It's kind of interesting to debate this with 100% map knowledge, but that was of course not a benefit I had at the time. Still, even with hindsight knowledge, I'd probably settle where I did. As this is a game I'm still playing (for the HoF) I have the starting save, but I don't want to load that and risk accidentally moving the warrior or something. So I don't recall exactly where the warrior started, but I think it may have been to the SE. I know the corn wasn't visible, and don't think the incense was either. So I settled and hoped for food. Otherwise re-roll. Copper and horse couldn't be known for 50 turns or whatever it was (less for copper). Just imagine you only knew about the 9-tile area around the current capital. That was what I knew (or maybe 1-2 additional forested tiles).
Had I known the entire area, I still wouldn't have settled on the gold, that's for damn sure. Good point has already been raised about health. I find that +2
is okay, but +3 can be pretty debilitating. There were more forests around too, which has mostly been chopped into settlers/workers. By fog-gazing I could see the outline of the river to the south and east, so I knew those tiles could be river-cottages. Had no idea about the north. So going north blindly would be silly in my view.
All in all I'm very glad I settled where I did. The more I look at it, this is going to be a beastly capital. All but one tile is riverside (okay two, but the plains incense is great anyway, post-calendar). And since this is intended to be a space game, it's going to be even more fantastic with Levee-boosted tiles all over the place (making GA even more surreally good). Food is a total non-issue, even in the early game. Didn't even bother to farm a floodplain because it would just be 7 wasted worker turns anyway. Gold has no food so it can be tricky if you are low on food, that is certainly true. But that isn't the case here. And even with food+gold+whatever, you get an extra
when producing a worker. Two on settlers (three if you work the forested plains tile) due to Expansive and Imperialistic. Gotta say it's been fun to play with Joao with boosts on BOTH workers and settlers, and a cheap as hell granary. He's fantastic for the early game.
As I explored the map more and learned it was pretty sweet, I tried to play more serious and it's been fun. Okay, so I "accidentally" crashed the economy and ended up with 18 cities by 1AD or whatever it was, but it has been fun. And once I dig us out of the hole I hope we'll be teching pretty fast (again).
I stated this previously, and others have as well, but it bears repeating: As this was a HoF game intended for space, I value early commerce a great deal more than the extra PH/gold hammer. It means I can get to Pottery-Writing early, and have a good chance to Oracle CS (not on Deity btw, where it would be hopeless). On that side of decisions, previously I have favoured getting early Alpha and backfilling up to Priesthood, which is also nice for knowing who may compete with you for the Oracle. Lately I've self-teched up to Priesthood instead, and gone for Math directly after Writing. Means I must make some sacrifices early and risk a very late Alpha (as sadly happened in this game), but
-wise it's cheaper to self-tech than side-track to Alpha. Not of much importance here really, but it also has the benefit of postponing "We fear you are too advanced" due to trading for cheap stuff like Mysticism, Meditation, Polytheism, Priesthood. If you get off to a fast start, pretty typical in these HoF-type maps, the AIs may not even have much to trade if you get early Alpha. It's honestly not that uncommon to see maybe a couple AIs with Writing when you get Alpha, and basically nothing to trade except some of Masonry, AH, BW, IW, religious stuff. Cheap crap.
As an aside, I did end up settling that dotmap SE of the capital for cow+copper. It has actually grown a bit now due to helping grow cottages for the capital, but in the early game it was very useful for helping with settlers/workers and a little later with military units. Sadly the attempt to kill off Washington early failed because the timing was terrible and he happened to have 4 archers in there, and 5 by the time I could have attacked (but no settler oddly enough, so he wasn't ready with a settler party). Futile to attack that with 7 axes+1-2 chariots. But I got a couple of workers out of it by managing to corner their retreat from west of his capital. And after some hesitancy I then moved north and took out Gandhi instead. It was tempting to wait until he had a shrine (in typical Gandhi fashion, he had a double-holy city) because he built Stonehenge (GProphet points). Would have taken too long for my comfort, so I decided to kill him off instead. Then swung back south for Washington again, with more units.
It has been fun so far
Too early to tell if I can get a good date out of it as the economy is down in the gutter currently, but hopefully I can recover okay and start teching up the tree fairly fast.
. Finally i see the Admin of this wonderful site. God bless you wherever you may be. No sarcasm, i really have lots of respect of the long time users, mods and all other people who are either supporters or have lots of messages posted on this board.
) it basically doubles your early research. Also there is really no lack of food around, the apitol has more than enough food for basically the entire game.
food surplus matters a lot early game, BUT you can always share this gold with the 2nd city and also there are a lot of turns in the early game where your capital doesnt grow at all anyway. Because it is building settlers/workers.
because of the 2 forests ofc, but surely you want to chop those soon to get some extra 
. I now shall recuse myself from counting FPs in the future.
)
, but I think especially for a long game, capital with high food becomes even stronger, while the gold-tile is useful mostly from T25 to say T100. Of course with this warrior position no way of knowing where the possible food resources are, and 2S and 2S1E seem most probable. Very hard to do anything else than SIP.
