[PB57] Pindicator searches for his mascot

[pindicator]

Reason for IND Aztecs: chain whipping into wonders is certainly buffed here, as you can recover from multiple 1p whips easier. Also forges go great with all the whipping. 

So really if I want SPI I need to ask if having half priced granaries or half priced UBs is more important.

I'm leaning granaries, although I'm not certain.

[pindicator]

Uh, did Old Harry just take my first idea?

[pindicator]

Currently how I'm leaning:

1B. On top of sugar
2.  SW of the plains cow (same as before)
3B. 1S of the corn. 

Capital would probably be inland by the cow as that would just be a monster bureaucracy location and since we are SPI I'd want to leverage that switch. It also gives us 2 high-food cities down the line for leveraging whips.

I would need to pick up that elephant with a 3rd city and I think settling the island naturally is the right move for that spot. We'd be down some commerce initially to other players so roading connections to all my cities would be a priority. But hopefully the location quality would help me make that gap up.

[Serdoa]

With your settling spots the sugar-city and the corn-city should have a connection via the river, shouldn't they? If so, you'd really only need 2 road segments to the cow-city.

[pindicator]

Something else I forgot to consider is border pops. The capital will be able to pop borders naturally to the pigs and sheep, but settling on top of the sugar ... I might actually want to spend the 25g here to pop the sugar city's borders straight away. Doing that will mean I only have gold for 2 workers, not 3. And yet without the border pop there isn't much use for a worker at that city until the borders have expanded.

Let's say I spent the 25g on a border pop. Then my total bill would be:

3 cities - 300g
2 workers - 120g
1 border pop for sugar city - 25g
1 scout - 15g
1 work boat - 30g

Alternatively, if I do not spend the 25g on a border pop:

3 cities - 300g
3 workers - 180g
1 scout - 15g

Actually, this has me liking the border pop version a bit more. I think that early work boat would be a huge boon for early scouting. I would likely start all 3 cities on new workers - although perhaps I could just put both of the initial workers at the capital and just have it build warriors to grow. Maximize putting growth and worker turns into the best location and have the other two sites play catchup by building their own workers while we wait for the right techs (fishing & agriculture). Actually, Fishing first would mean that I get the work boat hooked up on turn 5 at the latest (assuming I'm going to have to save up gold for a turn before 4-turning Fishing). That would mean we'd have a 4f2c tile that I could share between the other two cities before their workers were even done.

I kind of like that, but I'll try to do some sims on it versus the standard 3 worker start first. I suspect 3-workers are going to run into trouble with that city-on-a-sugar, though, as it will need to pop borders before the worker it builds can really do anything.

[pindicator]

With your settling spots the sugar-city and the corn-city should have a connection via the river, shouldn't they? If so, you'd really only need 2 road segments to the cow-city.

And now that I've set it up in a sandbox, I realize that it's only the 1c trade route from the capital.  Cities 2 & 3 are going to be connected from the start, so there probably isn't any rush to get that road connection down.

[pindicator]

Spam spam spamming away.

The border pop variant runs into a problem of needing too many techs and the workers we build start getting bottlenecked.  So I also need to compare it to my first start.  But the first start also needs a border pop to get the sheep, so I'm going to try SW of the sugar as well:




Probably will do the same strat where I have the capital grow while 2 workers move to improve it.  Will go agriculture first with this start and share the sheep between the capital and city 3, see how it compares to the settle-on-sugar start.

The interesting problem here is that since borders don't touch I don't have any trade routes until roads are built

[pindicator]

So I haven't touched this in a few days, but digging around in my sandbox I'm liking the Settle-On-Sugar option still. In fact, I'm really liking going Pottery ahead of Mining-BW in that option as well ... risking that nobody does a warrior or UU rush, but the commerce difference over the third option and BW first is pretty immense. Plus I feel with 3 cities down initially my goal is to get those 3 cities growing. I'll still have 1 putting out an eot18 settler but I'm hoping that by the time I do get BW in, the cottages will help speed it all along and then I'll be able to whip those granaries to completion.

When I tried a run through with the last post's arrangement I have a lot more commerce issues, even though I skip Fishing entirely in that start. I also run into problems with the workers not having enough to do, although that could possibly make things freer for workers helping get city #4 up and running.

It feels a little weird to delay Mining so long, but I like it the most out of my options tried.

[Tarkeel]

Just wanted to say that it's very interesting to see your thoughts on this kind of start, but I can't really comment on them due to spoiler knowledge.

[pindicator]

Logged in and claimed my civ ... password is mascots.
Decided that I better plant the capital down because that is at least the same in all starts.




And now i need to redo all my micro.