 After my defeat at the hands of the wicked Chinese, being advised by several of my friends on how to actually play Civ V, I can see the defeat, and this is now our third game of Civ V, the rubber match. I've never played on an Inland Sea map before, especially so tiny. So this will be very interesting. So I am the Shoshone, and Scott is Babylon. We're both early Civs, so they'll sort of balance out in that regard. And the Inland Sea map supposedly should have a saltwater ocean in the middle surrounded by a ring of land with no wraparounds. You can see this is actually the edge of the world. Two-player games are weird. I'm not sure how much this will affect me and how I play the game, but ships will probably matter, especially because I'm going to be on the coast. So should I move? There's always the debate of do you move your first settler? Now I could move him, but this space does not appear better than this space, because look, I got this nice bay, I got access to some luxury goods. Pretty much just going to start it right here. Now the first power of the Shoshone, who I've never played as before, is that my cities start with a ton more land. I'm going to try to take advantage of that and crowd him out. The other advantage is that these guys can supposedly pick what they get out of a hut when they open a hut, which I've never seen before. So I'm curious how that'll work. And so look at that native tongue. They choose benefit when discovering ancient ruins. I've not decided what I'll go for yet, but I think I'm going to go for culture first. Because while now there's another thing supposedly if I choose advanced weapons, they don't upgrade to an archer like a scout normally would. They go all the way to composite fucking Bowman. That could be off the hook. I could just find a hut, get a composite Bowman and just start menacing Scott. And I don't know what he'd do. He might just quit. I don't know if I'll do that or not. So my first one though, I don't want to do that right away because I'm not going to build another scout immediately. I'm going to build my monument first like I always do. Of course, maybe I should build a scout first with this sieve. Just got around a little bit. Oh, and there's one right there. But I might take the culture bonus first because I'd like this guy to speed around the map getting as many different things as I can. I want to find as many huts as possible. Ooh, sugar. I'm in a good spot. It's a little bit out of the way. One, two, three, four, five. So I'd have to build a city like up here somewhere to get it or expand my borders otherwise. So that's annoying. I'll deal with that later. Again, weird map. We'll see how this goes. But the other thing is that these guys are stronger than a normal scout. So I can use them in the early game as a military unit. So if I get anywhere near Scott, I'm just going to menacing with these guys and I'm going to build a bunch and sort of keep an eye on him for the whole game. Unlike the previous game, I cannot take Scott's ignorance of sieve 5 for granted. He knows the game better and I'm going to have to play accordingly. So look at this. This is the choice I have. Do I build another pathfinder now and try to rush those huts and maybe get more culture out of it and then build a monument second? I think the answer is yes. Fuck it. Full tilt. Sales of the wind. Let's go. So in terms of this, I don't have any particular affinity. If I'm going to go for these huts going around that way first, I don't think very hard about what I want to go for. And I think because Scott is going to rush writing, I probably need to focus on science pretty hard. There's nothing here where mining will help me in the immediate term. Now I guess I could do this and then chop down these forests right away to get a production boost once I build my first settler or first worker, but I'm not going to build a worker right away. So I think I want to go down the pottery road and then I'll start going down the religion road. I think that is what I want to do. Boats will matter more in this one. So a boat might actually be good. I'm going to go for pottery. That sets me up. Even though it doesn't let me take advantage of these deer right away, but it'll let me get these guys right away and that's going to be real important. And there are no other decisions to make this early in the game except I could eschew the gold to build that guy at the same rate, essentially. One turn earlier. Will one turn matter? Will one turn matter for building him? I'd rather build up a little bit of gold. Let's see how this goes. So in terms of a long-term strategy, I'm pretty much going to send this guy up this way, getting as many of these ruins as I can and sort of feel out the extent of this map. The second one is going to go down this way to do the exact same thing. And it really depends on what I find out there before I determine where I'm going to go after this. And I chose pottery because I would go for pottery independent of what I find out there. But what I go for next will be highly dependent upon what city I'm going to settle next. What I choose here, similarly, is going to be highly dependent upon what I find out there. So I can't actually make any significant decisions beyond that. Other than, I'm going to build two, possibly three, of these guys and harass Scott as much as possible. He's going to feel safe because he can build those walls of Babylon. He's not going to build them right away. He's going to be tempted to build other things first. And even if he builds the walls, that means he would have military units so he'll have to hide his workers inside while I pillage and just sort of mess around and take all the huts from him. That is my intent. We'll see how well that plays out.