18 civilizations. :lol: Playing as Victoria I've squashed out neighbours: Catherine, Asoka and Shaka. It's the year 400BC and my economy is totally grinded to a halt, we're talking 10% here. :lol: But I'm #1 in land, population and military. :crazyeye: Researching Currency and will probably follow up with Code of Laws.

Obviously neighbours still all around. I just wanted a quick tip. I'm going to stop warring and build my economy up and hopefully get Feudalism to get Vassalage before I start warring again. Do you think this is a good idea or keep the war machine rolling?

Also noticed that the victory conditions are different for a standard map? It's 30% population and 51% land area. Is that normal? :confused: Normally, I play large maps and I'm sure it's much higher than that.

Looks like population will be easy I already have 18% but only 10% land area.

Also, Huayna Capac got jealous and declared war on Sitting Bull. :lol: This should be fun. But I don't Sitting Bull to lose they're far away and if Sitting Bull is gone this would give more power to Capac. But I don't know how to help him aside from war? :confused: He has archery and mysticism so at least that's good news.

Also, I've only built one wonder: Statue of Zeus and that's all I'll build. Thought it might come in handy. :)

Land and pop percent goes down the more civs in the game. I don't think map size counts at all.

As to your other question keeping the war machine rolling is OK if you can take cities or pillage fast enough to keep your economy afloat. It gets easier once you have currency so you can build markets and run merchants or capture or build a shrine for the religious income. Settled great prophets are +5 gold too.

Once you get currency you can also sell techs to people for cash. I like to sell metal casting to my next target so they build forges instead of defenders ;)

Thanks. Actually I should rephrase that question, should I concentrate on getting vassals or should I still keep eliminating rivals completely? Economy-wise, I think it's more efficient to get vassals but I don't know.

Don't vassals add to your city maintenance. Sure you're not supporting captured cities (though it's not like you keep them all anyway) but how badly would multiple vassal maint taxes hurt would be my question.

Don't vassals add to your city maintenance. Sure you're not supporting captured cities (though it's not like you keep them all anyway) but how badly would multiple vassal maint taxes hurt would be my question.

Me too. I've had about 3 vassals on a large map (did fine financially) but I'm going to have to have a heck of a lot more vassals in this game to get domination.

I'm beginning to think razing (except capitals) might be a good idea. It's not like I have any diplomatic relations with anyone anyway. :lol:

Vassalage or Free Speech for domination victory?

I'm thinking running a CE with Victoria I think Free Speech will provide so much synergy and not to mention pushing out the borders for even quicker land annexation.

I mentioned that I got the SoZ and I'm thinking about building NE in that city so I can get Great Artists faster with which I plan to culture bomb. I haven't tried this strategy but I think if it all goes to plan I could be seeing my earliest domination victory yet.

You can just whack the culture slider up to 100% near the end so free speech isn't that useful really. Building a load of settlers (keep them in reserve) works if you have a load of empty land as well, you only need to pay extra maintenance for a few turns at the end and you don't really care if your army disbands as long as you hit the land domination limit.

Worldbuilder.. :D