SGOTM 06 - Trash Team

I'm worried about settling at turn 1 or 2.
This is always war, we don't want our settler to meet an AI unit, do we? I think it's safe to assume they are far enough away to move for 2 turns, but then it means that the warrior has to follow the settler, which makes the whole wandering settler rather moot.
settle in place is my opinion: we have fresh water, we have gold and cow and farmable bananas in the fat cross. It's not going to get any better.
edit : settling on the dye is indeed better than in place, but there is jungle down there.

I would prefer to settle 1SE, given what we know so far. As it is AW settling on a hill can sure be great help if our capital turns out to be a border city.

I still think the best choice of where to settle will come after moving the warrior 1 SW to the jungle hill.

Is there anyone who disagrees with the first warrior move?

From there, as you say we can do a tile by tile analysis of all proposed settling locations.

Fog gazing
Is 2SW a hill, or water? I'm not much good at this, anyone else?

The biggest problem I see with settling on the dye is that we have to wait until border expansion to work any 3f tiles.

What are our thoughts on economy?
In the beginning, we'll be using gold mines to boost our research, but being AW are vulnerable cottages a good idea? Is a SE a better approach?

chopster said:

Fog gazing
Is 2SW a hill, or water? I'm not much good at this, anyone else?

The biggest problem I see with settling on the dye is that we have to wait until border expansion to work and 3f tiles.

Click to expand...

To fog gaze further, we need to "move the camera". 45° rotation could help, or even better, flying camera to get a better angle.

About working 3F tiles, I'm not sure this is a priority. Are we agreed on a warrior first, or not?

I am pretty sure settling on dye will give the capital extra gold, so that is a nice boost.

Settling on dyes does give us an extra gold in the capital, but brings jungle into the start location and will leave us one tile away from the coast.

I don't think having the capital settled on a hill is that important, since it shouldn't be a frontline city unless the game's going very badly. Based on what I can see without opening the save, we appear to have ocean to both west and southwest which gives the impression of the capital being on a peninsula. There'll either be a narrow chokepoint to the SW or enemies will only be able to attack us from N and E. By the time we've got 3 cities, the capital should be secure.

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I've found my Warlords disk and I'm downloading the 2.13 patch (slowly) at the moment. I'll do some proper fog-gazing from the save if it arrives before I need to go out.

EDIT: It would have saved a lot of time if I'd realised BtS 3.13 had automatically updated my Warlords installation. D'oh!

Based on what I can make out with the flying camera:

1. 3N1E of the settler looks like a plains hill.
2. 1N3E of the warrior looks like a jungle grassland hill.
3. 1S2E of the warrior is an empty grassland tile - could it hold a resource? Iron/horses could be likely depending on map modification.
4. 2S1W of the warrior is grassland forest.
5. 2S of the warrior is jungle.
6. The jungle grassland hill 1SW of the warrior is almost certainly getting its fresh-water bonus on the diagonal from the river. Although that river could be running into an inland lake, I think that's much more likely to be coast down there.

1SW as an opening warrior move will likely still reveal the most useful information as far as settling the capital is concerned.

I just played what could loosely be termed a test game (prince, AW, with the start location modified in WB to give the tiles clearly visible in the screenshot), but on normal speed rather than epic.

Feudalism sling is definitely doable, probably by about 1200BC depending on how focused we are (we've probably got until about 900BC, give or take 100 years). The main issues are whether it's worth settling a third city in that window or not, and whether to build stonehenge or not. I'd be inclined to get archery very early (possibly tech hunting, agri, ah, archery) and then spam 3-4 archers while preparing for a second city (and possibly stonehenge). Based on protective archers and prince level, we'll not need any other units in the pre-longbow era. I faced two stacks of 3 warriors which were easily dealt with by those archers without any pillaging.

By 575BC when I stopped playing (I carried on to check that guerrilla 3 was available in warlords), most of the AI had expanded to 3/4 cities, none of which were terribly well defended.

It's too early to try and number crunch yet, but my gut feeling is if we're going to mount an early active defense (assuming we've got any neighbours to worry about), we should aim for either two cities plus stonehenge, or three cities founded by the time we complete monarchy and the oracle.

Good stuff, patagonia, except for the slow download

I'll move the warrior and post a screenie, while waiting for responses I will also try a test game.

More bananas...

Time for analysis!

The dye is the best spot, but has 2 useless coastal tiles.

Settling in place misses river access, which could cause our health to stop us growing. It's not a bad spot though...

Personally I like 1SE, as it allows more river cottages. And it has the hill defense bonus. Gyathaar might have placed all AI close to us.

in place gives access to fresh water (from the lake)

If we go for a feudalism beeline and there's no trading with the enemy then its going to be a long time before we discover calendar making some of the available resources largely irrelevant.

Prince, epic, always war is probably too straightforward for sgotm, especially with a 'highly modified' map. Good chance of having no metals easily available, if at all. Maybe we'll find the nearest metal is under an AI capital. Or else we could have an isolated start on a small island with a whole bunch of AIs happily trading between themselves across the ocean. Or share a small continent with a couple of the more belligerent AIs such as Monte and Alex.

I'd research hunting, archery, BW to start. Build warrior, archer, worker (whip once BW is in) then archer/settler. By that time we should have the neighborhood better explored and then we'll be able to have a serious strategy debate.

I'd start by settling on the spot.

Well, the bananas do offer one extra food and the dye one gold...

About not exploring, I have a test game and 4 AI walked upto my borders before I had city 2. Let's explore carefully when we have defense up.

I'm happy with settling on the dye or in place.
1 SW isn't too bad either, it opens up a second city with bananas and gold.

I would still settle in place (high probablily of having metals or horses in the BFC)

1 SW is a good city spot, but do we want 5 coastal squares in out capital? It's not that many as far as a coastal capital goes. Workboats could also provide exploration with minimal danger in the early game, until the AI gets sailing.
What do you think the chances of seafood on the coast are there? If there was fish, that would be a pretty big boost.

The second bananas aren't too enticing to me, as they're not farmable, so they're only a 3,0,0 tile until Calendar.

I'm liking 1SW as a city location, the real question is if it should be our capital. Although if we don't settle our capital there it will be lost forever as a city spot.

Should we risk doing a bit of a settler walk? I've never been one for it, but near the coast it should be pretty safe, and potentially reveal a big boost if it pays off.

EDIT: the blue cirle on the western gold makes me smell seafood in it's radius. If we settled 1 SE, then we could place a second city on the gold or the tile 1 SW of the gold, depending on the seafood location. That would be a nice second city for research.

cabert said:

I'm happy with settling on the dye or in place.
1 SW isn't too bad either, it opens up a second city with bananas and gold.

I would still settle in place (high probablily of having metals or horses in the BFC)

Click to expand...

I'll jump in with the settle in place camp.

If we do that we can still give the eastern bananas to a city working the other gold mine as the capital can get the food it needs elsewhere.

In the absence of visible seafood, moving to the coast strikes me as a waste of time and effort, although my main reservation with 1SW is that we'll have fewer hills to work in the capital pre-IW, which will be a way off if we do decide to beeline Feudalism.

EDIT: if we do have an AI close by, a settler walk could result in the end of the game by turn 5/6. I'd be inclined to take what's on offer (gold and cows now, with bananas and dyes to follow when calendar arrives) rather than taking an unneccessary gamble.

I'm throwing ideas around.
I sure wouldn't be disappointed if we settled in place, it's a fine city.

My only concern is with a custom map, we may be sacrificing two good cities for one very good one.

(a.) Hi ... checking in.

(b.) Hi particularly to Chopster! "Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi" and all that. (I'm in Adelaide).

(c.) Happy to go with the group verdict on settling, although I'd be inclined to go 'easterly' after the riverside Gold and Bananas for +1 each .

(d.) Inclined towards Worker over a Warrior for the 'asap' Gold mine, but I'm easily swayed.

Cam_H said:

(d.) Inclined towards Worker over a Warrior for the 'asap' Gold mine, but I'm easily swayed.

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Hey Cam,

All I'll say to this is that I went first in one of the DMAW SGs here a while back, set the capital to build a worker first and didn't survive to hand over to the next player (didn't survive to build the worker in fact).

I'd hate for that to happen in an SGOTM.

If we're going to send our starting warrior exploring (which we probably should from a hut point of view), I think the best move is to build a second warrior whilst working one of the forested grassland hills, before building a worker while working the riverside bananas (assuming we settle in place). This gets us a slightly slower opening than we might otherwise like, but protects us from any unwanted mishaps from the get go.

chopster said:

EDIT: the blue cirle on the western gold makes me smell seafood in it's radius. If we settled 1 SE, then we could place a second city on the gold or the tile 1 SW of the gold, depending on the seafood location. That would be a nice second city for research.

Click to expand...

Throwing ideas out is always appreciated at a time like this chopster.

Based on what we can see, settling in place would still allow us to place a city 3W of the settler's current location to work any seafood accessible from the gold out that way. Not ideal, but possibly useful from a cottage-growing GP farming perspective. The only caveat is that this would ultimately give us a niche city over there, rather than two stronger cities.