[SPOILERS] Catherine of China

[plako]

Maybe he had a plains hill or something?

Might be although I think they should have started on plains hill as it seems most/all of us did. Misclick might be possible also.

Moved warrior to SE and revealed lake fish and silk. The main question at the moment is how far should we go with our warrior? We can build 3 turn warrior. That is not fast enough, if timings go against us. What would you say, if we invest 1 turn on warrior now and send the current one out to check our neighbours. Nevertheless I think we're safe next turn so we can continue SE.

[plako]

Border pop came and there are more resources around, but where are all grain resources?

Since I don't want to wait until last minute to log in I think I'll put 1 5-hammer turn on the warrior next turn and continue to NE with warrior unless someone has better ideas. It seems that there is tundra in the south.

[plako]

Here is 1st sandbox for testing purposes.

edit. attachement updated to reflect T4 and one missing hill was added near sheep in the north.

[plako]

I haven't yet run any tests, but here is some preliminary thoughts.

First of all we got screwed . Agriculture could have been delayed for a long time in this setup. E.g. Fishing would have been much better.

There are plentiful of hammers around, but low early commerce potential. Main early goal for optimization should be to convert those hammers to beakers as efficiently as possible. Basic alternatives are either building army or workers and cottage everything or army of settlers grow to size 3 while building library and hire 2 scientists. The approach getting us 1st to Monarchy is the winner. Im both cases we need AH, BW and Fishing before heading to religious path and possibly also Wheel. Pottery or writing depending which path we take and obvivously depending on how close our neighbours are we might also need a more than token army.

Obvivously I'm simplifying things a bit too much, but I think it makes it more fun when there is simple goal we need to achieve.

[plako]

Gone through few tests and the lack of commerce is pretty frustrating. Main problem, if you can call it a problem, is to find something else than workers and settlers to produce. We don't need early chops or slavery in my opinion. If we can somehow secure ourselves without copper, I would postpone BW a bit, but this is probably widhful thinking. I actually like Fishing most. It is cheap and we would get 2 new cities nicely running with it whereas with AH we get only 1. Furthermore it makes pottery a bit cheaper so we could take that before Writing and get some use to our workers that we can easily produce a lot.

[antisocialmunky]

I'm usually for looping the warrior around. However in this case, we should be fine sending him off if we put a turn into that warrior. Its not like people can actually see into our city.

We may want to scout north. If this is one of those climate banded maps, then we are next to tundra so we are going to get less planty foods. I wouldn't worry too much about agriculture, it gets up cheaper AH and Pots.

[plako]

I'm usually for looping the warrior around. However in this case, we should be fine sending him off if we put a turn into that warrior. Its not like people can actually see into our city.

We may want to scout north. If this is one of those climate banded maps, then we are next to tundra so we are going to get less planty foods. I wouldn't worry too much about agriculture, it gets up cheaper AH and Pots.

I agree general direction N-NE seems best.

I like the map so far. Getting good opening isn't easy, but that is just great to challenge our minds.

[plako]

After further testing I think there isn't too much of a hurry to get Monarchy. Our cities will be quite small at least as long as we're spamming settlers and workers. The most promising opening is Hunting-Fishing-BW-wheel-pottery-AH-Writing. Productionwise spam 2 fast settlers after reaching size 2 to claim both Fish sites and a bit later close to AH coming online city near Sheep. Between these workers and military and after Pottery granaries.

[antisocialmunky]

I agree general direction N-NE seems best.

I like the map so far. Getting good opening isn't easy, but that is just great to challenge our minds.

Krill troll is usually a somewhat sophisticated troll.:neenernee

I agree, the main thing we need is commerce to support our cities... which means cottages. I think its quite feasible to make a hybrid hammer/cottage farm out of our capitol. It has decent food, some hills, and 4 river side grass. I suppose, we should figure out what's up north before deciding too far ahead.

[plako]

Warrior is moving NE and probably should continue to NE next turn. Reveals Sheep.

If this is based on Lakes map script, there is probably 5 nations in a row south and north. Jungle in the middle.