlooked. Depending on your military strategy I would build them in the capital either as second (after campus) or third (after harbour) district.
Not much to say regarding the second cityspot. Looks neat to me.
 
But I think that, for now, you should keep it at that. I know it is probably just enthusiasm, but you are focussing too much on ‘proper city spots’ in the north. Don’t pin yourself to those, because a focus on so many settlers will just be building cities for other players. Just securing that citystate will be enough on the eastern front. A third city near the natural wonder, at the barb-river, would indeed be a nice third spot, but I would keep it at that for now. After all, south of the capital might lay even better spots, which you haven’t uncovered yet.
 
The capital growth looks nice. I think you made the right decision to focus on growth for now. Due to the hills and forests, more growth also means more production. If no other barbs pop up (especially in the invisible south), it would be safe to go for a settler after that builder is finished.
 
Now, the question is: Do we have a snaky continent, an inland sea, or are we just in the arm of the Pangea? Looking at how the continent has a ‘sharp’ corner to the east, I suspect a donut with inland sea, but further scouting shall reveal that. If so, England might have been a good choice in hindsight, though Rome never is a bad pick.

[Japper007]

I didn't pin in the Encampment yet, as we as of yet don't know where our opponents are, I want to place it in the face of possible aggression. We have quite some turns yet before we have to make a final decision on that front.

On the map; while exploring with my Warrior last turn I discovered what I think is another "snake"heading west. We might be on that rough VVV shaped map that Cornflakes showed off in the General Discussion thread. We might have threats coming from both the Southand Northeast.

Still disagree on taking Kumasi btw, it's tiles are shit and it's Suzerain is awesome.