Gavagai creates a spoiler thread

[Gavagai]

I think I should post it here:

1. Dhalphir as Saladin of Mongolia
2. Baii as Isabella of Maya
3. Hashoosh of Montezuma of Greece
4. Gavagai as Fredrick of Korea
5. eastway as Darius of the Celts

For some reason Eastway has Dutch colours

[Catwalk]

The first screenshot above seems to show a cow on a peak! 1N of the corn, 2W of the sheep. Is the arrow playing games with me? It also looks like a cow is crawling around on the mountain.

I agree with both city sites. Neither is very impressive, but they will get the job done for early expansions and nothing better seems available. Unless copper and horses change that, of course. There seems to be a bit of a resource gap around both expansion sites, I'll bet that you're going to get either copper or horses there, with good chances of getting both.

[Gavagai]

You are right about cows, I noticed it too. Actually, I suspect it wasn't intended as I can't think of any reason for a mapmaker to place a cow on a peak.

[wetbandit]

Dedlurking, interested in your game.

You certainly have a lot of favorable cottage land available. With that in mind, I'm curious about your plans for the capital. Seems like in the short term it will act as your main production city. Given your desire to get cottages up early, it also looks like your best early specialist city with all that food.

[Gavagai]

Welcome on board wetbandit, more kittens are always good.
Yes, short-term my capital is definitely a prodution city. Actually, I've been thinking about it a lot while making a decision to move it as if settled in place (on sugar) it actually could work a lot more riverside cottages. Still, I decided that short-term benefits of having a cow and a sugar in BFC are more important.
Longer term it can function as a specialist city. However keep in mind that most of this food is going to be shared.

[wetbandit]

I imagine that you'd have to share everything but the sugar, unless you choose to move City #2 to the west or northwest to pick up the wheat. Obvious drawbacks of having the cities start slower and an awkward city farther west. By the time you're ready to run specialists, anyway, those cities will likely be working cottages and the capital could potentially reclaim it's food. You might end up farming a tile by City 2 anyway to irrigate the Capital's dry corn.

Interested to see how Oracle->Monarchy works out. I would look at this situation and think an early calendar is the way to go. I'm also terrible with leveraging PHI so hoping to pick up some more ideas with respect to that.

[Gavagai]

I spent some time looking at the map and I really like Monarchy better:

1. Specialist economy wants relatively food-poor overall land with relatively high density of high-yield tiles (e. g. lots of hills with lots of seafood thrown in). Here we see an exactly opposite picture: a lot of green riverside but, actually, not that many strong food resources.

2. There are very few hills, my planned cities don't have a lot of natural production. This means frequent use of slavery which goes badly with specialist economy.

3. Flat/immortal means lower distance costs but higher number of cities costs. Together with no barbs it favors sparse settling and large cities working a lot of tiles each and with lots of multipliers built. Once agains, this setup works well with cottage economy.

EDIT: and yes, our unique buiilding is an enhanced multiplier which we can build at double speed. Another small point in favor of cottages.

EDIT2. Yes, bottom line is that I really wanted to make specialist economy work here because I would really find it interesting to try to build the game around this enhanced philo trait. But I don't see a way to make specialists stronger than cottages with this land.

[Gavagai]

I imagine that you'd have to share everything but the sugar, unless you choose to move City #2 to the west or northwest to pick up the wheat. Obvious drawbacks of having the cities start slower and an awkward city farther west. By the time you're ready to run specialists, anyway, those cities will likely be working cottages and the capital could potentially reclaim it's food. You might end up farming a tile by City 2 anyway to irrigate the Capital's dry corn.

Interested to see how Oracle->Monarchy works out. I would look at this situation and think an early calendar is the way to go. I'm also terrible with leveraging PHI so hoping to pick up some more ideas with respect to that.

The big problem with early calendar is immortal difficulty level. It will take eternity to research up to it. Even self-researching much cheaper Monarchy can slow us down, that's why the Oracle is highly desireable.

[Gavagai]

...and here we go again. It looks like eastway is building a road towards the site of his second city. A couple months ago it would be no question for me that I should try to screw him around with my warrior. But after PB16... well, for reasons I don't understand a lot of people here would draw most bizzare conclusions from this. They would think that I'm "aggressive", that I will "attack them in future", that it is now "a duel" and that they now have to build a lot of military. They would build units, find their economy trashed, would blame me, of course, and decide that they now should play not to win but to cause me pain. Really, why is it so hard to understand that early skirmishes mean absolutely nothing?
It is so, so annoying, I actually don't really know what I should be doing now. Not harrasing early when you have an option to do so is straight up a bad play in my book. Also, it forgives careless play on behalf of your rival. You would allow him to get away with risky moves you wouldn't undertake yourself and would put yourself into disadvantage. And how should metagame develope? Everyone plays sloppily, being assured that neighbors wouldn't want to "piss them off"? How is it ever enjoyable?
And yes, we have no idea what eastway's stand is on this issue...

[Gavagai]

Well, eastway retreated his worker, I hope I already made him screw up. Moved my warrior 1N...



Oh, wow. Wow! This gold is a pretty big deal! I have exactly one unexplored tile near my capital, I surely hope to find grassland gems on it! Because otherwise we just got screwed in relation to eastway at least. Also, I find eastway's opening questionable: he built two workers and yet has nothing better for them to do but to road the floods?



Home. Capital has grown to size four, is working four improved tiles and started to build a settler which is due in four turns. Four is our number of the day, really. Also, a tile 4S from the capital is the one I've spoken about.



I'm the only person with size four capital, others, it seems, decided to build a settler at size three. We will see how my strategy would work out.