IND - can get a 50% bonus on failgold for stonehenge, plus build oracle faster (also, have marble for that) and get forges quick, maybe bulb machinery for crossbows.
IMP - this start, imp can build a settler for 2 turns, then 2 pop whip it (3 hammer from city, 4 hammer from mined PH, 1 hammer from wheat is 12 hammer, plus 2 extra food from city, wheat and clam, -2 for PH, 1 for FP) is 34 hammers and a 2 pop whip is 75 with bonus. that's not bad.
SPI - no anarchy is awesome, of course. Inca starts with mysticism and marble suggests oracle, anyway, so religion means a GP- maybe a shrine economy?
AGG - not as useful, with the terrace giving culture. Would be good to have a counter to keep superdeath and Krill off of me, though.
CRE - entire purpose of picking inca is to get the culture from the terraces. No point in picking Creative. Might do it, just to read the lurker thread after that said, trolling lurkers is fun, but not THAT fun
ORG - cheap stuff is nice.
CHA - ability to go high is nice. Faster promos is good, too, but the key to winning battles isn't to have higher promoted units, its to have higher tech units. An axe will kill a C5 shock warrior.
PRO - kind of meh for me, since I can't apply the granary bonus to terraces. Also, any archers I got would get into arguments with the quecha over who could kill who - would be a mess.
As much as I like the image of a bunch of quechas and drill archers settling their conflicts on a ball court, I agree that Pro and Cre are right out.
IMP is actually pretty intriguing to me, as we are expecting a cramped map. I'm not normally a big IMP fan, but all of that theorycrafting about it "not helping push past the economic horizontal expansion cap" doesn't matter much if the actual horizontal expansion cap is neighbours' expansion speeds.
ORG is good. We'll even want at least one lighthouse, in the capital.
IND is better than it's ever been (though a smaller map means less chance of renaissance era boosts being worth anything) and it wasn't terrible before, so I do think that now is a good time to consider it.
SPI is also very good. It does require a whole additional level of planning, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in-game.
Not a huge fan of AGG, and I like CHA (especially if low happy map, which we don't know except the expected that we don't have gold at our cap) but I don't love it.
For both IND and SPI, I should mention that Inca does have the ability to completely ignore the entire religious line of the tech tree until Code of Laws, especially if it finds happiness elsewhere. In a big game, this can be really useful. But, in our six person game, I am fairly comfortable going up the religious line. I heavily suspect that Krill of Aztec wants a very early monotheism, but India can't easily compete unless they have single food type resources at their capital and second city, and NA is de-incitizied from doing that due to their totem poles that can be pre-built in other cities
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
I suspect we'll have a fair number of coastal cities.
Small map with medium seas has between 450-500 land tiles, or 75-83 a person, which is pretty crowded.
Small map with low seas has between 500-550 land tiles, or 83-91 a person, which is still crowded. That's like 4 inland cities and 4-6 coastal ones
My guess is that we'll get low seas and no offshore islands (or maybe a small one each).
IMP is interesting - may not have enough land to make it useful - on the other hand, it may be vital to get the best contested spots (and we'll almost certainly be contesting with at least 3 civs). I assuming with a circle with disputed land in the middle, or a rough rectangle,where people will be trying to take land from 2 or 3 sides at once.
IMP/SPI will almost certainly be first to a settler, unless someone goes IMP/EXP.
I have what is almost certainly a stupid idea - it's a crowded map, so there is going to be cultural pressure very quickly. Creative Inca will win those wars. Granted, we'll piss people off a lot, too
no, I'm not serious about that. I want to be but I'm not.
It's not nothing to be really really good at something really really small. But probably too really really small and not enough really really good to be anything. Would be hilarious to read all the reactions, though. Alas, so it is.
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
So, a first try with IMP gives us fishing, mining, BW and part of wheel at turn 27, along with a worker, a workboat, a warrior and a few hammers into stonehenger (or another warrior or something), in slavery and having popped 1 pop point.
Without IMP, I dunno yet.
Growing to do a 2 pop whip seems slower than whipping at size 3 - my first try at that was turn 28.
A turn 27 or 28 settler sounds pretty good. I'll check to see what non-imp gives a little later
A second workboat for scouting has a lot of value, if the hammers into Stonehenge are enough for that. I'm guessing no, but worth mentioning. It would be nice to put all early game hammers into economy (ex. Stonehenge failgod over additional warriors), but we probably won't get that luxury. I can't remember, do wonders suffer production decay?
Btw, I will be away from my computer from Friday morning until Monday evening, which lines up unfortunately with microing the start. But, I can crack a look tomorrow afternoon at what I can find. And I did mention, but once things start getting more complicated, my bandwidth to micro falls off quickly. But, hopefully, I can help a little here.
Would you be able to make an excel document (or google sheets, etc.) that lists the moves if you find a good plan? That way I don't end up just duplicating your work.
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Yeah, sure. I'm 99% sure that we go worker->workboat while we research fishing->mining, so that's the first 10 turns or so in any case, pretty much no matter what we select. Well, if we get EXP, the builds will take less time. Main question is whether to grow on the FP while building the WB or the forest hill and then the clam. But that decision is a week away or so, unless we do 2-3 turns a day.
After that, I think warrior->something->settler while we research wheel->BW.
It's possible that the best move is not to whip the first settler at all and switch to slavery while the settler is moving.
I didn't realize that you can build workboats without knowing fishing. I tried WB->worker->quecha->SH till size 3->settler.
That was with the worker building a road on the wheat before going to the PH to mine, as opposed to just going to the PH to mine.
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Charismatic is the big winner so far. I guess people really like promotions. Well, with half the buildings giving XP, I guess charismatic is more interesting - sending out 3 or 4 promo units is good if you are at tech parity.
I didn't do a sim, but taking the numbers i see, at size 3 it's 6 turns to build a settler for an imp civ and 8 for a non-imp civ, with no whips. a 1 pop whip takes a turn off. a 2 pop whip would take 2 turns off, but it requires more time to get to size 2, so is later (I think). I think I'd prefer to use my first whip on the cheap granary.
IMP gives us the ability to 2 pop whip settlers after a small amount of hammers are given, which means the 2nd city can probably pop whip a couple pretty easily.
I'm really leaning into IMP as one of the traits - with terraces, that's a new city up and running with a savings of something like 50-60 hammers (15 savings on granary, 30 on monument, 15-30 on the settler itself), which means that each city can get an extra unit or two to defend itself. I think that advantage may be critical with the warmongers, since my UU is useless.
so, the other trait I think is IND, ORG or SPI. SPI would have an immediate impact, not losing a turn of anarchy for slavery. It does look for to a religion, but that's ok - I like happiness, too. IND does have an obvious tech line, which is "get forges" Org just helps with stuff.
I'll wait till SD and Krill have made their picks (Krill is waiting for SD) to decide.
that said, trolling lurkers is fun, but not THAT fun 
