[SPOILERS] scooter's thread: how to finish second

[scooter]

OK, pretty much move scout, hit enter thus far. I clearly scouted in the total wrong direction, but such is life. T8 and T10 progress:





T12 I hit enter, BW comes in aaand:



NICE. Grassland copper right there. This certainly changes my plans ever so slightly. This very likely removes my interest in mining the sheep, but I need to run a quick test to see if it's worth improving the copper with the worker instead of chopping.

[scooter]

UPDATE TIME. My scout which went the complete wrong scouting direction has almost correct itself, finding a flock of black and white speckled things:



The scouts report that the animals look yummy. T13 my worker is chopping, as it's definitely still worth chopping first here:



I was going to chop a different forest, but with copper in the BFC I can chop this forest and go straight onto improving copper after that. Anyways, on T15 here's my land:



Bad news: I guessed completely wrong on where to send the scout and ended up doing nothing but scouting my backlines up until now. Good news: I can seriously build ZERO military (except those needed for MP) for a very long time as long as I have a unit on this narrow ridge to keep an eye out on incoming things. I'll probably avoid roading the copper for a good while. Early Monarchy, warriors for HR, and cottage spam may be a good call here. Too bad there aren't more rivers. Anyways, I just played T16, so here's scouting progress:



Jungle. This is a pretty odd start. You of course don't want to mess with that jungle early, but I'm sure Commodore will have stocked it with goodies to be tempting. Anyways, chop came in and I finished the WB at EoT:



Worker, WB, and halfway to sz2 (with a 6F tile to work now) by EoT16 (normal speed) is pretty good right? Seems like it anyways.

[scooter]

T17 played and I guess I'll start reporting more consistently now that I'm actually uncovering fog again and real things will start happening . Woodward is rocking the glorious 6/0/3 tile:



FIN lake fish is about as good as it gets. I'll spend 2T on the warrior to grow to sz2, then it's settler time. My worker is currently mining the copper right now. I'll have 2T @sz working the sheep, then I'll have improved copper to work with my second citizen. Two people are at sz2 already:



WB first while growing I guess. If you're SPI + Fishing/Mining I could see that working nicely to whip the WB, but I don't believe we have that in this game. Anyways, I think that's Ichabod and Ruff, but I put zero effort into checking past screenshots/scores to see who did it, because I don't really care. Scouting:



More jungle, seafood, and calendar stuff. Demos:



Food leaders are almost certainly working fish and @sz2, having gone WB first. So that's the fishing guys, whoever those were.

[Serdoa]

Not having followed this game, only looking at your last two screenies is already telling me who are the ones at sz2 as well as who got how many techs already. Just saying

and yes that was totally only written to show off my 133t C&D-skills :D

[scooter]

Not having followed this game, only looking at your last two screenies is already telling me who are the ones at sz2 as well as who got how many techs already. Just saying

and yes that was totally only written to show off my 133t C&D-skills :D

Oh I know, I'm just purposely being ignorant to highlight how much I dislike C&D . Given your C&D abilities, you could probably tell me every thing every person has done quicker than I could point out the "obvious" things anyways.

[scooter]

Ok, I owe you all an update. Things are moving pretty slow being normal and all, but it's going pretty much as planned. Domestically, I hit sz2 and started my settler:



Worked the sheep for just a turn or two while waiting for the copper to complete.



That launched me to the top of the demos in food/mfg:



Something must be different with our starts here, I'm definitely the only person with 16foodhammmers despite starting 1T later than everyone else by being the only person to wait til T1 to settle. Anyways, the map is really... unusual. We already know I'm on a secluded peninsula that looks kinda like the Iberian Peninsula. The surroundings though are straight jungle it seems. Take this for example:



Do some fog-gazing and see how much jungle you see. I see some in the bottom-left corner, I see some straight to my west... I see some N-N-NW of the clams, I see some across the waters from the cow.... It's just a giant freaking jungle in the middle. This is going to be the most SimCity-like start ever because you will DEFINITELY not have to worry about rushes. Man, Mongolia would've been an unholy terror here. Anyways, that gets me to the last two turns. This was yesterday:



JUNGLEEEEE. Never seen anything like this. I'm really glad there aren't many forests by the capital, because Ichabod's going to get enough of a boost in the mid-game chopping this jungle. Anyways, today's turn was very funny. I still had contact with nobody yesterday. I open today's save aaaaaand:





And if that wasn't enough:



. So I went from 0/4 to 3/4 contacts there just like that.

Finally, I've started chopping the settler:



Also, got a nearby forest growth at EoT.



And that brings us up to date. I'll probably have more to say later about some map theorizing now that I've got a better idea of what we're looking at, though I'd like to see a little more of this "central" area first before being too confident.

[scooter]

Well apparently chopping down vegetation makes bands of settlers grow significantly faster, presumably because... well I have no idea. Anyways, I tried this technique:



T26 my settler was on the move:



Pretty sure I forgot to revolt to slavery. AGGGHGHGHHG. So stupid. Anyways, straight onto 2nd worker in Woodward:



And now tonight's turn, 8 Mile was settled:



Rather than getting straight to the rice, that is getting delayed ever so slightly to finish a chop into the second worker. I think the goal will be to grow onto at least the sheep and push for another settler. Seriously, the nearest enemy unit is still at least 30T away and we have barbs off sooo... I'm just going to spam settlers, workers, and cottages. Free 50T NAPs with everyone are fun.

[scooter]

Ok one oddity I've seen so far, but I hadn't commented on yet until I got to the middle of the jungle. Well, oddity isn't really the right word, more like observation. We have 899 land tiles in this game. That's pretty average, not spectacularly high but it's still pretty good for 5 players... The way we're placed and the amount of water makes this map feel much bigger than that, though.

So I countd my land tiles. I counted the tiles that were definitively mine up to the jungle, and the number is around 90 or so, depending on where you want to cut it off. I haven't defogged the entirety of the jungle middle yet (I actaully stumbled onto a branch before I realized what I was on, and now I'm just going with it), but I've seen enough of it to know it's fairly small. So let's just round up and say we have 100 tiles each on this mainland. That leaves a surprisingly high 399 tiles still out there, or let's just call it 400. Vikings really would have been good here. Add to this the fact that the middle isn't really desirable. Of course jungle is undesirable for quite awhile, but it's not like there's a huge stockpile of grassland gems in the middle to be racing for or anything silly like that. It's just a bunch of green tiles covered in jungle with random calendar resources buried in the jungle. Those will be useful no doubt, but not worth rushing for.

So then, the priority shifts to the islands. There's 400 tiles worth of it out there. Other factors:

1) I don't see gold, gems, stone, marble, etc. None of those valuable things are visible for me, so it's highly unlikely anyone else has those, particularly stone and marble. However, Commodore likes to include those on his maps in spots that are close enough to be a factor early enough for stuff like MoM/HG, but not early enough for stuff like Henge/Pyramids/Oracle (or Pyramids only if it lasts longer than normal). So I think it's a reasonable prediction to make that those will be in a nearby island.

2) Circumnavigation will be really important. This is kind of a duh, but it's worth noting. This actually makes me reconsider the direction my scout is going (northerly), as I may want to consider taking the westernmost branch to help circumnavigate. Wait, are we on a Toroid? If so, that might make such a change unwise. Note to self: check on this.

3) IC routes uber alles. It's free money. I like free money.

4) Yes we have 500 land tiles on this continent (in theory anyways), but ~120-140 of those are jungled if this pattern holds up. We'll likely settle more cities that are NOT on the main continent than those that are, since islands tend to result in cities with a higher proportion of water tiles - 50 tiles worth of island results in more cities than 50 tiles of continent.

All kind of obvious notes to make, but the point is these sound much more interesting than trudging through a jungled mess to be captain of the middle of our continent and therefore get dogpiled. So let's prioritize that. Would rather skip Colossus here because I believe the value of early Astronomy will be really good.

[Bigger]

how do you know how many land tiles are on the map?

[scooter]

how do you know how many land tiles are on the map?

If you hover over your name on the scoreboard, you get a little box that pops up breaking down your points. One of those is land points. In parenthesis for land points, it'll tell you the amount of land tiles you own like this: (<tilesyouown>/<tilesinthemap>). That last number is the one.