regoarrarr said:
A couple of notes from my experiments on the shadow game, in no particular order.
* Hunting is only 8 turns right away, with Archery another 9 turns.
* Settling on Turn 1 gives you 7 gpt distance maintenance, dropping research to 50%.
* You can pop hostile barbs right away (I did in one game with my settler)
* I settled 11 turns west of the start spot, and it dropped the distance maintenance to 6 gpt. Doesn't really seem worth it. Though one option would be to settle close to one of our neighbors and storm his city.
* I saw a barb animal at 3610 BC (turn 13). After that, it becomes very difficult to avoid them with the settler (given that they have 2 moves). Probably need to decide a place to settle by turn 10 or so.
* Health cap is 3, so Kyoto is unhealthy at size 4.
Need to do some more investigation, but I think it's better to:
* go workboat, workboat in Kyoto
* Go mining / BW and skip Archery. I think we'll have time to get axes before we need to stop barb archers.
(Welcome EL_OSO, we look forward to your work schedule letting up a bit.)
I agree with your first paragraph.
Try the workboat, workboat in Kyoto. I think you grow to size 5 (and unhappy) the following turn.
The trouble with going for Bronze is that I don't think we can count on having Copper in the 8 squares around our second city. So, we need to found the city, find a suitable Copper site, train a Settler (for the new city) and a Worker (to hook up the copper). All of this with 50% science after we found the city!
Isn't it 30 turns or so before discovering Bronze even if we don't settle the starting Settler? Then how many more before we can get the Settler to the Copper, a Worker trained, and the Copper mined and roaded, and an axeman out the door to protect the Copper?
If we settle right away, won't it be something like 50+ turns before we discover Bronze? All the while, we have one warrior to protect our "mainland" holdings....
And what if there is no copper
, either because the AI settles it or because the evil scenario designer removed it!
Then, we will be
as we try to earn the Wooden Spoons.
In addition, I actually think Archery will be useful in this game. We have to garrison our soon-to-be-many cities with some kind of troop, and archers are cheaper than Axes.