Here's some preliminary city placement. What do you think?
By the way, I am not too concerned about city overlap in this game. We will probably not be working all 20 BFC tiles in any of our cities for a long time, if ever, due to the reduced amount of farming occasioned by our anti-chopping RP Handicaps. So if you want to champion a city site just 3 or 4 tiles from another city, go for it.
The closest good city site is to the southwest of Cawak. By placing a city in the desert next to the oasis, I keep fresh water, get to work all three floodplains, and only end up with one desert tile in the BFC. I lose coastal access, though.
The other river system further southwest, near Justinian, also begs to be colonized quickly. It also has floodplains (5 of 'em) and two gold, and lots of food resources in the delta area. I am having a hard time positioning two cities in that area, and could use some help. I have preliminarily decided that the forest tile at the river mouth is one potential spot, as it gets the pigs, fish, and corn.
The last strong site is in the center, with sheep, wine, corn and elephants. Unfortunately, all of them can't be reached with one city, so I am considering leaving the corn to a a coastal city to the northeast that can also work a fish tile. The central city gets fresh water access, again, by being adjacent to the oasis and can work all of the river tiles in its BFC and get the sheep, wine, and elephants.
Discussion points:
1.
Settlements. Which first? Before or after Stonehenge? Justinian doesn't have Sailing (or Fishing for that matter, yet -- his clams are unworked as of now), but it's a matter of time before he loads up some Albino followers into a galley to settle near that gold.
2.
Research. I'm planning on going for the Stonehenge techs (Mysticism, Masonry to work the stone) then trying for Monotheism.
3.
Build order from here. I'm almost done with the worker, then I'm thinking finish the warrior I interrupted (for more fogbusting), then Stonehenge, then a settler. I really want to get Stonehenge out of the way so (a) I don't miss it and (b) I can grow Cawak to size 5 to crank out settlers, working the pigs, stone, lake, and two forested plains hills(this will Stagnate Cawak at the initial happy cap and produce 12 hammers/turn, and it will likely stay that way until we get some gold and/or elephants hooked up).
4.
Other wonders. I'm not averse to other wonders, but since we can't rush produce them, we have to be careful. Great Wall is probably out due to time constraints, but the Great Burial Mounds (pyramids) are a possibility, if I can get another city capable of producing units in the meantime. The good news is that our worker will have nothing to do at Cawak after the pigs and stone are hooked up, and so he can drive a road to the new city and help improve it quickly.
Attached is the savegame file.
