Second try:
Conquest victory in 1334AD. Still, that's with occasional reloading to compensate careless mistakes, could I ever take better
care of my undefended cities and straying workers?
My thoughts on strategic points in these Roman pangaea, always war games (all of these is vanilla, since I don't own Warlords):
1. Starting research sequence. Although we are Rome and have the great Praetorians, we need defenders better than warrior before we get Iron Working. That means we must produce Axemen or Archers. And of course Axemen is better than archers. But since this is Always War+Raging Barbs, we don't have much time to stray around. So the starting research sequence should be
BW (copper in sight) - Economic research (Agriculture, AH, The Wheel, Pottery)
BW (copper not in sight) - Hunting - Archery - Economic research
2. Scouting. We only need to scout the region that we can put a settler to connect the important resources (bronze, iron, horse), that is not too large, about 5-6 tiles away from capital in each direction. Further scouting is useless, and greatly increase the risk to meet possible enemies. We can safely bet that there must be some bronze or iron in that region.
Furthermore, it seems that AI archers would be much inclined to enter your territory if you HAVE entered theirs, so it is important to keep the scouting warrior outside any AI's territory.
3. Initial defense on capital. Well, that killed quite a few players in this GOTM! Be sure to save the second warrior to defend the capital. If Mansa Musa is around, one warrior might not be enough to defend his skirmishers! So the third warrior must defend the capital as well. As a rule of thumb, only send out the initial warrior to scout and leave all other warriors in your own territory.
4. Worker and improvements. An irritating thing in this game is that there will be a lot of AI archers, starting to come at around 2500BC, to pillage any improvements in their sight. So, we must make sure that we have some defense on EVERY improvement and the worker! A good thing is, the AI "occasional pillagers" typically won't attack our troops, so a warrior on each improvement and the worker will be safe for quite some time.
5. Second phase of defense. At around 2000BC we will need to be able to build defenders better than warrior. It is necessary to pre-build the defender (Axeman or archer) for a few shields so we can get them in 1 turn when we are in urgent need, but sometimes we don't need to build them immediately. Workers maybe more important. Eventually in this phase of defense we would kill all daring intruders in our territory with our axemen or promoted archers (it is quite easy to get experience by making the archer to defend on a hill).
6. Raiding. After we have enough troops to defend our own territory, the most important thing is NOT to attack immediately!
Instead, it is raiding. Attacking a civ takes a large amount of troops and only cripples 1 civ. However, by sending out raiding parties of 1-2 axeman or 2 archers, we can simutaneously cripple 3-4 civs with the smallest amount of troops possible. The raiding parties' task is to pillage enemy resources, but in the case that they will risk their lifes in doing so, they may just stand in a position with great defensive value (forest or jungle hills) and discourage AI workers to come out and make any new improvements. Archers with guerilla II will do a great job on that. The raiding parties should be send out as early as possible, and successful raiding is the most important point to win this game, in my view.
7. Kill the first enemy. Now we need to take the lands of our first enemy. In GOTM 22, England is the unanimous choice. That reveals an important point in choosing the victim. We need to have a productive core that is almost free from enemy pillaging. The English peninsula in GOTM 22 makes a perfect choice for that.
8. Setup of our empire. Now we have got enough lands and 5-6 cities. That will be the backbone of the empire. It is the time for some setup. We will need:
1 economy city to produce enough money and research for us to get the important techs (Code of Laws and construction).
1-3 frontier cities that will have city walls and be heavily defended, along with active defenders to kill enemy pillagers.
The concept of "frontier cities" is very important in this game. These cities must be able to sustain themselves WITHOUT any improvements since their countrysides will be continously pillaged. They should have good defensive terrains and are used to hold enemy attacking waves outside our productive core. Every pillager must be killed before they reach the productive core.
We cannot rely on resources in the frontier cities. One of the mistakes I made in my GOTM 22 submit is to use the west desert iron as the sole iron source for quite a long time. So I had great troubles in keeping the iron supply line intact. In hindsight, I should have used England's iron and identify the desert city as a 'frontier city' which only serves for defense.
In the replay, I used Rome and the northern copper city as frontier cities for quite a long time, which turned out to be much better, although I cannot use Rome's gold for several centuries.
Other cities will serve as military production cities. They will sacrifice 2 pops every 15 turns to endlessly pop Praetorians ,Spearman, Catapults and Elephants. So each city need to have a granary and a barracks. Most of them will possibly need Obelisks. Our workers in this phase will chop the forests heavily to setup these production cities as quickly as possible. And our attack directions will be chosen so that we get more military production cities over time.
9. Research. Research is hard with a large army. For a very, very long time Construction is the last tech I am able to research. The sequence should always be Code of Laws first, Mathematics-Construction following so that we will not be bankrupt in researching Construction while paying the military upkeep.
10. Attack the enemies one by one. That is arguably the easiest part. The most important thing is to take care of our straying troops, straying workers and undefended cities (which, is possibly my weakest link). We will be attacking one enemy at a time and keeping all others under the gates of our frontier cities. Most captured cities will be razed, since in this game it will be very very hard to keep a captured city without building walls. And our economy won't allow us to keep too many cities. In my replay I have 10 at most, to go with about -20gpt in 0% science... Our lifes will be much easier when we have finished up 4 civs. Since at this time, our production power will be stronger than the remaining civs. Finally, we CAN conquer with Praetorians and Elephants!
Successful execution of this strategy made my life much easier in the replayed game. The statistics:
England eliminated in 640BC
Aztec eliminated in 155AD
China eliminated in 605AD
Mongolia eliminated in 935AD
France eliminated in 1256AD
Japan eliminated in 1298AD
German eliminated in 1328AD
Spain eliminated in 1328AD
Cities built: 3.
Cities razed: 40.
Kills:
185 Archers.
110 Chariots.
100 Axemen.
98 Swordsmen.
68 Spearmen.
38 Catapults.
33 Horse Archers.
28 Longbowmen.
26 Warriors.
18 Keshiks.
8 Jaguars.
3 War Elephants.
See, the number of killed HAs are much smaller than in the lost game. Successful raiding really does the job.
