[Spoiler] Suboptimal's Next Attempt at Lurker Frustration

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I think buying a trader or a monument makes the most sense for a snowball. The monument purchase speeds up tile acquisition at city 2 and speeds the way to PP, while the trader increases food and production. Neither one can be boosted with a policy card like a builder can, so it seems best to build the, er, builder (I hate saying that) and buy one of the other two, depending on which you want more of. That would depend on the tiles at city 2 - if it doesn't have strong foodhammers of its own, then a)why did you settle it, and b)a trader might make sense there. If there's a fair amount of juicy second ring tiles, then a monument.

[suboptimal]

I tinkered with monument vs. trader a bit last night. Buy trader, build monument seems to be the better option, especially since a bought trader will complete its trade route right around the time cities #3 and #4 are being founded and so can shift to one of the new cities almost immediately.

Something else to play with further - I put Provision-promoted Magnus in City #2, ran colonization and built settlers in City #2 and the capital (having completed Ancestral Hall after getting the 3rd and 4th cities founded) and found that works well despite population loss in the capital. I'm also looking at a couple of other things as the late-Ancient to Classical era expansion phase has been a weak point in my games and needs improvement.

[Thrantar]

If the plan is to buy a trader, I believe they have scaling cost, so it might be worth buying the trader even before the trader has a second city to which to run a route. Monuments are much more interesting if we can't find a cultural city state. Getting +1 from a monument is more impactful the lower our base culture is.

Again, if we've giving up on a classical dark, I'd consider trying to aim for a classical golden. Science=gold for harbors and commercial hubs sounds juicy, given UD Harbors. Would require settling a coastal city, though, and potential other awkwardness for Era Score.

[suboptimal]

Traders scale with techs and civics but it's not too severe. One thing I noticed in a couple of tests last night is that we should strongly consider building one Encampment and one Campus as the initial districts. The Encampment +1 to trade routes and the following cities would get more immediate use out of a 12 trade route than a 21 trade route.

I think that era points in the Ancient should be taken as they come (or don't come). I think that trying to scrounge era points for a Golden Age (provided they aren't coming easily) can have some drawbacks. Yes, the extra science would be juicy but I'm more concerned with getting that in the Medieval age.

[Cornflakes]

Your starting screenshot:

   

Good luck!

[Alhambram]

My first reaction would be settle in place, it would be production heavy start and type start that is settler before builder opening.
In 1st ring two 22 tiles,one 32 and 2nd ring 13. You might buy latter if there isn't resource behind that 13 hill since tile picker prioritizes resources at 2nd or 3rd ring over normal tiles.

Settling at lake don't give sailing boost, however we can foggaze in northwest, very likely a coast, though need 100% confirmation when turning on settler lens which shows how many housing.
2nd city can be placed southwest along river, northwest at coast or east next lake, need to scout entire area first to determine where place 2nd city best.

Since it is type of settler before builder, I would pick Animal Husbandry as 1st tech, so we can see where horses are. After that mining, pottery-irrigation (for latter boost rice farm at capital with bought 3rd ring or another farm resource somewhere else close/next 2nd city).

[Thrantar]

Hmm... I think I favor settle in place, unless the warrior reveals something really juicy. Bananas are great, and plains hill gives a 2/2 city center.

[suboptimal]

Fog-gazing it appears that everything in the settler's third ring has coastal adjacency, except maybe that jungle 2W of the warrior. It also appears that there might be a spit of land NW of those northern bananas as well as a coastal land tile 2W-1NW from the warrior's current position. The warrior can get to the coast by moving W-NW on turn 1. The question is do we go that way for a couple of turns or downriver and let an initial slinger build defog the coast?

I don't like settling in place . It cuts off the entire visible coast to the north & northwest from being settleable. It also puts that 31 bananas reasonably out of reach of any city. Everything that would be third ring from the settler's current position (except that tile 2W of the warrior) appears to be coastal. We're playing England and that would be bad - we want coastal locations available. My thinking is to settle on the forest to the southeast. That opens up the currently visible coast for two city sites. Yes, it does prevent a second city from being settled lakeside and it doesn't provide the Sailing boost. Yes, we can't work the bananas from Turn 1 but the capital produces 1.3 per turn and that tile would be available to work on Turn 9. Likewise the jungle hill the warrior is standing on would be picked up in the late teens (before we have 4 population).

The downriver location (4 SW of the settler's current position) downriver (4 directly SW of the settler) would let us set up quite an industrial zone assuming there's no additional mountains or resources in the way on the eastern river bank. Between the capital and that city we could get a Campus (capital, +1 to start, +3 later on), +3 RND in the lake (capital), Encampment, 2 IZ (one in each city), GP, Dam and Aqueduct. The capital's IZ could be a base +5 adjacency (build it on the rice), the second city's IZ could be as high as +7 base. Heck, a third city west of the warrior could be close enough to get one down as well (+3). Of course, that assumes no riverside resources in the fog on the eastern bank of the river. That would make for a good industrial center for the empire. Remember, I am planning on building at least 2-3 industrial zones - we get +20% to building construction, extra yields from all powered buildings and I expect that this game will go on for a while (150 turns at least).

Regarding the direction of settlement I'm of two minds. Settling the river first is likely "forward" towards our opponents and we could get an Encampment built there as part of the above district pile. However, Phoenicia is in the game and we have a unique Harbor as a district. I think if there's two improvable coastal resources up by that coastal plains hill we might want to settle there first -- that gets the Sailing boost and makes the Celestial Navigation eureka available. The bananas to the east could be purchased and we could get two RNDs early (chop the coastal forest to get most of it done). Yes, the city would need to build a granary first to get some housing to prevent stalliing growth, but I think that's doable. Settler #2 would head downriver and we'd also fit a second coastal city on the jungle 2NW of the rice with Settler #3.

We should be able to see the coastal situation on Settlervision before anything moves. If the settler's current third ring is all coastal I'm going to move SE.

In my test games I normally didn't get Animal Husbandry until the first district tech was out of the way. However, Alhambram makes a good point about horses. I think we should go Animal Husbandry -> Pottery -> Writing -> Mining and Code of Laws -> Foriegn Trade -> Early Empire, maybe pausing at Foreign Trade if we can't locate a continental boundary early. If we settle inland then Bronze Working for the Encampment. If our settler goes coastal then Sailing -> Astrology -> Celestial Navigation.

[suboptimal]

Just saw this in the tech thread:

I selected a small map size in PYDT and the actual game is in standard size.

If this is a standard size map with five players and ten city-states we're going to have a crap-ton of room to expand.

I'm going to take a look at the SIP again as it occurred to me that getting two cities on the lake might be a good thing. I think this is a matter of jump starting the capital vs. positioning to take advantage of the civ's UI.

Edited to add

OK...I simmed out the first 30 turns in terms of yields and build times between the two locations. SIP gets the settler out EoT18 with 95 (post settler), 65, 51 as of EoT30. Moving gets the settler out EoT23 with 54 (post settler), 61.5, 48.5 as of EoT 30. Don't need to twist my arm any more for an SIP start. Guess I just needed to run the numbers. It also still makes the river industrial valley a possibility and we can use the two forests for RND + lighthouse. Just becomes a matter of where to put a Campus down. Likewise, that would prioritize a river valley settle for the first city since I'd likely want to go Encampment -> GP there with an IZ being the district at 7 population. Of course, if the southwestern short of the lake looks like a better option I'd go there first.

Another Edit

If we have horses in the visible starting map they'd either be in the plains to the north or the grassland next to the cattle. Likewise, the only visible valid tile for iron is the coastal plains hill up north.

[suboptimal]

Turn 1

OK...we’ve seen the start position provided by Cornflakes (thank you again for doing the map). What’s it look like on Settlervision?




Well, that’s interesting. The “coast” visible at the fog edge to the northwest is actually “lake”. The cattle off to the east are also fresh water adjacent. I wonder if this means we consider packing as many inland RNDs as possible into lakes? We’re definitely equatorial, though it remains to be seen if we’re on a lobe of some sort of if we’re at the center of the land mass near some sort of choke point. I did attempt to zoom out and rotate the camera view to try to glimpse the north/south map edges but no luck.

As previously stated the warrior heads downriver to the rice:




Note the river delta visible at the bottom of the shot. Likewise, viewing the area on settler vision indicates that the grassland and jungle at the delta both show as suceptible to coastal flooding (1m above sea level). We have coast and ocean to the south and some sort of coast/ocean or large lake to the north. As a reminder, any body of water larger than 9 tiles is considered salt water by the game engine, so that could be a big lake (look at the Atlantic Ocean to my east in PBEM 15, for example).

I settle in place, earning 1 era score for settling within two tiles of floodplains. I leave the city name as London for the time being since I haven’t come up with a naming theme. I start building a slinger. Tech is set to Animal Husbandry.

I’m going to move the warrior down to the coast on the next turn, then send it across the river and circling back east. I think it’s more useful to get the lake shore defogged than the area to the immediate west. The first slinger out will check out the area north & northwest and then escort the settler. That will be complete EoT 14. After that I’ll build at least one more slinger for defense & defogging and then maybe get a monument built.

I also see that I’ve forgotten to disable Sukritact’s UI mods that I have installed (silver chalice in the icon bar to the top left). Gotta remember to do that for turn 2.