Here's the starting postition:
Sirian described this in the introductory paragraph as "this start looks dry, no food bonuses in range of view. This could be markedly hazardous, so don't get too greedy." That was a bit of an understatement; this was a VERY dry starting position. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first action I took was to move the worker onto the mountain to the south to get a view of the surrounding territory. Not seeing any better terrain from that action, and knowing that this was an archipelago map, I moved the settler one tile east and founded on the forest you see. This way my capital was on the coast and I didn't waste a bonus grassland tile. Was it a good move? Time proved it to be so.
I started out by building two warriors for exploration duty as usual, then started up a granary. In this position, a granary was THE most important thing possible to build. Let me state that again: in a low-food start, a granary will DOUBLE your pace of expansion. I first noted this in GOTM7 when players who build a granary out-expanded me, who did not build one and got a bonus settler on the 2nd turn of the game. That was also a start without much food. In Civ3, growth is power, and in this start growth meant building a granary ASAP. I'll be interested to see the results of those who didn't build one at the start. In any case, here's the game 21 turns in at 2950BC:
Scouting with warriors revealed more of the same terrain: some grassland, lots of plains, hills, and mountains, and no fresh water for irrigation anywhere in sight. At this time you can see I was almost done my granary, and was running a farmer's gambit with my capital. Hey, there were no barbarians, so it was pretty safe.
I found Russia very early in this game - or rather, a Russian scout found me. I think I met them about 3200BC. That's very, very early for a standard map. When I didn't find anyone else after a few more turns, it was clear that Russia and I were stuck together on the same island. Hmmm... something was obviously going to have to go here. What do you think the odds were that I would be able to share the island peacefully with Russia? But that's a story for later. I made a big, big trade early on in the game in 3000BC. Here's a screenshot of it:
In essense, I traded away my tech lead in exchange for Russia's workers. I was behind in tech for a while after this, but I felt that that was justified by the bonus workers I got in return and the consequent crippling that Russia took from losing their starting workers. It had worked well in Epic#1, after all. Although I couldn't see the results directly in this game, time would prove that this was a good decision as well. Actually, I believe that trading for workers in the very early game is always a good idea, and this shows the extent to which I was willing to go to do so.
I founded my second city a little after 2500BC. By this time, several other civs already had three cities out (according to the end-of-game replay). I chose a good site for Bombay, with a cattle for growth and tons of mountains for future shields. It overlapped a bonus grassland with Delhi, which allowed me to do some tile trading. I really liked this spot. With the founding of my second city, the very early phase of the game ended.
