Worker first!

Since the AI won't give up gold so easily anymore, it seems to me that it is less critical to go scout first. In this start, I was playing Venice on immortal and with 2 riverside wheat, worker first seemed the way to go. I researched Archery with a view to building Temple of Artemis after the worker. Then I researched Pottery and interrupted ToA to build a shrine and finally finished ToA at turn 37.

As Venice i could agree, as any other civilization, where you need to find places to settle your next cities...no

If the land is nice like in your case it will work, in that start you can improve almost everything by farming and mining. Still the scout takes only 5 turns to build and can get you so much more from ruins - faster culture, more pop, free tech, nice sum of gold, and you still get some guaranteed gold from city states.

scout is very important, especially if you want to find religion. They should find a ruin that provides you with faith & many other advantages.

No way i am going without a scout unless i have small islands or some such.

I should note, if you didn't go tradition, it would probably be best to build Worker before Monument here. Standard Scout - Monument - Whatever build would not be the best imo.

I often get the best starter builds when I don't think about them too much... yesterday I spent minutes optimizing my early build tracks and failed miserably. One thing I tend to neglect is early defense - sucks to have a game start with unhappiness right after founding the second city as the barbarians rush pillaging your luxury resources.

For social policies, I tend to start with tradition, legalism, landed elite for faster capital growth and next aristocracy for extra hammers as I typically try to get Hanging Gardens in the capital.

I can see it with Venice or some other sort of OCC strategy, but even more so than in G&K I've been inclined to make two Scouts at the beginning. You need to find your expansion spots and trade partners, or else you'll have no gold at all.

Really depends on the tiles around your cap of course, in your example an early worker would rock.

In my Venice game on Emperor standard size fractal map I actually didn't get a worker till very very late.

I walked my settler 1 tile from a hill river spot to a spice river spot.

Had 2x wheats, hill, 2x crabs, forest in my first city ring, then ivory, deer and 2x more crabs in my 3rd ring, rest was pretty much just forest. 7x tiles that are +3-4 food without a worker improvement.

I went scout, scout, granary, bought shrine with hut spoils + early gpt, library, great lighthouse, got a monument from tradition, god of the sea pantheon, used my merchant to ally a culture cs and used the gold to buy 4x tiles to get all the crabs, 2x workboats and a tireme, 2x work boats, traded crabs for gpt and lux, Stonehenge, bought a worker, Oracle to finish full tradition, bought another worker, then chopped my way through a few more wonders, Colossus, Parth, Wguild. Never had a monster city like that so early before on emperor.

I have to admit though that my original plan was to steal a worker but the cs's around me were all giving out barb camp missions so my 1st scout turned archer and my starting warrior were mopping up cs influences that I didn't wanna wreck and the other cs's were to far away that I didn't wanna risk walking a worker from there through barb infested terrain.

Scout first. That way you can keep exploring and recall your starting warrior to the capital. If you don't have at least one military unit protecting your land you won't be able to do much with an early worker.

Scout first to get more ruins, then Monument to help you get culture.

+faith, culture, pop, tech helps you ball outta control earlier.

As with everything in Civ, your choices are situational. Hardwiring yourself to the same routine every single game will not reap the most benefits.

If you want a specific wonder at higher levels, worker first might well be the best option.

Well with Venice scouting is way less important. For any other civ, at least imho you need to start planning where to expand asap. .

I usually go Monument first and rarely, if ever, hard-build a worker. It's typically easier to wait for a nearby CS to spawn on, then nab it while researching a lux tech. It does mean that it takes longer to get the capital up and running but Tradition and a Granary as the 3rd (usually 2nd) in the build queue can help with that.

Regarding scouts, although I usually manage to sneak one in there if I'm not on a landmass to myself, I have noticed that there seem to be more ruins on the map in BNW. That could just be perception, or luck, but I certainly wouldn't be discounting them in the expansion; even as Venice.

Worker first is certainly more viable than in G+K.

Early trading partners aren't that important and the new powerful granary/caravan combination eats a lot of early hammers.
Also, a scout only costs 140 gold to buy. If your warrior finds a few CSs, that's very affordable and the early worker means more gold from improved luxuries.

It's also the best opening for getting Temple of Artemis, by far.
So yeah, on starts like yours, it's probably the best you can do, really.

But let's wait until the exploiters find this thread and suggest you steal a worker from a CS. ... haha, they're already here, so lame *sigh*

Veneke said:

I have noticed that there seem to be more ruins on the map in BNW.

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I have noticed this too. I've even found ruins near to enemy cities that haven't been picked up. It's almost like the AI's 6th sense for ruin finding is gone.

To my mind capturing a worker from a CS stopped being an exploit the moment CSs started going archers first. Unfortunately they don't always seem to take this clearly superior archer and instead are quite content to leave workers wander happily around the place, despite the rampant increase in barbarians and unscrupulous individuals like myself.

Scott Jegg said:

I have noticed this too. I've even found ruins near to enemy cities that haven't been picked up. It's almost like the AI's 6th sense for ruin finding is gone.

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I kinda hope it is because otherwise they know the ruins are there and are just ignoring it.

Veneke said:

To my mind capturing a worker from a CS stopped being an exploit the moment CSs started going archers first. Unfortunately they don't always seem to take this clearly superior archer and instead are quite content to leave workers wander happily around the place, despite the rampant increase in barbarians and unscrupulous individuals like myself.



I kinda hope it is because otherwise they know the ruins are there and are just ignoring it.

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I don't want to start this discussion again but you can declare war, steal the worker and sign peace on the same friggin turn ... the archer is 100% irrelevant here.

RealHuhn said:

I don't want to start this discussion again but you can declare war, steal the worker and sign peace on the same friggin turn ... the archer is 100% irrelevant here.

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Not if the CS start putting that archer on the same tile which they should.

Bas1c said:

Not if the CS start putting that archer on the same tile which they should.

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Yeah but they don't do that. So it's a moot point.

For the sake of discussion let's just assume people like to play fair and don't use exploits like this.
We had a good discussion about this a week ago. Maybe use that thread instead and feel free to bump it up again. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=500667

This should be about worker first or not. ^^