Seraiel
If you want anything from I please ask in German
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2011
- Messages
- 8,165
Of course you can force the point as you can force any strategy with the right circumstances, diplo luck, and a pretty badass start. Notice how you have almost no production in your entire empire. Given that you've basically cottaged everything, you also have inefficient setup for whipping. Not sure what victory you're going for here, but it looks like culture? UN? Religious? You'd be hard pressed to get a sufficient military up and running with no production to challenge high level AI. With the teams there, though, maybe you don't need a military? I'd say this isn't really a convincing screenshot given no production and some uncommonly great land (you think you have enough duplicate resources to sell back to AI? )
We weren't discussing courthouses for their maintenance bonus. We were discussing courthouses for their 2 and access to spy. Build wealth is almost always better than courthouses in the early game. With respect to maintenance, courthouses are only needed once you breakout and start getting a lot of cities & distance. But if you look at the screenshot, there is no city building wealth and 10 turn Longbowmen (4 in the bureau capital!). A serious lack of production there so building wealth would do almost nothing for you.
Uncommonly good start? How is 1 Gold (I don't count the other because I settled on it) and 2 sources of Food an uncommonly good start? This is Inland Sea, not the most common mapscript, but I know that Pangaea also has enough 1 Gold 2 Food Plains-Hill starts, it even got a lot better starts, like 3 times Food + Plains-Hill + 1 Commerce-resource.
Also it doesn't matter. 90% of the Commerce comes from financial Cottages (which btw. is the name of the thread and the topic we are discussing) .
And I got no production? I got 8 cities + have you seen the city-sizes? I could simply whip out 30+ units at any size, the point is I don't want to. It's far easier to have the AIs stay at war when one can bribe them because one has good Research / Espionage, and then backstab them later, when they're weakened and when units are better.
Really, no offense taken, but what I wanted to show was something like drewisfat wrote: Cities matter, GNP matters on Deity, so Financial, Philosphical (because GP are basically GNP) , and most of all Food. One can have CoL without problems at 1000 BC, that's also the time when one could even care about building Zigurats, because before that, Workers and Settlers are what counts, so it doesn't play any role that Zigurats come with Priesthood because at that time, one builds Granaries, Workers and Settlers, nothing else.
Also financial makes a huge difference, it helps staying competetive in tech which again helps with bribing the AIs so that they expand slower so that 8 cities and a setup like that are even possible. Really, Gilgamesh is no bad leader, but he is it because of Vultures, but all of the FIN leaders are basically great leaders, not every CRE or PRO leader is great though.
Castles are a complete waste of time as long as one can make diplomacy work, and diplomacy comes via GNP and Religion. Now one cannot control Religion, but one can control GNP, and FIN is the biggest boost to GNP together with PHI.
And drewis, don't tell me that this isn't important for really any game. Cities count, population counts, GNP counts, production is secondary on Deity and Courthouses or even Castles are a waste of time unless for the exploitation mechanics that Doshin talks of or when one has Corporations.