Supercharrihitstouristicharryshallowdocious

[Old Harry]

Quickly - Peter of Rome v3 without buying a tech.

Start all cities s2, buy a worker and work boat. The worker builds a plains mine, then bimbles around a bit until BW, we do some chopping and improve hunting resources when Hunting comes in. I'm going to come back and analyse how many foodhammers and commerce each of these versions has at t15, but for now I'm just playing by feel and this one feels pretty good.



Turn 15

[Hitru]

Briefly: Our idea is that in small games eco traits that scale with the size of the empire, especially FIN and also ORG, lose value a lot. So we believe that our best bet to create advantage around middle of the game is to use bulbs, which do scale little bit with size of the empire but are clearly more effective on small maps than in bigges ones. And for bulb game PHI is clearly the best.

We want to pair this with early trait (going for SPI/PHI could also be an option if we want to go hard for later game and feel confident about our early game) to help us be in a good position when we get to our window via bulbs. Here we have many options, namely IMP, EXP and even CHM (OH covered CRE) and things are not set in stone. But the curent leading idea is to grab Rome for forum, which would help us further with gpp generation + give us praets for early UU. Rome also has reasonable starting techs. With Rome we feel like EXP works well, cheaper workers and work boats is always great and double speed forum is great with whales and ivory already seen from starting screenie.

[Old Harry]

Peter of Vikings

If we start with hunting and fishing, don't buy a tech, do buy a worker, a WB and a couple of scouts things look even better:


Turn 0
Turn 15

[Old Harry]

Last one for tonight: Peter of Vikings v2

Settling pattern B (cap SE of Corn). Buy 2 workers, WB, scout, pop in A and B but not C. This seems to come out way ahead with two settlers ready eot15.


Turn 0
Turn 15

[Old Harry]

Which civ will we pick?

We're up (well Pindi is, but we could make our pick if we wanted), and having done a bit more simming I thought we were going with the Vikings. While it'd be nice to have Native America for the cheap insta-monument, Trading Posts (+25% prod for naval units) and Berserkers (Amphibious!) should be really strong if there's really a decent chunk of water.

We've gone back and forth on buying an extra tech. When I got to turn 21 in one sim, having six cities and an economy cratered to 20% I was wildly in favour. Then I tried a run buying mining, 2 workers and a single extra pop in the capital which left the civ feeling a lot weaker by t15 - fewer units running around and smaller cities. But it's the economy crashing as we settle cities in the approach to Pottery that's bothering me, so earlier to cottage-spam is pretty great.

Without knowing what's in the fog it's really hard to judge how strong the next cities will be, which makes choosing to buy the tech or not even harder...

Of course this was the point that Hitru threw Ethiopia and the Stele into the mix. The merchant slot would allow us to bulb Currency and get back into the game even if we totally screw the economy. Let's hope Pindi keeps delaying his pick.

[shallow_thought]

Which civ will we pick?

Without knowing what's in the fog it's really hard to judge how strong the next cities will be, which makes choosing to buy the tech or not even harder...

Of course this was the point that Hitru threw Ethiopia and the Stele into the mix. The merchant slot would allow us to bulb Currency and get back into the game even if we totally screw the economy. Let's hope Pindi keeps delaying his pick.

Yeah, anything that gets your trait into play early feels worth a look. But I'm not sure how being able to bulb currency will help if you crater before Pottery . More seriously, you'd need to get the Stele up in an expansion city with enough food that running a specialist doesn't cripple it - unless you really want to waste the hammers in the cap - and that's not guaranteed ...

[Old Harry]

Advanced start setup

We'll have two workers, three cities and six pop please.
(2x44 + 3x100 + 3x33 = 487)

Are you setting this up for us Noble or is the advance start going to work?


In the end we decided that 33 gold for each pop point (+12 food) is just too good to miss out on. That doesn't leave us with much cash left and a lot of tiles to improve. We'll take two workers and build the work boat, scouting units, and lots more workers pretty fast.

At the moment the next settler is due eot16. If there's an amazing site nearby another can be ready a couple of turns later, but with the costs I think we're going to wait until t21 when Pottery is in and we can start cottaging everything in sight.

[Old Harry]

Turn 0 - The Setup - Part One

Here's our first new city, and immediately we need to think about changing our micro plan! Do we want to settle the new pig instead of the sheep? It's not connected to a trade route, so the sheep is probably a better city. But is it better than the sugar/crab city?

[Old Harry]

Turn 0 - The Setup - Part Two

After 14 turns we have more workers (5) and warriors (4) than in previous runs, with a couple of settlers nearly ready. But even ignoring fishing totally we're still a couple of beakers behind because of not working the lake and crab and one missing trade route, with a lower tech rate. Which means all the workers have little to do and pottery will arrive later, so I think we're better off settling the sugar city.

[Old Harry]

Turn 0 actual

So that bit of sandboxing made me pretty sure we want to stick with the original plan and fortunately the team mostly agrees. It's looking like we'll have a strong fourth city though, which will be great. In fact having settled Batmobile and Crane we've got good city sites in every direction. Scouts will start to investigate around turn 5. Charriu is a bit worried that we've orphaned some food in the western waters.


So, our micro is pretty set, but what are the neighbours up to? So far Pindi logged in, settled one city and logged out. Presumably faced with a similar dilemma to ours, which he's still simming out.

TBS did the same, then logged back in to settle a second city which presumably revealed even more goodies, so he's gone back to the sandbox again.

Cornflakes also settled one city and logged out, before logging back in and settling three more! I presume he also bought some improvements to allow his crop yield to be 21?


Meanwhile Someone should probably let Gav know that we've started...

Oh, and these are the settings, they look okay to me.


Anyone want to guess at the naming scheme?