What's your favourite civ?

That does sound extreme.

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Except tanks. I love tanks.

So, in sum, I really believe that mounting an early offensive is a huge inefficiency. Particularly if your greatest threat is some distance away from you.

The process that seems to work without fail for me is to expand rapidly, build infrastructure, and THEN conquer the closest civ that is about the same size as yours, when you get cannons - earlier only when there is a civ out there that is just running away with the title or you have a nice tech advantage - and then aim for the biggest threat (unless you just conquered him of course).


edit: Of course, map size should greatly affect strategy. I favor huge maps and bigger. I imagine that the smaller the map, the more appropriate an early offensive is, due to the limited amount of space.

That is indeed a major factor. Delaying wars till 10+ units per city are available would be rather inefficient in smaller maps. You did not explicity name the ratio of units per city, but it somewhat sound like something far above the support limit, thus unit support would be relevant, maybe 400 gtp in total?

While there is still space you can take without war i agree that this is preferable. But the thing really is that this is very soon not the case. On small maps on Sid one may as well consider oneself to be lucky to be able to found a total of 4 cities till all other land is already claimed by other cultures.

It's been a long time since I've played - actually, come to think of it, almost a decade - but I always remember my favorites being Carthage and Maya. Both were Industrious, the Carthaginian UU was a powerful defender from the beginning of the Ancient Era to the middle of the Middle Ages, the Maya were unmatched in terms of filling my empire with Workers, and I always played the game for Cultural building and World Wonder hoarding with just enough military to defend myself.

Fun fact: The War Academy didn't have an article about my old favorites the Mayans or the Carthaginians, so I just spent the last hour writing a 950 word essay about why I used to love the Mayans (going back to the site's Civilopedia for a lot of the details that have slipped my mind over the years). Ginger_Ale (who managed the archive) and Ision (who wrote a bunch of the articles) haven't been seen in years, so I went over to the Strategy sub-forum to see who the new big cheese was that I should ask about submitting my essay to

And it turned out there was a second list. That the Mayans were already included in. By Ision. Saying basically the same thing I did. (OK that last part's actually a point of pride for me )