born losers

[Rusten]

Move scout 2N and fish is revealed. Should make for a good city later together with the pigs. I settle 3E of starting position.

Turn 6: Meet a Mali scout from the east. I decide to scout over there instead to find his borders (just as well, because I would've encountered a bear otherwise I believe ).

Turn 10: He is close, and apparently with terrible land.

Encounter a Viking scout 6-7 tiles south of Athens around turn 15. Not the best news. There are a select few AIs I fear very much in the early game, and they pretty much always decide to attack someone. Ragnar is one of them so tread carefully.

Big overview turn 20 (settling city #2 by the corn/pigs/fish makes sense, not sure we can beat MM to the clams):

Extreme density of food here. Should be easy as long as we survive the BCs. Can squeeze in extra cities with overlap.

And I will say it again: Please be prepared for Ragnar DoW in the early BCs.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

Maybe play till BW? Locating Ragnar would be nice. City 2 NE of the corn is fine by me. Mansa will culture steal the fish when he gets his third religion but whatever

 

[Rusten]

Maybe play till BW? Locating Ragnar would be nice. City 2 NE of the corn is fine by me. Mansa will culture steal the fish when he gets his third religion but whatever

Assuming you mean 1NE of corn. Don't think we'll lose fish, we're Pericles.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

Assuming you mean 1NE of corn. Don't think we'll lose fish, we're Pericles.

city number 2, NE of corn yes. (2NE being water )

 

[lymond]

Well, looks like the alternate settling site worked out nicely. Athens essentially blocks Mansa to land in the SW. Of course, the proximity of Rag will be a factor but it looks like we can easily get up the requisite number of cities.

Rusten - I fully agree on Rag. He is a lot of trouble in the early game. We will want Monarchy fairly early and even gift it to him if we can. Seems he often doesn't tech the tech that gives him his fave civic. Still, we need to survive until then. Hopefully, he demands something from us. Generally, he does not get along with Mansa either which is good.

Too bad that oasis was not 1 tile west. Not sure clam city is worth it, although it might prevent Mansa from trying to settle the fish down south from an eastern position.

hmm...there is a surprising lack of mountains in this land. workshops and possibly early caste will be of valuable - not that we wouldn't use caste anyway with Peri.

edit: clam city is not great early, but we just might want to make a play for it, i.e., the oasis/clam site near mansa

 

[Rusten]

Generally, he does not get along with Mansa either which is good.

Indeed, but after turn 25 he can't reach MM by ground without crossing our territory, and we don't have open borders. How does this effect DoW mechanics? It's been so long for me, I can't remember.

 

[lymond]

Good point. My understanding is that he may very well want to "clear a path" to Mansa. One possible way to mitigate this is to build a city on a hill in the SW and get...ugh...Archery...and let Rag just suicide on that city. However, I don't see any freakin' hills.

 

[kossin]

Lurker's comment:

It's probably safe to say that a standard approach to this map will be very risky. If you try to play it AW-style and just settle whatever crappy hill site (like the scout for example) and use spies on Mansa, you'll do okay I think.

 

[lymond]

Yep, that's kinda what I was getting at, just not near as well said

ah...and kos...you have officially been promoted to Lurker Elite status, thereby not having to say your a lurker

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

Somebody plays till BW? I can do it tonight if no one volunteers THis game needs some pace, we need to finish before mysty and his terrible luck come back

 

[Rusten]

Go for it.

 

[mystyfly]

Somebody plays till BW? I can do it tonight if no one volunteers THis game needs some pace, we need to finish before mysty and his terrible luck come back

too late it seems

Looks like we do have a great map though it's not exactly fair to use a pre-game-checked map but I guess it would indeed be nice to reach the ADs for a change

IMO Rusten may continue until BW. What about following roster:

Rusten - playing
Raskolnikov - on deck
Shyuhe
Lymond
bbp
me (give us some extra breathing time before the Bad Luck Factor kicks in )

 

[Rusten]

Ok, I'll play to BW now.

Not a fan of playing a "pre-game-checked" map either, but it was already selected when I joined.

 

[Rusten]

Played a couple of turns and there's an extreme amount of barb warriors (not archers). Is this due to it being a modified map?

 

[mystyfly]

I think the game was created using an immortal game, might be because of that...

 

[Rusten]

Played to BW. Not much to report. Scout died quickly to barb warriors (saw lots, but they're all gone now for some reason) -- it's impossible to safely scout through jungle, you can't walk 1 step and then go back.

State of the state:

Planned approach was whip settler when possible -> regrow to 4 -> whip worker.
However, we will have a fair bit of overflow hammers, I think it might be better to whip settler -> overflow into worker -> 1-pop worker.

Current worker goes down to farm corn IMO. We don't need the copper immediately. Better to get that 6F tile up and whip a work boat for commerce.

 

[Rusten]

I guess settling for the clam is a possibility too, I think I may favour that. We can work the oasis while growing to size 2 and then whip the work boat. Reduces the worker turns early on. Means no rush to whip the 2nd worker.
Culture battle with Mansa is tricky though. We have the clam in our 2nd compared to his 3rd ring, but I'm still not confident. I'm uncertain about winning that one long term. However, it will be ours in the early game where we need it the most. It's an ok city without it too, we can farm all the grassland tiles.

My main reason for wanting to settle clam is to stop any future culture bomb shenanigans from MM. He may get an artist and bomb a city there to get more tiles, and then we'll lose our copper.

 

[shyuhe]

I think the eastern clam spot is good for a second city. It'll keep our copper secure and it can work 3 tiles + 2 scientists at size 5 for the early game.

I'd like to find Ragnar to the south but I don't think we can go look for him without axes. Assuming we don't find any other neighbors, I think it'll be prudent to settle a city on a hill to the south and use it as a defensive buffer against him. We're not going to improve the jungle for a long time anyways. It's unfortunate that we can only see one hill in the jungle so far :/

 

[Rusten]

With Pericles/philo we will be running caste for major parts of the game and we will get more GSs than we need. We can run artists in clam+oasis for extra culture and use the GA for a golden age if that's what we get.

Running artists will make it easy to keep clam.

RE: Ragnar: don't obsess about hill cities. These early BC attacks are without catapults and we are creative. We will have better defense than a non-cre leader.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

Nice discussion! I like the clam idea. It unlocks two additional cities compared to the other dotmap

got it for tmr.

edit: wb mysty