(0) 4000BC I roll a game, take the first start and begin. The starting position already poses a tough choice - stay where we are, or move to get the corn in play. Well, we DIDN'T move to get corn in play in my last SG, and I thought that was a mistake, so there's no way I'm going to ignore that corn this time! (Not to mention, with our game and variant goals, more food = very good indeed!) I move one tile southwest and found the capital; this leaves three hill tiles intact for production, while giving us two major food resources and a floodplains, plus oodles of grassland tiles for potential cottages. Yay!
The city is named Cornelia, after the family line of my namesake Lucius Cornelius Sulla. I was also considering Sulllavilllle, but even I don't want to type THAT many Ls.
(Note to other players: don't go with the default names for this game. Come up with something interesting and unique! We only get five cities, so we can afford to have some fun with this.)
We started with Mining and Hunting, so I figure we may as well go Agriculture/Animal Husbandry to take advantage of the tech discount for know the prerequisites of AH. Worker out of the gate to start, and with Hunting tech, we can probably skip warriors and go right on to archers for real defense afterwards. I've enjoyed doing that in the past with civs who start with Hunting. Alright, let's get this started!
(1) 3960BC Pop a hut on turn one of the game - new tech!
And it's BRONZE WORKING! [dance] Wow, what a lucky break. We have copper located just to the west of Cornelia. On second thought, we may not need to research Archery soon after all.
I rename our scout "Bronze-Finder" in celebration of his mighty deed.
(2) 3920BC Bronze-Finder (hereafter B-F) spots fish AND clams off the coast to the south, right by the bronze.
Perhaps this will be a good spot for one of the golden five (?) Lot of desert tiles though...
(3) 3880BC We meet Cyrus who is REALLY close to us:
Interesting. Nothing says that we have to be peaceful in this game though!
(Keep that in the back of our minds.)
(8) 3680BC Agriculture -> Animal Husbandry. Buddhism FIDL (obviously not by Cyrus, unless he popped Mysticism from a hut).
(15) 3400BC Worker -> warrior in Cornelia. We ARE going to need at least one military unit here, and there's nothing else to build but barracks at the moment. Basically, running max food and we have to put shields into something. B-F also popped a hut in the tundra north last turn for 36g. The land up there does not look promising, we may have to get creative (ha, a Sirian-like pun!) in this game with the city locations (or be aggressive against Cyrus!)
(16) 3360BC There's another corn + cows location in the east, but there's a LOT of tundra around it. Another place we'll have to think about though!
(18) 3280BC AH -> Wheel. I'm heading to Wheel en route to Pottery, since we already have Bronze Working for Slavery. Can't see anything else out there at the moment that we should be pushing for... (maybe Mysticism for Stonehenge, but that's more of a long-term deal)
(22) 3120BC Cornelia to size 2, still pushing max growth. Cyrus has built a second scout, which is poking around our borders. What a waste of production!
(25) 3000BC Hindu FIDL - by CYRUS! OK, that settles it. He's gonna have to go down!
We can make Persepolis into one of our Five Golden Cities if desired (or raze if a potentially better spot is seen). Priority #1 is now beelining a settler to the copper before Cyrus can get there. Cornelia will grow to size 3 next turn, finish its warrior the turn after that, and then I'll start a settler.
(26) 2960BC Borders expand to size 3, we finish Wheel and start Pottery, warrior due in 1.
(27) 2920BC Cornelia on settler, due in 9 turns.
(30) 2800BC And that's where things stand after 30 turns.
I believe our next city should go here, on the red dot:
It might look like a bad location, but there is only one tile of overlap with Cornelia, it claims COPPER, there are only four actual desert tiles (not great but it looks like more than that), and fish + clams = one awesome location for our variant! Down the road, we can almost certainly get the Colossus in this spot (ok, maybe that's being a little TOO forward-looking!) I envision our worker building roads towards that spot and then hooking up the copper, followed by some slaved axes from Cornelia (which has a ridiculous amount of food). This being Monarch, the AI won't have a chance of holding out.
To the team:
what say ye?