I think the Moroccan start will be an interesting challenge
I might like to take a peek over the grass hill before settling, like vadalaz mentioned above: there could be something that persuades us to move on to that hill instead of settling in place. I'm not too enthusiastic about the idea of abandoning the coast, but there is another flood plains coast in the south: it's too close to settle if we settle in place, but if we do end up moving, we can still access the fish from over there. To persuade me to not settle in place, I think I'd optimally love to see multiple food resources: early food is what I'm most concerned about for our capital. Flood plains are nice and all, but they won't do much until Civil Service, and currently the only real food source is the single fish. (We might want to open Sailing early-ish for a work boat and trade route).
I love culture more than most civ-vers, but I'd 100% build a scout first here. The starting position is not stellar, and we really want to know what's in the vicinity, and fast.
An early shrine in an attempt to get DF (meaning Pottery first), as well as some kind of an attempt for Petra, is almost mandatory with this start, I feel. It wouldn't be the most amazing Petra city in history, but together with Kasbahs it could turn a mediocre capital into a better-than-average one.
The big question for me is whether to go Tradition of Liberty. Early scouting should play a big part in this decision (how much nice land to settle we see), but my early thoughts on the matter are:
- Liberty is my first instinct here, even though I'm generally a Tradition guy: our capital, as it stands, will not be great, and we'll have a pretty slow start in there, so the early bonuses would be very welcome; and expanding quick and going wide is the natural choice when your capital isn't anything to write home about. We can also maybe use the Liberty finisher to get Petra.
This seems like the obvious choice for early strategy, and probably the one we should go for, assuming there's a decent amount of good land to settle around us. I'd love to do some scouting before committing to it, though.
- The argument for Tradition, then, would be that
if we get Petra, we will actually want to grow the capital quite a bit and make it the hub for our trade routes: with 2 gold from each desert tile (Petra + Kasbah), the capital should produce quite a bit of gold, and all the usual cool stuff from Tradition (Monarchy + Landed elite + the finisher) would definitely help getting the most out of its potential. We do also have the marble, which is obviously nice to combo with Aristocracy for some early wonders.
It would be slower, riskier, and possibly simply worse, than Liberty though.
In fact: if we do want to go Tradition, I think we might actually want to go all-in, balls to the wall, screw the risks, and
force our capital to become good. I'm talking getting Aristocracy, beelining Currency, and rushing Hanging Gardens before we go for Petra. With HG we'd be able to work all those hills instead of the crappy food tiles and have a pretty nice production powerhouse, which would turn into a pretty amazing sea trade route hub later on.
It's a risky as heck strategy, and it can backfire really badly, but it could be fun... and I'm a bit of a sucker for risky all-in strategies.
It's also something I've never tried before. Which might mean it's not really any good, obviously.
That said... just going Liberty, doing some fast expansion and going really wide might well be simply the better choice. It'd be safer for sure.
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By the way, do we have a victory condition we're aiming at, or do we just play it by ear for now? With Morocco, a relatively peaceful economy-first approach (with trade routes going to as many civs as possible) is the most natural one, but it can be converted to a number of victory conditions - and there's obviously nothing wrong with some good old warmongering either.