King of the World #22: Gilgamesh

Round 0: Older than Ancient (18000 B.C.)
Round 1: The Lay of the Land (18000-17100 B.C.)
Round 2: Cuneiform in a Linear Empire (17100-15150 B.C.)

Greetings, all, and welcome! The King of the World series is played on Earth maps, sacrificing exploration for realistic scenarios and blah, blah, blah. We all know what we're getting into here

This game is a return to the Ice Age that killed off poor Ragnar in his prime. Well, not the same Ice Age, precisely. This'll be the BTS scenario, rather than the Vanilla one, and there'll be no Raging Barbarians here:



We're playing Gilgamesh on Emperor, and, this not being the familiar Earth map we all know and love, I guess there's a little bit of the old Exploration phase here, so I won't spoil things with World Builder screenshots.

Gilgamesh is something of a forgotten Leader (at least by me). Being BtS, and being shoehorned into an already crowded corner of the globe, he doesn't show up in many KotW games, and he's relevant in even fewer.



Gilgamesh is Creative and Protective, not exactly a powerhouse combination. Though I must say, not having to worry about Monuments does make me rather partial to Creative. He's outfitted with the Vulture, a Swordsman-strength Axeman that has a smaller Melee bonus and the Ziggurat, a cheap Courthouse that unlocks at Priesthood. Both seem like solid early bonuses, so I'm thinking that some primitive-era aggression is in the cards.

But where do we start? For this being an Ice Age, our starting location looks pretty darn tropical:



We're somewhere in the Middle East, though what that means on this map I can only guess. It looks like we have coastline to the southeast, which might be a smart direction to settle in, if only because I foresee health issues early on. I'd like to treat this as a new challenge, so let's try to limit the spoilers, at least at first. So, knowing what we can see, where should we set up camp?

Here's the save:

Subscribed; this should be a fun one.

Do we know who else is on the map?

I'll be following this too. I'd suggest moving, since the production at the start would be very poor and you'd have to whip everything. It'd probably also rule out any rushes too.

Move the warrior onto the plains-hill to get a look around? If production is a big problem, 2N starts to look like an interesting option; 2 plains-hills plus a bunch of floodplains should give you plenty of early-game flexibility. Hard to say for sure without knowing what resources you get / give up by doing that though.

2E looks like being coastal, and you will get at least one plains hill for production. Move the warrior 1NE to see what else you'll be getting.

We can infer based on real-world locations that Gilgamesh would start somewhere in Mesopotamia, right? It looks like the floodplains land on regular Earth between Saladin and Cyrus.

Just at a glance, you're going to need production, which implies setting up camp near those hills. 2E wastes a floodplain but does pick up a hill (and appears to be coastal), so that might not be a bad place to start, maybe with an eye toward picking up some hills with a second city. 1NE might be one off the coast if I'm reading it right, but it'll grab both hills. If this is indeed similar to the Earth Mesopotamia then you can expect to settle two or three cities around the Tigris and Euphrates and do pretty well for yourself.

I think Giggles is a top-shelf leader personally thanks to Creative (yes, it slows down later, but a strong start is half the battle) and a really powerful UU. As you said, seeing him be the focus is going to be fun since he's largely been steamrolled in previous KotW games.

I actually played through a little bit and, while I'm usually a normal/Monarch player, I did surprisingly alright.

Only thing I'm going to say, is that in terms of the actual size of the map

Assuming this is relatively geographically and historically accurate, you are by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, essentially in the middle of the Middle East. You have Persia to your East, the Levant to your West, Arabia to your South and Caucasia to your North. You can see the coast of the Persian Gulf at 2E1SE so settling 2E, 2E1S or 2SE will get you coastal.

I'd wager most of the land to your west is garbage, so early expansion targets should probably be in Persia and India depending on who your neighbors are. You should also make the most out of Mesopotamia since good land seems to be scarce in Ice Age. You might also want to take a look at Egypt and Eastern Africa for expansion. It all comes down to who your opponents are really.

I note from the Screenshot the warrior has already moved, so it looks like we're stuck with what we can see. I personally would move 1NE with the settler and settle there. It gets both plains hills, which will be vital for production, and whilst it is probably one off the coast it is at a diagonal, so the coastal tile will not be in the BFC.

DT

DT has it right. The Warrior has been moved, so that option isn't available to us, at least not without spending another turn. The landlocked capital idea 1NE does seem to have merit, though I worry about initial Health problems...

Neal said:

I worry about initial Health problems...

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I generally don't put as much thought into this as I ought to, but now that you've raised the point I think that's a real problem to worry about. Your capital if you settle 1NE is going to start out losing 1 food per turn to sickness... and the resources you need to gain health will probably be scattered all over a huge map (corn in the Americas, rice in east Asia, pigs in Europe, deer in northern Russia...). Plus you currently have zero health resources visible, so if you're particularly unlucky your capital itself may not get any you can improve quickly. That'd leave you with your best "growth" tiles being 4-food farmed floodplains which cost 2 food to feed the citizen and another food in sickness, netting just 1 food per turn each.

Even after you get out a worker, if you're lucky enough to have maybe wheat, cows or sheep available in the 1NE BFC (assuming Earth18-like resource distribution), you still just grow to size-2 before you start losing food again. Add a granary, and you can get to size 3.

In short... these floodplains are not worth it this early. It's probably worth burning a couple turns moving just to get away from all that sickness.

Those two rivers plus the coastal tile I think I see 3E1S says you're probably right by the Tigris and Euphrates near where Babylon normally starts. Moving 3E would put you near where Persia used to show up - just 4-5 floodplains then, and coastal to boot (might grab a seafood or two out of it), plus those hills between the Babylonians and the Persians won't have just vanished from the Ice Age scenario. So that'd be my sober second thought - move 3E. As a minor plus, you could move your warrior onto that plainshill next turn to take a look at some of the stuff you'd be getting by doing so, and settle 1NE instead if it's really bad over there at the cost of just 1 turn.

A second option would be 3 north. That leaves you with just ~4-6 floodplains to deal with, and would hopefully grab some plainshills and/or resource tiles up that way.

As a somewhat crazy third alternative, you could head northwest towards Turkey at least until you hit the headwaters of the Euphrates. It'd probably burn at least two turns at the start, but if northern Europe is full of snow and ice, and your area is full of plains and desert, the green land is probably in the Spain/Rome/Greece/Turkey band.

As a really crazy fourth alternative, you could go on walkabout. Maybe you want to march across the Bering land bridge before settling (I assume it's there in Ice Age). Maybe there's a land bridge to Australia you can follow to start off there. While not good moves (probably moves that would lead to crushing defeat on Emperor difficulty on a new map), they could make for an interesting challenge.

Hurrah! The honeymoon must be over!

Welcome back, Neal!

I agree with posters urging you to go north. You need production, health, and food resources. On the Earth map, at least, all of that exists up near the headwaters of the Tigris.

Playing a shadow game as one of your rivals in proto-Africa at the birthplace of the human race.



EDIT: Ahahaha, never mind.

Ooh, Oz-Man, you are fighting yourself? Yes, you are toast

Subscribed, really looking forward to this

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just what is the dificulty level?

strijder20 said:

Ooh, Oz-Man, you are fighting yourself? Yes, you are toast

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Nah, I'm shadowing as somebody else. Is spoiling who else is on the map okay? I'm in Africa.

EDIT: Okay, I tried again as Our Fearless Leader and got a culture win. This is a really interesting map. The best part was the person who ended up being the map's high scorer and stone-cold military bad-@*%:

Yeah, I think we can discuss who's out there. The roster is shown on the leader select screen, and, while exact location may be unknown, I imagine general regions are gonna be pretty consistent.

I'd go 3 north. Don't know this map at all. Finding copper could be a useful early objective.

Welcome back Neal! This is a fun map and Giggles is my favorite to play on it. Without spoiling much, I think the other posters have it right - you have a lot of flood plains and will have similar health issues like you had in your Mansa game. 3N actually looks like an interesting choice because you'll turn that useless desert tile into a city tile and I think you'll find some good production up there. If I remember the lands around the equator are somewhat similar in resources to Earth 18.