cabert - what is a good strat for this one?
I've tried a few starts with Julius Caeser and Mansa Musa.
My thoughts re: war:
If you measure the passage of time not in turns, but in technological advances, it takes over four times longer to walk anywhere on quick as it does on marathon. Your units cost 50% more, take 4 times as long to walk to the battle, your siege takes 4 times as long to reduce enemy defenses, then the captured city is in rebellion for 4 times as long, and (finally) it takes your workers 4 times as long to walk to the new territory before they can start making up for the sloppy AI.
Partly, the added time delay gives your rival more time to build defensive units, build walls, grow culture, and, possibly, tech to a new military technology (thus units which go a long way to fight are obsolete by the time they get there).
That can be overcome on Noble.
The bigger drawback is return on investment. Because it takes so much longer to conquer a and convert a city, you're exploiting its production for a much shorter time period. This is severely exacerbated by the midieval start era, whereby a chunk of history has already passed you by. The noble difficulty level almost makes things worse, too, because the AI have fewer goodies and less-developed terrain for you to take over.
As Caeser
I played pangea, low sea level, and 14 rival civs to make sure I could conquer nearby cities early on. That part of the plan was, I think, smart. But the praetorians didn't help as much as I'd expected. After the first city or two, you really need 4-6 catapults moving in with the assault force so you can reduce the defenses in a single turn. I think an aggressive leader would do just as well with normal swordsman (and then you could pick a better second trait, like financial).
As SpaceMan Samusa
Financial is always a good trait, and avoiding anarchy is more critical at quick speed. Hence the choice.
A skirmisher rush can take out one rival on a crowded map, but overall I found it more profitable to REX on a sparsely-populated map.
The AI gets all the default religions, which becomes annoying because religions don't spread fast enough. So twice I teched for music first, and both times I popped a great artist whom I used to found Christianity. In my current game I have eight cities, very few units, no war, the Great Library and the Apostolic Palace (for bonus hammers). But it still feels slow. I'm at 1600, researching Education (I already have machinery, civil service, paper, printing press, and a few others). I'll let you know how it turns out.
Can anyone remind me how to see the list of submitted entries?
Cheers,
Jason
I had 1966 as well, you must have had more points then me.
