City 2 location (& dotmap)

[DaveShack]

We have only 6 turns to make a final decision on where to place our 2nd city. There was some good discussion earlier on making it a general settlement plan decision. What we need for that is dotmaps along with analysis of what each city in the proposed arrangement gets in terms of tiles and what we expect that city to do. If we get general consensus in the thread then it can stand on its own, or if there is a lot of disagreement we can vote on it. In order to make the 6 turn deadline, the discussion needs to be done within the next 3 turns, to leave time for a vote if one is needed.

Proposals are now open. Dotmaps and your reasons we should choose each location, please.

 

[cav scout]

Here is a dotmap for our southern lands since this is where our 2nd city is going to go. The red dot city is my prefered spot for city 2. The borders only show which city has primary ownership of a tile. Working shared tiles that belong primarily to another city is certainly something we will be doing.

Spoiler :

 

[YossarianLives]

Here's another overview of the land (taken from the sandbox save, not the real game), with resource bubbles on, and showing a bit more of the north and west.

Spoiler :

I like cav scout's proposal a lot. I'm going to try to run a few tests, but my gut tells me that his red location is better than 1W. It let's us delay a road connection so we can get more cottages and the wheat farm out quicker, plus let's it share both mines with the capital, which it may need to do since it grows really fast if we give it the farmed Corn.

I think we should move Yellow 1S to give it the hill protection and bring it a little closer to our core. That's a great city and should be an early priority, but it's pretty far from Indira. I'd also try to get Green on the lake to the northeast of it. Indira will probably be at 3rd ring by the time it's planted, so the Deer don't need to be in Green's first ring. Locating Copper might also change things a bit.

 

[DaveShack]

What does the southern location give us, over another direction?

 

[cav scout]

The main reason we are wanting the southern direction for city 2 is to gain early synergy with Indira to execute a coordinated REX plan. Indira will work FP cottages and serve as a settler/worker pump. City 2 will produce units to guard the REX and allow Indira to maintain it's focus. My dot map was limited to the southern region only to illustrate how city 2 will fit into the overall plan. I wasn't suggesting that we found all thes cities first before moving to other parts of the map.

City 3 should absolutely be the gold city. Getting the gold hooked up early is key to a good snowball. And this city will be a monster hybrid with both awesome commerce and production.

City 4 should go to either to claim a strategic spot that might we might be competing with another team for or the blue dot flood plain hybrid city location. Without tech trading commerce is going to be king, so the earlier we get powerful commerce cities going the better.

 

[bcool]

Getting the Oracle might be a worthy goal, enough to risk not researching bronze working. We have the skirmishers if we research archery.

Founding a religion is almost as good as getting the gold, since it will give us free happiness.
Perhaps we even want to go with meditation after pottery then hunting then archery, then priesthood, then animal handling. If we found a religion then settling by the river won't be quite so bad.

I'm okay with settling by the river with the red dot city if we perhaps go for a religion. (this isn't shown on my dot map). I think it makes sense to settle by the lake and get the deer with Indira's culture and then either get the gold and pigs with a religious border pop or by building the oracle in the green dot city.
Or if that doesn't happen quickly enough we can settle the orange dot city perhaps to get the gold access.

With a religion(s) spreading around yellow dot city looks good. It would be nice to get a workboat explorer out of a coastal city if that sea isn't totally enclosed. Yellow can help grow one of the capital's FP cottage while the capital works other tiles or if we whip the capital.

Blue dot city would be a good research city, not a high priority.

edit: 2nd dot map attached
The grean city is moved up 1 to make a great city with a few forests to chop out the oracle quickly, so we get the gold, pigs, cows in the city radius quickly. red city moved to the river, so we can research a bit faster so we are more likely to get a religion and the oracle.

 

[cav scout]

I would support delaying Bronze Working to go for a religion. I would recommend going for Hinduism though with Polytheism though. If RB just teched Myst then they are beelining Priesthood for an Oracle slingshot. This means we would not be able to beat them to Meditation and Buddhism.

Would we be okay with city 2 being the site of our holy city?

 

[Aivoturso]

What else are we planning to do with our second city aside from pumping out settlers and workers? The location by the river does not seem that great as finance nor a production city. The plot in bcool's first dotmap could work as an average producion city at least.

That being said, out of three dotmaps I like bcool's second one the best. The gold city is in much more comfortable distance from the capital and this city placement allows for a production city to be squeezed between the green and red cities improving our defence. Also, I think it is important not to focus our cities too much to east. Though the land in that direction seems to be rather good, it wouldn't do to leave our backdoor open, would it?

Postponing BW in order to secure a religion seems risky to me. I feel that by the time we settle our 3^rd city we should know where the copper is. We have Zulu and Native America among our rivals. Reason enough to keep on the safe side, IMO.

 

[YossarianLives]

I strongly support researching BW next. We've delayed it long enough, and with all this food, plus being Spiritual, Slavery ASAP is critical.

I'm posting a plan in the new sandbox thread that has us 3-pop whipping a Settler for city #3 on T43, the same turn BW comes in. At this rate, with no teams chasing Religions (except potentially RB, though I still have them pegged for Hunting), I think we could get one of the early religions after we finish BW. Plus, if we could get our Religion in our Gold city, that would be much better than our support city in the tundra.

Edit: @Aivoturso, we'll also be using it to pump out units. It'll be very fast to set-up, and then can work improved Corn, Wheat, and two mines at Size 4, while our capital works up to 4 FP cottages.

Edit #2: @Green dot on bcool's second dot map: there are no good tiles to work in the first ring, so that city doesn't contribute anything before a border pop. If we can't get religion in there immediately, we would be forced to chop out a monument as first build That's probably still our best option, though, especially since the capital will bring the Deer within our borders on T50.

 

[1889]

Yossarian’s plan makes good sense to me. I can see the advantages of settling our first city at bcool's red dot (second screen shot). Not the sort of place I would settle normally but it does give us a working city very quickly. All the other locations are going to need border pops before they can start working. Also the tundra city gives us a trade route right away, this early in the game those couple bucks will be handy.

I also agree with bronze next. That tech is too valuable to postpone and it doesn't have to mean we necessarily forfeit a religion.

 

[bcool]

Okay, I got confused. We don't have skirmishers since we are an Indian civilization. We do need bronze working for protection (assuming that we have copper).

An early religion won't necessarily be lost if we get BW, however any hope of building the Oracle probably is. The Oracle is a big sacrifice if there is already a race for it.

Settling a cows/pigs/gold/deer/silk city does cry out for a quick border pop. If we aren't going to get the Oracle or an early (pre T50) religion, we might not want to settle there. However it will have deer access by T50 and could whip a monument relatively quickly.

Also settling by the river is risky if we don't get a religion. It is a poor long term city that requires a border pop eventually. It does free up the 2nd worker a bit but by only one turn! If we did settle 1W, we wouldn't send Lord Parkin down and thus we wouldn't slow down the capital's cottages. The worker produced by the capital would move & finish a road before moving to the wheat. The wheat farm would be produced a turn later.

Advantages of city 1W of the river (likely has copper in its BFC, the river location likely doesn't), the river location has fewer hills and fewer forests in its eventual BFC, and it doesn't need a border pop for the cows). It is a significantly better production city. Settling next to the river yes gives us about 10 more commerce which means we might get BW or a religion 1 turn earlier. Is that really worth the long term difference in productive output in the river city versus the better city 1W?

I played with the sandbow YossarianLives created and settling 1E of the river, I was still able to whip a settler out on T43. I didn't use the corn in the 2nd city and so I produced an extra warrior in Indira and the 2nd city. It looks like in YossarianLives game he grew to size 2 earlier by using the corn. There is some fine tuning we can do here. However, the point is settling 1W will not significantly slow down our tech pace.

 

[YossarianLives]

Seeing the saves, I agree with you that the short-term cost of settling off the river is insignificant. Losing the trade routes for 5 turns only means we'll have to drop research to 90% on the last turn of BW. It doesn't delay BW, and probably won't end up delaying our next tech either (though settling our third city will). The city won't get big enough to need the fresh water health, and building the road with the second Worker only delays the Wheat farm by 1 turn.

I would use Parkin to start roading towards city 3 after the second cottage, to connect it with the rest of the empire.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I am strongly against racing for Oracle. Everyone will be going for it and only one will get it. Its way too much of a gamble. Let's just get BW. As for settlement, I favor settling towards our rivals and filling in the safe spots later. So I would not like to settle the tundra first because that is a safe area that we can always settle later. I would prefer to settle agressively to the North and East before taking the safer Eastern and Southern sites.

The Green dot in cavscout's dotmap seems like a good spot for city 2.

 

[Aivoturso]

Green dot won't do as the second city. The plan is to get the second city to pump out our workers and settlers ASAP. The green dot does not have any overlap with the capital's resources. It also only has a single extra resource (that we don't have the tech for yet). All in all, the green dot at this point would not contribute that much. However, upon the inspection I think that 1 SW from the green dot in Cav_scout's map could be viable. It would require a border pop to get it up to speed, though. So I am in favour of settling south first and then going for the land we really want.

 

[1889]

Starting to develop some consensus here. Please correct me if I'm wrong but so far it looks like most are in favor of settling south first (red dots). There is still some debate about whether to settle on the river 2W of the cows or off river 1W of the cows.

 

[DaveShack]

As a general principle I favor settling resources, and toward potential opponents. If those were the primary criteria, setting to the south sounds like a horrible idea. Maybe not the worst thing we can do, but it violates two very important goals. On top of that, it's land that doesn't have a very high max population.

What I was looking for was reasons that settling there is worth breaking the rules. I'm worried we'll be stuck with a city that we wish we could raze later to eliminate the penalties. Why is it better than east, west, or north, in concrete terms, and for more than the next 20 turns?

But I also think it's worth repeating that I lose a lot.

 

[Sommerswerd]

But I also think it's worth repeating that I lose a lot.

Well I don't, and I agree with Dave that settling towards the tundra for our second city is a decision that I would not make. This is not RTS where you put the Town Center out front to Tank damage and protect your town

However, I am not doing any testing, so if the guys doing the testing think its the best possible thing to do, I am in no position to refute them. It just seems like a subpar choice on its face. I will go back and reread to see if there are some convincing reasons on our forum...

 

[YossarianLives]

The southern city will be strong Mfg powerhouse in the immediate-, near-, medium-, and long-term future.

At size 1 it can work Indira's Corn to grow in 4 turns.

At Size 2 it can work PH Mine and Indira's Corn for +4 and +5, or the Mine and unimproved Wheat for +6.

At Size 3 it can work Improved Wheat and a couple PH Mines for +10.

At size 4 it can work Improved Wheat, Improved Cows and a couple PH Mines for +13 (16 with forge).

Add GH Mines at Size 5 & 6 for +16, then +19 (20 then 23 with forge).

Add grassland farms (2 pre-irrigation, 2 more post-irrigation) to support up to size 10-13, depending on what other tiles/improvements are worked.

Work the 6 Corn at every stage when wanting to grow up to the next size, whip as necessary and work Mines to stagnate growth while waiting for unhappiness to fade.

Because of the snowball effect of Civ, the most important factor is that it becomes an asset to us very quickly. At size 2, it can give us two Warriors every 5 turns, with currently existing improvements! It will let us get the Workers and Warriors necessary to plant and protect a Gold City next, either around cav's yellow dot, or bcool's green dots.

 

[cav scout]

Yossarian pretty much summed it up. The snowball effect from the early game synergy of the close southern spot makes this a great city. Think of it as a nursery/incubator for our REX.

Also- lets be careful to avoid the "lets make every city have the most awesome resources in the bfc" trap. Getting fixated on mega awesome cities (omg this city will be a beast at pop 20) could result in us getting left in the dust by the other teams. The opportunity cost for founding an "uber city w/5 resources" is often alot more than meets the eye at first glance. The only thing a good city really needs is one food resource.

 

[slaze]

I don't know. So far I'm seeing bcool's 2nd green dot as best, but would like to play it out w/ the worker.