A few more hours of sleep in my body and I feel like a whole new person!
(And now the forum works again so I can finally post this
)
Smurksheim
I touched up my spreadsheet to work for Heim in the current situation. It shows Heim working as a 4-turn factory at 3.5->5.5, and the transition to a 5-turn archer-settler factory at 4.5->6.5. Again, don't take the actual turns literally.
View attachment 104158
FP town
I had a notion that moving the FP one tile to the west, to where the mongol scout is currently. The rationale was that the coast is close in the east, and by settling one tile west we'd be able to get more towns inside the RCP-5 disk. But it turns out there's no real difference, moving one tile to the west just brings a bunch of mountains into the disk, so the number of locations to settle certainly wouldn't increase. Besides, with our current planned location for the FP a bunch of ring 5 towns will end up by the river, which is nice.
So, my point is that we should settle where we've planned to, just wanted to save anyone else from the trouble of investigating the same thing.
Where to put the Indians?
We've discussed briefly where to put our own two cores. I think the locations are well chosen, since what we will need more than anything is commerce, for fast research. Between those two areas we cover all currently visible rivers on our home continent. So, not much to discuss there, those will be our cores.
But then where to put the Indian core?
We need to put it somewhere with good production capacity clearly, but also with some nice commerce to make India able to keep up in tech. Looking at our home continent, the only area not covered by our own intended cores is the Carthaginian homelands. That land does have some nice properties, lots of hills and grasslands (some of it currently jungled) will make for good production. Hopefully the land extends to the west some bit as well, though it looks dangerously as if it's lands end beyond Carthage itself.
What's the alternative? If we don't put the Indians up in Carthage, and our continent indeed ends right there, the only other options are either to give India one of our cores, or to set them up off-continent. The former is clearly less desirable, and while the latter might be appealing if we find some nice land it will probably be very hard to facilitate.
I don't have the answer to this, but I think we should have it in mind from the very start, later on it might be hard to turn the whole ship around. If the Carthaginian lands are not what they should be, perhaps we need to consider giving away one of our own cores. Since the FP doesn't move it would have to be the palace core. That land gives both good production and commerce, so if it wasn't for the fact that we wanted it ourselves it would be ideal as the Indian core. However, I'm thinking it's a lot easier to relocate us off-continent than Gargamandhi. Perhaps we should keep looking for a nice second core for ourselves?
Miscellaneous stuff
zyxy, I think your new plans are good, so go ahead and play. Keep a lookout for trades, though I suspect waiting for Writing is probably the best way to go.
ControlFreak, it's all good that you play Friday, that means I get the chance to play during the weekend.
If I were to play in the middle of the week I'd probably have to skip the way things look now. Only one more really intense week left though, then things are starting to look a lot better for me.
), until we want to leave 4-turn settler mode.
. BGs will have to be constantly swapped as 'heim goes up and down two sizes.
Now go get some 
!
