[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

So assuming no early science or culture acceleration, sailing + astro have been taking something like 25t to research with both boosts, same with CoL + FT. The Plan as it currently stands looks something like:

t1-t5 start builder, work 3 food tile
t6-t16 settler
t16-t25 finish builder + cap holy site
t25-t37 boat spam

so we do not NEED the astrology boost.... but without it we're going to have to delay something, either the boats or the holy site -> pantheon + religion, for lack of science. we do have some fairly-compelling things we could do while we wait (monument to help the nightmare culture sitch), but i think it's clearly suboptimal - delaying the HS could cost us our pantheon choice and the t61 religion, and delaying boats could cost us one or more CS if we have to race thrawn and chev to them (and you'd better believe we do)

in PBEM20 the astrology eurekas looked like this:
- roland/suboptimal t5 lmao
- cmf/mpf missed it (marco hard-researched t28)
- woden/ljubljana t30
- TAD/kaiser missed it too (kaiser hard-researched t34)

so... yikes, we'd have needed quite a lucky break with scouting, which is especially unlikely if one or both of us plans to skip an early military unit. dang. back to the drawing board?

or perhaps based on the start i can force TAD to hard-research it and delay sailing? if one of us has to delay galley-spam, you'd think it should be portugal who makes weaker galleys, and TAD needs it for their CelNav beeline anyways. worst-case TAD can do the third city settler before boats and then have 3 cities to spam from instead of 2...

[ljubljana]

oh shit we have a start!! thank you kaiser!!!!

ok, i'm so stupid but.... are you certain that's a floodplain SE of the eastern start, and not a marsh? if it's an FP we have a total lack of 3-food tiles in the first ring which is really concerning. but i don't know how strategic view works LMAO

[williams482]

Also of note: we don't have a three food tile! Looks like a couple 2-2 grass forest hills are the obvious tiles to be working from the beginning.

[ljubljana]

re +2 holy sites: the FP 1NW of the western start works too, no? and luckily neither FP can conceal a hidden horse

[williams482]

re +2 holy sites: the FP 1NW of the western start works too, no? and luckily neither FP can conceal a hidden horse

Um, yes it does. 

I don't generally play on strategic view and I hate how ambiguous that graphic is, but I'm pretty sure that's a floodplain. If it isn't then we have a ton of marshes in the area, including at least two placed on plains tiles.

[williams482]

I think the eastern start is still preferable for Japan as it has a marginally nicer campus location for district #2: 1E of the city center (hopefully after chopping the forest) will put it adjacent to the city, the HS, the mountain, and the geothermal vent for a full +5 (!!!) out of the gate. The western site definitely can't do that.

[ljubljana]

i guess marshes look a bit bluer than this, huh:



pantheon situation is looking pretty abysmal... wtf are we supposed to take here?

on the other hand the trade route sitch is dreamy, as you've said. almost impossible to imagine a better setup for portugal. and i will bet that those two islands in the channel will make for horrifying, monstrous feitoria cities

you are probably right about the eastern start for japan - we want the holy site to go towards the GP + campus complex, not away from it, and that's the start that does that. let me think about it more and let's let TAD weigh in before committing, though

[ljubljana]

just in case, @Kaiser could you please confirm that we have 5 visible floodplains and 0 visible marsh here? i literally do not trust my own eyes lmao

also, do we get to know whether the starts are on separate continents? not that it really matters ig

what in the world do we even open with here? it will take 8 turns to hit size 2, in which we'll get 48 hammers. warrior-first seems unbelievably wasteful if we can avoid it, builder-first terrible with no first-ring resource tiles to improve. do i dare advocate for monument-first here? that's why i asked about the separate continents, if not we might need one of us to hard-research foreign trade and it could be me

one thing that worries me about the eastern start - the ocean in the east suggests that there's not much room for a big inland district complex, unless we're willing to pave over a lot of hammer tiles. and it does NOT have many of those visible, in contrast to the west

[ljubljana]

relevant: "Pariwan" looks like Pariwanaqucha, an Incan lake name. So the eastern start isn't THAT close to the opposite coastline, thank goodness.

thrawn is not gonna be happy about this, this is a miserably bad setup for the vikings

[ljubljana]

actually, we're going to have to think more closely about east vs west imo. these starts are highly unbalanced in terms of quality - the western start has seven hills for production in the first two rings, while the eastern start has four. to get the strong district cluster we see in the east, we'd have to pave over the one flatground forest and one of the few hills, leaving almost no good tiles for the city to grow onto with feed the world food. at least in the west our size-10 Japan capital will have something to do with all those citizens. if we have one civ in Japan that is vaguely capable of making use of 7 hills at the capital in the early game, and one civ in Portugal that has no real bonuses towards doing so, we might be making a big mistake by not giving those hills to the civ with a realistic chance of working them...

on the other hand, the extremely strong feitoria city looks to be 1W-2NW of the eastern start settler. we might end up kicking ourselves if a bunch of those coastal tiles get eaten by culture from Portugal's capital...