[SPOILERS] WillPlunder as Mehmed of Arabia: Noobs meet world

[Plunder]

Rather than moving our warrior, what about moving the scout up NW? It'll reveal a non-jungled plains tile, which might have copper on it.

We'll have to make a good plan if we want to settle our gold city as first. If we do, I suggest to get a religion as well, it'll surely land in that city, netting it a nice +5 culture from being a holy city (if I remember correctly). No need to fiddle around with monuments, and we can work the gold tile asap.

[WilliamLP]

(About the anarchy turns don't produce EP point) Oh damn.

Sorry, I think refusing to move the warrior to the hill is way too paranoid against a risk that is almost mathematically 0. It is mathematically 0, if we can get the first part of the turn from Kuro when / if they try and run a warrior in. The move reveals the plains tile you're talking about. And it's also a better standing position to prevent more barb spawns.

The reason to rest up the scout is that I'm really hoping he can win 1 more combat. If he does, he is woodsman 2 and is quite a bit more valuable. If he moves and sees an animal right now, he is dead with quite high probability. (At 0.6 life currently.)

I agree, the gold city and early religion seem to go well together. I'm not sure whether going for Buddhism or Hindu first makes more sense, either. Hindu is more expensive by a bit, but it might be less contested, gives a fallback chance at Judaism, and leads to the powerful OR civic on the way to Monarchy. Someone has to be thinking about an early Oracle, and they'll get Buddhism before us, perhaps.

[Plunder]

Also, considering our lack of strategic resources, how much turns is it to IW and to AH? With human barbs getting close to be spawned, warrior vs warrior are not my preferred odds ;-)

[WilliamLP]

This turn pace is pretty crazy. New map info:




Nope, no resources on that plains. There's a grass tile to the S of it, which we will reveal soon. Even if there is copper there, the city sites that would claim it all seem to suck.

The most conservative tech path (other than archery) would be Agri->AH immediately after pottery, on the wild theory that an early religion isn't very useful when we're dead. How many turns it is depends on where our second city plant is. The close sites can get immediate trade routes and boost our economy immediately (by a couple of beakers, but still). The gold site would be a drain for several turns, but getting gold worked and online sooner has advantages too.




Wetbandit planted a city. Kuro gained a tech. Global power rose by 5k which makes it very likely that Kuro just got wheel.

I wonder if we can metagame this start at all:
- Either we don't have copper, or we have it in one of the tiles we're just missing, like that grassland 2W of the scout.
- Commodore set up the map, and it was approved by other experienced players. Would they have signed off on a map where Kuro had no neighbors but us, and they had copper, and we didn't? I think not.
- So I think we can almost assume that either both of us have it close by, or neither.

[Plunder]

I think it's faster to get a nearby city. It'll take quiet a lot of turns before we can work our gold tile. atm it's most important to get up to speed. So I would suggest to settle the B-city or the one North of B (your suggestion) and get a bunch of cottages up and running.
Although, this city that closes of the peninsula is also not that bad, especially if we go for agri and AH now. It'll be grow easily as it can share a clams from the capital.

Do I understand correctly we won't pursue the GLH any more?

[WilliamLP]

3 people planted cities last turn. And this turn Azza had done so too before I played. This means the age of human barbs should be upon us. Right now they are pretty aimless but there's a point where they get more aggressive and actively go after cities.

TIL about barbs. Long answer here. Barbs won't enter our culture until there are 21 cities on the map, unless it's to attack a unit. After there are 31 cities, they cross another threshold and can enter culture to attack a city two turns away.

I moved the scout for the last bit of interesting close map info. It was interesting but not in the way we wanted.




Not that a grassland cow is a bad tile but... it's official. We're playing without copper for the foreseeable future.

I think this vastly limits our options. We need Agri->AH, or else a single barb axeman could just make us dead. We may have even needed Agri->AH before pottery.

GLH and early religions? Forget it.

If there's any silver lining, it's that AH is just what's needed to make the city sites that share the pig suddenly quite good.

The realistic choices for the second city:

1. The site to the north that I think is terrible. The trouble is that it can't get more than one hammer without the cows, so it's limited to chops and the whip. Even after the border pop (which needs a monument and waiting 10 turns), 3 hammers from the cow is nothing to write home about, and it will never be a very good commerce city without a river near. Sharing the clam with the capital isn't even all good news, because the capital often wants it for itself, and gets much more benefit out of population growth.

Another non-obvious disadvantage is that if more seafood appears to the NW of the capital, having this site may make it impossible to claim. E.g. if there's a fish claimed by 2N3W of the capital.

Still despite all of it, this is the only city site that grows quickly, right now.

2. The various pig sharing sites. They get the river for commerce, and some production with the grass hills (and the pig before AH). The site on the banana or 1E of the banana can get to +4 food before AH, the other sites not even that, very easily. However what they can do is work the pig and crank out warriors and stuff to free up the capital to grow. After AH the food problem goes away so they may be better as a 3rd city.

3. The gold site. I spent a couple hours simming this out. It's trouble is economic drain, because it gets -1 maintenance for distance cost compared to the others, and it can't hook up with roads very soon. It really needs 2 additional workers as well, to get it going quickly. The gold comes online with the capital at turn 59-60 or so. After that it's a really good city. But... I think the key point is our need for learning AH very fast, and planting a city that actually reduces our beaker count may not be an option.

On the foreign front, Kuro planted their second city, and whipped the capital to size 1 again. Personally, I think they may be overextending their economy a little bit already. We'll see in the graphs to come.




I'm not sure if there's any value left in posting the demos every turn. Does anyone reading like to see them every turn? I'll snapshot them anyway to look at, regardless.




Someone's working 19 food already. That seems like an explosion of a start. Power rose by 7, which is hard to infer very much about.

[WilliamLP]

And... yet another turn rolled, while I was writing the last turn report! It seems like everyone is eager to get to the interesting parts of the game. I certainly am.

After seeing everything interesting nearby. I'm moving the scout toward the capital again. I think he's most valuable as a spawn buster. Being sure that no barbs will spawn in any 5x5 square we want is not that small a thing right now. A jungle expedition is probably just going to kill him off as soon as he sees a warrior.

Comparison between us and Kuro:




This is pretty comparable. They passed us with the second city. It will be three more turns until our settler comes out.




We've been working more hammers at basically the same food level. They've been chopping more, but it also means they'll run out of forests first.




And they've lowered their economy a bit with an unconnected city, until they can spend the worker turns to connect it.

Demos:




I think we're probably in the lower half, or near it, for starts. But I also think we're a little ahead of KuroBaII right now.

Updated sandbox. Note this gets pottery 1t faster than the real game because I forgot to put in my panic turn of Agriculture research. But it should even up after that.

[Plunder]

bah, I'm not to happy about how our start is. I would love to hear how experienced player would have played our start. I think we did a good job regardless, although probably not optimal.

What about moving our gold city to one SW of the gold? We could think about planting a city at the 'B' site (one SE of our worker) and then one SW of the gold. We can connect the gold straight away. The bad thing is that it has no food resources in the first ring. But we won't be able to pop our borders in a quiet a while anyway. Connecting the gold would increase our research speed by quiet a bit. Also it'll not prevent us from settling the north. But I think that no food is maybe too bad....
Maybe this is a good option for a 4th city, so we don't need a border pop from our planned gold city (if we plant that one as 3rd).?

[Plunder]

At the moment I would say, try to maximize our GNP, and whip and chop out everything else ;-)

(although we didn't discuss this, I assume we have the conventional play of revolting to slavery with our first settler in transit?)

ps. what is the eta for our 3rd ring border pop in our capital?

[WilliamLP]

Yeah, working the gold is a -2 food hit, so claiming it without a really good food surplus is a non-starter. A second city also really needs to contribute to the empire in terms of building things too, and working the gold (the whole reason for being) would mean it can't grow at all.

30 hammers + 10 turns for a border pop isn't that bad, it just means that a city needs enough in its first ring to keep busy until then. The N gold site definitely has this.

This start would have been pretty good with a different civ. (Other than the no copper part!) With agri + fishing, one could build a WB and grow to size 2 while researching AH, and everything would be great.

With SPI, needing fishing to be viable pretty much means no spare beakers at all for an early religion.

Doing this same thing over, I would have thought harder about growing the capital to size 4 with the third WB and 2 workers before the settler. This would have cost only a couple of turns on the settler and we'd be in a stronger position for food and commerce. But I thought we'd want the settler earlier to claim something quickly, so it's all hindsight...

Oh well, the game isn't over yet. We make the best with what we've got.