Delicious, delicious hammers. Somehow when founding cities and checking them against my list of names, I skipped Concentric Squares and Script California.
The capital, whose Oracle gambit shaped the whole course of my early game and made possible my midgame transition. I think the very early Granary and frequent whipping helped me keep up in expansion while still accumulating overflow hammers for the Oracle, and it later picked up a respectable number of villages and towns.
Onramp did exactly what it was intended to, helping shuffle tiles around between whip cycles and eventually finding its niche as the home of the Heroic Epic. This city birthed the Great Merchant that bulbed Currency, made the defense against Khan possible, and built the entire first wave of Accuracy trebuchets that made the attack on Ginger palatable. Not being coastal prevented me from making an earlier attempt on the northern island, but that tradeoff was definitely worth it.
Despite having a half-dozen power tiles to use and never disappointing, Silent Walk never really stuck out to me. In my mind, it featured most prominently in 3-pop Settler whips during the first and second post-CoL growth spurts, training Confucian Missionaries, and building Work Boats. From another perspective, being the port that allowed me to settle the Stone that boosted the Pyramids, one could argue that this was one of the most important cities in my game.
Ah, Tellefsen Hall. A powerhouse. As the Confucian holy city, it locked down the border with Ginger. The shrine and terrain made this a natural place to stack commerce multipliers, and there were enough forests and base hammers to build the Pyramids reasonably quickly.
The Moai was unusually strong in this game - we're working 12 water tiles, of which only one is ocean, and one has a bonus hammer thrown in. Building the wonder itself was rather laborious - I was torn between swapping to Slavery to overflow some 2-pop whips into it, and staying in Caste System to make the most of Representation. In the end, it worked a few mines and a workshop and made do, but I'm not confident that this was correct. In general, I think we could've whipped more frequently, especially for expensive infrastructure that sat in build queues for a long time.
Geopolitical necessity made this into a production city and staging point against Khan. It built my fleet of ultimately completely useless Galleys (last seen leisurely sailing down the outer coast toward Ginger) and then served as a staging point for my 2-move counterattackers.
Outside of a few bizarre suicidal raids from Khan, the city did its job of deterring an invasion and staking a claim on those Gems. Khan made good use of IND to stack wonders and pressure us with +72 culture per turn, so Marchup Cadence ended up trying its best to hold onto its 1st-ring tiles with a combination of Sistine Confucian buildings, its own wonders, and Artist specialists.
Tossing & Turning made all those golden ages possible, first contributing to the mad dash to Civil Service and then birthing some of the higher-cost great people. Those workshops were impossible to share and felt a bit wasted as a result, but again, tradeoffs.
This city hooked all-important Stone and provided a much-needed 2c trade route, and then tried to grow large enough to provide a 3c route. Sadly, with the war weariness, it never got there, and we stagnated it on specialists instead. We were also going to draft it into oblivion to augment the attack on Chichester and then garrison that area against Khan, if the game came to that.
One of our biggest mistakes was not settling this site earlier. Just look at it, even after giving away two of its food bonuses. Unfortunately, our worker scarcity and pathing locked us into delaying this until the second growth spurt, but it still effortlessly contributed 1t mounted units and Settlers.
A filler-ish city that nonetheless achieved a respectable hpt.
This city might have deserved a few more commerce multipliers, but in the end, hammers rule everything around me.
The western counterpart to Sproul Steps, specializing in building and staging reinforcements against Khan.
Our foothold in the center. Ultimately, nothing came of this (good on Khan to rule out any kind of attack on Mount Pleasant), and it did precipitate a risky war, but it also denies Khan a canal into the eastern inner sea and a route into our core. As with Marchup Cadence, no news was good news.
A rough analogue to the Stuntsheet One site, Gauntlet managed to finish most of its infrastructure and start pumping out units despite being founded a dozen turns later. It was a real shame to let this land go unclaimed for so long - I highly doubt Ginger would've been able to stop us from settling here while he was occupied in the center and west.
Now we're at the first of the real fillers. The plan here was to build the basic infrastructure and then grow it up for drafting, but we decided the payback time on a Monastery wasn't worth it by that point.
Half Hog had a few more tiles to work with, taking some more food resources from Stuntsheet One and scrounging together enough hpt to alternate 2t cavalry and auxiliaries.
This filler babysat some cottages and helped fill out the drafting rotation.
Big Game Tempo was going to eventually give its food back and stagnate on all of the coast. I'm not entirely sure why we didn't build a Granary here.
A cultural filler on the southern border. Would've grown up to fill out the drafting rotation.
Ditto.
Ditto.
