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DaveMcW

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The sun rises on the year 4000 BC. Since time immemorial, the Sirian people have lived a nomadic life. After years of wandering, they are ready to settle down and found your first city.

Willem van Oranje, your people have vested absolute power in you, trusting that you can build a Civilization to stand the test of time!

 

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Neat! Thanks, Dave.

Holy heck, if everyone has a start like this, combined with tech trading on, this game is going to blitz through the tech tree. :eek: That's going to make defence quite a lot easier and offence much, much harder. Interesting.

Since you've taken our leader to put on the map, I presume you've also taken the other teams' leaders. Mind posting in the main forum with the list of civs? :)
 
Well, everyone will likely have something similar, or else this start would be vastly unbalanced. Which worries me slightly, given how fast teching can be when one person has 2 Golds at their capital, let alone everyone having something similar, let alone tech trading on... but I digress. Thanks for making the map, Dave. :)
 
No possible way of knowing that right now just from the fact that it's a coastal start. But it would be kind of neat if it turned out to be an islands map. Indiansmoke wouldn't be happy (he was pushing for a pangaea), but everyone else would probably be okay with it. :p
 
This is a financial civ's dream. Most certainly a good situation to settle in place. I don't know the map maker's philosophy about modifying starts, but I wouldn't assume that everyone else will have comparable starts, sometimes you can balance out a good capital city site by giving better locations nearby for the 2nd and third cities.

What do you think about the first build? Maybe a workboat to get that nice coastal fish up quickly.
 
Well, perhaps we have no Horses or Copper and have a next door neighbour with both. In that case, that wouldn't be particularly balanced either. :p

It's interesting to note that the impact of Financial will be slightly lessened if everyone has similar starts. (For instance, one guess would be two civs each start with Gold, Silver and Gems respectively.) It'll still be a good trait, but if everyone else has similar resources, the impact of Financial will be lessened slightly. Not that I'm regretting picking a Financial leader at all, this is a tasty start after all. ;)
 
Haven't analysed it in detail yet, but my guess is Work Boat first will almost certainly be the best option. (I'm glad we started with Fishing!) The question is probably whether two Work Boats or Work Boat -> Worker will be the preferable option. That's harder to say without doing a proper analysis.
 
Heh... just had a thought. You know what would be funny? If this start was an April Fools' joke, and then the real one was much less shiny. :p
 
Yeah, that would be mean, taking away our nice Golds and Fishies. I hope not too. ;)
 
Ha, I bet it is an April Fools joke!

But if it isn't, I think we need to capitalize on our Creative trait and prioritize Writing for a quick Library / Academy in the capital. All that early commerce needs early multipliers
 
Nice work, wabatt.
But if it isn't, I think we need to capitalize on our Creative trait and prioritize Writing for a quick Library / Academy in the capital. All that early commerce needs early multipliers
Yeah, an early Great Scientist will be very, very powerful for this start. We should definitely try to pump one out ASAP.
 
I propose we spurn this double-fish double-gold plains-hill river site and settle 1W for an optimal one off the coast.

Ok being serious now, having fishing and no land-food makes a 6-turn workboat a pretty obvious first choice, unless we think we need a warrior. I don't think we do need a warrior first as we can build one in three turns if we need to, and should have at least 3 turn's warning of any attack. Plus I don't expect us to be super-close to any other civs.

Tech wise my thoughts are:
* mining we need at least before we finish the worker, as the gold should be the priority.
* writing as early as possible.
* bronzeworking at least before writing or else the library will take forever to build anyway, creative or not.
* sailing when we have time to build a lighthouse, probably not straight away but maybe first after writing?
* hunting + animal husbandry can possibly wait, although if there's no copper around we will need some sort of barb defense.
* mysticism and friends we can hopefully skip for quite a while, being creative. I know there's some good stuff down this path but we can't have everything.

The ideal early capital will be 6 population, working fish, fish, gold, gold, scientist, scientist (then switch scientists for cottages once we have an academy and the happy cap is lifted). For this though we will need at least 1 more happiness (if I count it right anyway - 4 happiness for free and 1 from gold), preferably two if we've been whipping. If we're lucky we might find a happiness resource to cover this without a big detour down the mysticism line for a religeon or HR.

So, this turn, I would settle in place first, then move the warrior 7 (NW) to move away from the coast and reveal more, work the plains hill, build a workboat, and set tech to mining.
 
We get 4 happiness for free, plus one from the gold, plus one from the palace. So it'll be 6 right from near the start.

I agree with your tech priorities. I'd also add The Wheel (we'll have to hook up that Gold), and probably Pottery at some stage, being Financial (although we won't need cottages in our capital until much later).

It's a shame we're not Industrious and don't appear to have Stone around (although maybe we'll get lucky and find some). The Pyramids would be absolutely ideal for this start. Failing that though, we'll need Monarchy pretty early, which conflicts a bit with the plan above to avoid the religious line for a while.
 
We get 4 happiness for free, plus one from the gold, plus one from the palace. So it'll be 6 right from near the start.

Ahh of course, palace indeed. So, we can work the fish-gold-scientist capital as soon as we build the library. Without even monarchy.

I agree with your tech priorities. I'd also add The Wheel (we'll have to hook up that Gold), and probably Pottery at some stage, being Financial (although we won't need cottages in our capital until much later).

I had those in mind as necessary pre-requisites for writing, although now that I check, you can get it from animal husbandary or priesthood as well. I usually prioritise pottery anyway so I've never noticed you can skip it.

It's a shame we're not Industrious and don't appear to have Stone around (although maybe we'll get lucky and find some). The Pyramids would be absolutely ideal for this start. Failing that though, we'll need Monarchy pretty early, which conflicts a bit with the plan above to avoid the religious line for a while.

I won't deny hereditary rule is extremely good, but I'm not sure to what extent we *need* it, given what we can do with the 6 happiness we've got. I'd certainly consider writing (via pottery), bronze working, and sailing to be higher priority, but that's not saying much as they're basically early techs. By the time we have those we'll be in a better position to compare the cost of monarchy+prerequisites to things like alphabet, calendar and currency, with hopefully the possibility of trading for monarchy and/or its prerequisites. I'm not saying don't get it, but if for instance we can get another 3 happiness with calendar then I'd rather get calendar first. This is getting all a bit too far ahead though.

Of course I'm skipping the oracle and various other wonders here, I'm just expecting that a team which starts with mystycism is going to beat us to the oracle, and that the various other marble wonders via polytheism aren't worth pursuing without marble. The lighthouse is definately worth considering when we're on the coast, especially if no-one is industrious, and only requires a minor detour to masonry.
 
Heres what i think our immeditae area looks like with bleeding; ice is stuff i have no clue about

EDIT: Version 1.3

I'm certain that "tundra" is actually a plains hill forest.


Workboat first, working the plains hill forest seems far and away the best opening with this start.
 
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