boring small island start

[bvanevery]

Comments and questions about the strategies I'm using in this game, are expected and encouraged.  Please make them in this thread.

I quit this game.  If you have followed any of my previous posts, you can guess what my settings are.  Only humans in this one.  Someone requested a visual for my AARs, and it helps that this time I have little to say about it.  At 11:30 PM it just didn't seem worth the mouseclicks anymore.  I really don't like it when lots of SPs go by that I want, that I can't do anything about.  Nor do I like invading Cha Dawn, as he never builds SPs and is always behind on tech.  I don't need more cities, my own are better placed and aren't unhappy about being captured.

I started in the center east of that island, where that lake-looking thing is.  The land there wasn't very good, and there was a lot of fungus that I subsequently cleared out.  It took me 5 turns just to settle my capitol, on the point of the west coast.  I chose Explore focus at the very beginning, knowing I'd need to get off this rock.  That always puts me behind on everything else and is making me really grumpy game after game.  I do not like these kinds of starts.  Also unusual is I got basically no mineral deposits on this land at all, so nothing to easily crank out SPs with.

After spreading onto my limited land as best I could, I did something unusual.  Instead of immediately making Transports to fish pods, I made a whole pile of Sea Colonies.  I settled all of them to the west on top of various resources.  On the positive side, it created a fairly permanent obstruction to Cha Dawn bothering me with boats.  It took quite a long time to garrison them, but eventually I had a wall of ships in port that would just blow away transports that stupidly tried to cross.  On the negative side, these cities were productively worthless.  That's a lot of early game expenditure on basically nothing, and part of why this game kinda blew chunks.

Yeah, the graph says I'm nominally most powerful.  I have no reason to really believe it, because other factions banged out all kinds of SPs that I couldn't even touch, despite having a fair number of the techs.  I did get The Human Genome Project using 2 Artifacts I found on my island.  After that it took forever to amass Artifacts and money, despite extensive exploration of the immediate area.  You'll note the area is denuded of pods; that's me at work.  In the upper left you can barely see one of my transports trying to sneak an Artifact home past Cha Dawn.  In the southwest you see Lal, whom I had a Magnanimous Truce with.  He landed on me during some sunspots, that's his scout on my southwest shore.  In the southeast is my ally Yang, who got choked by an even smaller island start.  I also allied with Miriam, who got me in a war with Zhakarov immediately.  I figured, better to pick on him than her!  They were both pretty far away.  Never met Morgan.

Bad start; I'm increasingly impatient with this; would rather put the mouseclicks into a different game.

2nd image is to see if the quality is better with a crop at 1200 pixels wide.

[bvanevery]

EPILOGUE:

I blew off this game.  It was perfectly viable, I've been in this position in games hundreds of times before.  But it's not enjoyable.  If you like your SPs too, maybe you'll go to school on the limited info I provided here and see it my way.

Does every writeup have to be massive?  Why not meditate on something short and sweet for a change?  You can see a naval defensive perimeter for dealing with an annoying near neighbor.  It worked fine; frankly it worked great.  Happy to share it with you.

This was also my 1st AAR to include screenshots.  I wasn't going to squander that new level of production effort on a lame game.