in Civilization 7 every choice you make shapes the future and just like the butterfly effect even the smallest decisions can have gamechanging consequences later on down the track in this video we look at those decisions and we analyze them because you might not think there's much that can be analyzed within the first 10 turns but I'll tell you right now I've learned a lot in the last 24 hours diving as deep as I possibly can into this so let's get to it and talk about what we're actually doing we're going to be looking at this spawn looks like a pretty standard spawn nice easy simple no crazy resources in here for us to go to or Bel line to there's a few decisions that we could make but the first one's going to be about whether we put down our city in place or whether we move it over towards fresh water which is probably going to be a little bit smarter than what the computer says here because this is the only tile that we've actually got fresh water on so we're going to go ahead and put that City down now that's an obvious choice about how this game would go had we moved our Capital City down here then it's going to look a lot different in 100 turns or 200 turns down the track than what it does now but what if I told you there were incredibly subtle choices that will shape the way that this game plays out and the biggest one is a trap that even myself I've fallen into many times before in previous videos even just yesterday I was I was falling into this trap and it wasn't until I sat down and did this deep dive that I said okay I'm making a mistake and I need to share this with everybody so what is that mistake that mistake is The Granary the granery is actually it's a warehouse building it provides a bonus to any of the Farms that you've got so that sounds great if you've got Farms the only thing is Farms aren't actually good you look at this as a position to expand on and you think wow okay we've got two food and a happiness over there that seems like a pretty good deal I want to take that it's more than the one food and one production but the truth is when it comes to your Capital City production is the king and it's the king from the very first turn and what that means is that we need to optimize our play style and keep in mind this is only if you want to optimize your play style if you want to work to towards beating the deity AI then 100% I think this is the best way to play but if you just want to chill if you just want to make world wonders that's not a problem at all feel free to play that way this is more about that minmax mindset which is something that I I I I minmax everything I do I'm telling you right now I'm going up the stairs I'm thinking about okay what am I going to take upstairs with me so that I don't have to go up a second time so uh I I I live and breathe that minmax style but the point is that farms unfortunately are not the best opening so in this video we take a look at the four different opening that we've got the first one being Farms which is the worst opening the second opening being the opening on water which is where you take fishing boats on a navigable river or in the open ocean and from there you look to expand out and around the map that's the that's the the third best or the the second worst so there's there's four of them that that's number three on the list number two is where you take uh wood cutters so if you've got a nice little forest ring like this where you can potentially look to expand out to them that's the second best one uh and then the final one the number one the best one by far in my opinion is the mines so these mines right here so we've got iron we've got another mine that we could put here another one that we can put here we've got another mine over here and these are by far the best opening in my opinion so what we're going to do in this video is we're going to break down we're going to have a benchmark which is going to be 30 turns into the game and we're going to take a look at the difference where these early decisions uh and how they impacted us at that 30 turn Mark and then we're going to go after we've done that we'll go through and have a look at those 10 turns and the decisions that we can make through them do a little bit of a play through as well so let's get to it and take a look at our first save okay we're here on our first save and you can see we've got lots of farms we've got a granery over here it's probably giving us awesome value on all of these Farms the only trouble is these Farms aren't that hot our population in the capital is currently nine we're about to hit 10 now keep in mind that does include buildings but the main thing that's of importance are our expansions we've settled the natural wonder we've settled or we've forward settled not just one but a second enemy as well we've looked to take as much land away from them as we possibly can and we're looking to now settle back in these positions that aren't as challenged we're at turn number 30 and it's at this point where we talk about just to a little bit of a brief overview on the way to play against the deity AI so the first thing that you're going to want to do is taking a look at the tech tree and when it comes to the tech tree there's very important techs uh in my mind that are are more important than us others so the first one is writing I think writing is incredibly good because when it comes to science in civ7 it's not particularly easy to come by you don't get plus one science for plus one citizen it just sits there a 10 unless you manage to grab you know an incense tile or a natural wonder that gives you science or perhaps you build a library which is exactly why it's so powerful so that's a huge component of the early game is beining towards the library now there are definitely openings where you wouldn't do that but from what I've found right now that definitely seems to be the best opening because by leaving the library until later on you fall too far behind in science and you're just not able to keep up with the diety or the Dey AIS so just talking a little bit about our path so we would want to go to writing uh because writing is going to provide us that we'd want to get the Mastery for writing as well and then we want to look to come to bronze working and that's because of the extra production that it provides to the barracks uh so it gives a plus two production as well as the fact that we're able to upgrade our units and it makes it easier to defend in the event that the uh AI attacks us but from here we've only got three expansions and part of the reason why we've only got three is because our production in the capital is quite low if we have a look at what our capital's currently got in it we've got a total of 13 production now one thing to note is that with that production you're not able to build a whole lot of things so your buildings start to stack up and you've got some really good stuff in here as an example you've got a plus six Garden that you can put down in a wonderful spot and six food is a lot in fact it's three Farms worth of food and because of that you're less incentivized in this game in in civ7 to go for food early and that's part of the reason why in my opinion Farms are the worst tile that you can take early because there are ways to mitigate food growth later on so the first one is the garden the second one is the bath which you'll be familiar with if uh well if you've worried about personal hygiene it is a 10% growth rate but also Plus for food and then it also has uh a an adjacency bonus on the river so if we put it here we'd get four and then we'd get five and then we'd get six probably uh and uh we'd also give a bonus to the capital so it would be a very nice uh thing whereas with production there are other ways that you can get it but they're typically going to be smaller amounts that you're going to be doing that further and this is the real key point in this analysis your production is linear through the game every time that you're adding more production uh you're adding a a set amount onto that and you're building things that are staying relatively uh the same cost obviously there's exceptions to that like building settlers uh but further to that if we were to look at Food it scales it's not exponentially but it is it's not it's not pretty so here we're at 208 food okay and our next citizen is about to roll over so we when we end this turn that citizen is now going to be worth 332 F so that means that I need more than 50% more food now to power up that next citizen so if I'm investing that food and I think this really is where it comes down to the cracks of the issue what's the purpose of my food in the first place that's to grow and why do I want to grow well I want to grow so that I can get big why do I want to get big I want to get big so I can produce lots of things okay well there we go let's cut out the middleman let's not grow and let's just produce lots of things so instead of going after the farm tiles we could go after the mine tiles or we could go after the wood cutters that's essentially the idea so I want you to take a look at this keep in mind this is turn 30 uh we've got 1 2 3 4 settlements at the moment we we've got another settler that's in que we've got one that's moving out towards this position and the general goal is that we want to get to six to seven settlements as quickly as possible that's our goal so that's what we're going to be looking at let's roll over onto the next safe which is going to be the fishing boat opening our second opening is the fishing boat opening and it looks very similar to the farming opening we've got four settlements in total we've got our settler that's moving out over towards this expansion on the East and we don't have any settler in que at the moment but we'll go ahead and we'll queue him up he's got a another five turns to go now one of the key differences in this opening is that you'll notice well if you've got a Keen Eye that we don't have a library and there's a very specific reason for that that's because the fishing boat opening is a low production opening you don't have a lot of production however there is a Pantheon that mitigates this and that's called god of the sea which gives plus one production on fishing boats the only trouble is this isn't like previous Civ games where you can just take your Pantheon and you've all of a sudden got your bonus unfortunately you need to build an altar and that means that you're putting a lot of production into a building that serves a purpose to give you production and don't get me wrong it's a lot of production it's definitely worthwhile but it also means that you're not able to afford luxuries like the library and because of that you start to fall behind now don't get me wrong you could 100% throw a library and try and squeeze a library in here somewhere and that's 100% doable but it's one of the consequences of opening with the fishing boat opening is that you have production than the other openings you've got more than the farm but the Farm opening but that is at a cost and that cost being that you're going to have to put down this alar so other than that the the key difference here is just the fact that you're able to take advantage of the water you're able to to leverage the growth and the growth is significantly higher on a fishing boat opening in fact it's the highest growth opening that there is the only consequence is it's a very low production opening so one of the things that you can do is come down towards uh the bottom side of the tech tree look to go into uh to get the plus one production on mines and quaries and try and pair that with this kind of opening but you can see even at this point because you've already invested so heavily into fishing boats you've got the fishing Key you've got the pantheon for it as well it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to just be putting down a mine right now because I don't have a Brickyard I don't have a s pit I'm not going to be getting super duper good bonuses from this so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense at this stage to be doing that and because of that it remains a relatively low growth start uh and subsequently it sits on on the tier list if you had to it's not really a tier list I'd just say it's probably the the the second worst or the third best out of the four let's move on to our second one and this is going to be our wood cutter start okay we're here at turn 30 on the wood cutter start now this is the second best of them and you'll already see a huge difference in it we have not only our capital and our first three expansions we've also put this one down and we've got another two cities it's absolutely crazy isn't it because I think for most people myself included you look at that and you would think okay it's not going to be a huge difference but it's actually massive it's it's insane the difference between it and the reality is that the capital isn't actually that much smaller we still need a decent amount of food to grow here and further to that the production that we've got we're able to utilize uh in buildings such as the bath or the garden a little bit later on and that's going to help us boost that food number back up we're going to be able to get these towns that we've got out here that are feeding into us but one of the things that I'm sure you've already looked at and said well hold on this doesn't make any sense you're unhappy in all of your cities in fact you're probably crazy unhappy and you're exactly right we are 100% we're very very crazy we're very very crazy we're also very very crazy but we're also very unhappy uh we've got some towns here that have got minus5 it's it's it's not looking pretty but the good news is it's not going to stay like that forever there's a number of ways that you can improve uh throughout the game Your settlement limit at the moment we're 7 out of four and that's because we have a base of three and we picked up a fourth one from irrigation and we'll be looking to pick up uh organized military which is going to take us to five and then entertainment which will take us to six and that's our general game plan I I follow this game plan in every single game that I play because I want to make sure that I am maximizing my settlements but reducing the penalties that are associated with having those settlements so now that we have discussed happiness and the fact that this actually is something that can be mitigated how much is it really affecting us right now CU it is affecting us right now so here in Sparta we've got plus one food plus one production plus 4 plus so a total of plus4 and that actually brings us down to 2.7 so it's a significant reduction in the actual yields but the truth is that we're going to be very quickly on on the heel looking to try and pick up these extra settlement limits and that's going to push us up into a reasonable territory so in the short term it hurts but in the long term it's definitely beneficial to be playing this star to be playing this way to be securing as many settlements as we can the only trouble is when you open with a wood cutter opening like we've done here you've got a problem and that problem is that it's not easy to fit the library in and this is where we get into a little bit more of the advanced component of the the uh the guide which we'll we'll talk more in depth about further on but essentially when you look at the tech Tree Lumber camps uh under animal husbandry they get you get plus one production on camps and wood cutters you also get the S pit which gives additional production to camps and wood cutters so if you start off with a lumber Camp opening which is 1 2 3 uh which is 100% a lumber Camp opening uh you would want to be going down into that and because you're going down into that you're actually going away from writing you'd have to come back up into Pottery and then go into writing and because of that it means that you are going to end up delaying your library now there's nothing there there's no reason why you can't just go back up into Pottery and then go into writing uh but there is a world where some people I'm sure will say well it's it there's no point to get the the library early you should get it later on you can always catch up with science you know can put down all of you can turn your cities over and you you'll catch up to the AI in in science eventually and they're right 100% the trouble is the mid game you're going to have so much production on on your cities that you're not going to have enough science uh to actually get those buildings out quickly enough uh that that's the trouble that you've got you've got all this crazy production but during the mid game you're not researching things fast enough but by the end of the Antiquity era you're 100% able to to do it but in that that's from my experience in just playing these through I've played all of these games through now uh and that was the one thing that I noticed is the weakness to this strategy the weakness to opening wood cutters is the fact that you don't have that very straight flow into the library uh and it sets you behind on science so at the moment we're only 14 uh let's check in with our final save and see how much science per turn it's doing okay so here on the fourth and final save you can see that we're at 25 science per turn and this is because not only do we get the library that's put down but we always follow it up by going into the Codex that's provided at mastery not only does that give you the two science but it also gives plus one on science buildings so that two science that you've got from the base yield of the library that becomes three and then with the Codex it becomes five and then if you've got any adjacencies so for us here this was the best best adjacency I could find was just a plus one it goes up to six which is a huge amount if you're talking the difference between 11 and 17 science in the early game that's that's absolutely crazy and that's reflected in our uh in our technology so you can see we're researching sailing uh no we we've we've already been up the tech tree we've already made our way to bronze working and now we've doubled back and now we're going to go sailing into currency uh and that's just how far ahead that you you can get with this my estimate is that at this point in the game on turn 30 I'm about 11 tiles or sorry 11 uh turns ahead in science uh than what I would be uh if I didn't do that now my math is probably off but that was my my from looking at it on how long it would take for uh the other play through to catch up to where this playthrough currently is on science 11 turns is what I had now that's obviously going to change cuz you'll pick up more science through Through the Ages but anyway that that's roughly the difference anyway let's let's talk a little bit about what this expand what this Strat does differently so we've got 1 2 3 4 five uh We've also got one settler that's here that has been hit by a little bit of flood damage uh but is about to make make its way over and we've got the second settler which is about to come out so if it came down to it you would say that the other one is definitely a more expansion focused opening right we've put all of our production and put it into expanding quickly we we haven't gone into a library we haven't gone into an altar like we would with a fishing opening we don't have low production like we did with the Farm opening it was just pure production whereas here we've flexed a little bit into science but we've covered our bases by doing that and it means that we've been able to deny these expansions from our opponents it means that we've been able to take any further expansions that we want and we can now continue coming out to expand further because we've got our science uh Focus here what we're able to do is build a lot or have a lot more options when it comes to Building inside your town or inside your city so we've got access to the barracks that we could put down right now which is incredible because it's going to take that production and it's going to make it even higher uh so it's a very high value uh building for us to have and to be able to get that earlier is significantly important so why is the uh the mining opening so much better and the answer is because of the way that it just simply funnels in uh from Pottery into writing so pottery provides a plus one production to Clay pits mines and quaries as well as plus one production on Clay pits so the mines don't get it but the clay pits do get uh extra one and then you can just follow it up into writing and this works really well with the standard opening so if I was to say you know civ7 has a standard opening an opening that you can use in pretty much every game it would look like the following you would open with a scout you'd follow that up with a second Scout or you could do a warrior I'll be honest with you I'm kind of leaning more towards a warrior now just because I found Barb camps can be really Troublesome early on uh and just having that Warrior to deflect the early Scout makes it so much easier uh so after the Scout after the warrior at that point you would then go into the Brickyard so the Brickyard is going to provide you heaps of production and keep in mind we're going to do this in in the subsequent playthrough that's that we'll do after this little little bit right here uh and then so from there you'd go into a settler then you can do a a second settler but by that time you will have unlocked the library and you can quickly pop the library out takes a couple of turns because you've already got the all of your production is set up you're geared ready to go and then straight back into more settlers that's it the only pit stop you're doing is at the settlers uh and because of that it means that you're able to keep that that science flowing quite High throughout the mid game and you're also able to guarantee your follow-up expansions and that's why I think mining is the best opening now keep in mind not every single opening is going to be viable on every single spawn there's going to be spawns where you've only got the option to put down wood cutters or options or or spawns that well you've only got the option to put down farms and that's okay but it's about understanding look being able to look at your spawn and go okay well hold on I know that mines are the best because they allow me to get into libraries faster so I should look for those and if I can't find them that's okay I can go into the wood cutters because wood cutters are still going to be a high production start and if I can't find them that's all right I've got water nearby and I can put fishing boats on the the water I can get the pantheon that allows me to increase how much production they've got and then worst case scenario you've only got Farms well it probably just roll that one now speaking of rolls let's take this one back to turn one let's have a look at how it actually plays out we're going to do up to 30 turns uh we're going to uh try and emulate our success here and we're going to explain our decision- making uh and and go through and and try and guide exactly where everything needs to fit in perfectly okay so we're at turn one we're playing Maria and we're playing the Greeks and the reason why we're doing this combo is because this is a combo that doesn't have any advantage whatsoever to anything other than influence I guess is probably it I guess we've also got the hoplight but you know there's no bonuses like Ben Franklin's got to early production or early science buildings it's purely just as standard as you can get now with regard to our momentos or momentos I think I've been saying that wrong my entire life we've just taken expansionist as well as cultural which are like the base base ones and I think that most people will agree that those are pretty kind of stock standard that you'll have them in your games if you want to take them so let's go through our playthrough so we already know where we're going to settle we're going to be settling in this position here and that's just simply because it's got the fresh water we know that it's got fresh water because it's next to the navigable river so we'll go ahead and we'll settle and we'll look towards our first production so I'm going to start off with one Scout and we typically want to move our Scout in the path of least resistance and that is going to be down towards this angle so we'll move down towards the South now even though I know the map layout right I know that there's a natural wonder over here I know there's a city state over here I know that we've got pakui down here and we've got Jose Rosal over here I'm still going to play the exact the game the same way that I would play it if I didn't know all the decisions will be based on the information that we've got now because we're going for a mining start here that means that we're going to be moving into let me open our Tech we're going to be moving into uh our Pottery opening so that's going to give us plus one production on our mines once we've got the Brickyard so we'll do that and we'll go for our second round of production so I'm going to open up with a hoplight as well uh so we'll use our hoplight to scout early on uh and uh we'll bring him back if we need to uh so we're going to start by taking the first mine we've got the iron which is great and we'll move over onto the culture and of course we're always going to take the culture in this circumstance the sooner we can get to Chie the better it's going to be very advantageous for us we could look to move down towards this direction this actually isn't a bad little spot and over here we'll send our hopl over in this direction and now we're going to use a technique that I know it's a little bit um how do I say this politely uh it's a little bit controversial in the Civ Community but I do think it's worthwhile if you haven't got it mapped already make sure you do uh so under configure it's the force next turn button and the reason why that's important is because it allows you to roll over the turn without doing the things that it's asking you so I've got production right now I've got six production and I don't want to spend it on a scout or a hoplight or a granary I just want to keep that production and roll it over into the next turn and by doing that it allows me to essentially pre-build my the next thing that's about to come out right now or the next turn so let's go ahead and complete this this turn so even though in this situation so this is one of those things where it's like uh you know 24 hours ago right now the the the guy that you're talking to would have taken this tile every single time I never would have thought okay well I want to try and minmax all of the mins that I'm getting but now it's it's been brought to light and uh it's definitely things are things are different now uh so what we're going to do is we'll go into mysticism that's always our first default opening our government we're going to go into oligarchy because it's it's nice and simple look typically you know what we are playing on Dat and I do want to go for all of the Wonders we're going to we're go classical Republic and I do that just so that we can get the production speed uh and you can't really do that without uh without having them uh so plus one production and science on the palace we want to really make as much production as we can uh with regard to our um our Pantheon we don't care that much about it there's a lot of good pantheons that we could take so for us you know we it's much of a muchness happiness or gold we're going to take gold still asking us to do this one and our final uh we're still being told that we need to do our production so we'll go ahead and we'll cancel that now that we've got Pottery research that means we can begin our production it's the brickyard and we haven't really thought about where we're going to be putting these things down where are we going to be putting our Brickyard down well for me there's already a clear end so this one's going to be a library right here because it's adjacent to the iron uh so that's probably going to be the library and the blacksmith and that will be adjacent to the city center as well so that gives us a nice little bonus here um and then on this position right here we've got adjacency for two mountains uh which means this is a perfect Monument spot which means this position right here it doesn't really do much for us so I think this is definitely the best spot on top of that after we've got the Brickyard on this tile it then allows us to Leap Frog to another mine tile so that to me seems like a no-brainer so we'll go ahead put that down uh we've got a bit of a bug at the moment I think this has been introduced in the new patch but you can see we're already at halfway through on our production for the Brickyard so we'll make sure that we go ahead and do that and we've got a scout but we'll come down to this uh we can spend three turns of production in a thany and gain a boost to the earliest available technology or we can move on now normally in this position I would probably take that cuz we quite literally just finished our technology so it makes a lot of sense to do it but because we're doing a a playr where it's like a more General playr I'm just I'm just going to take the science all right well we've met Jose rosale so now that we know Jose Ral is down here this means that we want to forward settle him we want to get a settler down here ASAP but the other thing that we know is that we've got a natural wonder right here and we need to settle this as well and I would say look would you would you forward settle Jose if you gave up this natural wonder probably not I think under all circumstances you're going to want to take the natural wonder first it is by far the um the number one priority and then this will be our second priority here so that's what we'll look to do uh we made a bit of a mistake here we've walked right next to painted rock but that's okay we'll uh we we we'll be able to get out and now we've also met piki so let's see if we can spot his capital okay so we've spotted the capital so now we know okay p shak's probably a bit more of a threat so we want to get maybe one maybe two settlers out in this situation uh we're going to go ahead and take this one we're going apply to the fields or to the cities now because it it's offering us double the food compared to the production you better believe we're going to take the food right because if if we look here we're we're producing we've got six food and eight production we're focusing our production so for us it makes sense here to always take the food so we'll go ahead we'll do that uh and we've now got another growth uh so we're going to grow to our mine so that's our third mine that we've got now we're about to hit brickyard and this is going to be our power Spike get ready there it is 1 2 3 four hammers our production has now gone to 12 and that's why this start is so crazy good so now in this period here we've got a nice little downtime where we can look to get a couple of settlers out it's going to take two turns for us to get settlers and we've got our first offering uh here there's a part of me that thinks okay maybe it's better to save my uh my influence for piki cuz he's closer but I Love Culture I Really Love Culture so I'm not going to say no to that that is that is a deal I'm always going to take especially this early on you'd be crazy not to so you can try and overthink it as much as you like and uh but at the end of the day you're always going to be able to say the the culture is worth taking now I'm just curious here yeah okay that that's probably what I suspected was going to happen we're not going to be able to get the goody Hut there I think Jose R is probably going to get it uh but uh we we might come down over here and try and Scout towards pasak CTI so we've got an offering offer here three happiness in both cities or we can pay nothing for it and then get influence hey we've already got 16 a turn 18 a turn it's it's already kind of crazy there's a part of me that just wants to accept it right because can I can we double check you can't actually see how many diplomatic actions you've got but look uh normally I would say no but the fact that we've got so much influence I'm still saying no I'm still saying no sorry sorry the rizzler unfortunately loses out today and uh this is all all pretty tough land over here you can see just mines and and Forest but we did find what have we got 30 culture or fine production to the nearest settlement F production is really not a lot 30 cult is decent even for 25 gold to pay for that I think that's fine and that should almost push us to complete mysticism here in fact it did we'll take that uh so now we can choose our Pantheon and we can see what's available so I would say the best pantheons for us in this circumstance is always going to be City Patron goddess this is by far the best Pantheon that there is in the game full stop uh there's there's really no questions uh about it but other candidates maybe God of the Sun it it's not terrible god of wisdom is actually not that bad uh same with goddess of festivals quite good but we're just going to go ahead with City Patron goddess so let's do that so we've managed to secure that on turn 10 which is decent now keep in mind we are playing on the online speed and that's just because we're doing this video and I I you know I want to get through this relatively quickly I don't want to be here for 6 hours with you guys going through the age of antiquity and now we're at this point where we've got three turns until writing is completed and we've got two turns on our settler so we're going to make another settler and this is where the power of uh of this production start comes in you've got so much damn production it's absolutely crazy uh the the level that you can get with it what do we got out here looks like we got a bit of a Barb Camp potentially so we can come back up and loop around here but this looks like the end of the continent over in this direction so I think it's probably going to be more valuable coming down around like this we'll come back down again and we can now pick up our fourth mine so that's going to give us a huge amount of production here and we've got an option for open borders now we' never got an offer so I always wait one turn with uh our leaders just to before or to see if they make an offer but piki didn't make an offer to us now he's actually met someone else it's not Jose Rosal it's somebody else there's a chance that he's already offered them uh and he won't have any uh he won't have any influence cuz he needs influence to accept our agreement so we're going to go ahead and offer it to him and so he's accepted it to or accepted us now I could also send this down to Jose Rosal the local festival and there's a chance that he accepts that and then we get more happiness from from our investment but I really just want to kind of push the relationship up with him so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to offer that to him and that will push the relationship up twice as fast than if we just had one so we'll continue expanding and continue moving we've actually located another uh we can lose this unit or we can move on uh I think very much we're going to move on we we're not in the business of losing units thank you though uh and we've got our next settler which is now going to be coming down so we're going to forward settle here of course we're going to look to emulate the exact same way that we played earlier uh so will forward settle down on this position here next settler is going to come here now at at this point you could look at this and say okay you got one turn until riding's finished do you force forcibly end the turn and wait for it or do you go for another settler and the only reason why I'm doing another settler here is because this spot right here is going to be contested right like that that position right here this tile is very good we get we pick up all these resources it's a perfect blocker City uh this is amazing what is going on right there there's there's something wrong with my8 I don't know what it is uh but uh all right at this point we probably want to go into I think culture is fine here as well and now we're going to move into writing two now one thing to double check before we go into writing two is how long it's going to take us our our library so our library is going to take four turns so let's go ahead and put our library down right now so even though we get the plus 31 here or the 3+ one over here we want to put our library here because we know we're going to get that bonus no matter what that's the adjacency bonus from the palace so we'll go ahead and put our library in that position we can even move it up to the top of the queue just so it's it's in there nice and snug and then from there we've got two turns on the settler four turns on the library we've got six turns on riding the Mastery so we'll look to take that and we'll continue moving down I think we want to probably do that get a bit of a vision in here he's got a nice look and cap lots of food but as we know where we where are we going over here as we know food is not the the best resource early on so we've settled now this is going to be aggressive uh and I think it's within uh eight or nine tiles somewhere in in that region so this is going to hurt him but the good news is uh so we've settled too close to him but because we got these Endeavors off before we settled the risk of him rejecting the Endeavors is very low but after we settle the risk of him rejecting the the Endeavor is much higher so we always want to try and get those Endeavors out before uh we forward settle somebody we're going to take this time right here it's going to give us jeez have a look how good that is so it's oh it's vegetated that's why so it's getting the bonus from the Redwood Forest that is a that is a that's a good looking tile uh keep in mind incense incense is one of the worst resources in the Antiquity age I if I was doing a resource tier list uh it would be the third worst resource the worst resource is this one right here Jade absolutely terrible incense uh together with silk is probably the the worst resources though uh so we'll go ahead we'll slot that bad boy in I think it gives us a total of uh wow zero thank thank thanks incense do nothing I remember the first time I saw incense I was like that that tile's crazy it gives me plus one science and I get an extra 10% science and I've got 10 science it's like two science that's like a 20% boost and then I actually realized what it did and I was I was disappointed okay we can become suant of an independent power or disperse an independent power uh I think we're more likely to disperse an independent actually we do have a lot of influence we could become a suin I I think we could do that we've got this one over here we could look to try and befriend it right now but I kind of want to keep this in the bag in the back pocket just in case he tries to denounce me then we're going to be able to to cancel out the denouncement and then that doesn't happen so now let's look at where we're going down the tech tree the the the key here is that we're going into Mastery of mysticism because that's going to give us plus two food in all settlements and while food might not be powerful in the capital it is very powerful in our settlements M or in in our towns mainly because our towns scale with food very well they get that both that growth bonus all right well we got a nice little bonus here for culture we'll definitely happily take that one and we'll take the plus two gold as well uh so we're up to 22 culture now so things are starting to kick quite nicely into gear uh we can look to move this scout past but I kind of want to move it back just to cover over over here on painted rock cuz I don't really I don't really know about these guys over here uh we we want to try and bring back our uh is this a legion no it's a hoplight we want to bring back our hopl we've got our great General gosh I I I I'll stop eventually uh calling these the names of of games g past and our next expansion is going to be on this tile so the game saying that that should be the the straight route that's all you need to take and let's see if we can get another got down here at tent camp so we'll look to take that and our next setle this is going to really upset him so we're going to go from an an a relationship of eight down to a relationship of 12 yeah so we've we' forward settled him again I think this one also might be considered a forward settle on him in this position uh and not only that look we we've already forward settled at this point we might as well go take his tiles so let's do that we've got uh we've got that and that's going to make the relationship even worse because now we've got borders touching and uh borders are not like skin uh we don't like them touching uh all right so let's keep moving down over towards this this position we'll start taking our natural wonder now we've got another offer for six culture that pushes up us up to 24 very happy to take that and it looks like that 10 Camp is gone I don't see it but I do see Jose Rosal big very cheeky down here we're going to continue making our way down we found another city state and we found another ruin over here so we could look to try and snag that one and we've got a little bit of a trouble right now so we need to get our top light over here ASAP our library is under construction so we can't really get a we could look to try and screen with our army Commander let's see let's see if we can make this oh that's not good that's not good and he's on the tile that we want to get to hold on they're ignoring us if you stand still they can't see you Jose result offering us up some more happiness we're not going to take it uh but we are definitely going to take that oh that is a wonderful plus three food in towns uh this is definitely one of the best ones I think if if you're going to if you're going to put them up on a list that is definitely the case so now we're going to head down into animal husbandry we've finished our Mastery uh which has provided us with a codex it's also given us plus one science on science buildings now for some reason our math has been a little bit off here and that's okay it does happen uh but uh we we'll get it all sorted out even if it's only for a turn or two without the without the uh the library I think it's still absolutely fine so now that we've gone into these uh so we've gone into the Mastery for mysticism I think the most important thing is to move up towards entertainment Coliseum is one of the best Wonders that you can get in the Antiquity age and uh the sooner we get it the better so I do we want to hold ground here I I'm scared that they're going to double slam us cuz if they double slam us we could be in trouble and if we move to this tile yeah I think we just hold position on on this spot right now let's so we're going to end turn oh my gosh it's true if if you just I have no idea why they're not attacking me that is wild dude they it's like they don't see you all right so we're going to settle in this position here so we've managed to get three settlements down at a pretty early time here uh on top of that we've also got our library uh we're sitting on 15 science we're going to go slot our codex it's already slotted uh so let's let's put it in the library that way our yields look a little bit better lovely uh and uh we can continue expanding but at this stage things are looking good we'll go ahead and we'll take the uh marble just because it gives us the culture which is very very nice even though it's tempting to want to expand over towards our flat planes and try and grow I think the the early culture just makes so much sense and here our expansion is going to be based on securing this land we're denying this tile right here uh from him so if we take a look yeah we're we're fine here we're fine I I I don't mind doing this so we'll go ahead we'll take that tile that means borders are now touching uh so we're going to have a slight reduction in our relationship and plus one production on a palace you know we're going to take that and we're going to head straight back into the settler making so we'll throw in another how many more settlers are we going to do maybe another three what are we at at the moment we're at four so I think Seven's a decent amount just to kind of start off with and then you can always add in you know another five a little bit later uh he will stick the great general or the uh the commander into into the City and it looks like we've come across another continent and we want to take that ruin thank you we can claim the wine or we can tear down the winery I don't actually mind the 37 Gold I think that's quite good now we do have a little bit I say a little bit a little bit of uh a little bit of coin that's stacking up here and normally the way that I like to spend my coin is in emergency situations so say that you've got a city that's under siege or a town that's under siege you could buy a hoplight in it uh but the other way that I like to spend it is in in these towns because they can't build buildings themselves so you need to purchase the uh the building in those towns uh whereas like you know we could purchase an alar in here but it it just doesn't seem like a reasonable Endeavor uh just simply because we can already build it okay so now we've reached this point where we we don't have any mines left to build on uh so where do we go from here so I I think that we can probably start looking towards whatever the best yields are so we could take this one here and we're going to be building on this soon so we're going to be able to reallocate this citizen a monument is going to be going down here as soon as we unlock it uh we'll be looking to do that uh let's go ahead and sleep and we can probably let's move you out over here oh we can't actually get it this turn there I don't really want to fight on the river cuz that's uh we're just doing it we're just doing it we'll just take it he slams The Grand great General that's wonderful that that is perfect and we can just move to this position here we're not going to move the hopl on top uh we could even we could even heal this one up actually no we we'll we'll slam him as well so we're pretty low right now but we'll be okay and now we'll take our final natural wonder tile and here once again we could look to try and expand down towards this position uh but I think it's probably going to be more valuable just us moving back up towards this side we could go for food here in fact food right now in in this town is going to be really important so even though The Granary only offers plus one like if we think about the food like we're getting we've got six food so going to seven food here is not terrible and I can definitely see Farms that we're going to be putting down but I think overall just getting in the Brickyard sooner rather than L it's probably going to make even more sense than that okay so we're going to continue moving out to resources next one up is going to be our gypsum so we'll go ahead and we'll take that and now we'll move down into masonry there is an argument here that you could move into irrigation cuz it provides the settlement limit and that's going to help you uh because you've got a four out of three at the moment so that'll that'll you know give you a little bit of Leverage there but my thinking is you probably want to get into masonry sooner because not only does it provide you access to the monument but it also gives you plus one production on your mines and quaries and how many mines and quaries have we got 1 2 3 4 here and that that's just in that base we've also got a lot of quaries so it makes a lot of sense to get it sooner uh the realistically the amount that you're losing uh the amount that you're losing from having that it's it's not particularly big um or like if we were to picked that up it it wouldn't be it wouldn't be gamechanging okay so we could look to move out towards this position on the east side we've got a lot of influence that's stacked up but the rizzler is looking to give a little bit of Riz over here to the the hoal people uh so we're just going to bite our time with that there's a part of me that really wants to settle out here because we know that there should be a settlement out here somewhere uh but instead we're going to head out over towards this side and we're just going to wait because remember the moment that this turns over to his uh to his city state it will stop fighting with us so that's what we're going to do and uh speaking of fighting looks like we've got the man himself Augustus all right so let's check I don't want to offer Augustus anything cuz I suspect he's very far away from us right now I think did we meet him down here I don't know where we met him I don't oh we've got it could be over here that he is I don't think he over here I don't actually remember meeting him in in in the games that I played previously like I I I met him met him but I never actually saw where he lived I I didn't know where he lived he's not like Tubman you just know where they live uh so in this position once again we're going to try now uh to see if we can get oh you you think you're going to denounce us you think you're going to denounce us that a't that ain't happening it ain't happening Chief so now that we've canceled the denouncement we've still got influence in the back pocket we can try it's very likely that he's going to reject this though it's incredibly likely that he rejects this right now uh we'll try oh he accepted oh he accepted he double accepted that's great so that means that we're going to trickle in influence and this is part of like a real key component early on is managing your relationships and making sure people don't go to war with you and look I I know earlier on I did say that we we've specifically picked like Greece as well as maavi because they don't really have any bonuses towards city building but they definitely do have bonuses towards relationship building so I look I I I'll take that criticism I'll take that complaint for sure let's continue moving on uh and we're going to heal in this position just here I don't think we need to actually get any units down here at the moment um how are we doing with regard to do we have any gold I want to have a look and see I don't think we've got any gold there is gold down here so we could in instead of going into public life let's go into code of laws it's going to take us a little bit longer but what we're going to do is we're going to get a Trader and then we're going to come down here trade with kokia get the gold and then after we've got the then we'll buy everything for our settlements it might take a little bit longer this way to do it but it's probably going to be the smartest way for us to do that all right our expansions continue we've got another settler that's going to be coming out shortly uh and then after that we're going to be getting our Monument down and now we found he is down here all right we we we took well they've taken quite a bit of damage down here let's take a look and see uh oh okay next expansion so we could look to go into the marble I'm just going to keep it simple we've got we've got a threat at the front here and even though I was just talking about buying stuff I think like the most important thing here is just going to be securing territory so let's go ahead we'll buy The Granary and then we'll just drop in I think on this time probably makes the most sense uh just cuz we are in a in a town here we're going to take all of that and we'll happily take the culture and at this point it's it's all smooth sailing now we could go masonry for the plus one production on buildings uh but that's only plus one production in the cap it doesn't really mean a lot whereas like the irrigation tech means a lot in this situation uh we're going to cancel this settler and we're going to put our Monument down because we know we've got a plus four Monument so we'll go ahead and do that that's going to kick out the citizen and where do we allocate that citizen we don't really have anywhere good to put the citizen we could this tile right here is incredible you know what we could do uh we could our next citizen our next growth is in nine turns and that's a long time and I want that tile right now so I'm going to hold that instead uh and we are going we're going to just hold that citizen just keep them here we're not going to expand into any specific tile and uh now that painted rock has been taken let's go out and take a look over towards this East Side so we've still got our citizen Jose razal he's offering us happiness we're just going to take the influence for the moment and we'll happily take the gold did we did that didn't that did not go through sometimes they don't go through it's it can be a little bit strange and now our next expansion which tile is the best one here I mean none of these are going to get fresh water and oh we can't we we can't actually build here so there there is there is 100% a city state down here uh so we're just going to go for as close as possible to the water I think that probably makes the most sense and once again our Capital wants to grow we're not going to allow it for the moment we've still got that citizen in our back pocket that we're going to spend whenever we oh that was the wrong you you came to the wrong Neighborhood Mr Scout I think you might be the First lost unit of the game uh I I always do my best to try and keep the the units alive but it can be difficult now one other thing to note is we put this town down and we want to expand but we can't because we we're expanding our capital and I'm curious how you guys feel about this so leave leave a comment down below if you feel strongly either way do you think it's okay to forcibly end turn so that you don't have to spend something so like for me it's about making sure I end that turn so now I'm going to be able to grow to this tile which is a three production tile and I I don't feel like I've exploited the game in any way I don't think I've done anything wrong it's just that it's like it's not an obvious mean if that makes sense and I know that sometimes people can feel a little bit iffy about that so I'm curious what you think uh We've now got a Brickyard down here which is a plus4 I think it's just going to make more sense for us to take that sooner rather than later we'll expand our territory down here we've now got access to this one and we've picked up the gypsum we could look to try and take the Jade uh even though Jade's not really that important of a resource uh we we still want to have the Jade just mainly because it's going to give us that uh potential 20 uh resources that we want at the end so I'm has been completed and now we're going to go for our next settler we're at turn 28 at the moment and our Scout almost went down but not quite not quite how how we doing over here Jose Rosal is also going after this one he's he's looking to RIS up everybody right now he's doing a wonderful job as well and let's keep scouting out over to here because we know that there's an expansion out there but we're pretending that we don't uh and now why is it saying that this is a better spot and why can't we settle there maybe I want to settle there is there a city state out here potentially I mean there's there's an ice wall so now that we've got irrigation we're up to four five out of four on our settlement limit which is going to bring the unhappiness down slightly so instead of with this one you can see that it's we've got four production Four Happiness and we're only at 3.5 so we're losing about you know what I'm trying I'm trying to very quickly do the math in my head but it's it's not going to work i' I'd have to stop and and and think about it and I I just want to play we're going to take that culture and now we're going to move towards bronze working uh because bronze working is our key upgrade here this is really going to allow us to push if we want to push it's going to allow us to defend if we need to defend and it's going to allow us to move into a more reasonable uh amount of production on top of that um it also is going to give us if we take a look in here sorry uh it's also going to give us access to the bronze working Mastery which is in my opinion the one of the best masteries in the game have a look at this plus two production on Military buildings which by the way your barracks is a military building so that goes from 2 to four but plus three combat strength for infantry units that is C crazy so if if you're maybe if you're playing in a multiplayer game online essentially what you've done is you've just rushed science you're quick science building as quickly as you can and now you're rushing towards your tier 2 unit and you're rushing towards an upgrade for them as well underneath that so it gets absolutely crazy uh just how powerful it is uh but we'll continue on moving forward here expanding or looking out towards that side I think we'll settle a city or town right out here on the edge and that's going to push us up to six we'll take the dies over the pearls yeah we'll take the dies over the pearls and we'll go ahead and grab the gold we've also got access to another codex we could take the influence but the Codex is infinitely better not infinitely but it's it's still pretty good uh I don't I think it's probably just better to have you in the capital uh the happiness and we roll over now to turn 30 so this is going to be the final turn even though to be honest there's a part of me that would really love to just keep playing through at the same time I just want to make you know I I don't want every video that I post to be 90 minutes long I and I know there are people that would watch the video wait did I just accidentally roll I'm sorry I rolled over to 31 all right we're going to the no no I'm just kidding I'm just kidding but seriously okay let's we'll we'll we'll do a turn 31 stock take and and see where we're at uh just actually I'm just going to I'll stop playing Okay so we've got the four towns down over here we've got these two down here we've got the seventh one that's coming out towards this position at the moment it doesn't really look like the rizzler is out here we see he's somewhere in this region but overall this is a good spot and on top of that we've got our science uh that's being maximized by our um by our library we've got our monument that is absolutely pumping out culture and now the big question becomes what are we going to do with our gold because at at this point and I very intentionally made sure we didn't spend our gold this game with the exception of like down here uh and that is because gold is really one of those resources that you can just do anything with right so we're sitting at 54 gold a turn right now but you could easily increase this up to 70 80 gold per turn very quickly uh just by getting a couple of buildings in in these outer towns but where I think the gold is probably going to be the most important at this point is going to be in Sparta Sparta right now is an incredible candidate for a city it's got a lot of Base production if we take a look at it you can see it's already sitting at 10 it's got the natural wonder here as well it's got a lot of Mines plenty of resources and plenty of tiles a lot of space to grow uh this is a perfect candidate and I think spending gold on going into a city here makes a lot of sense on top of that I really value having science and I really value having culture and there's a really wonderful spot that I can put down my library with and it's right here but not only that I want my library right now because well we we need we need our library as soon as possible on top of that we've also got the monument which gets an adjacency bonus towards uh the uh towards natural wonder we could technically put it on this tile right here but then we'd get rid of the Vegeta Forest so probably not worth it uh and then we can't put it on this tile so we could go ahead and we can't uh we can purchase it right there so now we pumped up those numbers a little bit more the moment that we've got that City we're looking to take advantage of it and now we can start working on a garden and that's one of the ways that you can use your culture or rather your your gold to really bring your game online a lot faster um and uh yeah essentially that's it so look o overall cuz I I don't know exactly what the title of this video is going to be but I just want you to know I still value the granery I still think it's an important building I just don't think it's the important building that a lot of us come to civ7 see and click immediately cuz it's the first thing that we've got available we there there's definitely a little bit more depth to the game than just clicking The Granary first and I hope that this video has achieved that I hope that you've enjoyed watching this video uh if you've got any constructive criticism leave it down in the comments if You' got any rude things to say as well Chuck them in the comments I read those as well uh if you've enjoyed the video feel free to leave a like and of course if you're looking forward to more civ7 content then make sure you hit that subscribe button because there is always time for one more turn