possible quick expansion idea

[albiedamned]

My friend at work and I were just kicking around an idea for jump starting your expansion. I'm not at home so I can't try it, but I thought I'd throw it out here.

Start building a settler right away as soon as you found your capital, even though it will be ready long before you grow to size 3. Use your worker to build a road or two, but then right before your city is set to grow to size 2, add the worker to the city so that your growth takes you to 3. I believe this strategy is the quickest possible way to get that first settler.

Some obvious downsides:
- If you don't have squares you can work which give you 2 food (grassland, bonus squares etc.), forget it because you still won't grow fast enough.
- Using this strategy, you haven't built a single defensive unit.
- Also using this strategy, you haven't explored at all. Therefore you don't have a good idea which direction to send your settler, and might wind up wasting turns moving him around.
- Also because you haven't explored, you haven't gotten any potential benefits from barbarians villages.

So there are some major drawbacks, but I don't think there is any way to build a settler faster than this.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

I tried this at my friends house and found that it works best with an Expansionist civ. The extra scout goes exploring for a new city site, and could get some barbarian huts. The worker should irrigate a square to give faster growth and build a road square to give more money. Although this is quickest way to get 2 cities, i'd rather do something like this.

(1) Found city, use scout to go exlporing, use worker to irrigate. If no irrigation, build roads and mines
(2) In city, build a warrior.
(3) If there is enough food forsize 3 city, build a settler. If not, build a temple or any other culture buildings. if you don't have that, then build anything else.
(4)By now, your scout should have ransacked a few barbarian villages, and found a new spot for a city
(5) Build settler, the build temple.

Repeat.