I think you meant 33 food, so at +3 food/turn that's 11 turns.
Yes, I did; edited to reflect that. I think I did the rest of the (non-Bronze Working) math right, though.
As for epic details, it will be 45 hammers per chop, so just one chop will finish the WB. Also I'm pretty sure it's 5 turns for a chop.
An epic chop gives 45 hammers post-Mathematics. We won't have that tech, so it will only give 30.
I am not in favor of settler first until we find that ridiculous city spot like in SGOTM2. I just don't think it'll pay off.
I'm curious: what city spot did you find?
First, the starting location is still pretty good for a commerce capital. There are 9 tiles, 8 of which are cottageable if we only put a plantation on one of the spices.
Generally, I'll take the 3F 3C tile over even a grasslands town: food is priceless in Civ4 and you can usually turn it into anything else you want, whether it's production via the whip or commerce via earlier and more consistent cottage growth or specialists. (1 food is 3 science under Representation.) Building many farms usually isn't worth it, but the extra 2C and resource tilts me towards the plantation here.
On a sidenote, Alan has updated the starting picture. There are blue circles (not that that means much in Vanilla
) both where our settler starts and 1E of the scout. Does that mean the site 1E of the scout has a food bonus or does the one floodplain in range count for that?
Generally, the blue circles in vanilla are only useful for one things: telling you where fog-covered and hidden resources might be. The game avoids founding on a resource like the plague, so if there's a natural location for a city and the blue dot isn't there, there's a good chance there's a hidden resource there. It doesn't seem to take account of the differences between resources when placing the blue circles, so the blue circle northeast is a strong indication there's
some resource there, it may not be food. However, it's definitely worth checking out. One other note is that due to some questionable code in the city-placement algorithm, it
likes founding on floodplains, so the blue dot beneath the settler is probably highly bogus.
You make some good points. Without stone, my gut reaction is that it's too expensive. Unless we have no strategic resources. But by the time we know whether or not we have metal, it may be too late to decide to do the pyramids. And if we're not alone on our island, I suspect we're better off consolidating the Russian motherland.
This is only Monarch, so even without stone, if we get
right on it, we can get the Pyramids if we want them, especially since we start with Mining.
This brings up the possibility of something I refer to as the "iron question:" if you've discovered Bronze Working and Animal Husbandry and you don't have either copper or horses, do you go to Iron Working ASAP? The problem is that while Animal Husbandry and Bronze Working both offer other benefits, Iron Working is expensive (~450 beakers in this game!) and useless if you
don't have iron, unless for some reason you have an urgent need to chop jungles. (Unusual in general, and very unlikly in this game.) My usual answer is that I don't: it's a big gamble, and there's not much change in the window of opportunity between going for Iron Working ASAP and going for it later. The early UUs, horse archers, or axes you don't want to see will be there, or not, based on the resources situation, not on how fast you rush: there just isn't enough time to finish research on Iron Working and build axes/swords before Monarch AIs get their resources hooked up and build axes/horse archers/early UUs. There are some unusual situations in which I would go to Iron Working, but let's hope we're not in any of them.
My personal feeling is that, given what we know about the start, we're going to want to develop Bronze Working as our first military tech. (Note these are not beelines--we'll pick up worker techs in between the military techs as the situation warrants.) If we have copper, we're fine and build some axes. If not, we hit Animal Husbandry and look for horses. If we have those and we want to attack someone, we develop Horseback Riding while looking for copper resources and prevent AIs from mining them, if possible, with chariots, then take cities with horse archers. If there's someone on our island and we have copper or horses, we rush. If we spot someone right off our island and we think it's advantageous, we develop Sailing, build a galley, ferry troops over, and rush. If we meet someone but we don't know where they are, we don't rush. If we don't have copper or horses and there's someone off our island, even if we know where they are, we don't rush. If we don't have copper or horses and there's someone
on our island--things get rough, and we'll have to reevaluate.
(Note that I'm referring to attacks starting before 1000 BC here: I often do a lot of my fighting in the 500 BC-1 AD window, after building a wonder or two and some cities.)
Your point about the benefits of a specialist economy on this map need to be in our heads. I don't have much experience with running specialist economies. On this map, my guess is that we'll want to be slavers so we can use food for production. We're not spiritual, so we wouldn't be able to switch back and forth between caste and slavery without significant penalty. Does that limit our specialist economy prospects to later in the game when we have buildings from which to run the specialists? I guess you'd need the buildings (temples) for Angkor Wat priests anyway.
I'm not exactly an expert, but I have a little bit of practice. Some general principles:
1) The capital emphasizes cottages and commerce, because of Bureaucracy. You only assign specialists there if you want great people.
2) You
do build some cottages. Cottages are generally more efficient than farms pre-Biology even with Representation. Here's an outline of why. A farm gives you one-half a specialist, or three science and some GPP points; a town gives you four commerce, and a village three. You get less commerce during the 30 (45 on epic, I guess) turn cottage/hamlet start-up period, but your total population counts are lower so you need less health/happiness, Printing Press arrives earlier than Biology, and you'll have the mature towns if you want to switch to Free Speech or Universal Suffrage. (I often don't, when running a specialist economy, but sometimes you want to.)
3) You build some extra farms. The exact details depend on how your GPP are distributed and what a city's terrain looks like, but the idea is that you'd rather run specialists than work marginal terrain (coast/ocean, forests, irrigated plains). Generally, you want to build farms instead of cottages in locations where GPP matter, because there your specialists enjoy a clear and significant advantage over cottages.
4) National wonder choices are more complicated. Normally, I try to build a GP factory when I'm running a specialist economy, since because of the National Epic, it's more efficient to bunch all your GPP in one place as much as possible. (In practice, I usually end up having two or three cities that produce the lion's share of my great persons, with one being a food-heavy National Epic city, and the others being wonder-heavy cities.) Without Caste System, that means you have to have wonders in place to support mass specialists of your preferred type in the GP factory. This can mean putting Oxford, Wall Street, or the Iron Works in an unusual city; world wonders (particularly Angkor Wat) and shrines also factor in. You also have to consider what specialists you want, and how you intend to use them.
5) Caste System is not needed. A city with a library and a forge can run three specialists, an engineer and two scientists, which is more than enough for all but the most food-rich cities. I always whip a forge as my second to fourth building in a city, and both libraries and temples are cheap. Before those buildings come up, the city is usually growing at maximum speed for whipping, working high-food tiles.
A couple of minor corrections: When I rolled up a sample start, there is a 2B (2 beaker) refund for each tech, so fishing requires 88B and BronzeWorking 268B. I don't know why. And you get one free beaker of research just for being a civ, so you actually get 11bpt (8 palace, 1 city center, 1 flood plains, 1 bonus) once you settle your capital.
Ah. I didn't take into account how the game rounds the research cost multipliers, so my estimate was a little high. I forgot about the free beaker, also.
Also, there is a discount for knowing prerequisites, so while Fishing takes the full 88 beakers (or 8 turns at 11bpt), we actually research Bronze at a rate of 13bpt so it comes in after 21 turns.
And yes, you're correct about this: techs with prerequisites give you a 1.2 bonus to research. (Of course, this gets into nasty rounding issues because Civ4 uses integer math--argh!)
Of the starting courses you work through (nice work on those btw!), I think this is the best option. It's our fastest way to get an improved resource into play.
The option I noted as strictly inferior gets three less commerce because it grows more slowly, and has two fewer hammers of overflow.
I think the biggest benefit to Bronze first in this situation is that it gets us slavery quickly. This basically lets us think of those floodplains as being 3H1C each (instead of 3F1C each).
For the record: Bronze first, warrior first, work floodplains. Grow to size 2 after 11 turns. First warrior completes on turn 17. Either continue to grow (6 more turns). Or start worker. Bronze is due in 4 turns. After that, we'd be deciding what to build second, and it would depend on what our scout reveals. 8 turns after bronze, we can have fishing. After putting a turn's production into the boat, we can whip one out on turn 30.
Yeah, this is a posssibility. Whipping conversion of food to hammers is actually better than 1:1, of course.
Does the reduced cost (will verify in-game, of course) of bronzeworking make that a more compelling first tech choice to anyone?
It does for me. I think too much more discussion of the capital site is premature now: we need to know what the scout sees to decide. I'd really like a chance to look at that before you found, so if you wouldn't mind delaying, I'd appreciate it. I think the scout should move E first and then NW, N, or E, depending on what you see.
Right now, I know I'm not the right person to play second. 
and probably moved us from the top third to the bottom quarter of finish dates (assuming we eventually finish). But oh well. Now I get to learn something about late-game warfare.
