creamcheese:
I like your awareness for MM. E.g. in turns 0 and 2, where you changed tile assignments in order to gain an extra coin, some extra food, etc. Keep it up, this is what it takes to become a MM guru in the early phase...
You finished your first settler in 2590BC, just like in PaperBeetle's, templar's and my game, so you should have quite a strong start. And because you have a warrior in that area, you are able to found the second town by the cow, something that neither of us was able to do.
A tip for improvement might be the following: I see that your worker is currently mining a river grassland, while both river plains are still unimproved. If you irrigate a plain, you'll have an identical tile (2/1/2) as a mined grassland, but you'll have it 2 turns faster! (7 turns for roading/irrigating the plain, instead of 9 turns for roading & mining the grass.) Due to this it will take you longer to get the 4-turner operational.
Also, due to having only one warrior on MP duty, you have only 8gpt. This could be 10gpt as in my game. It will be interesting to see, whether the early cow town will be able to compensate that until Republic.
You already raised the question of who should be the first target for military operations:
General game plan is to republic slingshot and then get ironworking as fast as I can and go whack someone with upgraded warriors/built swords. USA is probably a better target, Rome has Iron I think Lanzelot said at the beginning. Legionaries are hard to kill.
I was going to raise this question after turnset 3, when everybody has done about the same amount of scouting and can see the outline of our continent, but well, let's just assume we all have already the same knowledge as Aabraxan and Glasnost, and discuss it now...
The current situation looks as follows:
- In the north we have the Americans, which appear not too strong. Probably have bad land or not much of land.
- In the south we have Rome. They have very good land (I have already seen a cow, a sugar, many BGs and some floodplains) and also they'll be a real nuisance, if they manage to hook up iron.
- South of the Romans we have the Chinese, don't know much about them yet.
So at the moment my battle plan for taking over our continent looks like this:
The first target should be the Romans. Perhaps we can beat them, before they have been able to connect any iron, and that would make our task much much easier. At least we should be able to engage them, before they have built too many Legions and pillage their iron early in the war. The other reason for choosing Rome as first target is: once the first wave of our army has finished Rome, it can proceed south and continue to conquer China, while the second wave that will then be built in our core can march north and take on America. From a logistics point of view, this will save a lot of time - units don't need to march back and forth from the topmost north all the way south or vice versa.
Of course this plan may need adjustment, for example if we get sneak attacked by one of our neighbors we may need to change plans, or if more information about the AI's land gives good reasons for making a different plan (e.g urgently needed resources (luxuries, iron) that we want to get).
Another -completely different- plan might be to declare war on China first, bribe Rome to join us and then attack America, while Rome and China are weakening each other...
After America is finished, turn back south and pick up the remaining pieces of Rome/China.
On higher levels, where the AI can put up quite a fight in the AA, a plan like this might be advisable, but I think on Emperor the straight-forward plan should be faster.
Aabraxan:
The big pluses of your game are the early contact with China (already got their gold and some techs), the early second town and you already have a curragh in the water, so you can hope for very early overseas contacts, getting more trade opportunities and a pretty good picture of the world (will come handy when it's time to plan the first invasions...).
However, this comes at a certain price: the granary is not yet ready, so your REX phase will now be slower than that of the other ones, and for my taste Alesia is a bit too far from the capital. The question of this game will be, whether the curragh and the early second town can compensate for these two disadvantages.
A tip on MM:
Alesia grows and picks up the fish.
You could have set the citizen on the fish (collecting two coins) and then you would still have gotten the shield during that interturn, when Alesia picks up the river BG during growth. This would have gained one gold. (The two gold from picking the fish on growth are lost, because commerce is calculated before food/growth.)
Now if I can just get it to 8 spt (it's at 4 now), I'll have a 4-turner.
Well, actually you only need 6 spt for a 4-turner!
Glasnost:
Ok, here I need to criticize mainly two things:
- Entremont has a barracks already, but you didn't build a single veteran unit yet?! Instead, Entremont is building a settler now. So what did you build the barracks for? It's only eating your gold, but not giving any benefit yet...
- You are researching Iron Working, but Rome already has it! So the gold for IW was kind of wasted, and you will probably no longer be able to achieve the Republic slingshot. Consequently the despotism penalty will hurt your game for quite some time.
I know, you bee-lined for IW because you want to go for a GS rush, but without the power of a Republic government, that rush might not have enough punch to be successful on Emperor level.
A little tip: if one of your neighbors has an iron-based unique unit (Rome/Legions, Persia/Immortals or Celtia/Gallics), then there is no need for you to research Iron Working, because the AI will most probably do it for you... Better concentrate on other things, so you have something as trade bait. The "Writing path" is usually neglected by the AI, so going for the Republic slingshot and/or Literature is almost always a safe bet.
Another thing that is slowing down your research progress is the fact that your cities are too small (and don't have military police yet, once they grow). Probably a consequence of your early war with America and the blocking of the choke point?! In general I would say, you succeeded in crippling America, but the war damaged your game as well. If you finally get the two captured workers back home, they may repair some of the damage in the long run.
splunge the 2nd:
Ok, you continued from my save, and are now in a quite similar position as I am. There is one major difference, however: you did not chop the forest into the first settler. The consequences of this are twofold: first your settler came one turn later (2550BC instead of 2590BC), and you had to work the two forest tiles extensively in order to get the necessary shields, while I was able to work the gold hill here and there for some extra gold. Also you are improving the grassland tile instead of the second plains tile, which takes longer. Both factors result in a slightly slower research: you still have 8 turns left on Writing compared to my 4 turns.
Looks like you are also going for a coastal town first, instead of the very close settlement pattern that I will try. As in Aabraxan's game this should be a very interesting variant to compare, because maritime exploration will be an important point in this game. However, as templar already pointed out, the location at E-SE can be turned into a 2-turn worker factory, which will also be
extremely powerful!
Comment on the turnlog: apparently you played 11 turns instead of 10 and then saved at the beginning of the 12th turn (2470BC)... The actions of "Turn 9 2590" seem to be missing in the log, while the turn that you list under that heading should actually be "Turn 10 2550", and the final turn should read "Turn 11 2510".
Finally some comments on PaperBeetle's and templar's examples. I'm not going to make a review of these, because who am I to critize our two of the best MM gurus and long time GOTM champions...?
These are perfect examples of how to play this start. Just some explanations for our students.
The first thing you'll notice, is that templar left the two irrigated river plains without a road. Well, I just told you this is bad, didn't I... But in this case it is justified, because it was the only way to get enough food and shields to have the 4-turner operational already at this point. The slight drawback is that in the following turns some worker turns will be lost when putting that missing road on these tiles. But in my approach I still need quite a while to get my 4-turner operational, and I expect that the faster settlers in templar's (and similarly in PaperBeetle's) approach will compensate for that.
Another point that was caused by the bee-line for the 4-turner: there's no military police yet, also resulting in less commerce. This is something that PaperBeetle also mentioned already: from the three starts, mine is the one with the highest commerce, having currently 4 turns left on Writing, compared to PaperBeetle's 9 and templar's 20 turns. The interesting question of this comparison will be, by how much the other two will have caught up in the course of the remaining two techs. Will they reach Republic at the same time or even before me? No idea at the moment. But in any case, we can see here that the different approaches amount to some kind of "trade-off": a bit more security and higher initial commerce traded for more food and faster expansion.