Wow, thanks for all the feedback @sampsa!
Being on a 10turn cycle 3-pop whipping settlers is nice. Only one turn to catch a forest with the settler is needed, so the granary can be utilized fully.
Yes, I do see that I seem to be quite behind in settling, this bothers me. @Fippy did give a thumbs up for pottery first, and I would be very eager to get an opinion on how this could be timed better.
3-4 cottages might be excessive? Should one perhaps switch to chopping once two cottages are done? I feel that I'm on the right track, but I took it abit to far.
Tempted to replay with a more conservative approach, and see if I can find a sweet spot between what I managed and what the chop-chop gang produced.
A city generates instantly roughly 4 Food/hammers at the cost of 1-2 commerce (3 if you don't have it connected). This is very nice but it is still nothing magical, this benefit need to be compared to other opportunities.
If the raw numbers at this point doesn't clearly indicate that more cities are better. I'm not eager to just say that the raw numbers are wrong because more cities is better.
With such power tiles, whipping at low pop is very much doable.
Only thing I can think of is that horses around slightly tilt us toward music, but this isn't significant enough really, we will in all certainty get AH in time to make the choice of going for aestethics or not. If horses are anywhere near us, we will be able to get them in time for cuirs.
I do feel more comfortable with a few chariots, but you are correct in that they don't do a very good job against barbs. When they do kill an archer they are likely out of action for quite some time healing again, and they need to be full health to have good chances.
I have become more and more comfortable with growing into one or two unhappy faces if there is enough food (and a granary) to do it quick enough.Yes, but a granary does not speed up chopping.In fact, every turn spent putting
into a settler/worker with a granary makes the granary moot. For this reason I'd like to always whip them after granary, but with this
-cap whipping lots is not easy. Thus granaries are just not very good here.
I guess the biggest issue in your save is how much later your settlers are out compared to some other saves.
Being on a 10turn cycle 3-pop whipping settlers is nice. Only one turn to catch a forest with the settler is needed, so the granary can be utilized fully.
Yes, I do see that I seem to be quite behind in settling, this bothers me. @Fippy did give a thumbs up for pottery first, and I would be very eager to get an opinion on how this could be timed better.
3-4 cottages might be excessive? Should one perhaps switch to chopping once two cottages are done? I feel that I'm on the right track, but I took it abit to far.
Tempted to replay with a more conservative approach, and see if I can find a sweet spot between what I managed and what the chop-chop gang produced.

I'm not throughoutly convinced about this wisdom. Swordnboard is certainly a very skilled player, but I see no value in itself by having more cities at a certain point. If the potential to catch up or surpass is there.Indeed, I probably would have added it if I had felt like there is not enough info.Anyway, I feel
is overvalued in the spreadsheet when calculating raw empire outputs. I share Swordnboard's view that saves with 3 cities are quite significantly superior to saves with 2 cities and raw numbers at this point don't reflect it very well. The sooner you found cities the sooner they start to generate all three
,
and
for you.
A city generates instantly roughly 4 Food/hammers at the cost of 1-2 commerce (3 if you don't have it connected). This is very nice but it is still nothing magical, this benefit need to be compared to other opportunities.
If the raw numbers at this point doesn't clearly indicate that more cities are better. I'm not eager to just say that the raw numbers are wrong because more cities is better.
Well... An unimproved floodplain yields 1F+1C, a pig yields 4F. Thats about four times as good.Yes, you are thinking rather long term, but also saying that pig yields you 4is not entirely fair IMO. It's 3
better than an unimproved floodplain (and 1
worse). We don't really have the
-cap to allow heavy whipping, but certainly that time will come after Mids.
With such power tiles, whipping at low pop is very much doable.
These are all very fair points.I care very little about horse at this point for many reasons. Chariots I view rather useless against barbs, as they can't very comfortably attack archers, so I'd rather just fortify warriors to forest. We are not HA-rushing through the jungle. At this point we don't care if we attack with cannons or cuirassiers, it doesn't alter our early play at all. And if we have horses south of jungle, nobody is stealing it from us.
Only thing I can think of is that horses around slightly tilt us toward music, but this isn't significant enough really, we will in all certainty get AH in time to make the choice of going for aestethics or not. If horses are anywhere near us, we will be able to get them in time for cuirs.
I do feel more comfortable with a few chariots, but you are correct in that they don't do a very good job against barbs. When they do kill an archer they are likely out of action for quite some time healing again, and they need to be full health to have good chances.
Yes, I realized that my perception was abit skewed. I think that anyone who went BW first probably made a sound call to then postpone AH at least untill after pottery. Possibly even more.Yes, I think it's fair to say AH costs roughly double of what fishing costs. Since you went pottery first, your empire can deal with the cost of going AH better than saves that went agri-min-BW.