A bit on the background:
I've played a number of games at noble, although most of them hardly constitute "playing" but rather experimenting with things. On noble, you can do almost anything and still win. I've played a few at prince, and given a nice starting position seem to do well on at least continents map. Mostly I play to some point in the game, evaluate how the starts worked out, and then abandon the game and start a new one. Completing the game is, if you're leading in land and tech, just work, not so much fun anymore. Except if I want to try out modern warfare
I'm still prone to reloading, as I often forget something (civic changes, city management, worker chopping when it was supposed to only prechop), misclicking (why is the city garrison running here? Err... the artist is left as garrison? reload and start moving the correct unit), want to get the numbers without calculating them (quicksave, declare war, check combat odds of my units vs. border cities, quickload to before war declaration - yes I know I could calculate the odds but the game can do it faster, just not in peacetime), and even sometimes refuse to accept some result (losing a warlord cavalry against halfdead mace isn't acceptable to me - I don't fight with the warlord unit except in the "certain win" cases).
I'm a wonder addict. Bad thing. I also drop build queues (mostly very suboptimal) to cities and let the governors run them, hoping I don't need to hear about them too often. Not good either.
A lot of issues I need to get over to get to play for real. Then again, it's for fun and I'm not playing competitive games, so don't see anything wrong with it. Just that to get a hang of what competitive playing is, I need to play for real for a change And I think Tiny Islands is something I can learn a lot from.
So, onto the matter at hand: Archipelago map, Tiny Islands. Warlords, not vanilla. Epic speed, standard size, no Vassal states (maybe they'll work better after the patch), no barbs or huts (have to try out these some day - how do barbs work on the waterworld? Do they get ships?).
I have a soft spot for Ragnar, and it seems to me that Tiny Islands is a map made for him. All cities are coastal and navy is of utmost importance, leveraging both the UB (Trading Post, replaces Lightouse: naval units built start with Navigation 1 promotion) and UU (Berserker: Mace with Amphibious).
Starts with fishing, therefore immediate access to working the waters. Hunting doesn't seem that useful though.
Traits: Financial and Aggressive. The latter lends for warfare (duh), with IMHO unlocking of promotions being the most important aspect of the free Combat 1. The former adds extra commerce to all coastal tiles, and as on tiny islands land tiles are rare, you'll be working the waters a lot. Then again, without cottages (on what tiles? Not like there would be that many land tiles) running specialist economy seems like the only way to go really, which again I'll have to learn to do.
So what are the most important things I can see about the waterworld maps easily?
Let's start with the obvious: lack of land. Duh. It's water, not land. This means also lack of normal land improvements: can't cotspam (two cottages are not cotspam, and I probably will end up putting workshops on those tiles instead of cots), and no hammers. Repeating the last point: no hammers. Water tiles don't yield hammers (excepting whales which are rare and require Optics), and there are very few land tiles. This means that land tiles will be improved mostly towards hammer yield, and hills are premium property.
This is offset by abundance of seafood. Let's see: with lightouse (Trading Post for me, thank you) each coastal and ocean tile yields two food, being workable for the commerce yield (3 for financial leaders, and forget about those ocean tiles unless they have resource) but no excess food. However, clam, crab, and fish are plentiful, each providing lots of excess food (clam and crab F+3, fish F+4, with the lightouse). And there are few land tiles to begin with, so shouldn't be a big problem to work them all with some amount of excess food left over.
So lack of hammers is an obvious problem. Lesson number one: I've learned to love the whip I can now settle that single tile island, grab two seafoods, and whip up the improvements I want. There just is no other way, so whipping it is.
What does lack of hammers lead to? Slow building. Even with the whip, building anything takes a lot of time. I have to wait fo the oppression to be forgotten (or deal with long and bad oppression periods - yes, I've cracked the whip a few times in fast succession with somewhat unhappy results for a long time to follow) and in that time, very little gets built. So I have to be very careful about what I want built. Big issue for me: learn to build only what I need, not everything that might or might be useful at some point.
Slow building means no wonders. Or at least, very few wonders. Industrious and appropriate resources would obviously help a lot, but I'm trying to get over my wonder addiction here and Ragnar isn't industrious. Access to stone and/or marble still easily gets the better out of me, and thus I may try to build some wonders if I have them. I can now do without Oracle, without Pyramids. One wonder I go for desperatelly is Great Library. And on waterworld, I really would like to get Great Lightouse and Colossus. The latter is fairly easy to get, but the former might not be so. Other wonders depend on the situation, but any that only affects "cities on the continent" is probably a bad deal.
Not that the AI would be wondercrazy either... Stonehenge built in a distant land in 220AD? They don't like it? All wonders will be built a lot later than on landmaps.
Apart from hammers, lack of land also means no cotspam. Coastal tiles do produce commerce, but even as financial leader 3 commerce per tile isn't that much. And it's not going to be improved by Printing Press. However, they do produce the commerce unimproved which is a boost early on.
Low commerce and low hammers means that things will mature slowly. Tech rate is slower than on landmap, buildrate is slower than on landmap. Everything is slower. This is one thing I'd like to hear about from the experienced players: is this true?
Lack of land also means less need for workers. All cities will be connected with sailing (or astronomy, but you won't even get to settle on those spots without so they'll be connected when settled), so road networks aren't needed for connecting cities. Units are moved with ships, so road networks aren't needed for that either. Roads are needed to connect the landbound resources, and are built when the workers get bored. Just make sure you don't have too many workers - I don't think you need more than one per major island anyway and you can move them around from island to island when one gets improved. When new resources are discovered (mainly meaning coal and later ones) you just need to shuffle them around to those few tiles. And with railroads, you need to shuffle them around again.
However, land resources are precious, so workers are definitelly needed. And hills need to be mined.
Apart from general lack of land, there's the issue of splintered land. You can't move units without ships. Having transports of the age (Galley, Galleon, Transport) around in reasonable numbers is a big issue. I usually station one on each major island (major meaning an island that can support more than one city) so that if the need comes, I can whip a unit and send it to where it's needed immediatelly. There aren't rail networks, there are transport networks.
Any war involves transporting units with ships. A galley can only hold two units, which makes early war a big pain - a fleet of galleys is needed.
With the low strength transport ships come another issue: warships. Starting with triremes. You just can't ignore this: Triremes are your Chariots and Horse Archers. Caravels are your Knights. Frigates are your Cavalry. Destroyers are your Gunships. From Frigate on, the warships also bombard city defenses, thus doubling as siege machines. I've yet to play real modern war on Tiny Islands map, but I'm guessing carrier fleets are going to be the real deal there.
All the problems above have also lead to my lesson #2: micromanagement of cities is a must.
Onto the start of the game..
I still want a "good" start, so I do restart if I don't get some minimum to work with. My minimum requirements aren't that big though: two seafoods of which one in the capitol inner ring, two hills to provide hammers and to set my citizens on when waiting for whipping effects to be forgotten. I want my starting island to support two cities, which means some more seafood. Anything more is a bonus: starting island that can support three cities is very nice (even if the third one is a fishwhippery only), resources are nice to have. Having gold in the capitol's fat cross is a real boost. More food and more hills are excellent, but more food without more hammertiles (or resource tiles) doesn't seem to be very useful.
Gold (or silver or gems) is a real boost as it's a tile you can work on for high commerce, a few hammers, and absolutely no food. When working on land tiles for hammers I always cringe for not getting commerce, and early in the game even three commerce from coastal tile means a lot in research times. Gold is golden.
My best start ever has been an island that supported two cities but had all three seafoods present, total of three for each city at that. I had five hills for my capitol (of which two overlapped with my second city allowing me to manage production capability between the cities nicely), of which one had gold, another had copper. I even had marble and wheat (on top of which my second city went - what do I need the wheat for anyway if I have three seafoods? It was a good - no, the only - location to set second city to). This was a dream start that won't be happening often.
I've tried starting on the islands that are wholly within the capitol fat cross sometimes (when the starting location is otherwise nice), but I've got real problems expanding early on in those cases. Need a galley even for the first settler, a location to settle, maybe need a second worker early on... I'm not very good with this kind of a start.
So after maybe having to restart once or twice to get the start I'm OK with, I take a very simple approach at first: settle, force work on seafood (3 commerce, capitol food balance +2), set out to build workboat (not that it's going to complete before the whip), scout my island (not going to take long), and research mining -> BW. Switch to slavery, whip the workboat, set on to a second workboat. Wait until city is one turn from growing to size three, whip the second workboat. Start worker. The city is at size two, working two seafoods, so the worker will be trained fast with all the food.
After that work on the trading post a while while the city grows to size three and forgets about the whip, then depending on the tiles I have, complete / whip the trading post, settler, and two units (one for each city). If I have some landbound resource I want to work on, I may wait for the city to grow enough to keep working that while I whip a bit, but if not, then keep whipping the city to size two working the two seafoods. The second city may need workboats that I might whip from capitol, but what it needs most is a bit of culture to get the first border expansion for full fat cross - unless it's second ring isn't interesting (unlikely - can't get all the good tiles to first ring often). Probably monument.
When second city is up, it's time to start with the navy: two triremes will be sent to different directions, to discover new lands, civilizations, map the world, and eventually grab the circumnavigation bonus. That's a big deal on waterworlds. A galley after them, to wander close by, looking at the islands I will be settling next. If my starting island can support a third city, I'll probably settle that before settling other islands, but ultimatelly resources will decide that.
Research wise, after BW next up is Sailing (for Trading Post), after that maybe some worker tech if I see resources I need (and wheel to connect the resource). Need Mysticism for monuments for second and subsequent cities.
After that, towards Writing (library so I can finally use that excess food for something good), Priesthood and CoL. Aim is to get Confucianism so I don't need monuments but can get the first border expansion with culture from religion. Lots of ways to go there: I need Metal Casting (forges, Colossus, on path towards Optics), probably need to fit Iron Working to some early research position (don't need that very soon, but if I don't have copper close by it's a priority tech - and it never hurts to know where the iron is even if I don't need it yet), Alphabet is good when I find other civilizations (and for Literature -> Great Library).. So many things to do.
One thing that must be remembered: for circumnavigation, I can't wait for Optics. The two triremes must go out early on, and will make slow progress as they hit dead ends and so on. Hopefully I get circumnavigation close to hitting Optics. Way back home will be a lot faster as I don't need to hit all the dead ends and I'm moving quite a lot (+1 move is a lot even when I already have Nav1) faster.
I think I've got the start going OK, but then I hit problems.. How fast to expand, how far to expand? When to go to war? Galley fleet protected by triremes is needed then, but if I have copper and a nearby civ, I might be able to axerush. I also easily hit my builder habits here, and going the builder way without hammers is slow progress. I need to learn to use specialists efficiently, as I will be having cities with excess fish that should be turned into beakers, hammers, and coin, without tiles to work on for them.
I've played a number of games at noble, although most of them hardly constitute "playing" but rather experimenting with things. On noble, you can do almost anything and still win. I've played a few at prince, and given a nice starting position seem to do well on at least continents map. Mostly I play to some point in the game, evaluate how the starts worked out, and then abandon the game and start a new one. Completing the game is, if you're leading in land and tech, just work, not so much fun anymore. Except if I want to try out modern warfare
I'm still prone to reloading, as I often forget something (civic changes, city management, worker chopping when it was supposed to only prechop), misclicking (why is the city garrison running here? Err... the artist is left as garrison? reload and start moving the correct unit), want to get the numbers without calculating them (quicksave, declare war, check combat odds of my units vs. border cities, quickload to before war declaration - yes I know I could calculate the odds but the game can do it faster, just not in peacetime), and even sometimes refuse to accept some result (losing a warlord cavalry against halfdead mace isn't acceptable to me - I don't fight with the warlord unit except in the "certain win" cases).
I'm a wonder addict. Bad thing. I also drop build queues (mostly very suboptimal) to cities and let the governors run them, hoping I don't need to hear about them too often. Not good either.
A lot of issues I need to get over to get to play for real. Then again, it's for fun and I'm not playing competitive games, so don't see anything wrong with it. Just that to get a hang of what competitive playing is, I need to play for real for a change
And I think Tiny Islands is something I can learn a lot from.So, onto the matter at hand: Archipelago map, Tiny Islands. Warlords, not vanilla. Epic speed, standard size, no Vassal states (maybe they'll work better after the patch), no barbs or huts (have to try out these some day - how do barbs work on the waterworld? Do they get ships?).
I have a soft spot for Ragnar, and it seems to me that Tiny Islands is a map made for him. All cities are coastal and navy is of utmost importance, leveraging both the UB (Trading Post, replaces Lightouse: naval units built start with Navigation 1 promotion) and UU (Berserker: Mace with Amphibious).
Starts with fishing, therefore immediate access to working the waters. Hunting doesn't seem that useful though.
Traits: Financial and Aggressive. The latter lends for warfare (duh), with IMHO unlocking of promotions being the most important aspect of the free Combat 1. The former adds extra commerce to all coastal tiles, and as on tiny islands land tiles are rare, you'll be working the waters a lot. Then again, without cottages (on what tiles? Not like there would be that many land tiles) running specialist economy seems like the only way to go really, which again I'll have to learn to do.
So what are the most important things I can see about the waterworld maps easily?
Let's start with the obvious: lack of land. Duh. It's water, not land. This means also lack of normal land improvements: can't cotspam (two cottages are not cotspam, and I probably will end up putting workshops on those tiles instead of cots), and no hammers. Repeating the last point: no hammers. Water tiles don't yield hammers (excepting whales which are rare and require Optics), and there are very few land tiles. This means that land tiles will be improved mostly towards hammer yield, and hills are premium property.
This is offset by abundance of seafood. Let's see: with lightouse (Trading Post for me, thank you) each coastal and ocean tile yields two food, being workable for the commerce yield (3 for financial leaders, and forget about those ocean tiles unless they have resource) but no excess food. However, clam, crab, and fish are plentiful, each providing lots of excess food (clam and crab F+3, fish F+4, with the lightouse). And there are few land tiles to begin with, so shouldn't be a big problem to work them all with some amount of excess food left over.
So lack of hammers is an obvious problem. Lesson number one: I've learned to love the whip
I can now settle that single tile island, grab two seafoods, and whip up the improvements I want. There just is no other way, so whipping it is.What does lack of hammers lead to? Slow building. Even with the whip, building anything takes a lot of time. I have to wait fo the oppression to be forgotten (or deal with long and bad oppression periods - yes, I've cracked the whip a few times in fast succession with somewhat unhappy results for a long time to follow) and in that time, very little gets built. So I have to be very careful about what I want built. Big issue for me: learn to build only what I need, not everything that might or might be useful at some point.
Slow building means no wonders. Or at least, very few wonders. Industrious and appropriate resources would obviously help a lot, but I'm trying to get over my wonder addiction here and Ragnar isn't industrious. Access to stone and/or marble still easily gets the better out of me, and thus I may try to build some wonders if I have them. I can now do without Oracle, without Pyramids. One wonder I go for desperatelly is Great Library. And on waterworld, I really would like to get Great Lightouse and Colossus. The latter is fairly easy to get, but the former might not be so. Other wonders depend on the situation, but any that only affects "cities on the continent" is probably a bad deal.
Not that the AI would be wondercrazy either... Stonehenge built in a distant land in 220AD? They don't like it? All wonders will be built a lot later than on landmaps.
Apart from hammers, lack of land also means no cotspam. Coastal tiles do produce commerce, but even as financial leader 3 commerce per tile isn't that much. And it's not going to be improved by Printing Press. However, they do produce the commerce unimproved which is a boost early on.
Low commerce and low hammers means that things will mature slowly. Tech rate is slower than on landmap, buildrate is slower than on landmap. Everything is slower. This is one thing I'd like to hear about from the experienced players: is this true?
Lack of land also means less need for workers. All cities will be connected with sailing (or astronomy, but you won't even get to settle on those spots without so they'll be connected when settled), so road networks aren't needed for connecting cities. Units are moved with ships, so road networks aren't needed for that either. Roads are needed to connect the landbound resources, and are built when the workers get bored. Just make sure you don't have too many workers - I don't think you need more than one per major island anyway and you can move them around from island to island when one gets improved. When new resources are discovered (mainly meaning coal and later ones) you just need to shuffle them around to those few tiles. And with railroads, you need to shuffle them around again.
However, land resources are precious, so workers are definitelly needed. And hills need to be mined.
Apart from general lack of land, there's the issue of splintered land. You can't move units without ships. Having transports of the age (Galley, Galleon, Transport) around in reasonable numbers is a big issue. I usually station one on each major island (major meaning an island that can support more than one city) so that if the need comes, I can whip a unit and send it to where it's needed immediatelly. There aren't rail networks, there are transport networks.
Any war involves transporting units with ships. A galley can only hold two units, which makes early war a big pain - a fleet of galleys is needed.
With the low strength transport ships come another issue: warships. Starting with triremes. You just can't ignore this: Triremes are your Chariots and Horse Archers. Caravels are your Knights. Frigates are your Cavalry. Destroyers are your Gunships. From Frigate on, the warships also bombard city defenses, thus doubling as siege machines. I've yet to play real modern war on Tiny Islands map, but I'm guessing carrier fleets are going to be the real deal there.
All the problems above have also lead to my lesson #2: micromanagement of cities is a must.
Onto the start of the game..
I still want a "good" start, so I do restart if I don't get some minimum to work with. My minimum requirements aren't that big though: two seafoods of which one in the capitol inner ring, two hills to provide hammers and to set my citizens on when waiting for whipping effects to be forgotten. I want my starting island to support two cities, which means some more seafood. Anything more is a bonus: starting island that can support three cities is very nice (even if the third one is a fishwhippery only), resources are nice to have. Having gold in the capitol's fat cross is a real boost. More food and more hills are excellent, but more food without more hammertiles (or resource tiles) doesn't seem to be very useful.
Gold (or silver or gems) is a real boost as it's a tile you can work on for high commerce, a few hammers, and absolutely no food. When working on land tiles for hammers I always cringe for not getting commerce, and early in the game even three commerce from coastal tile means a lot in research times. Gold is golden.
My best start ever has been an island that supported two cities but had all three seafoods present, total of three for each city at that. I had five hills for my capitol (of which two overlapped with my second city allowing me to manage production capability between the cities nicely), of which one had gold, another had copper. I even had marble and wheat (on top of which my second city went - what do I need the wheat for anyway if I have three seafoods? It was a good - no, the only - location to set second city to). This was a dream start that won't be happening often.
I've tried starting on the islands that are wholly within the capitol fat cross sometimes (when the starting location is otherwise nice), but I've got real problems expanding early on in those cases. Need a galley even for the first settler, a location to settle, maybe need a second worker early on... I'm not very good with this kind of a start.
So after maybe having to restart once or twice to get the start I'm OK with, I take a very simple approach at first: settle, force work on seafood (3 commerce, capitol food balance +2), set out to build workboat (not that it's going to complete before the whip), scout my island (not going to take long), and research mining -> BW. Switch to slavery, whip the workboat, set on to a second workboat. Wait until city is one turn from growing to size three, whip the second workboat. Start worker. The city is at size two, working two seafoods, so the worker will be trained fast with all the food.
After that work on the trading post a while while the city grows to size three and forgets about the whip, then depending on the tiles I have, complete / whip the trading post, settler, and two units (one for each city). If I have some landbound resource I want to work on, I may wait for the city to grow enough to keep working that while I whip a bit, but if not, then keep whipping the city to size two working the two seafoods. The second city may need workboats that I might whip from capitol, but what it needs most is a bit of culture to get the first border expansion for full fat cross - unless it's second ring isn't interesting (unlikely - can't get all the good tiles to first ring often). Probably monument.
When second city is up, it's time to start with the navy: two triremes will be sent to different directions, to discover new lands, civilizations, map the world, and eventually grab the circumnavigation bonus. That's a big deal on waterworlds. A galley after them, to wander close by, looking at the islands I will be settling next. If my starting island can support a third city, I'll probably settle that before settling other islands, but ultimatelly resources will decide that.
Research wise, after BW next up is Sailing (for Trading Post), after that maybe some worker tech if I see resources I need (and wheel to connect the resource). Need Mysticism for monuments for second and subsequent cities.
After that, towards Writing (library so I can finally use that excess food for something good), Priesthood and CoL. Aim is to get Confucianism so I don't need monuments but can get the first border expansion with culture from religion. Lots of ways to go there: I need Metal Casting (forges, Colossus, on path towards Optics), probably need to fit Iron Working to some early research position (don't need that very soon, but if I don't have copper close by it's a priority tech - and it never hurts to know where the iron is even if I don't need it yet), Alphabet is good when I find other civilizations (and for Literature -> Great Library).. So many things to do.
One thing that must be remembered: for circumnavigation, I can't wait for Optics. The two triremes must go out early on, and will make slow progress as they hit dead ends and so on. Hopefully I get circumnavigation close to hitting Optics. Way back home will be a lot faster as I don't need to hit all the dead ends and I'm moving quite a lot (+1 move is a lot even when I already have Nav1) faster.
I think I've got the start going OK, but then I hit problems.. How fast to expand, how far to expand? When to go to war? Galley fleet protected by triremes is needed then, but if I have copper and a nearby civ, I might be able to axerush. I also easily hit my builder habits here, and going the builder way without hammers is slow progress. I need to learn to use specialists efficiently, as I will be having cities with excess fish that should be turned into beakers, hammers, and coin, without tiles to work on for them.
