I too settled on the phants. Made for a very rapidly growing and fast producing high-happiness capital. Yay.
The surrounding land... poop until Iron working, and wide open leaving myself vulnerable to barbarians. Most of the best early settling spots were
too far off to risk settling so early so I considered my options.
I immediately ruled out a rush considering that my research rate was likely to be absurdly low given large area around me and that settling 3 cities before a catapult-less axe war is usually suicidal, even with vultures, and that my tech rate was liable to stink for a long time.
Given my surroundings, I teched hunting >> AH (starting with hunting mightn't have been the best move given what I discovered later, but seemed perfectly viable at first glance). This much seemed clear.
What to research next, however, depended on where I wanted to settle first. This was not clear to me; looking south, I saw a bunch of jungle, and, assuming it was trash, sent my warrior north to find a load of desert.
. My warrior had to spend a lot of time healing to animals, and it took a while before I had a good look at the area (even considering this is epic...). I only picked up 1 hut (the one I got when I settled, a map
).
Not sure what to do, I figured mining was a decent choice no matter where I decided to go, so I took that next.
After a lot of staring at the map and attempting to come up with a dot map that would earn me a healthy amount of
early commerce! because I needed pottery, writing, priesthood, and IW as fast as I could get them. I decided to settle on a close-by jungle hill to the south that could just sit on the corn and some cottages early on while I blocked off the best cities to the north and south. Needless to say, Freddie beat me to the gold spot (which mightn't have been the best 1st city anyway considering how far away it was...)
After deciding this, I set up a fog busting perimeter and immediately lost 3/4 of my initial warriors to barbarians despite having 92%, 67%, and 75% chances of winning respectively
. This was the end of my fog busting perimeter. I was (somewhat stupidly in retrospect) too focused on bringing home pottery and bronze working to want to potentially waste early beakers on archery / masonry, and promptly a horde of barb archers came to raze all of my cottages, and seriously threatened to take Eridu, so I figured I was doomed.
There were some strategic holes in my playing, and some bad luck, but I do feel my reasoning was mostly valid.
