Huge post here, sorry, just spamming ideas and replies/comments to posts from earlier today
I realized today, while whipping is a good means of converting food into hammers.
Pre-granary at size 6, whipping 3 pop is exchanging 1 food for 1 hammer, while we dont have any other means to spend the surplus food from the power tiles (deer and wheat) how about only producing settlers/workers from athens at size 4?
This works the power tiles + crabs + 1
2/1 + 4/2 + 6/0 + 4/0 + 3/0 (either farmed grassland or i.e. beaver)
Minus 2 food per pop, 8 food for 9/3 food/hammers or 12 production per turn.
Or a settler every 9 turns
Since the surplus food is "only" 9, thus it requires atleast 10 turns to grow back to size 6
Then atleast 1 turn (or 2) into the settler and another to whip it, but this can generate some 30-40 bonus hammers into next project(s) / unit(s)
Only problem with straight Worker/Settler production is we will be low on MP warriors.
Not only can the warriors act as MP, they also can go explore/worker steal and fogbust (prevent barbs from spawning near)
On sharing the Wheat, sure in the real game it MAY be an option to consider once we know more about the fog.
Long(er) term I would expect the island city to grab the crab from our capitol, at that point sharing the Wheat is not really an option (anymore).
On not sharing it in the test game is just to make things more alike, right now your 8 pop is boosted by sharing the wheat... vs my 9 pop that isnt.
Plus I am speding a turn or two more on walking the settler. Just trying to make things (more) comparable by keeping things alike.
Plus if worst comes to worst, Corinth can be founded 1 N of the northern most gem and be an inland city (to bad about the TGL routes!) and have a riverside farm to aid it in growing a little.
With hopefully a lot of flat grassland, cottage the crap out of it!
But we lack facts here and speculation is just that, so just for now, lets try and keep things alike in our test game(s)?
Early academy might be nice, however if our capitol makes 20 commerce @ 70% slider = 14 beakers.
The academy will add 7 beakers, but cost us possible precious time in our expansion where a settler could add the same 7 easily and more in the future.
Question in general, why do we settle Sparta at the lake for 1 gem? because of the visible food?
Wouldnt 2 gems be more important, even if they could be further away? Why not settle Sparta there and leave the lake for later.
This may also mean that (early) AH is completely mute, hoping there is a farm or camp food resource up there.
This will also mean we DO need a warrior to defog because of the elongated travel time... and much higher risk of encountering Barbs
But gets a 13 commerce city online that much faster (vs a 9 commerce city)
For the scout assuming a route like this is possible...
I would move the scout north first along the coast to the eastern most gem,
then 4 north-ish to reveal any BFC that may cover the two gems (total 4 turns or so)
then swing west (if possible) aiming to unfog the remainder of the possible city site 1N of the northern gem (3 turns? maybe 4?)
Then swing back south to west of the cow-ish depending on how much land is there offcourse another 4 turns.
Meaning in 12 turns we scouted our area... this offcourse depends on how much forest or jungle we find.
Reason I want to go counter clockwize are two fold
1) Need to know the possible 2 gem city ASAP
2) Once near the cows, we can deside to either run with the scout or keep him near for fog busting though ideally perhaps we may want to time that (more) to really synch up with the settler depending on build queue (settler at size 2 or 3)
Barbs will enter your borders when there are 3 cities per player on the map, IIRC
If we are worried about barbs, I believe my scenario using AG>Mining>BW had 6 warriors overall and 3 workboats (2 are actually needed 3rd is exploratory/for the wet beaver (island city) or can be replaced by 2 warriors)
This if anything is a major difference between BW first over Potery, mucho more hammers now vs likely more beakers post currency time
Idle turns of the worker, assuming moving is NOT an idle turn... obviously there are idle turns waiting for the border to pop
There is no idle time between the camp and start farming the Wheat... Thinking about it we can actually stick one turn farming in on the tile SW of the wheat just for optimization sake.
Dont expect we will actually farm that tile but.... if we want to be perfect about it
Assuming we go AG > Mining IIRC there is one turn "idle" time before we can mine the grass hill.
But that can be spend putting a farm 1W of the Wheat, this farm can later be finished and is usefull assuming Sparta gets settled in range of that like SE of the Lake or on Ronnie's wheat sharing spot.
Idle worker turns are not THAT important as long as we have the improvements in place. One downside I am still to fix, I never chopped/mined that south hill of Athens
Very nice second city for our soon-to-be-growing empire.
