[SPOILERS] DaveV is not clowning around. Well, maybe a little bit...

[DaveV]

Survey(or) says:



Wine/horse/sheep looks reasonable for my next city. It looks as though the mountain 5S of the wine has a couple non-mountain tiles attached to it, so future offshore trading depot?

[Qgqqqqq]

A Strong Freak is very nice!

[DaveV]

Another cash event:



36 gold, pretty much average.

[RefSteel]

Looking good so far; good luck with future pRNG! Did you have a tile in mind for that Wine/horse/sheep city? (Or have you found a site you like better still?)

Anyway, it's good to see I really didn't forget to include horses somewhere near you!

[DaveV]

Yes, horses are nice to see. I'll be more excited about copper when I finally get around to researching mining.

Another injection of cash:



The full 50 gold this time, ka-ching! My demos are pretty bad, but my economy is being kept afloat by these cash events. Better to be lucky than good. I'm hoping the guys with ridiculously good numbers are benefiting from God King. And, speaking of tech, someone just established Runes of Kilmorph. Although that religion has lots of strengths (and cool music), I think the lack of culture bonus in non-holy cities is a real drawback at this stage of the game. Maybe it's Aurorarcher, and he's going to pop borders with his world spell. Hmm, something I've never tested: can Soldiers of Kilmorph give their hammer burst to settlements? That would be a cute way of working around the limited build queues.

A few words about my tech path: education is both an economic (cottages!) and a military tech (+2 XP from Apprenticeship). Next I'll go for Mysticism, set up my GPP buildings (mixed GPP, relying on the RNG yet again). A sage will help bulb along the magic user line; a bard should give me both Drama and Sanitation; a merchant is the worst option, probably will use him to bulb horseback riding. I'm almost exclusively working farms and resource tiles, so I don't miss the lack of mines at this point. I'll need to clear some forests soon, though.

@Ref - planned city site is N of sheep. Not an overly ambitious reach, coastal, pulls in all three resources after CRE border pop.

[DaveV]

Settler completed, on its way to sheep/horse/wine city. I revolted to Nationhood and Apprenticeship for the +2 XP.



Demos still look terrible. I'm slotting in some buildings to try to improve that. Also, someone just popped a great sage

[DaveV]

City #3, named after my new avatar. People younger than I probably don't remember Bozo, but he used to have a pretty popular TV show.

[DaveV]

I popped the scout out to scope out the nearby terrain, and spotted barbarian borders in the western fog:



And in the southern fog:



My second freak finished EoT:



Not as exciting as Strong, but a decent set of three promotions (immune to disease, immune to plague, +10% strength). Assuming the free promotion from Apprenticeship goes to Combat I, this guy is +30% strength. I won't be sad about keeping him, but I won't be heartbroken to turn him into a freak show either.

[RefSteel]

Looks like good progress! Do those barb cities affect your plans yet, or are they just curiosities out in the fog for now?

[DaveV]

For now, the barb cities are just a future source of a couple stacks of four single-promotion warriors

In the not-too-distant future, I may flop down cities to culture flip the barb cities. Barb cities in FFH never generate culture, so if I can pop 3rd ring borders over the city center, the city will flip eventually. Very thematic, since it relies on good RNG and puts CRE to good use. Downside: I have to deal with the city garrison when it's kicked out of the city by the culture flip.