On high levels, you will be behind until renaissance. Why dont you get 3 siege towers and composite bowmen and take a city or two. Unless you take a capital, or declare war more then once, your warmonger will fade in 20 turns max.
I really dislike stuff that is only useful when the AI is cheating badly. I mean the UA would be much better if you got a beaker boost even if there are no techs to steal...and im wondering how to mod it to do that.
I dont see any reason to stop at one city. The AI is going to keep trying to screw you over for the rest of the game, and with world congress, it gets really annoying. Its much more convenient to kill off a civ in BNW now.
Yes, I rarely use Diplomatic Marriage. Not to say it isnt useful, just that its rare. Coffee Houses are amazing. Having GP come out of your capital only isnt true. I often build stuff like Artists guild in my second city, and work science slots in other cities too. This gets you more GP overall, in all cities.
But why? The only times i ever did that was when i had massive overpopulation in my cities end game and could fill up specialist slots easily. Your capital typically has the best GP bonuses due to national epic + passive GP gain from wonders. Having your GPs spawn in other cities is less efficient overall.
Bowmen are brutal. They are basically like super early composite bowmen, which allows quick barbarian hunting, and possibly knocking down opponents early, before they get setup. If you get attacked, walls of babylon can save you.
Well im playing on king and normal archers handle barbs just fine, and ive never had to rely on defensive buildings. A few melee + archers is more than enough to beat off any invading AI force. Personally i feel that all unique abilities/units should remain useful throughout the game, not just for one short period. As it is its just so easy to tech to composite bows that i dont find myself impressed by bowmen. It would be a different story if they had some kind of unique promotion that remained after upgrades though. I think i will try to mod walls to give a culture boost once a tech is researched...
erm... Tourism bonus is amazing for cultural victories. one golden age in the late game can get 1000 tourism, and that can speed up your victory exponetially. Not to mention more GWAM will get you more culture.
In my experience by the time i start building stuff like hotels and airports i have already won the game, so its not a problem at all to get enough tourism. I dont even need to use concert tours, i can just keep hitting end turn to win. Also the 50% bonus isnt much considering the limited slots for GP generation in the first place.
Byzantium does not get a bonus vs naval ships. This point is invalid.
Im referring to the unique ship they get which has a bonus vs naval units.
Harbour= no, not all your trade comes from your capital. usually, i get trade routes from almost all my coastal cities. Carthage might not be able to reach that gold mine of a route, but maybe Utique can. Also, you can get free connections without building roads.
Everytime i play a coastal city, my capital ends up at the coast and that dominates trade throughout the game with some very few exceptions. Ive never actually had another city out-trade my capital if both are on the coast. Free connections are cool, but the bonus isnt very significant.
+2 happiness from buildings is much, much later. +2 gold early is great, actually its +3 gold, because it dosent cost maintenance, but library does. its much more significant than you think.
I would rather take +2 happiness because its much harder to get happiness than gold. Ive never had gold problems once i get a few trade routes up and going...
No horse needed is good. No limit on them. this means you can rush someone with them. also war chariots are not affected by terrain like regular chariot archers, they act like regular units, with +3 movement.
I played egypt recently and their chariots do get affected by terrain just like regular chariots. Ive never actually run out of horses, so not needing horses is no big deal...
Why would you not want more units? Maybe you clear a camp with your warrior and you get a free archer. Yay, i dont have to build/buy one. Your spearman clears a camp, and duplicates himself. Why wouldnt you want that?
It eats up a lot of gold in maintainance and i ended up with half a dozen free units just sitting around doing nothing, and ended up replacing them later when i had heroic epic. Unless you are trying to do an early rush, i dont see the appeal.
The weakness is they cant get WC host, but who cares? you wont get that anyways on high diffs. They have freaking 40 strength! Get a fleet of them, and maybe 1-2 galleasses, and sail them to a nearby coastal city. Bash some Turtle Ships against it. 2 turns later, city! No iron required. No navigation required. Cheaper to build. Get the point?
In my experience, hitting a coastal city with melee naval units is pointless as they just take WAY too much retailation damage. Never tried that with turtle ships though.
Your capital is likely to build any building first. So when your second city has 4 production, you get 1 extra production. Not great. But when your second city has 40 production, you get 10 extra production. So, when you get late game and you have cities at 100 productin, you get 25 hammers. Thats great, isnt it?
It sounds great but in practice it still takes FOREVER for puppets to build stuff mid-late game. I honestly find it much easier to just mass-purchase stuff in annexed cities.
+1 production on horses/iron. these resources are not rare at all, look at the map. Sometimes, you can get up to 4 in a city. Its small, but early 1 hammer is big. Once you get that early headstart, it snowballs.
Ive tried playing on legendary start but even then its really rare to get 4 in one city. My last game had one horse and one iron. In my experience its much easier to go huns and get +1 production per pasture instead. Ive had games where i ended up with 4 or more pastures at my capital which made a huge difference, but i have never once had a game with 4 or more horses/iron at my capital at the start.
Funny. Celts have forest bias. Will you have a worker on turn 10? No, so 1 faith per turn starting at turn 0 will almost always get you first pantheon (unless someone finds 2 religion CS). And first pantheon usually leads to first religion. Pictish warriors are good and clearing out encampments, they have 25% combat boost outside territory, which means 25% better against camps. Also, they get faith, which means faster religion.
My point was that having the bonus dissapear when you improved the forest was lame. You actually clear barb camps much faster with archers, however the combat bonus does stay when you upgrade it so thats decent (but not the faith gain).
So do archers. Atlatlist stays longer then archers. So, they are obsolete slower then archers.
Composite bows are still much better and are not hard to get.
Sea Beggar plus armory- Blitz ships with 45% bonus against cities. And supply. Which means they can heal on the go, and ram into cities. Polders give +4 food, +1 hammer, +1 gold after Economics. Tell me a Farm that does that, farms gives +4 food, or +3 food, +1 hammer. Marsh on its own is 1 food, not -1 food. Arabia's UA is not remotely close to the Netherlands UA. Arabia is more oil, and religious caravans. Netherlands is less happiness loss from trading resources.
Supply is nice but its just so much easier to just use frigates that can upgrade to +1 range quickly after bombarding some hapless land units. It takes too long to take cities down with melee naval in my experience, when you take into account how much time you need to heal up the ships after a single attack.
+1 hammer and +1 gold come way too late, meaning you are stuck with a slightly better farm for the crucial early game. The Arabian bazaar gives you an extra resource, that is far better than Netherland's UA since you can trade the extra copies and keep the full happiness boost. Personally i would at least have Netherlands keep the full happiness even after trading the last copy away, you used to be able to trade resources for an instant 200 gold but now that you need friendship to trade gold, the GPT is much less attractive.
Ok, so you have a destroyer capturing Battleships. Tell me the differnece of a Trireme and a Battleship.
That was in reference to the AI keeping masses of tiremes around even in the modern age. Also i typically dont find it useful to capture AI ships as they are almost always level 1, whereas i typically have at least level 3 starting ships. I dont even use destroyers for melee combat, since a battleship just wipes the floor with them. I just keep one or two around for capturing cities and use subs to 2 shot enemy naval ships (which the AI hates to build).
