TSG96 Opening Actions

Welcome to the TSG96 Opening Actions thread.

STOP - Please do not continue reading this thread until you have completed at least 80 to 100 turns in your game.

This thread is used to discuss the game once you've started playing through your first 100 turns. Apart from normal decency, the only posting restrictions are to please not post videos until the deadline is finished and to use the spoiler tags for screenshots. Here you can post questions related to the game and share your achievements/anger/frustration/victories while you play. Please remember that we are running a family friendly site, so express anger or frustration with this in mind.

Please use this thread to discuss your goals for the game and your opening moves through the first 100 turns. Anything after that should be posted in the After Action thread once you have completed your game.

- What were your initial priorities with Science being the main objective?
- What tech path did you follow and why?
- What Social Policies did you choose and why?
- Did the terrain and/or difficulty shape these decisions? If so, how?

The maps been available for almost 24 hours and no opening actions?

Settled on the copper across the river. Cap BO: Stele - Scout - Granary - Worker - Warrior - Spear - Settler. Rush bought a worker and stole another one from Hanoi. Earth Mother pantheon.

Policies: Trad opener - Liberty to free settler - Tradition free steles, and about to hit the happiness policy which I really need.

Scouting reveals a pretty isolated start with average land and a lot of flat desert to the east, so I decide to make my cities coastal to rectify the situation with Cargo Ships later.

Going to finish NC on t85, then I think I'll settle the salt&horses spot next to Bogota, conquer some of Morocco and place a coastal city there, and perhaps take Kabul which was puppeted by Venice.

Happiness is going to be a bit of an issue, I'll need a mercantile CS ally soon. AIs aren't improving their lux either... not with Ahmad with his 8 sugar tiles.



edit: t112, Marrakech and Kabul are mine, and I've settled two more cities, so I have my 7 city empire now. Science is slow but it's been a fun game so far.

I've played 100 turns. Really hard to tell if I'm doing well -- the combination of Raging Barbs and No Ruins definitely lowers the baseline.

I settled in place and did a Trad/Lib mix (Tradition opener, Collective Rule, working on finishing Tradition). I was building a Stele first anyway and figured an early hammer boost from Liberty would be really handy with the Raging Barbs. Then I saw all the Cultural City-States nearby and decided to go ahead and be greedy with policies -- extra culture obviously means extra policies, and it definitely seems easier to ally City-States with Raging Barbs (Raging Barbs may not actually spawn more camps, but it makes it less likely that AI or City-States will succeed in killing camps on their own.)

Opening build order was something like Stele -- Scout -- Worker -- Archer -- Archer -- Pyramids. I even cash-bought a Warrior while building the Worker, since I really needed another unit and I didn't have Archery yet.

Three-city National College on Turn 85 (so far looks like that's the average time ), then two more cities. I'm going for Metal Casting before Education, which means Edu looks like it'll be post T-130. Yikes, that's slow. The thinking is that:

1. Most of my cities are going to be too small for specialists for a while anyways, 2. The Trad/Liberty mix means that I have more policies than usual that I need before Rationalism, so I'm not in as big of a hurry to get to the Renaissance as usual, and 3. It looks like the AI are all really struggling and I can build a lot of Wonders, so I really want to get my hammers up.

I got allied with Hanoi pretty early, so I've gotten a good number of free military units. This has freed me up to send armies to far corners of the maps for City-State quests, and I've gotten lots of influence along with some free workers. Gold and Happiness are both very good and I haven't even unlocked Monarchy yet. I feel like I've got a nice base to work from but this start is just so slooooow. Hoping I can catch up once my capital starts growing. I just got my first trade route, and Hanging Gardens will finish in five turns. I don't even have a Granary in the capital yet eek, so there's a lot of room left to up my food.