How to deal with isolated starts?

Arrowstorm

Chieftain
Joined
Jun 29, 2013
Messages
80
Location
Denmark
I always find myself struggling with isolated starts, where you're alone on a small continent or something. With no trade partners, and with no space to expand, how do you deal with that? What victory can you pursue?
 
I like to play large island/small content maps but yeah the start can be pretty slow depending on if any shallow water is around that connects to the other contents/islands.

Just found your 2 or 3 cities and go tall, build wonders, stockpile some gold (or use it to get friendly with the city states rather than buying settlers), beeline the various naval techs and build a small fleet to go out and find the other civs ASAP (follow the shallow water routes until you get navigation), trade, take over a few port cities with your navy, etc.
 
I like to play large island/small content maps but yeah the start can be pretty slow depending on if any shallow water is around that connects to the other contents/islands.

Just found your 2 or 3 cities and go tall, build wonders, stockpile some gold (or use it to get friendly with the city states rather than buying settlers), beeline the various naval techs and build a small fleet to go out and find the other civs ASAP (follow the shallow water routes until you get navigation), trade, take over a few port cities with your navy, etc.

So the English/British style? Interesting.
 
beeline naval techs and see what opportunities arise on distant lands
 
When I find myself in those positions, it helps to focus on building your infrastructure early to keep pace with other civs who are in contact with each other. Build a coastal city as soon as possible and crank out a couple triremes. Usually you can locate neighboring city-states and empty land (for post-optics settlers) pretty quickly.
 
I guess this is a BNW question since in G&K & Vanilla there's no disadvantage whatsoever in starting isolated?

My normal map is the large island, where by definition every start is semi-isolated. (There will be a city state or two sharing my land mass) but no other major civ on my starting land mass.

As long as you don't delay too long for Sailing it's not actually much of a problem. It appears (unless playing Venice or starting OCC), that your first trade route or two should start as an internal food route to get population up and its not until they renew that extrenal trade will be more worth while.
Also, sea routes are much better than land routes, but you need ships defending it from barb ships; (and in general need to be more active about clearing nearby barbs than in G&K)

Edit: Wouldn't you know it, I just rolled a true isolated start playing Venice. (Well, there was one city state on my landmass, but I bought them out right after Optics)
A couple of ships quickly showed my landmass was actually totally surrounded by ocean.)

What I did was:
1. Ignore military
2. I had noticed this was a good religious start (several gold resources) so I started down Piety. Great Library built; NC soon afterwards.
3. For quite a long time I ran just one cargo ship (from my puppet to Venice); I wanted as much of the population in Venice. When I finally reached Forges, I added a Cargo Route sending hammers to that puppet so it can build at a semi-decent rate while waiting for Astronomy.
4. Following completing of this I started the Exploration path. (I chose the reformation one that would allow any faith based person so I wouldn't need to pick Commerce)

I may have dropped at too low a level while getting used to BNW mechanics though since it turned out I was still #1 in science even being isolated like that.
I just now reached Astronomy.
Several cargo ships are now in the queue for Venice (3 AIs had ships wonder close enough for me to see them) ready to start adding trade routes. In addition I have two saved up Merchants of Venice for when I find a couple of city states along with saved up Missionaries to convert those cities.
 
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