Starting Position

The sun rises on the year 4000 BC. Since time immemorial, the Maverick people have lived a nomadic life. After years of wandering, they are ready to settle down and found your first city.

Gandhi, your people have vested absolute power in you, trusting that you can build a Civilization to stand the test of time!

Wow, is this actually starting? Sweet! Thx, Dave.

Only 2 food and 2 gems? Bloody awful.

Can't really imagine a reason to move the settler.

Wow, so i'm the first to see this(edit: second)... Well obviously it's a great starting position (although i'd suggest that other teams may have similar starts as it will all probably be balanced. Actually, since we are phi we may have preferred more food and less commerce, not that 2 gems is anything to complain about.

Can't remember what techs we start with, but we only really need mining and agri for this start. Now its time to consider moving west in search of food although i doubt theres a better spot for the capital. 1W is one off coast, loses riverside and plains hill but could open up more terrain. However, in the last game, getting an exploratory workboat out early was crucial am I correct?

They were nice enough to give us riverside, plains hill and irrigate both rice. However, riverside grassland gems would have been nicer... Not complaining too much though! Looking forward to plenty of discussion on this one!

Coastal is huge, as is the PH, IMHO.
We start with Mining and Mysticism.

I agree, great spot, no reason to move our settler. I'd vote for moving our warrior north west to get up on that hill to see what's around. I'd like to see us go for either meditation or polytheism and snag one of those early religions too. I'm so pumped for this!

We could maybe move settler 1S to settle on the grassland and give us that plains hill for extra production. Could be a bonus if we go for Great Wall.

On the flipside that will give us less tiles with forests to chop in radius.

I say move warrior NW onto the hill to see if there is a good place for 2nd city close by.

Extra hammer from PH is worth way more.
If we go for a religion, we can't get Agri in time (I think, not familiar with Monarch research times). We could be farming the rice in 12t. I prefer food first here, but I guess it's open for discussion.

Hmm, we might also consider bronze working. With all the forests around we're going to need to chop both for extra hammers and in order to improve. However I do agree that it's tough to pass up the two rice sitting right beside us. I just hate having to be under another player's religion in mp cause they get to see what you're up to but both chopping and rice farming are tempting.

It's a nailed on settle-in-place, and research Agriculture, surely? We're on a plains hill, so we're not going to move *off* the plains hill. Not only that, it's riverside, has plenty of production and two gems!

Settle in place, warrior 1NW.

Trouble with settling 1S is that you loose +2 for fresh water. Also, settling on/off the plains hill is a short term/long term thing...we settle there and get the extra hammer in our city, or we settle off it and get (eventually) a five hammer mine (with railroad).

My vote is for in place, warrior 1 NW

settle in place, research agri, build worker (rel we should gun for mono, no need to rush now, better focus growth ASAP)

and since most fin leaders dont start with myst, we can still have a shot on going for a reli after agri

Snaaty said:

settle in place, research agri, build worker

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+1

Snaaty said:

and since most fin leaders dont start with myst, we can still have a shot on going for a reli after agri

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Sure. Do we get to know what leaders have been picked yet, btw?

Settle in place, no doubt. Where else would we move him to? Keep the fresh water and plains hammer hill. Tech Ag, build worker for gem hook up. Warrior to hill 1 NW OR plains forest 1 SW to set up the next move of 1 W to the grassland hill that's in the fog. There seems to be a lack of forests in the immediate area and would open up a nice chunk of LOS around our capital, something 1 NW does not provide due to the forests that surround that location. Doesn't totally matter, though I figured I'd throw it out there.

Excellent start - but I can't help wonder how the other team starts look.

Here's a link to my spread sheet. I'll try to whip up a plan for the start later tonight, so you can see how it works. If you want to try it, you need to enable macros (it's Word only, no OO).

Backwards Logic knows the drill already, he might beat me to it.

Agreed -- settle in place, research agriculture, then bronze working.

Maybe worker->worker->warrior->settler

After that, make some more warriors for our early fogbusting brigade and locate (hopefully) copper. Maybe tech a religion and Priesthood (for cheap temple and priest specialist to pop a gprophet), all while churning out axes for garrison.

BTW, our river is backwards. The source is at the ocean and the delta is inland

Also, there are 4 non-forested tiles for potential hidden resources (please be copper, please be copper...)

Long-term, there's nothing wrong with this being a Bureaucracy/Oxford capital if there isn't a more food heavy site elsewhere, right?

babybluepants said:

Wow, is this actually starting? Sweet! Thx, Dave.

Only 2 food and 2 gems? Bloody awful.

Can't really imagine a reason to move the settler.

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I can't imagine moving either. It's even on top of a plains hill!

Uncle_Cheesedog said:

I agree, great spot, no reason to move our settler. I'd vote for moving our warrior north west to get up on that hill to see what's around.

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I agree with you on that. Virtually no other decent alternative, unless we want to gamble on seafood in the fog.

javidbing said:

We could maybe move settler 1S to settle on the grassland and give us that plains hill for extra production. Could be a bonus if we go for Great Wall.

On the flipside that will give us less tiles with forests to chop in radius.

I say move warrior NW onto the hill to see if there is a good place for 2nd city close by.

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I think the extra hammer from the plains hill is important - as babybluepants has said. Also, moving south loses fresh-water health bonus. And we are not expansive.

Uncle_Cheesedog said:

Hmm, we might also consider bronze working. With all the forests around we're going to need to chop both for extra hammers and in order to improve. However I do agree that it's tough to pass up the two rice sitting right beside us. I just hate having to be under another player's religion in mp cause they get to see what you're up to but both chopping and rice farming are tempting.

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Right now, I'm leaning towards Agriculture first, unless we want to gamble on a religion.

Snaaty said:

settle in place, research agri, build worker (rel we should gun for mono, no need to rush now, better focus growth ASAP)

and since most fin leaders dont start with myst, we can still have a shot on going for a reli after agri

Click to expand...

Looks like a solid plan to me. When do you think we should get Bronze Working?

Niklas said:

Excellent start - but I can't help wonder how the other team starts look.

Here's a link to my spread sheet. I'll try to whip up a plan for the start later tonight, so you can see how it works. If you want to try it, you need to enable macros (it's Word only, no OO).

Backwards Logic knows the drill already, he might beat me to it.

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I too am slightly worried. If this is the start we get, then the others will have starts of a comarapble caliber.

I'll check the spreadsheet.

The Mike said:

BTW, our river is backwards. The source is at the ocean and the delta is inland

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Yes. Just like last game, the mapmakers don't put the rivers in the correct spot. But I can't complain when we get an otherwise excellent start like this.

The Mike said:

Also, there are 4 non-forested tiles for potential hidden resources (please be copper, please be copper...)

Long-term, there's nothing wrong with this being a Bureaucracy/Oxford capital if there isn't a more food heavy site elsewhere, right?

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This looks like a great bureaucracy/oxford capital, even with coast. Of course, it's often best to have Oxford in an inland city that has lots of rivers. But if we can't find such a city, then this capital will do.

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Wow, looks like the map-making progressed faster than I thought. Very nice job!

I understand we only have a screenshot at this time? We cannot log in yet?

I'd wager that every civ started on a plains hill, and with at least 1 ancient smiley. I also noticed the backwards river. I hope that's intentional as a teaser, and the rest of the map will have default layout... no Gold on grassland like in Sullla's report.

(It really is amazing how much impact Sullla has had on the Civ community.)

Those who think this is an excellent start are not going to be happy with what I have to say.

To be honest, this is a poor start I feel. For many reasons. Most obvious of all, is that everyone else is going to get their starts tampered around with as well. But look what happens to us here…

We are Philo, so food is king. It is the most important resource for us. Yet, we got shafted here and only have 2 rice patties. This is definitely not good. To make things worse, we have only a single river tile, and it even results in not one, but TWO illegal double-terminations.

Our East Rice won’t even be able to irrigate until CS.

All our sea-food has been removed from this map, so that gives us 5 tiles in our BFC that are totally useless for the entire game. Nuts…

Oh wait, not useless, our opponents get to use them to amphib assault us if they want haha!

Those two gems are over-kill and we can’t put them to much great use. Each already burns off 1 food and we are very limited as it is. Gems on hills take away both food and hammers, it’s a terrible spot to get them in.

I suspect Dave tried to prevent us from exploiting food too much with Philo so he made sure to hurt us there, but then gave a few gems to dampen the pain, but it is no consolation here. We won’t even use those gems if we ever get our pyramids up & running.

I’m going to keep my fingers crossed and hope we get another food source in our FoW tile, but from past experience, there is always one team who gets pretty screwed by the game admins.

I think it’s clear we settle in place. I’m not even sure why anything else could be suggested here.

I’m just not sure on which tech to go for right here, to be honest my first opinion is to go for our Religion NOW. Then we don’t have to worry about it later. I would not even bother wasting time on growing up our pop, but chop out workers, and a settler and get our second city up asap. Our warrior now needs to find our next city spot. Unfortunately it will have to be a bit aways from our capital, since we got totally screwed by useless un-workable water tiles. This really hurts on our starting trees to chop, and we have to chop many for both our capital and our GE Farm city.

And for the record, just one Gem source alone is enough to tech to our oracle pre-requisits for MC in over-kill time. Our bottle-neck here is our hammers/food. We just won’t get these enough in time. This has to be where our main focus is, the hammers.

obsolete said:

Our East Rice won’t even be able to irrigate until CS.

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It's already irrigated actually.

I see your point. Tried a test run and it hurts that we can't farm any of the grass pre-CS. Growth problems at size 4-5 due to working gems. Still, I wouldn't complain about this start in any other game. I don't expect any of the teams have 2 6f tiles either.