Best Starting Techs?

I used to think AG/Mining but now AG/Wheel. Wheel is more expensive than mining and having it lets you play flood plain pottery openings or set up a chariot rush more rapidly. AG means you have or are within 1 tech of all land food.

Researching mining if you need it soon is easier than grabbing the more expensive wheel technology.

 

Don't forget you can build stonehenge right away!

Clearly, the world will be impressed with the pile of rocks that is your capital. Who needs to eat?

 

OK, I can see this "best starting techs without being restricted to the first column" thing is worth its own thread...

6 pop isn't that hard to reach, and even then it doesn't need to all be happy. Plus the barracks gives you +2 under Nationhood to cover most of the draft . And as for Monty picking a fight, even archers can hold him back pre-construction (when used wisely), let alone rifles.

That'll work great when you can't see Uranium (Physics)

 

Agree with TMIT and others on supremacy of TW over Mining. You're going to want both early, and given that you can self-research either before your first worker is even out, I'd prefer to have the more expensive one as the freebie.

Having the wheel early also encourages you to road ahead of time to future city cites, which is an important thing to do for quick expansion and early trade commerce. But if I don't start with TW I often find myself neglecting it in favor of researching things like BW or Writing and building all manner of improvements in the capital.

 

Fishing + Mining, because that's what rome starts with!

Seriously though, agriculture and wheel. Wheel just takes too damn long to research at the start. Mining is cheap. Fishing isn't really superior to agriculture even if you start coastal because you're going to want animal husbandry as one of your first 5 techs or so and agriculture leads to it.

 

Very true. I have Horses and Cows in my fat-cross in today's game. Life is good!

 

Sorry I don't buy the wheel > mining, just because it's 1 turn more to get and occasionally you have floodplains making early pottery sweet, and occasionally you have BFC horse (and some livestock which made you research AH) for instachariots.

Don't get me wrong I like TW a lot, it's always solid and occasionally great, but mining is great more often than just occasionally.

Taking a comparison just between those two techs clearly it's possible to get either one in plenty of time for the first worker to do something with it, so we have to look at the second level techs which are made available straight away. Now IMO cottages and granaries are later considerations than whipping, chopping, and copper discovery in most games.

Put another way if I don't have the wheel it's not uncommon to leave it till 3rd or 4th choice. If I don't have mining, I will quite often be going mining first.

 

Dragging this slightly off-topic now, but I tried Nationalism/Rifling on a small Pangaea (edit: on Monarch level), with predictable results (conquest win in 400BC). I never even lost a battle. So... yeah.

 

Ag+wheel over ag+mining over anything else ;-) for me.

interesting enough ag+wheel is paired with my favorite leaders (hatty, mehmed, gilga)

 

Well you can also usually go mining+BW in the time it take you to build a worker and improve an AG resource, assuming you've got one. Additionally it's notable that starting with TW+AG open up a quick path to Writing via Pottery. But I agree that both combos have considerable strengths.

 

Hmmm, it is interesting to note that if you have Rifling, you don't even need the knowledge of Gunpowder, since Gunpowder only act as a pre-requisite for Rifling, instead of an enabling-tech for Riflemen (like how Gunpowder is an enabling-tech for Cuirassiers and Cavalry).

It might be fairer to also give the AIs Feudalism and Rifling... Feudalism because they are unlikely to use Nationalism but they will almost certainly use the Feudalism-enabled Serfdom and Vassalage Civics.

Better yet, give the AIs Military Science and Feudalism, so that they will have the potential advantage of +50% bonus versus Riflemen should they not be too stupid to be the ones to attack first.

 

But, like TMIT said, if you have AG, than you either have a land food resource, or it's in your BFC.

 

I do like having early pottery with the wheel/ag for graineries, and generally if you start w/mining, there's either gold or silver nearby, but that's no always the case.

 

fuuuuuu

 

If I couldn't get the military techs, I'd take currency and corporation. Then... war!!! Without having to worry about Strike.