^I'll do that, else it'll be a mess soon. I'm not so worried about missing an early trade, the start's slow anyway and will be very slow with iw first, if 'm able to catch up around 500 ad with 10+ cities i'm happy. I'm not in such a hurry to be equal in tech since there's not much risk i'll be attacked.
Rather long and maybe somewhat incoherent post since i have more or less written down directly what i'm thinkng about our options from here,
If i don't go for IW directly settling gems will take rather long to make a profit i think. I'd need to go mysticism ->writing then probably aesthetics, backtrade for IW before the gem city would be profitable. After writing i can speed things up bit with libraries but it would take a long time. As it is i did some very rough calculation, it's 11 turns to bw now mysticism will be ~7 turns and IW between 20 and 25 turns i guess. So we're ~40 turns from IW meaning we'll get it around 1300 bc which would be fine by me.
There is a problem though, this calculation assumes i only settle the gems city , if i settle more
IW will be delayed longer. Connecting the cities will help with this however. I feel it's a bit early to speculate on this, not really sure how much workers i'll have how the land lies exactly etc.
After BW it's almost certainly best to go myst since even something like wine city needs a border pop. We'll have a clearer view what to tech next. It's good to keep in mind that the gems city doesn't have to be settled immediately, a monument can be pre chopped there so we'll need so settle ~12 turns before iw. Just station a settler there to make sure no ai picks the spot. In this light we may settle one city closer to home but to make any city profitable in terms of science we'll need writing so this a different route altogether and unfortunately we'll have to decide here soon, settling close to home means directly going after writing, settling near gems means iw. Stationing a settler near gems leaves both routes open but we may well be forced into settling rather soon, also since we delay our cultural border another ai may settle right on one of the gems so we lose one + other tiles, this makes just stationing a settler there a not so good idea i think.
Capital's not really good for cottaging and it needs to produce settlers/workers/chariots for some time. Our new cities will need a granary but probably after a monument. Don't think we're in such a hurry for pottery but can't delay it forever of course.
So: as far as i can see,
1. settle gems asap and chop a monument, go iw directly
2. settle gems asap and chop a monument but go a more normal route to writing, build some more cities and prioritize libraries, soak up the maintenance from the gems city pre IW.
3. Build closer to home, i'll leave that to Duckweed.
There is one other important advantage to 1. There'll probably be lots of barbcities, even with copper swords are so much better in taking these cities out compared to axes. If we don't have copper we may easily lose some of these cities to the ai. Taking out barbcities'll generate money too.
Almost everyone is in favor of settling on the wine now or later, i think it's best too but i'd like to point out that it's not necessary to settle on the wine for an early scientist as 3 food resources is overkill. It'll be a great midgame spot for gpp and Globe also since there are 3 mines to build them.
@kadazzle, that's indeed an other small advantage of settling on wine. It's a fair tile to work as well though 2F1H4C.
@babybluepants, she'll be but it doesn't matter for the stealing? If you mean it's for visibility of research you may be quite right, is it possible to generate enough spy points to do that? think so actually. Atm i'd need 73 ep to see her research and it's already 136 for SB. Like to see some other thoughts on this, i'd be inclined to switch for this reason. There's a good chance btw we'll miss lib here especially if we go iw first. Not such a problem if we secure enough land.
I may play to BW tonight, we'll have some more info by then.
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