[LITTLEFOOT] Terrible land but good leader... at least!

Hello everyone, I'm Littlefoot and I'm going to let you take part as I play the game Civ 4 with my best friends as well as Ali who is... uhm... well, I like her a lot anyway.

I'm going to be playing as Suppilumiuma I who is financial and imperialistic. I admit, that these are not among my favourite traits but I think I can work with them pretty well. More about this later. First of all, we need to take a look at our starting position and decide where to place our first city.

 Okay... whoever made this map must clearly hate me... What is this even?!

Well, it can't be helped, we all agreed on taking whatever comes our way because generating the map takes so long... so let's see.

[NOTE: When referring to directions, I use the numpad which should be at the right of your keyboard. So whenever I suddenly start referring to numbers when talking about directions, that's where you have to take a look at. 5 is always the tile that you're starting from.
8 is north/up
6 is east/right
2 is south/down
4 is west/left
and the other numbers are the diagonal directions. I hope you understand the system. Maybe I should just enable the in-game tool to make it visible though that'd be a little annoying perhaps. We'll see :) ]

The most important thing when founding a city is that it has enough food to grow fast. Most of the land seems to be water which is not bad. Water is rather rich in food (well, fish and these things that Chomper would eat in our world) but it doesn't have any production.

A city can use every tile that's 2 or less tiles away so I need to look which position gives me the most good tiles. Mostly, you look at resources there. I see a fish far in the south, shrimp twice as well as a whale though we can't use the whales yet. On land, we have Fur twice. Fur is only good for my economy and it makes my people happy but that's not our main concern right now. The first city needs a lot of food and also good production so we can start expanding as soon as we can! The only good place that I see is 8 of the northern Fur on that hill (a tundra hill which gives an additional hammer (hammer means production) ). It would be able to access all major resources in my terrible starting land (seriously guys, it looks like we're on top of the world where only those plants grow that don't taste good at all and where the Ground Sparkles (snow) fall and the icy wind blows. How am I supposed to get back at Cera for winning the last game?!

Anyway, that city would have the two shrimps, the whale and both Fur. Not a lot of production, admittedly, but it'll have food in abundance once we build a lighthouse in our first city.

I don't really see any alternative except for a city somewhere south of the Fur but that wouldn't have nearly as much food so it'd be worse. I'll found my first city as I said.

Okay, here we go. Not really a great city but it's the best we can do here. Now we need to think about what to research. It looks like the Sumerians start with the knowledge how to build roads and how to do agriculture. None of this is of any use here because we don't need roads that badly yet and agriculture doesn't work without freshwater. All we have is the salty stuff. What we need is the knowledge how to fish! If we know how to fish, we can gather the food from the ocean. Until then, we can only use the land around us... which is terrible! Oh... this is going to be so bad...

As you can see here on the city screen, there are only two tiles we can use for now. We need to build something in the city now. All things need a certain amount of production to be finished and it'll take a certain amount of turns to finish depending on how much production is available.

Eventually, I want to expand so Workers to improve my land and Settlers to found more cities should be our main priority, however these are expensive! It's usually quite a good idea to build a worker really early but they can only work on land. Since we have very few of that (heck, why didn't Ducky get this starting position anyway? She's a Swimmer!!!), a worker wouldn't make much sense. We'll need some military at some point to protect our cities from barbarians but, for now, it's most important to use the time we have to wait for fishing to be researched to build scouts so we learn more about this strange land. This is certainly far from being a Great Valley... The tile with fur on it is the better choice  for now even though it won't give us any food so we can't grow. The extra production is helping a little more though. We'll have more than enough food soon but production will be rare. There's also some commerce that we can gather from the fur already so it's accelerating the research too. The scout only need 3 turns to build, that's pretty good, actually.

So here's the overview for now. The borders are going to expand in 5 turns, actually, adding a whole layer to our culture. All of this will be what the city can use. The borders can expand much farther but the city can't work the more distant tiles.

Okay, now on the left you can see the abilities of my sumerian civilization and my (hittite) leader. I'll explain. Sumerian traits first.

• In combat there's a small chance to capture a prisoner. These can join a city, giving it some production. It looks like the odds are higher for me and I get additional production for them. Also, I have a bonus on two technologies. Writing and Mathematics are rather early technologies so that should give me a boost early on!

Now financial:

• As the title says, it helps me financially. [The odds to get this trait were only 3%] Financial buildings like Market, Grocer and Bank generate some extra money (and are being build quite a bit faster) and any tile with more than one commerce gets an extra commerce. This applies to all coastal tiles for example so it's good luck I'm financial in this situation here!

Now imperialistic [Odds at 8%]

• This trait is a good mixture of everything I think. I like this trait a lot actually! In combat, you get XP for victorious fights and once you've gathered enough, a Great General will be born who is a very strong unit that you can do lots of cool stuff with. I get them twice as fast and their bonuses are much bigger! Isn't that awesome?! Though, that only comes in handy once I actually engage in war *grins*
  
  Oh, my siege weapons are also better because they get a free promotion which is very strong if you ask me (makes my siege weapons heal while they move - usually units only heal when they don't move!  Big advantage while at war!)
  
  Cities cost me less which combines nicely with my other trait and, in my opinion, the strongest thing about imperialistic is that Settlers build much faster! That means I can expand much quicker! Hach, if only I had a better first city... so much potential!

Well, we should also take a look at our unique units and buildings. [In BASE there are 3 instead of just 1 Unique Unit (UU)]

First, there's the vulture. Basically, this is an Axeman (these have a bonus against other melee units) with more strength but less bonus. The strength against melee units doesn't change but it's stronger against all other unit types. It's a pretty early unit. Just need to find some copper somewhere... we got scouts for that after all.

The Sickle Swordsman is a swordsman with a free "cover" promotion which makes him stronger against Archery Units. In other words, he'll be much better at attacking other cities (usually defended by Archers) which is what swordmen are good for.

The Marjanni is chariot (strong against Axe- and Swordsmen but not Spearmen) with a huge bonus against other chariot units. That means we have three early UU's, hopefully we find somebody to test them on *smirks*

...as well as a very early UB (Unique Building)! The Ziggurat can be built much earlier in the game than the Courthouse and provides a free Priest Specialist on top of that, how awesome is that?!

Well, I don't like my land but the special things and the traits are pretty good if you ask me. Maybe if we find some better land soon, we won't do too poorly? Anyway, I'm done with this turn, next is Cera. Hope she's getting the same type of land that I do, otherwise she might end up being stronger than me... she's really good at this game...

Once the scout is built, I'll give you the next update, seeya!