I've played this one a lot recently. This is probably my favorite of all the scenarios. The best I've done so far is
finish on turn 70. I'm not exactly sure how to get it much sooner than that. I've tried a few odd strats, but they all come out to be in that area.
As with most games, your opening 10 turns or so are pretty important. I will say there are a few fundamentally important things you understand, irrelevant of what strategy you end up using. Or, maybe a better way to say it is, you need to take these things into account when laying out a strategy.
- Jin will start making Siamese Elephants around turn 30. They're OP normally, and overly so in this scenario. Jin needs to die before the elephants come out.
- Arabia has an immense amount of Cash, and has to deal with Greece and Persia's warmonger ways, and so given time they will have a huge army. If you don't get into that area before turn 50, you're going to get stuck into a slog
- It will take at least 30 turns from the point you think you might start doing something about japan before you can actually finish off japan.
- The only GOOD way into india is with an open borders treaty. Since he's unlikely to grant this once he realize you're a genocidal madman, you will need to get some troops inside of India before the treaty expires.
As for strategy, here's what I generally do. I'm not convinced it's the best one, it's just what I've traditionally done. These tactics assume you opt for the "try to stay somewhat happy" method.
In explanation, there's two thoughts to this scenario. The first is to keep every city you capture and garrison it with troops to deal with the barbarians. You will be at a permanent -33% to your damage as a result. This is livable, but worse is the fact you will get "revolts" every few turns that pop out barbarians. These aren't a huge deal, except they'll head straight for your iron/horses and pillage them. This stacks an additional -50% to your damage, which is too much. As a result, I prefer to strive to stay above -20 happiness. So, the basis for the following tips assumes you'll attempt to do this. If you choose the other route, caveat emptor.
The first turns are primarily about acquiring Keshik. You really only need 1 horseman to take cities, and a pile of Keshik. You will get two free horseman for taking Western Xia and Almanty. Unfortunately they have nothing else useful, and so you'll take happyness penalties for holding them, and you will need to protect the pastures.
If you're unfamiliar with them, keshik are movement 5, can move after attacking and have a pretty strong ranged attack. This means that you can park a bunch of them outside of the city's attack range, pop in, shoot the city, and then pop out. It takes a little practice to get it down, but after a while you can basically drop a city in a turn or two. This speeds up when you get Logistics (two attacks). Just make sure the horseman is within range and has a path to cap the city when the time comes. You should basically NEVER be getting attacked. If you're taking damage from anyone, you're doing something wrong. The occasional troop may clip one of your keshik, but pull that one back and let it heal. Opt for killing troops over shooting cities if you have too. A dead keshik is wasted turns, and healing is wasted turns.
Your first policy should be the additional XP. You want to go straight up one of the attack bonuses (open or rough) and then get Logistics (double attack). At least any keshik you start with before about turn 25. After that, grab the bonus city damage when it's first available.
Tech wise, you should be reasearching up towards Astronomy. You'll use the free tech boosts later on for astronomy and navigation. You may get education out of it too, depending on your timing. After that, head up towards crossbowmen and longswordsmen. They're handy in Japan.
It's best to avoid taking cities you can't directly use and that you can't raze. This primarily means city-states and capitols. If the city state doesn't have an astoundingly compelling reason to take it (aka, horses) then you probably shouldn't. Even then, I skip Uighur (though it has horses and iron). The only city I ever keep that can be razed is Liaoyang. There's on in Arabia that's questionablly OK, but by then it doesn't seem worth the effort.
My opening turns generally go like this, shoot down in the first move with a horseman and scout western xia and meet Jin. Sell him everything you have but 2 horses for 290 gold. Use this gold to upgrade your other horseman to keshik. Use your two workers to first upgrade the sheep and mountain next to Kharakorum, then build a road down to the silk road. Use your army to take Western Xia. If you can, grab the worker while you're at it. If everything goes well, you can grab the worker and cap it by the end of turn 3.
Of the 4 keshik, khan and 1 horseman you had, take the keshik, khan and one of the new horsemen you got and head west to Almaty. I prefer to run up the road to Uighur then take the hills through Uighur. They'll get upset, but it doesn't matter. You come out on the NE side of Almaty and you shouldn't have hit Persia yet. They will probably have allied with Almaty, but since they haven't met you yet, they won't declare war when you attack.
Head the damaged horseman you used to capture X. Xia up towards Karakhorum and let him heal, also upgrade the 2nd horseman to a keshik.
Now that you have W. Xia, if you haven't met china, do so. Sell western Xia to either Jin or China. You have excess horses from Kharakorum, so you don't need them for now. The important thing is to ditch it. a.) it's negative happiness you don't need b.) it's a weakness for the AI in the future and c.) It's additional cities they will fight over while you're busy. Use the Cash to buy another Keshik. Sometimes it pays to wait a turn or two for one of them to build up some cash. It's a fine line because they use all their (prodigious) GPT to pay off city-states. So you have to time it some. Try to get your troops out of it before you sell it, else they'll hit you with a "move your troops" nag. While standing is somewhat irrelevant, it will impact the gold you can wheeled out of them in the future.
If you capture the worker, then send him down the silk road to the north entrance to India. In theory you should run into an indian unit. Get an open borders treaty. He will probably want money for it, which is fine. Whatever he wants is cheap in the long run. Build a road through the mountains into india. If you don't capture the worker, you probably want to take one of your two starting workers to do this. You need that road built.
You should quickly cap Almaty. This basically starts the point where you have two armies. You have to be careful about making sure your units don't die. Generally this isn't an issue except against fighting persia, due to his extra movement for golden age, and because there's so many roads. I'll call the two groups "army A and B". It's likely you'll have generated another Khan by now, so it should be back in Karakorum.
Upgrade the two horseman you got from Almaty to keshik. You now have those 3, plus maybe the 1 you bought for selling W. Xia, and the initial horseman you let heal. It's now time to deal with Jin and China. Here it depends somewhat on if they're still at war or not, But you need to take Beijing. ASAP, to get rid of the Great Wall penalties. Movement is your only saving grade, and the great wall is a huge damper on that.
The city to the right of Beijing, Liaoyang, is the one razeable city that I don't raze. You will need this to produce the triremes you need to upgrade to frigates to take Japan. It also has horses, iron, and gold, so it's not terrible.
From here, the flow is basically up to you. Buy more Keshik as gold and horses are available and split them between the two armies. You will probably also want to buy archers or scouts to garrison in any cities you do keep. This has two advantages, it gives you +1 happiness and it lets you deal with barbarians trying to steal your horses. I always keep a worker on hand to fix any that get destroyed. You'll have no shortage of free workers.
The general Idea for quickly doing this is to push hard into the weaker cities for any civ. If you push hard and fast enough, you should be able to take and raze a few cities. When you can push for peace do it, and try to get all the AI's cities (besides there capitol) and some gold and GPT. This is why it's best to try to avoid being flagged as a backstabber or genocide early, as it facilitates them making deals.
If you do it right You should be able to rock Persia and Jin quickly, and leave them with just their capitol. In the case of Jin, His capitol will be pushed one city south since you took Beijing. From here you basically have a few choices, which is what order do you push into China, India, and Arabia. China and Arabia can generate huge armies and have tough units. India is a pushover, but it's awkward to get in and out of. I usually delay Arabia to push India with Army A. Take the road you built in, push through to the southern pat of India, then declare war. Ghandi is prone to deals. Sometimes you can just take 1 city and threaten another and he'll give you all his remaining cities.
Move on to China and Arabia. Depending on your standing with China and her general mood, she may not be willing to give cities in a peace deal. It's mostly a wash here at this point. If she does it early enough, and you can get 2-3 cities out of it, it's worth it. Otherwise, just wipe her out. Then wipe Jin out, then take Army B and go back and wipe out India. You should be building Triremes at this point. With all the civs getting wiped out, you're getting 1k gold and a tech upgrade. China's capitol has 8 iron, and you have iron from other sources, so you should have enough to upgrade triremes to Frigates by now. I generally shoot for 8. I also generally build a few swordsman/longswordsmen to act as meatshields. You will need something other than frigates to knock down the city. If you can spare them, keshik work great. Otherwise if you've researched crossbowmen you can use those. If you take Korea, you will get 2 free crossbowmen, but I find korea is a waste of happiness and time, so I usually leave it.
Once Army B finishes up with india and persia's capitol, head up towards Russia. Army A will finish off Arabia and Greece. Army C is functionally your frigates and anything else you can throw at japan.
In closing, there's basically two cheap tricks/exploits you can use to make this scenario easier. If you're unfamiliar with them, they are:
- Before you go to war with someone, sell them all your GPTs, and any resources you have for all their cash. When you declare war, the deal is instantly voided, but you keep all the cash you got
- At the start of your turn, all deals currently in action are validated to see if you can still do them. This means that if a deal included a luxury that has gone away, the deal is broken. This means you can sell people a pile of luxuries, and just make sure that the deal includes a luxury that exists ONLY in a city that is about to disappear because it's down to 1 population and being razed. It's important to note that this won't work if the luxury exists somewhere else in your empire, as it will pull from your luxuries before it breaks the deal. You will still get 1 turn of penalty for it, since the razing happens after the deal validation.
You are not required to use these tricks to do this scenario. They make it easier, but by no means are they necessary. In fact, later on if you got good GPT deals on peace settlements, the cash is mostly handy to rob the AI of the ability to buy more troops, than it is you actually needing the gold.
Anyway, there you go.
. Well, impossible with Bizantines anyway since they have only 2 cities lol.
barrier as often as possible. One simple trick is, of course, to take cities only at the end of the turn, so that the increase in unhappiness does not affect your remaining forces. Still, this requires that you are below that value. The key idea is to conquer only what is necessary and raze almost everything you can: almost no city state has a luxury ressource which does not appear at any capital (you cannot raze); the same holds for most other cities - exceptions are wine, gold, pearls, and whales, which is why you may keep one of the cities with such a ressource (I kept Lioyang with gold as a basis for the invasion to Japan and Crusader States with wine to have space for the attack on Cairo). The only other city states I took were Western Xia and Almaty for the bonus horsemen. In particular, for this strategy, it is of little use to conquer cultural city states to get further social policies to improve happiness, if keeping these additional cities cancels these benefits.
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