Thanks Leif.
I've been working on starting positions. Here are my thoughts:
1. Settling in place - a good overall choice. It has fresh water, plenty of food, 2 riverside grassland for cottages, 10 forests in BFC, and can reach fish with workboat now. Since we're going for CS-slingshot, we want a capital with a lot of commerce and hammers, and settling in place gives that. The 10 forests in the BFC work especially well with Bureaucracy too. We only need a few for Oracle chop, and other can be chopped after the 50% bonus kicks in. This makes it easy to build other early wonders in the capital: Great Lighthouse and/or Artemis. Cows, clams, and fish with a cheap granary will give fast growth, and extra hills mostly make up for no second fish. Settling in place allows for another city somewhere to the east to claim fish, either on marble or to the northeast. This makes sense from a maintenance standpoint.
One drawback is having to research animal husbandry early, but this is only a small drawback. Animal husbandry may reveal horses, or be needed for our second city anyway. AH opens up writing. Wheel/pottery opens writing at a higher cost, but pottery allows us to build our cheap granary. But then, the granary is not necessary to get the capital to its happiness cap quickly. Granaries will be more important for lower food cities.
2. Settling on cows - a good choice for an early advantage. Extra food in capital gives a worker in 12 turns instead of 15. Being able to skip AH early means being able to go for Pottery instead and build an earlier granary. Also, building on the cow gives easier access to the fish, getting the fish nets built on the 1st turn of having built the workboat, instead of the 6th. All of this adds up to earlier population growth. Moving off of the riverside tile loses 2 health but gains one more tile to build a riverside cottage.
There are a few drawbacks. Building on the cow means losing out on a 6-yield tile in the capital. A 6-yield tile would be worth quite a lot after Bureaucracy. And a grass hill is also lost. That's a total loss of 5 hammers per turn, or 7.5 with Bureaucracy. Since this will probably be a 200-250 turn game, long term production must be considered. Settling on the cow only gives 6 forests in the capital's BFC, compared to 10 for settling in place. And settling on the cow means likely not being able to use the eastern fish.
3. Settling east of cows - great for settler and worker production. Settling east of the cows gives cows, clams, and 2 fish in the BFC, an embarrassment of food riches. At Pop5 and with a lighthouse, the caital would have a net yield of 18 food-hammers, able to produce workers in 3-4 turns and settlers in 5-6 turns. Food can be turned into hammers generally with Slavery. In fact, with a granary, a food is worth 50-100% more than a hammer, except for building wonders. The extra food can also be used to support 2 more specialists, allowing the capital to produce extra Prophets, Scientists, or Merchants as needed.
Again, there are several drawbacks. This site is forest poor. Settling on a forest destroys 1, and leaves only 3 forests in the BFC. Chopping will be quite limited, and this site has fewer base hammers than the in-place site. Overall, it's the worst place for building wonders in the capital. A food is worth less than a hammer when whipping a wonder. When we are in Caste System rather than slavery (which we want for producing scientists), the extra food will be hard to turn into production. There is a limit to how many settlers and workers we want to build. And constantly switching between Slavery and Caste System will be costly. This site also has the least cottagable land.
I'll try to run some side by side comparrisons to put some numbers to these musings.
....must not do this in the real game. I tried settling on cows and a wonder building game to 1050ad and only had 40/310 points. (scotland yard doesn't count)
