Part 2: Starting research and scouting until the second city (T2 - T39, 2440 BC)
Thouhts about Research:
There are 2 main variants, how to tech here:
A) Go for pottery first and build early commerce
B) Go for BW first and chop/whip an early settler for a second spot
How much time do we have?
Worker needs 12 turns, builds farm in 6, growth in 7 with farm
=> at turn 21 we should have pop 2, a warrior and we are on the way to our barrack/granary.
A) Pottery needs 17 turns, we can road directly on the way to the farm and start to cottage ~T20; Darius gets +2
soon in T27, which is +20% research
B) BW needs 23 turns, we cannot build any road, and only build a mine next to the wheat. In the end we need additional 17 turns to get significantly more commerce.
I definitely go for Pottery first. This way we may be slower at the settler, but start with a stronger commerce and a granary. Maybe we should start the settler at size 3, which gives us 15
instead of 12
with a second cottage.
Edit: Ah, misconcepted, we play Cyrus, not Darius. But OK, I stay at my decision here
T2:
Let's scout around for the next city spots. We go clockwise around the FP area, because settling near the FP seems to be commerce-wise interesting.
T13:
We scouted around:
Near the FP there are some great spots. One with stone and pig, which is additionally a great helper city, and 3 possible spots west. Settling at the PH spot SW of start would had been good. But we had not the knowledge.
We met Augustus (Industrial, Imperial) in the West. To work with him, we have 2 possibilities:
A) Kick him before he gets his praetorians running (we need horses for that to do this early)
B) Tech him out and conquer him with maces
We should think about teching AH before BW. But let's do this later. For now we know enough about city spots and should go for Augustus. But before I want to know, if there are some interesting tiles near the sheep.
T14:
Build a roadpart for free: Move the worker 1N, build road 1 turn, thenafter NE for the farm. Voila! We have 1 workerturn saved.
T15:
Near the sheep are pelts and a nice coastal city spot. We should think about this.
T19:
Our farm is ready, now we go for cottages.
We are again at a decision path:
A) AH first to find horses
B) BW first to chop/whip
Let's do some maths:
We grow in T21 with 1/24 and +5
would again grow in T26 with 2/26 and +6
and again in T30 with 0/28 and +7
and thenafter could build a settler with +10
/
in 10 turns, so we can found the 2nd city ~T43.
Meanwhile in T25 our first cottage is ready, in T30 our second and in T35 maybe our third, which accumulate +9
every tun and soon +12
And the cottaged area is great to work for our new cities.
Meanwhile we could do some micro for the granary to make whipping really cheap.
We will finish BW at T44, when started right now, maybe some turns earlier because of our cottages.
So in both variants we have our second city before we have BW. But with AH after BE we have no chance for improving the pigs directly after settling.
So we go for AH first. And we should even think about going Stonemasonry before BW. Should we give a shot for building the pyramids here?
Well, let's think about this after AH is done.
Why not BW first?
Neither chopping nor whipping gives us an advantage immediately when going for pyramids. We can use the time for building up a strong second city, which can build the settler for city number 3, while our capital works for the pyramids. After BW we stil can chop the forests.
T21:
We reached size 2. Now: Warrior or Granary? A warrior is needed for securing our second spot. Our home warrior cannot do it, he is needed soon for happiness. A granary is not that urgent now. We go for warrior first and thenafter granary or maybe barracks. If there are horses nearby, we switch to barracks immediately! In this case we can try a 2-city-immortal-rush.
We found Augustus in the west:
T23:
And he really has a juicy, but hard to defend land... we set our espionage to 100% for Augustus. He gives us +6, so he must pay
for espionage. This may be a bad decision... he will lack research soon.
T24 shows this:
A good starting spot for fishing, but he needs BW soon. But it seems, he can tech it. Let's see, what he does now.
T26:
Size 3. We go for a granary for now, because we have plenty of land to expand and a slowteching neighbor, which can be outteched easily. A barracks is not really necessary, but when we start to whip, we want an already filled granary.
Scouting in the south shouldn't be that interesting anymore. There's jungle. Augustus will expand to the east for sure.
T28:
Horses are available - but far away. At higher difficulties a rush with immortals should be impossible, so we don't try it here too. Barracks are no priority anymore.
We will focus on mids now and found 3 cities nearby:
T30:
Size 4. Now let's go for a settler. Remember: Imperialistic leaders have +50%
for settlers, so we should choose hammer-tiles instead of food-tiles.
This way we don't need 10 turns, but 7!
We immediately start a road towards our new city spot. Maybe we should use ur imperialistic trait to build a second settler before starting the mids.
Because in FP we need 3 turns, we start road on the forest-plainhill, where we want to save one turn later in game for chopping for mids and building a mine.
T35:
We start Stonemasonry.
T37:
We go for size 5, build another warrior to keep the 3rd spot save before going to mids. Maybe a second worker can do a fine job in connecting the stone earlier.
T38:
We were hunted by a bear and a lion, but just in time built the 2nd city. We now start improving the pig. Look at the science-rating. Because the pig-improvement takes 4 turns, we can afford binary research without a turn loss so we set the research to 0% for 1 turn.
T39:
Nothing important happening, but I submit a save now, because you did it for 2440 BC before too. Part 2 is finished.
Demographics:
Your game as comparison:
Coastline seems to be devoid of seafood.
I finished Mids this turn, so will be running Rep after Revolution.
