I split this post into two parts so Compromise could get the relevant part (found on 12**) first.
Our starting island is awesome. Look at all those gems! We're also alone and so have some breathing room. We want to build enough units to fog-bust the eastern half of the island, then fortify a warrior/archer on the northern choke to prevent the barbs from crossing.
This whole situation screams "Pyramids!" to me. We're a Philosophical/Expansive leader on an archipelago map with stone
in our capital radius and no one else on our island. I thought the Pyramids were an obvious play in RB Epic 9 for similar reasons, but our situation is
much, much better for them than the RB Epic 9 starting position. I think it would simply be nuts not to build them.
We should chop the forests in our capital post-haste, either for faster settlers while still growing our city (possibly combined with whipping), or for the Pyramids once we have stone hooked up. We're Expansive, so we don't need the health benefits, and these forests are on grasslands next to a river, which we should be cottaging as soon we grow the capital to work those tiles. Our capital will have more than enough production from the stone quarry and the hills: we won't need to work junk 2F 1H tiles, and lumbermills arrive far far too late to be worth considering for the capital. (Later on, after we've founded two or three secondary production cities, we should look into cottaging over the grassland hills, too: the plains hill and stone quarry will give more than enough production for a mature commerce capital.)
This is an archipelago map, which means that barring unusual situations, all cities should be on the water, since they'll all have water tiles anyways and we'll be aiming our tech path and wonders to take advantage of the sea. We're Expansive, we get cheap harbors, giving +2 health with the seafood we already have, and bonus commerce as well. If we can finagle the Great Lighthouse, too, that will put our economy in great shape, and combine better with our harbors.
I don't think "conquer the wonders" works. More likely than not, some civ halfway around the world will build the wonders in question. Meanwhile, the defender has a big advantage in warfare on archipelagos because of the necessity of building boats: when one of every three units has to be a fifty-hammer galley, you're talking about building three-halves more units for the same effect. Moving and exploring also takes longer on archipelagos. I think our starting situation argues that we should build up our own island first, then go conquering. We don't have an early UU to exploit here, and our only visible military resource is going to take awhile to hook up: I counsel patience, early focus on economy to get a tech lead, and going after the AIs with catapults and, probably, swords.
Because I'm ambitious, I'm going to suggest we look at building the Great Lighthouse, too. The Great Lighthouse is a good wonder to play in combination with the Pyramids and Expansive, because it takes virtually the same techs (Sailing is something we have to get sooner rather than later anyways). The AIs are always slow to build wonders with prerequisite buildings, I assume because their scripts don't beeline the prerequisite buildings like they do the wonders, so we have a better chance to get it. The biggest thing that makes me hesitate is that the capital is the best early city to build it in, unless we try to settle blue dot early (I have a dotmap.); but building it in the capital will dilute our great engineer pool with great merchant points (ick!).
Here's my tentative dotmap. I went for quality over quantity, trying to make sure to maximize the number of resources in the borders of our first four cities, and to make sure every city has a food resource. At the moment, my temptation is to settle red-dot first ASAP: it's close to the capital, it has cows for food and production, and it make a decent whipping site until we can develop Iron Working and start chopping those jungles. I'd strongly consider settling blue dot next, because we can mine the copper and workboat the fish before Iron Working, and it's also close to the capital for low maintenance; also, it has a lot of production and a hills forest we can shop, so it's entirely plausible we can build the Great Lighthouse there.
If we want less immediate output in favor of more cities and long-term potential, consider the following changes. Move green-dot 1N, blue-dot 1S, red-dot 1W, and build two more cities, one on farthest west tiles and one on the farthest east tiles.
For tech path, we have some complicated choices. We want Iron Working sooner rather than later to chop all those jungles. We want Masonry for the Pyramids, the Lighthouse, and to start the stone quarry. If we do found blue dot, we'll need an obelisk, so Masonry. We may want Archery for barb defense. (How lucky are we feeling?) We want The Wheel and Pottery for granaries and cottages. We want Sailing for lighthouses. We want Animal Husbandry for the cows and to reveal horses.
My feeling on our general plan is that we want to whip out a worker after the workboat, then chop the river forests, timing them so we can whip two settlers, for green dot and then blue dot. After that, we want to start the Pyramids in Moscow while whipping improvements (granary, lighthouse, etc.). I think our tech path for that would need to be The Wheel, Pottery (we have a lot of tech we need to research, so getting those cottages started early would be nice), Masonry (stone quarries take while to get up), Sailing, and then Iron Working. We stuff in Animal Husbandry as we need to pasturize the cows for the second city, and Mysticism when we need an obelisk for the third.
Compromise, I appreciated your HoF post in the Maintenance thread. Did you ever get an answer as to what the mod
does? I don't have the time or the patience to wade through the posts over at the HoF forum. (
Why don't they have good summary written somewhere?)
