Thoughts about fishing:
Having workboats for scouting and possibly finding AIs is something in favour of fishing that I did not consider. In almost all my coastal starts I send out one (or sometimes two) wbs out in different directions. A very reliable way of scouting.
Here however we didn't start coastal so that possibility was not on my radar. Not good!
Getting early trade routes is nice, but at best it's 1c per city at this stage and sailing feels like aeons away.
The fish site is for much later, and the crab site hmmm... Well in my situation I'm one turn from completing the granary and then the value of that corn is doubled in the capital, having to lend it out for the crab site is not tempting, at least not in the stage I am in in my save.
Indeed, it might be a bit early for scouting workboat.
From my save, likely continuation is to whip the worker and then finish the granary, then chop out two settlers with the two workers.
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.
Something that is not considered in the spreadsheet is cottage maturation, something that I find very important.
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.
Also interesting to hear arguments against AH.
I can't help but thinking that the value of a 6 food tile is underestimated. Chopping non stop in an endless forest yields you 5H per turn. While a pig yields you 4F (equals aprox 8H with a granary and heavy whipping). Could be that I'm thinking abit too long term here.
Yes, you are thinking rather long term, but also saying that pig yields you 4
is 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.
Also, with a copper no-show the information about horses is crucial imho. How else can we make a long term plan?
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.
We get a 20% discount for AH since we know AG, something that we don't for fishing (no pre-req) so AH is "only" 2x the cost of fishing.
The cost for AH is considerable though, and seeing all different saves I start to think that the tech path of ag,min,bw,ah is abit to slow commerce wise.
Getting pottery and laying some cottages down is probably more crucial than getting horse-info and bringing the pigs online.
And if you go for pottery after bw, fishing is almost for free.
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.
@mscellaneous I start to like your position more and more.