Yet another dotmap..

[Winged Monkey]

Hi guys,

I'm playing my first immortal game today, so I thought I'd come here to get some feedback before I do something stupid and get myself killed!

I'm playing as Ramesses II, and rolled a pretty lucky start: Stone in the BFC, and a huge chunk of blockable land. The thing is, I'm not quite sure where I should put my blocker city. Bismarck is lurking down in the southwest so I have to get it online ASAP. I've already built the Stonehenge, and the settler is on his way. But where to put him!

Spoiler :

(No seafood on the three coast tiles south of blue city.)

This is what I've come up with so far, but I'm not sure if I like it. There's a little too much overlap, one of the cities is settled on Ivory, and the blocker city will have basically no production at all.

Good suggestions?

 

[johnny_rico]

An amazing start, by all accounts. Loads of health and happiness, horses and stone in the BFC, and elephants. Are you playing with balanced resources?

What does the land do in the SE. Does it end, or continue, similar to the SW?

Finding Bismarck is key. I'm not certain you want to spam too many cities in the jungle too early. You could go with the pig/wheat city in the SW to seal it off but it may be a while before it is connected. You could rush iron working and get chopping or let Bismarck in and rush construction to crush with elephants.

I'd say you need a lot of war chariots to fogbust and scout.

 

[Bhruic]

This is what I've come up with so far, but I'm not sure if I like it. There's a little too much overlap, one of the cities is settled on Ivory, and the blocker city will have basically no production at all.

I think your choices are fine. Some overlap isn't a problem, and you really don't have much. Settling on an Ivory is actually fairly useful - Ivory doesn't given much in the way of bonuses anyway. And you've already identified the blocker city as having a useful role, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't have production.

Bh

 

[Winged Monkey]

An amazing start, by all accounts. Loads of health and happiness, horses and stone in the BFC, and elephants. Are you playing with balanced resources?

Nope, and I swear to God it was my first roll! Had it been Emperor I would probably have restarted, but since this is my first Immortal game I'm gonna take the edge provided by the RNG gods..

What does the land do in the SE. Does it end, or continue, similar to the SW?

Small peninsula with... Marble!

Finding Bismarck is key.

I'm not certain you want to spam too many cities in the jungle too early. You could go with the pig/wheat city in the SW to seal it off but it may be a while before it is connected. You could rush iron working and get chopping or let Bismarck in and rush construction to crush with elephants.

I think letting Bismarck in might be a little too risky. I'm not sure if the accumulated cost of hammers for units/going for construction before other more useful techs/gold for unit support makes it worth it, when I can simply block him with a single city. Would be fun to try though!

 

[Winged Monkey]

I think your choices are fine. Some overlap isn't a problem, and you really don't have much. Settling on an Ivory is actually fairly useful - Ivory doesn't given much in the way of bonuses anyway. And you've already identified the blocker city as having a useful role, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't have production.

Good point about the Ivory. Oh well, I guess the blocker city at least will have 2 hammers in the city center and a couple of plains forests...

 

[Alsn]

I would settle the blocker city 1 tile to the NE. It will have much more overlap but in return you get a mined plains hill that will provide some much needed production. Just let the northern city take the overlap tiles and have your blocker city be just that, a blocker(not to mention that you can share the grass hills between the two cities when they need production).

 

[Bleys]

Heh, that game looks already won to me. Holy Resources, Batman. Does it even matter where you put a blocker?

In situations like this I always go for higher production, and depend on my cultural borders to get happiness and health resources that may be outside my cities BFCs, but thats a personal preference. Keeping production up to speed is one of my main weaknesses, so I try to work on it each and every city. Either way, your cities are going to grow quickly, so you can always use the whip a bit more liberally. Keep that happiness up, and the food coming in. Also, I notice your "band" of Jungle isnt very wide at all, and you have forests both to the north and south of it. Chop some up, I bet they regrow a LOT if you dont clear whole blocks of them.

You could spread out a bit, not worry about getting every resource in a BFC, and build a while, then, later, REX in a bunch of filler cities, switch to Nationalism and go to town. I think thats how I would play it.

 

[Winged Monkey]

Heh, that game looks already won to me. Holy Resources, Batman. Does it even matter where you put a blocker?

Those resources wouldn't do me much good if I got bogged down in a wide-front war against Bismarck! But yeah, the start was pretty ridic.

However...

Not sure how well I'm doing. I might have made some overly bold choices early. I went for the blocker city first which almost instantly took me down to 60% research. Then I settled the pink dot to get me down to 40%. Then... I settled a marble city way down south-east (insta 7 gpt maintenance) to get me down close to zero. However, I had the pyramids-->representation and got the GL in 8-9 turns, so even at 0% I teched decently. But then... Ol' Churchill decided to stop by for a visit in the middle of my heartland. He somehow managed to sneak a few galleys in. Naturally we couldn't have that, so I declared and kept the two cities he managed to plop down. Which made it kind of hard to get up from 0%!

But CoL/Currency/Calendar and soon Bureaucracy is helping out nicely though, and with Churchill out of the picture it's just a matter of consolidating the land I think.

Empire view:

Spoiler :

Tech situation:

Spoiler :

Mansa is dangerously close to lib, but he's currently getting clobbered by Shaka and probably soon dead. There might be hope!

All in all, I feel I learned something about the price of too heavy early expansion. I think I could have gotten a much better start if I had expanded a little more carefully. The marble city wasn't really needed - I would have gotten the GL first anyway, and the Parthenon was already built. On more ordinary map rolls, such decisions would probably have cost me the game. The pace of the AI is really noticeably different from Emperor.

 

[Bleys]

I see your point, but I wonder if a "lock-out" city would have been better. BTS has fixed a LOT of the problems of AI civs sneaking around such cities and plopping a settler down behind your lines. If this was Vanilla, absolutely the full blocker, but perhaps if you had dropped your first city 2E + 1S of the pink dot, it would have been adequate to keep the Germans out, especially since I assume your using the Obelisk as one of your first builds in new cities.

All in all, please keep updating. This is a great teaching game about playing that level.