[BTS] Monarch Hammurabi, please help me with my early game

[Fippy]

I cannot help wondering what your worker is doing, really farming a green tile?

 

[FlyinJohnnyL]

I'm guessing he's farming the FP and the screenshot just has the worker in a wonky spot for some reason.

 

[lymond]

way to much OF? ha..no such thing....anyway, putting it into a new worker was fine.

settling 3N for the ivory is the last reason to do so, but it is a fine city nonetheless.

Roading the cow is a very big mistake that you must learn to correct. First it was not needed and never will be needed, so you wasted worker turns. Second, if you are going to place a road, place one 1NW of Babs to connect to river and cities on that river.

And yes, farming the green tile or anything around Babs at this point is bad. Your goal now is chopping or improving specials

The funky culture from your funky espionage setting still does not explain the 2nd border pop in Babs, which still should not have happened yet as of your last screenshots ...(well maybe whatever turn you are on the last couple..can't tell cause your screeshots are whacked)

Get the Bug mod

 

[drewisfat]

100 / 6 = turn 17 he gets the second border pop. He moved settler the first turn, so he should get border pop on t18. His screenshot shows the border being popped by t19. Looks fine to me? I got no exp in no-espionage, but my googling said it only changes the culture requirements for the legendary border pop.

 

[sampsa]

Many mistakes have been already pointed out, but here is one more: you should definitely have chopped the tile you settled on. I'd even delay the cows a bit for that, since the 2nd worker is out sooner. These early turns are really really important...

 

[reflec]

Many mistakes have been already pointed out, but here is one more: you should definitely have chopped the tile you settled on. I'd even delay the cows a bit for that, since the 2nd worker is out sooner. These early turns are really really important...

Should I always be chopping or only when building settler/worker and maybe granery?

way to much OF? ha..no such thing....anyway, putting it into a new worker was fine.

settling 3N for the ivory is the last reason to do so, but it is a fine city nonetheless.

I know ivory won't be important till I get a couple more cities, I think 2nd city should've been more production oriented

Also I literally don't know why I'm farming grassland over fp, i guess I didn't even notice when playing

 

[lymond]

Should I always be chopping or only when building settler/worker and maybe granery?

Again, you don't use BUG/BULL so you don't have our advantage of auto worker chop cancellation on the last turn of chop. But still, you can manually control the worker so as not to complete a chop or otherwise take the hammers at the right time. You can also prechop basically. (BUG makes it soooo much easier) Things can be timed and the intricacies of these actions will become familiar the more you play and learn.

So basically it boils down to this generally. Worker improves food specials the cap can work...all of them if you have the tech. You may have one or you may have 3. FOOD is PRODUCTION. At that point, if you have BW, you plan to start chopping into settlers or workers, even if you whip them. Mines are meaningless here cause you are getting 20H a pop and whatever whip OF. And early mine or two can't compete to the production you can get from whips and chops. (Though if you have copper in your BFC or horse that is a power tile and you want to improve it asap and generally not whip off such tiles)

Whipping settlers and sometimes workers is basically turning food into production. Keep this in mind...1 whipped citizen = 30H. 2 whipped citizens = 60H. That is a huge amount of hammers at once early game when your base hammers in a city are usually 1 or in this case 2H due to PH settle. The excess is turned into OF which can be used in a new build such as the worker you produced after the settler whip. Now think of this, if you had a chop ready at the time you whipped the settler you'd likely have a 1 turn worker.

So think about how you can apply all this production to getting up a fast early empire.

I know ivory won't be important till I get a couple more cities, I think 2nd city should've been more production oriented

So the question here following on the last bit of info i wrote is what is meant by "production"? How is your city 2 not productive in your mind?

(ivory is just basically a normal mine...it does provide happiness but that is not a big concern at present)

Also I literally don't know why I'm farming grassland over fp, i guess I didn't even notice when playing

And this leads to another key point that you need to realize. Good worker management. You need to start focusing on improving in this area because EVERY worker turn matters. I'm not sure exactly what you've absorbed so far as you tend to selectively pass-over some of advice given so far - not saying you are ignoring per se, but things like what I mentioned earlier about roading the cows had a significant meaning. You wasted 2 worker turns on something completely unnecessary and failed to actually hook up your trade network. These are decisions you cannot get back and when you make them you start losing the advantages that you - as a human making good decisions - have over the AI and the game's innate challenges.

 

[reflec]

Again, you don't use BUG/BULL so you don't have our advantage of auto worker chop cancellation on the last turn of chop. But still, you can manually control the worker so as not to complete a chop or otherwise take the hammers at the right time. You can also prechop basically. (BUG makes it soooo much easier) Things can be timed and the intricacies of these actions will become familiar the more you play and learn.

So basically it boils down to this generally. Worker improves food specials the cap can work...all of them if you have the tech. You may have one or you may have 3. FOOD is PRODUCTION. At that point, if you have BW, you plan to start chopping into settlers or workers, even if you whip them. Mines are meaningless here cause you are getting 20H a pop and whatever whip OF. And early mine or two can't compete to the production you can get from whips and chops. (Though if you have copper in your BFC or horse that is a power tile and you want to improve it asap and generally not whip off such tiles)

Whipping settlers and sometimes workers is basically turning food into production. Keep this in mind...1 whipped citizen = 30H. 2 whipped citizens = 60H. That is a huge amount of hammers at once early game when your base hammers in a city are usually 1 or in this case 2H due to PH settle. The excess is turned into OF which can be used in a new build such as the worker you produced after the settler whip. Now think of this, if you had a chop ready at the time you whipped the settler you'd likely have a 1 turn worker.

So think about how you can apply all this production to getting up a fast early empire.





So the question here following on the last bit of info i wrote is what is meant by "production"? How is your city 2 not productive in your mind?

(ivory is just basically a normal mine...it does provide happiness but that is not a big concern at present)



And this leads to another key point that you need to realize. Good worker management. You need to start focusing on improving in this area because EVERY worker turn matters. I'm not sure exactly what you've absorbed so far as you tend to selectively pass-over some of advice given so far - not saying you are ignoring per se, but things like what I mentioned earlier about roading the cows had a significant meaning. You wasted 2 worker turns on something completely unnecessary and failed to actually hook up your trade network. These are decisions you cannot get back and when you make them you start losing the advantages that you - as a human making good decisions - have over the AI and the game's innate challenges.

Thanks for the write up, I didn't know you should base your entire production off of whipping and chopping

Does that mean you should build exclusively farms?
When/do you ever switch over to relying on hammers from improvements?
If we are going to rely so much on whipping, wouldn't that make ivory more important to get asap?
Should you whip warriors/military or just settlers/workers?

Also on the point of prechopping, it sounds like you would prechop but then move your worker somewhere else, and you'd waste a turn going into that same forest again to finish chopping?

 

[FlyinJohnnyL]

I will mostly only whip settlers and workers. The exceptions being if I need to whip military for barb defense, or gearing up for a rush. Axeman are an easy 2-pop whip to get max overflow though since they are 35 hammers.

 

[reflec]

T37-42

Spoiler :

Oh boy..

F

So here pottery will finish in 4 turns, I go ahead and farm the grassland for 1 more turn, I need to wait 1 turn before I move to forest to make sure the chop goes into granary

Find charlie's border to the west

Rookie mistake here by scouting the copper late and only now finding deer there
More importantly, I realized that I could've just moved onto the plains hill instead of farming that 1 turn and then entered the circled forest on the same turn, which would've given me 20v16 hammers and put worker in a much better position

Yeah I'm definitely seeing the importance of planning your worker moves now. After that chop my worker was in a horrible position, so far away from other forests + I'll waste another turn crossing those hills. I think it's probably still worth it to go over to those forests over farming grassland/fp

Whipped granary which gives me 18 hammer OF, 1 turn warrior or 10 turns settler with the food surplus.
Sent north worker to the other forest, will get like 2 hammers OF from that
Teching writing now

Sent warrior from babylon over towards charles, in hindsight I should've sent him to zara or to explore NE since I already explored W and have 2 warriors at charles but 0 at zara

So where do I go from here? Do I send the south worker over the hills to the forests? Or do I keep him here and build farms/cottages? What do I do after I'm out of forests?

 

[Willem V]

Sorry if I missed it but what difficulty are you playing on reflec? The barb pressure you can expect depends on that, and that may affect your settling decision (maybe prioritize copper) and/or teching decision (maybe prioritize archery).

And I am by no means an expert, but I think the building of these very early granaries is not optimal (as I have been taught very recently). The chops that went into those could and should have gone into workers and mainly settlers.

Which leads to a general answer to your question where to go, which is: expand further and decide your next worker actions based on your plans for further expansion.

More specifically, have you thought about your third (and fourth) city site? If you are planning the site NW of the cows, I do not think that is the best spot for the next city. Better sites IMHO would be closer to the capital, either a helper city on the PH SE from the elephant, or a city N of the copper. Not the best food maybe, especially for the copper city, but you can farm the floodplain in the BFC of the capital and another river tile. The elephant city can share the corn and will have 3 FP to work with initially and 5 FP to work with after border expansions.

Generally speaking the Tundra deer is nothing special and not worth settling towards the tundra for. The luscious FP river on the other hand looks very attractive to further expand towards.

As for teching writing, I do not know if that is the best decision either because you are not going to be building libraries just yet. You are or should be in full expansion mode, trying to crank those settlers out ASAP. If you get copper you can hold out without archery. Maybe mysticism would be better here? For failgold options and a quicker border expansion at Akkad (via chopped monument), to get horses in play and being able to prep tiles for a next (fifth) city up the river near Akkad? But others are in a better position to comment I think.

Cannot open the save so do not have any more or better advice for you right now.