Settle in place, what all this marlarkey about the plains tiles not being used, you DON'T have to put 2nd city 3 tiles away from capital, why not explore the other side of the stone and evaluate.
If we're supposed to get 4 resources in starting City BFC and Seafood ISN'T COUNTED as a starting resource, what else do we have??
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Hi IPEX, nice to be in another SG with you!
Good point about the settling, it really is waaaay too early to be deciding about settlement, we need exploration first.
Re the seafood though, unfortunately I'm not sure if you mean that we probably have something else or that we probably don't. Here is my take: I thought seafood counts as 2/3 of a resource meaning we have our full compliment visible.
I think its important that we understand the idea behind the variant / SSE. As I'm sure most of us know the whole thing is predicated on an uber strong city with tons of settled specialists (the reinforcing cycle of wonders into GP points to settle GPs to more GP points) and by denying the AIs most of the wonders we slow their pace down too.
Its very important to plan the start carefully and grab the early wonders to start the GP points and set the whole thing in motion. You can't implement this strategy after missing a lot of the early wonders.
I agree with the desire to get out GP points, but feel that specialists are a very good way of doing this as they generate more GPP than any wonder so a large food surplus isn't so bad.
As for the AI, I think the idea of grabbing wonders to slow them down is a bit misleading. Remember that if we get the wonder then they will put the hammers into something else and if they get lots of failure gold than that will go into research. And we will have put hammers into a nice shiny object rather than infrastructure military or settlers. Now admittedly they don't leverage those benefits very well, but neither do they leverage wonders to the max.
As far as settling, I'm def against SIP. We need
for our cap not food surplus. And if we did SIP it guarantees we can't share the food with any other cities. 5 seafood (+ wheat) is overkill in a normal game anyway as it will be long time before our happy cap allows us to take advantage of the huge food surplus (whip anger will determine whipping pace not food/regrowth).
In addition for this variant we a) are not city spamming (so food surplus into settlers isn't good) as we focus on our capital and a tight empire to keep costs low and b) out capital needs to focus on wonder building not running specialists
I think that means something like settle ISE or wander inland...
If we settle 1SE it doesn't lose
, still plenty of food and can settle 2nd city 1W of wheat for Clam+wheat+stone (which we want early). Only reason to change this would be if border pop for city 2 is not fast enough to get stone when we need it...
While I think 1SE is the best way to split the seafood, I feel that it is not as good as SIP. Here is my reasoning.
1) The cap will loose a hill if it is 1SE so I'm not sure how that will get more hammers than SIP.
2) I feel that the city 1W of the wheat is very inferior, while it does have wheat and Clam, the rest of the tiles are all brown and mostly flat with no river, so hammers would only come from workshops. It just does not have enough food to support that.
3) Least importantly, that settlement placement looses one fish which makes me sad.
Early offline game with WB to create similar starting tiles leads me to a few early conclusions (more to follow
1) Why go BW first since our worker will be delayed till after WBx2 and prob after first wonder. I think myst (for SH) is the way to go
2) We need to move fast to be able to get SH & GW (which will be our barb defense)
3a) Tech order something like myst -> BW -> mason -> TW -> ??
3b) Builds something like WBx2->SH->worker then either settler->GW with chops or GW-> settler (not ideal as delays stone)
Might be best to SIP after all for plains
bonus but not sure...
What turn did you get SH with that build order? Going for BW first and SIP I found I got the second WB out just after it finished. Then I was able to revolt to slavery while the 2nd WB was enroute to an ocean fish. Working both fish I could get out another Warrior while moving towards Myst, then partially complete a third warrior to size 4 (working max food) at which point I started on a worker (2fish+2hills), whip for 48 into SH, and start mining the grass hill. Then finished the warrior, started on a third WB until size 4 (max food), start on settler (2fish+2hills), had to put the mine's chop hammers into SH, then whip settler for 44 to finish SH.
Net result: WB->WB->Warrior->Worker->Warrior(started earlier)->(19 spare hammers into unfinished WB or Warrior)->Settler->SH (using 2 whips+1chop) by turn 52.
So with my build order Myst could probably go before BW, but I like how the revolution time is right before we lay the 2nd set of nets, and there is no time to get a third tech before BW because of the worker coming out to build a mine.
The settler is out a bit late, but not all that much considering a wonder was built at the same time and the worker was late too.
Here is my initial map for the test as well as the situation as of T52:
for SH for free monuments, Mids, Oracle (MC for Colossus?) maybe GLH being coastal just to start.
and 
(from rep)
