After thinking it over for a day, I'm on board with namliaM about Sailing first and then AH. It does seem to work out nicely, especially with the GLH planned in Sparta...
Pros of Sparta, it's a stronger hammer city, it can start quite a bit earlier on the lighthouse (if sailing first
), it has the extra lake tile also, so the LH provides a little bit extra as compared to Athens.
@nocho, remember you can move the mp out of Athens to bust fog after the gems are mined!
And this was a nice little extra piece of the puzzle for comfort in Sparta.
The
PPP would be as follows (basic idea courtesy namliaM, with some tweaks):
Tech will go Sailing - AH. Binary research, that is, a turn of 100% cash when we can't maintain slider at 100% research.
Builds
Athens: settler, worker,
settler warriors.
Sparta: warrior, worker, lighthouse. (Sailing just in when worker done, so perfect timing).
Corinth: warrior (1 turn), galley (Corinth is founded 1 turn before Sailing is in; anyway having the warrior in the queue for an emergency whip is actually a positive by-product in case of higher than expected barb activity)
Tile juggling notes:
Athens: keeps wheat for first two turns of the existence of Corinth to spit out worker a turn sooner.
Sparta: keep max food while on warrior
Corinth: first two turns forest gem, then wheat. At growth to 2 wheat and gem of course. After border pop work other gem forest as first will be chopped (see below).
Workers:
w0: straight mine gem at Sparta, walk to gem N of Corinth along the south (no barb risk). Chop (!) gem. Point is chop is done when Corinth pops borders so we work other gem. At that moment w2 (from Athens) can immediately start mining saving us a precious worker turn from not having to move onto a forested tile. AH is done when that gem is done, so will stop there, but obvious next target would be gem #3, though we might consider redirecting a worker to a horse tile if we have one then.
w1: (the one from Sparta) mine SW of Sparta. Mine is done when handing over, so can decide then whether to mine another hill, pasture the cows or a potential horse.
w2: walk to Corinth, mine gem.
Other units:
Warrior at Sparta: walk to Corinth founding site, move there before settler does (same turn).
Warrior at Athens: walk to Sparta when gem is online
Scout: continue scouting the NE area. Try and land on forests or hills. With human barbs coming soon, the likely lifespan of the scout will rapidly diminish imo, so I'd just try and get as much info as we can (without risking unnecessarily, obviously).
Civics:
Switch to slavery when settler for Corinth is just done.
In general I think this is the most flexible and integral approach that addresses most of our key points:
- Quickest way of mining the gems
- Quickest expansion rate, including setting up settling the island (and getting furs for another happy)
- Head start on the GLH, which really was (and is) to me the most important consideration. Imo it definitely should go to Sparta, it can start earlier there and the city has more potential hammers.
I attach a save of how things should look like when handing over. Note that all cities have interesting whip options at this point, although possibly we should refrain from all of them.
Stopping conditions:
- mainly unexpected barb activity
- can't really think of anything else, but anything else unexpected will make me get back at you too, don't worry
Proposed playing if enough green lights:
24 hours from now, BSP is urging us on after all
We would want both pretty quickly, whatever order we decided to settle them. They would also be very easily defended, which never hurts.
