Settled 1S as well, which seems to have worked out well so far, and will be nice for irrigation purposes later. Met Willem's scout in T2, which surprised me. Didn't think we'd share land with another civilisation. I settled two cities pretty early. On the ivory and on the PH between us and Willem. Stole a few workers too. Didn't manage to take Amsterdam as early as Powerfaker, and I took quite a few losses. City was smaller too. But it's a nice one, so I'm glad to get it, and get rid of Willem. I noticed the would-be horses (before AH), so made sure to trap a worker there before he could improve it. An archer guarded him trying to get back to Amsterdam, but we nailed them.
The very early scout died in a 70-ish percent fight. Then later that warrior got attacked by a wolf.
Cool. Doesn't at all hurt in the super early game
Had 15 axes when I declared on Willem, which was probably overkill despite the heavy losses. That cost a fair bit, so I had to delete warriors and use axes as MP. The archer got to live too.
Built GLH in Amsterdam, used most of the forests for it (if not all). Should be a great wonder for a map like this. Ragnar found us with a workboat, which was promptly destroyed by a galley that had started to explore the coast. So he doesn't know where we are yet. Seems like the DOW caused him to make many more units, though, and I assume he is the one with most power in the world currently (but we're not far behind). Also built Colossus. Ended up with a GM from GLH (40% chance), and I used him to bulb MC. Am working on MoM now, and hope we nail that one. No forests left to speak of, so it will have to be slow-built. Just got Aesthetics and have queued up a few wonders. Think I'll try to get Great Library once we get Literature. Not sure where to go after that, but possibly CoL-CS. Music is probably safe a while longer, and the capital isn't terrible for Buro.
Seems like we can't reach Ragnar, and none of the others have found us yet, so don't think we can reach them pre-Optics either -- unless it's possible via expanded cultural borders somewhere. I've sent a trireme to check out a possible path, but since nothing else has come that way, not even Ragnar, I guess it's just a one-tile island or something.
We got 9 cities and doing over 200 beakers at full tilt. The barb city on top of Iron helped, which we captured a while back. It recently got out of revolt. A settler will found city #10 next turn, and two more are just about out. One will probably settle the banana, and maybe I'll send the second guy on a sea voyage. Shame about no food on the fairly big island to our NW, so I may have to send them further. Always a bit risky, so perhaps it was a mistake to send the trireme off exploring. Oops! Haven't settled the southern iceballs yet. Some nice locations down there, but figured I could backfill it instead.
A couple of overview shots.
No Oracle for me, it went quite early. Mids went very late, so almost sorry I didn't try for it. Crazy expensive without stone, tho!
Cities aren't very big yet, but plenty of room to grow now with Calendar resources online, so I'm trying to grow the capital a bit more. Same with the silk city. That one could have been a pretty excellent Buro city, but probably not worth moving.
As mentioned above somewhere, it kinda plays like isolation. I'm not sure how to play out this one, whether to go for early Optics or sit back and develop our land more. I'll probably go for the latter tbh, since I've already invested into marble techs, and not gone for HBR+construction yet.
