Where would you settle?

Edit: argh, I can't edit my title to correct the typo. Moderator Action: Fixed typo in title.

Hi all,

Ive just started up a new game with Arabia, with the intention of getting four cities out early and building as tall as I can. Unfortunatey, I'm flummoxed as to where I should put my settlers.

I'm on an island with just Ethiopia and some city states. There are four or five obvious places for OK cities but with two problems: firstly, I don't want five or six cities. I want four good ones. As such I need to maximise the resources avaialble.

The other problem is that none of the obvious spots that suggest themselves to me are anywhere near Mt Sinai (bang in the centre of the map, below Mecca). +8 faith is such a massive boost that I really can't imagine doing without it.

So, I thought I'd throw it open to the board. Where would you settle?

Alt question for extra points: what pantheon? Fertility Rites, Godes of Festivals, or Desert Folklore. Or even One with Nature?

Oh right, pictures. Yeah, that would help.

Could you post pictures with the grid outlines? It would be easier to see where to settle next.

But let me try like this:
1st pic: right of river below wheat, you gain access both to sea and have a river, you also get both wine and silk, which is a good happiness bonus.

2nd pic:
Above the mountain, nest to river. You gain 2 wheat, incense, oasis, sheep and Mt. Sinai. I would recommend you to build you 2nd city here, allowing you to get your religion up and running.

3rd pic:
Hm, don't know.. Maybe go next to mt. Sinai, actually when I think of it, it is a better 2nd city position, you gain 3 wine, 4 sheep, horses, deer, oasis and mt. sinaia, you lose a river but you get a lot of resources.

You have three quite obvious city sites at coast/river spots: West of the river in first shot, south of river in second shot, north(west) of river in third shot. The last city will have Mt. Sinai in third ring, so you may want to spent a bit of gold to buy your way to this right away. I would place a fifth city on east coast, also on river/coast location. River/coast sites make for pretty awesome cities, so having access to four of these locations is too good to miss imo.

Next to the deer next to the mountain, sout-east of the flood-plain wheat
On the hill on the coast with the recommended icon, on the coast south of the cows
On the ruin peninsula, on the barb camp

off topic rebuttal to your sig: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_tensor

Some interesting perspectives!

The fact that you all disagree makes me feel slightly better about my own dithering. All of that desert and tundra is rather putting me off some of the spots, but on reflection I perhaps didn't take into account the fact that I can use those costal tiles.

To be honest, the most I look at the options the more I think "oh to hell with it, let's put down eight cities", especially given that +1 to trade routes...

Magma_Dragoon said:

off topic rebuttal to your sig: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_tensor

Click to expand...

Sorry, I got irritated by the amount of times I'd click on a link and it would take me to Wikipedia, so I wrote a greasemonkey script to redirect them all. I intended to make it similar to Kitten Block and release it for public use, but never got around to it.

I tried looking up metric tensor on Wolfram Alpha instead and I clearly need to come back to it when it's not oh so very late at night!