Best food start ever??

[jedibob5]

Holy crap. I swear I didn't use WorldBuilder.

Spoiler :

FIVE SEAFOOD RESOURCES, plus almost all other squares (spare one hill) are riverfront!
Now, I'm pretty sure a good civ player could work wonders with this. However, I'm pretty much a novice at Civ 4. How should I best take advantage of this start? Cottage the land or farm it for even more food? Hannibal is financial, which would make running cottages good, but I've heard that if you have a lot of food you should try and run a specialist economy with it (although I have zero experience with such an economy, but I've read enough on here to get the idea of what it's about).

 

[Wulf38]

You don't necessarily have to "run a specialist economy", but I would go caste system and farm great scientists in that city for most of the early-mid game, and found another overlapping city to cottage those nice riverside tiles. Later you could also use it as a globe theater drafting city, and pre-caste it can be used to whip units.

 

[ywhtptgtfo]

Holy crap. I swear I didn't use WorldBuilder.

Spoiler :

FIVE SEAFOOD RESOURCES, plus almost all other squares (spare one hill) are riverfront!
Now, I'm pretty sure a good civ player could work wonders with this. However, I'm pretty much a novice at Civ 4. How should I best take advantage of this start? Cottage the land or farm it for even more food? Hannibal is financial, which would make running cottages good, but I've heard that if you have a lot of food you should try and run a specialist economy with it (although I have zero experience with such an economy, but I've read enough on here to get the idea of what it's about).

I have seen 6 on A.I. starts.

 

[Revenant]

A post in the funny picture thread has 6 fish in the BFC, but even this is pretty sweet. It's almost too much food for one city

It's definitely a great person farm city. The capital can always be moved later for when beaurocracy comes around.

 

[Farm Boy]

You don't necessarily have to "run a specialist economy", but I would go caste system and farm great scientists in that city for most of the early-mid game, and found another overlapping city to cottage those nice riverside tiles. Later you could also use it as a globe theater drafting city, and pre-caste it can be used to whip units.

I am ******ed. This semi(at best) emperor player just got overlapping cities through his thick skull.

I kinda wish I had read somebody say "this fat cross is too good to be a city in 1500bc, it needs to be two cities untill 1500a.d. at which point it's suboptimal but who the @*#@ cares, you got 3000 years of use out of it rocking ass as two cities" before now.

Guh to personal stupidity.

 

[Lord Baal]

I am ******ed. This semi(at best) emperor player just got overlapping cities through his thick skull.

I kinda wish I had read somebody say "this fat cross is too good to be a city in 1500bc, it needs to be two cities untill 1500a.d. at which point it's suboptimal but who the @*#@ cares, you got 3000 years of use out of it rocking ass as two cities" before now.

Guh to personal stupidity.

Dude, I'm a noble-level player at the moment. You're not stupid at all, you're clearly doing better than me. Admittedly, I play for fun rather than for a challenge, but you're still owning me.

 

[Farm Boy]

I guess I was more just expressing that I finally got the reasoning behind something that could be extremely useful(overlapping cities). Though, looking at my current map, I don't think I am doing to well at implementing it.

 

[ywhtptgtfo]

Sorry, what's good about overlapping cities?

 

[Derakon]

They can share developed tiles (in the early-mid game you aren't going to be anywhere near working all of a given city's BFC anyway), and keeping your cities close together helps keep maintenance costs down.

 

[swilhelm73]

Also, it isn't a bad idea to plan one city with access to a few food sources and not much else to be your draft/Shakespeare's theater city. You won't need more then 7 tiles when you get fully going. But you do want access to as many food bonus tiles as possible out of those 7.