[BTS] Spain, early religion, stone, marble - how to play this start?

[oynaz]

(Emperor difficulty, BAT mod)
So, I started a game with everything random, including Civ. I rolled Spain. I have stone and marble nearby. Not a lot of resources on the map, but a ton of forest.

And Lizzy and Cyrus to the North.

Normally, religion is a very low priority for me, I mostly just adopt whatever keeps me om good standing with my neighbours, so I decided to go far outside my comfort zone, and go straight for Polytheism.
Lo and behold! An early religion. Though at the expense of my economy. I am far outside my comfort zone here, so I am curious: How would you play this?

 

[lymond]

Not much to say in strategy terms regarding an early religion . Have fun with it. Start is pretty bad and I don't like the move to the coast, if anything I'd move inland. Based on what I see here though, I'd be thinking Mids and Phants.

 

[Chase_2_Rabbits]

How would you play this?

I'd probably quit and try and roll a better map

If I was going to play this map, I'd load the 4000BC autosave and not waste time researching Polytheism. Spain has the worst possible starting techs and you have a food poor capital. Development here is going to be slow even with optimal play.

Anyway, as played: research agriculture, stop building warriors and build a worker, farm the FP & cow (maybe even the jumbos if worker has nothing else to do). Given that Poly is already in, I'd then go mining, BW, priesthood and chop the Oracle for CoL on the way to the marble auto-win with Conquistadors. Lib date is not going to be great with this mediocre loooking land, and we don't have much map knowledge this early to help us choose a long term goal - but if I'm Spain and I see marble I think Conquistadors.

I guess Mids is nice too when we have stone and are spiritual, but it's a big investment and I don't see much food close by for running specialists. There's elephants for an earlyish attack if your neighbours are close enough; and the stone makes for cheap walls and citadels and city raider III Trebs if you fancy that route.

Basically you have a lot of options, but none are going to be easy to execute with a crappy capital and uninspiring land to expand into.

 

[sampsa]

I think an early religion is a significantly bigger mistake here than it usually is. Reasons: low -capital that has an AH-resource and a -resource (thus it's hard to properly use the +1 religion provides and the AH-resource is 2 techs away) Well, at least you have a floodplain to work, but still. I'd clearly favor the lake compared to ivory btw. You need a lot of techs to make anything out of this land.

 

[6K Man]

I don't know if you could see it at the start, but I'd suggest reloading and settling on the Marble, or 1N of the Marble. Can't decide which.

 

[oynaz]

Thanks for the replies. I know that early religion is usually a mistake, but randomly drawing Spain with a horsehockey capital calls for an unusual strategy. And the thing about the random map scripts are that they can produce entire worlds of horsehockey city locations.

So I played on. Making two half-decent cities nearby, then making a good commerce city all the way around the Northern bay, leveraging the stone and marble to sustain my economy on fail gold. I also snagged up Parthenon, Mids, Temple of Artemis and Great Library, and managed to spread my religion far and wide.

My economy is picking up, but I am woefully behind Cyrus. Lizzy somehow sucks completely in this game.

So, the usual strategy from where I am now would to attack Lizzy and take all her cities, which would put me on par with Cyrus. Afterwards, I could perhaps attack him, or go for Astronomy and go somewhere else if he is too strong.

But, permanent alliances are turned on in this game. I think the time has come to convert Cyrus, tech peacefully to astronomy, then lead me neighbours on a glorious crusade!

 

[oynaz]

The year is now 1560. Every city on my continent is Hindu, and me, Lizzy and Cyrus are all Friendly with each other, and have defensive pacts. It is a place of love and wonder indeed!
On the other continent, however, we have Genghis Khan, Julius Cesar, Hammurabi and Wang Kon. Predictably, it is a slaughterhouse.

This is turning into one of my most enjoyable games, unusual strategy and all

 

[scheines]

A couple pointers:

• CTRL + Y shows tile yields. Maybe it's my preference, but I find it helps me optimize production / growth better. You can see which tiles are worked with this on.
• Any city without it's own food is dead weight in the short / medium term. Blokkerby, Jermineby are especially problematic. Toledo is OK since you're claiming a lot of happy resources.
• Conversely, any un-utilized food is bad. Settle a city by the clam, settle Barcelona with sheep in the inner ring, etc. to get your empire scaling faster.
• Buildings are often not necessary in non-space race games; that market is currently going to net next to nothing. Similarly, temples probably aren't usually necessary when you have 3 early happy resources (and plenty of surplus to trade for more!)