How do you make the mongols work?

I know, spam Keshiks, but that's not the end of it, is it?

I mean, Keshiks come at the worst possible time of the game. I tried to go wide with them, founded 6 cities, and go ham when I got my OP horsepeople, and I could take cities and stuff, but my happiness just can't take it.

And I am building circuses and Colosseums and stuff, but it's just not enough. I can just about balance my happiness out to fluctuate between -2 and 6, but because I founded 6 cities everybody hates me so they won't trade their luxes with me (unless I give them everything I own), so that's not an option. And if I'm not mistaken, the Mongols should build wide so they can spam Keshiks more quickly.

But just in general, I'm not impressed with wide play anyways, but I thought I will give it a shot.

I'm playing on Immortal.

What can I do?

Also, I could upload a save file with the game I started. Pretty neat start, I have to say. I would be curious to see what a pro guy like youz could do with that game.

cheers.

1. Remember that the AI founds a lot of junk cities, so don't try to keep all of them but instead raze the junk ones and only keep the ones that are decent.

2. Founding wide + Conquest wide under a global happiness model is bound to run into very high happiness issues.
It's generally better if planning a conquest approach to instead go Tradition tall (no more than 4 self founded cities). This includes Monarchy for a 50% pop unhappiness reduction from the capital. This should give you a bunch more breathing room in happiness.
Also you'll need a religion with happiness beliefs but it doesn't have to be your own.

The self founding wide approach is more for if you aren't planning any offensive wars any time soon and so your right, the timing is wrong for Mongolia & Arabia. You'll still need to have enough army for a defensive war since just founding 6 cities quickly will cause your neighbors to be upset about you founding cities too agressively.

AI always charges an arm and a leg for its last copy of a luxury. It's by design because otherwise getting We Love the People day would be too easy. If not willing for 1 : 1 trade when they have spares, that means they are upset at something you've done, perhaps the war mongling.

Why found that many cities? As Mongols, found a couple of cities, churn out Chariot Archers (and a couple of spearmen and horsemen, to protect the CAs, to take city damage and to take cities when city HP falls to zero) and then go knock heads, building XP and taking capitals (raze non-capitals, unless they have some compelling reason to be puppeted). When you get Chivalry, upgrade your already well-promoted Chariot Archers to Keshiks and roll.

Would you grab the Honor opener and farm barbs, or go straight for Tradition?

When taking non-capitol cities, it is advisable to raze them at once since you will not suffer a science penalty when doing so (stopping razing it will get you the science penalty and it will stick). After all, you want to have a steady science going while you conquer the world.

as with Honour and Tradition, I'd say try filling out tradition first, but getting occasional points in honours, especially the lef tside with the free GG and +50% experience. But that's just me.

You can also try Honor 3 cities then Commerce. I think Honor + Tradition is redundant especially if you are going all out conquest. If you are filling out Tradition you are planning for the late game but then you are not making the best use of your keshiks.

Jinavajra said:

Would you grab the Honor opener and farm barbs, or go straight for Tradition?

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Straight Tradition for me. Warrior Code is useless (you don't care about training melee units and you will get a Kahn soon enough) and Military Tradition may help level up your CAs more quickly, but you really don't need it. The right hand side of Honor is equally unattractive since they eliminated the happiness perks in Professional Army. And the Honor opener is not worth the long-term opportunity cost of the culture that could be invested in Tradition.

Would you ever suggest just going down the left side, to Military Tradition? (I forget if you can get that as your 2nd or 3rd Honor policy.) I find the extra XP helps to get to those key promotions like Logistics and Range a lot quicker.

Also, I'm surprised that nobody uses Liberty when conquering. When you're a warmonger, you naturally end up with a wide empire of more than 4 cities, and wouldn't the liberty policies help with developing those cities?

Taking honor is for the fast xp (faster logistics) and finisher gold.

Liberty is good too. You save hammers for settlers to making chariot archers in the early game and the extra hammer per city will add up.

Straight tradition will result in a slower conquest but if you are only comfortable with tradition then take it.

something like this youtube playlist

Deity pangea win before reaching industrialiation

So, with the new patch, do we think that the Mongol vs City States bonus could be more useful now?

Am strongly considering starting a game with an ancient era grab of a juicy city state. City states often seem to pop on natural wonders, and it'd be great to snaffle an Uluru with a Mongol invasion.

I like to start with tradition (legalism then landed elite (if happiness is OK) or monarchy (if happiness is not OK)) to quickly grow 2-3 cities, and then fill out the left side of honor as I amass 2 groups of 4 keshik (and 1 horseman) each (one of the groups has a free khan from honor); but with the new patch, I may have to change my starting strategy a bit due to the tradition nerf. I think it's very beneficial to get the honor policy that increases experience (it's not worth it to complete honor though in my opinion). As a matter of fact, I think it should be mandatory to get the left column of honor when playing Mongolia. It allows keshik units to get to logistics extremely quickly.

Asklepios said:

So, with the new patch, do we think that the Mongol vs City States bonus could be more useful now?

Am strongly considering starting a game with an ancient era grab of a juicy city state. City states often seem to pop on natural wonders, and it'd be great to snaffle an Uluru with a Mongol invasion.

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It should help AI Mongolia a lot.

However, since conquering a city state removes the city state bonus (including special resources) it would have to be one of the weaker types of city states to be worth conquering and even if it's a weak type you might also want it to have a natural wonder within its cultural boundary.

I would rather reccomend wating a bit on CS state bumping until they get a chance to build infrastructure and universities ... So you can focus on military techs get a swarm of keshicks ready - then bump and annex 2-3 CS and use their universities (you might not even have the tech for) to keep up in tech .. Tho at that point you could just bump regular AI cities anyway .. So probably still only worth to go for CS if in spectacular rich location or of highly strategical value ..

The only thing I would say is if you have enough horses (as a resource) try and keep some horsemen to use just to snag cities. With 5 movement points you can keep them out of harms way and use them to snag cities when they have 0 hp. Keshiks move fast and ideally you want a fast melee unit to take cities as quick as you can. You only need a couple for this though, I mention it because once you reach Chivalry you lose the means to get new Horsemen so it can be worthwhile keeping some around for this.

I did notice that, and it was really annoying. I tried using pikemen for this purpose, but they need to spend a turn in the city's firing range before they can jump onto the city itself, and you know how gentle a 25 strength city with a comp-bowman can be to the pike-guy....yeah, not very much.

Jinavajra said:

I did notice that, and it was really annoying. I tried using pikemen for this purpose, but they need to spend a turn in the city's firing range before they can jump onto the city itself, and you know how gentle a 25 strength city with a comp-bowman can be to the pike-guy....yeah, not very much.

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Yeah and footmen are annoying because they really slow down in rough terrain so it makes it worse. Whereas Horsemen get 5 movement I think (with the Mongol UA) but you need to be careful positioning them too as they will also be 1-shot from a city if you miscalculate and position them badly.

I don't know if anyone's tried this before, but I wonder if you could play Mongols with a purely harrassment strategy. The goal not being to take anything from your opponents but simply to wage war with the world and bring them all down around you. Destroy their armies and take down their strongest cities until you're on top.

Mongolia and the Huns are harder for me to play well on larger maps with lots of oceans separating civs (especially if I get a land start)

Asklepios said:

So, with the new patch, do we think that the Mongol vs City States bonus could be more useful now?

Am strongly considering starting a game with an ancient era grab of a juicy city state. City states often seem to pop on natural wonders, and it'd be great to snaffle an Uluru with a Mongol invasion.

Click to expand...

Taking a city state early is always viable. It goes well with Honor start because you don't want to be wasting turns on building a settler. Just make a CS your second city.

Are you sure? Does that not mean a denounciation snowball and no trade for 100 turns?