Now that I can actually look at the save I'll make better ppp. I'm planning to play until alpha is complete, which is currently 19 turns away.
Worker will cottage FPs for the 2nd city and improve corn after border pop. It's too late for building roads to speed up settler. We don't have much to do with workers right now, since we've skipped many worker teches like mining.
Plan roughly 16 worker turns, alpha will be sped up with 2nd city.
On the underlined part - we are just in time to build a road 1E (and exactly 1E, not 1NE for example) of capital to settle 1 turn earlier (wins 3
1
1-2
). All that compared against starting a cottage which wins only 3
(3 because that road delays our cottage by 3 turns) makes building the road a clear winner.
Capitol doesn't really have a great 5th tile to work, wine could be farmed or cottaged. It would be just annoying later to build winery on a mature cottage. I'm somewhat concerned about barbs coming from the south, so I think I'll first get two warriors out to spawnbust. Then a worker.
Actually now that we have the granary, we might as well use it. Whipping workers/settlers with a granary is much better than slow building them. Just hate to whip the cottages away, so we want to grow to at least size 5 and the 2nd city can borrow a cottage.
It's quite a long time to alpha, so I'm not sure if it's good to delay our expansion for that long. But the fish-gold site couldn't be improved before alpha, since we lack all the mining and fishing. However, the sheep-horse site could be improved pre-alpha and we would get horses for barb defense, which would make barbs almost a non-issue. I think I could get out a worker and a settler from the capitol pre-alpha. For faster tech and thus earlier oracle, we could get a library, but I think expansion is more important at this stage of the game.
Going 3 cities then Oracle is a huge gamble as it will be late. To me it seems that the only 3rd city that doesn't slow Oracle down is the gold-site (stuck at size 1 for a while working the gold), but we will get the tech for it only after alpha. Right now I think we should not insist on the Oracle and just go ahead and settle an immediately beneficial 3rd city. We have done too much non-optimal stuff already and the early game is not forgiving to mistakes. We might still get a late Oracle say ~1200BC.
Note how in that Kakumeika-game I linked they were able to skip AH and go straight pottery-writing-alpha. They also got a quick library in capital to speed up research. We are at least 10 turns behind, which is way too much of course.
The marked city locations must be changed not to miss seafood. 1NE of the gold and on the western elephant is the only way to get both fish, right? I'm not very afraid of the barbs, but agree that the best 3rd spot is sheep+horse. I think 1NW (on the desert) is a better spot than "kaupunki"-labeled spot though. Gains 4 riverside grass and the ability to borrow sheep from cap and requires 1 less road. The labeled clam-city has to be changed then of course, but there are three different ways to claim it anyway.
Scouts will continue to map out ai lands. Since there is some time before tech trades worker steal from mansa remains a possibility (I thought that we we're a few turns from alpha, and so war would have prevented tech trade). In my experience ai makes peace on emperor after worker steal quite easily even without killing a scout after few turns.
OK, good to know about the peace. Just keep an eye of the possibility to perform the worker steal. Heal the warriors, too, we don't want them to die. I think the main mission for the warriors is to confirm the assumption that we don't have land access to more AIs.
A possible build in the capital is warrior x3 until size 5, then switch to worker and whip it next turn, finish 3rd warrior (if too much overflow put it in library), grow on library (or get warrior if needed) until size 6, then whip settler. The built worker prepares connection to 3rd city and pastures sheep, then horse.
I thought about the 2nd city build and I think granary is the best. Capital needs to build warrior for this city. We need to increase our happy cap for granary (=growing) to be useful, but our 4th and 5th cities will claim phant+gold.
To all team members: Ask if you don't understand something I say.
edit: I think we should farm the wine, as we need capital to have 5 workable tiles. Not sure if this should be done with 1st or 2nd worker. Look into it.
for a long long time.
I'm just saying that there is no hurry, let's not rush.
