i MAY have been exaggerating your skills but everyone elses was true :)

Deity? Well...

Anyway, I signed up. Map for discussion:

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/civ4game...tart_large.jpg

The only drawback to settling in place would be that we lose one of the floodplains and that the city itself will not be a very productive one.

Cons on not settling on place: we lose one of the clams, and one of the spices.
I don't see us getting a productive city if we settle some to the north. We should optimize food production.

I think settle in place

Loss of one clam is not that big of a deal.

I would send the scout to see what the black tile is north of the spices. IT may be a good place to settle as we wouldnt lose either of our Floodplains and we could have better territory North to grab that second spice. A sligth overlap in working tiles isnt that bad on a map with alot of water.

I dont like settling in place. Since you will drop one food essentially we would have to farm teh other floodplain just to make up the food loss.

I think, Scout should mve E first, then we might consider settling NE or N, for a Space Race the FP cottage is too valuable to lose. N could be nice for Colossus or TGLighthouse.

My take on it : setling off the coast and/or off the river seems a bit silly to me (in a general case), except if there is much to gain. Not really the case here. That'd leave us with settling in place, north or east. IMO we should first move the scout east, then south, to reveal what's up in the east. I wouldn't mind losing a resource in our 21 if we could get it back with another city soon. Settling east then seems better than settling north, as the southern spices might be lost for harvesting. Also, if we settle off the floodplains, we gain one more floodplain for irrigation or cottage, but we lose one clam for high food : I'm not sure we actually gain food that way.

Summary according to me : scout E then S (if nothing extraordinary after E), then let's see how it is.

And I'm just realizing that we won't be able to do that before another 12 days. [lol]

Dont forget with 17 other AI this will be a very crowded map

Alan has asked whether one of the vanilla teams wants an extra player, he has two who'd like to join left.

Anyone against it? Otherwise I'd tell him in 24 hours that it's ok if it's ok for the player to join here.