Captain Crunch said:
Hi i am starting this thread to see what are the first priorities for you guys for first few turns.
1. Tech wise
2. Production wise
3. When to produce settler worker etc wise
I usually start by running down the checklist of what I need. In the opening, the usual problems are:
Food
Defence
Useful Builds
Useful Improvements
Culture
Happiness
So I'm usually trying to figure out an optimal sequence of solutions to those problems, which vary with local terrain and the leader I'm playing.
I'm a builder at heart, so I normally try to minimize the number of hammers I invest in military in the early going. It's a style choice - and if it's less effective than attacking the AI immediately, I'm ok with that.
So on land based maps, playing normal speed single player, I'm usually aiming to have a worker built by turn 15. This usually means that I'm building worker first as I research worker techs. Worker + Agriculture out of the gate is very common for me.
The exceptions are usually exceptions of timing, rather than theme. Agriculture isnt actually useful for anything before the worker is finished and on the tile you want to improve, which leaves time to slot a technology in ahead of it, if you like. For example, in a recent start my initial tech order was Archery then Agriculture; on the turn when the worker finished I was able to start training the archer immediately - teched in the other order, and there's a turn of lag before archery finishes.
I learned recently that there's a slightly more efficient way to get the first worker out, if your initial tech to research is Bronzeworking (you pop rush the first worker, having built a warrior first). That means that when your worker appears you have Mining (a starting tech, given that you researched BW first), Bronzeworking, and one other starting tech. So you've got this worker, but maybe not a lot of improvements to make.
I'm more likely to choose this second approach if I have pretty rocks to mine, or if I have a lot of trees, and ambitions for a rapid expansion. Chopping is effectively 5 hammers per turn, which is lovely for production but the builds available from Mining + Bronzeworking are not all that great - this generally leaves settlers and workers as the best investment of hammers (and perhaps some warriors to escort them).
Circumstances where I'm not looking at worker first? If I'm going on a religious hunt, because Polytheism and Meditation provide little in the way of improvements. No point in building a worker when there is nothing for him to do. Instead, I'll normally set the governor for growth, and invest the hammers in warriors for scouting or fog busting, or in Stonehenge, until it it time to push out settlers. To see how this sort of approach might work, look at
RB1: Cuban Isolationists.
If Hunting is one of my starting techs, I usually feel as though I'm wasting it if I don't get scouts out while there are still huts available. So scout first becomes a tempting option.
If I've got a coastal city with fishing resources at hand, then the fishing boats get bumped up in priority. It's usually possible to get a warrior/scout out while researching fishing, so I'll do that, then max the hammers to get the boat in the water as quickly as possible. If I started with Fishing, I'll go boat first (again sacrificing growth).
