Strategy suggestions

What 1F is worth varies depending on sizes, but it's +/-2 hammers at low sizes, which means that you can put these 2 hammers into a wonder with marble/stone (perhaps forge and OR) and get a return of 4 gold or more.

I just tried this (Immortal Brennus thread) and...wow. How have I lived all my life never doing this? 250 failgold from 1 whip (Marathon speed).

Is there an article on what's good to whip for failgold? Basically, which things cost just over a multiple of 30 (or 38 or 46, depending on forge and OR) on normal speed, so you can put 1 turn in, then whip for full failgold. If there's not, I'll post on it, but didn't want to duplicate work.

Thanks.
 
Whipping takes double pop on wonders.

They fixed/nerfed overflow gold in the previous patch because they thought protective was overpowered.
 
Last thing I will say is I am more MP player than a SP player - although I win 50:50 my immortal SP games, multiplayer is where I feel myself most confident, so all those advices may not work spectacular on a SP game :)


This is a key difference.

Most MP/PBEM games are played on Quick speed rather than Normal speed. Quick speed devalues food (and hence farms) to a great extent thanks to the reduced food cost to grow or regrow after whipping. This (plus the lower micro of cottages vs specs in RTS mode MP games) tends to tip the balance in favour of cottages rather than farms.

I suspect that in a Normal speed PBEM, farms would edge out cottages (in non-capital cities, you'll want B-cracy boosted cottages in the cap if the terrain permits).
 
Food cost to grow scales.

What does not scale is short turn times to produce something when you get near the 1/turn line, and movement. Movement scales incredibly terribly relative to production.
 
trying rushing a bit with Hannibal on Emperor, Pangea, standard, with numidian cavalry.
built 4 cities, 3 with nice production for unit prod, one commercial coastal to generate cash for my conquest. got Isabella as nearest neighbor and rolled through her lands, capturing like 5-6 cities.
and then boom my economy crashed so badly... STRIKE and -50 gpt :D
do you keep only the nearest cities and give back the others or what?
how to avoid such crash because it seems inevitable.. like, maintenance of one city is 10-15 G, thats a lot.
so I managed to get my economy back on track a bit, lost liberalism race, now going for gunpowder + steel and will try to own.
my BPT is abysmal, I suck @ SE, need way more practice. I build too many building I think instead of wealth.. :)
good thing I have like 15 cities - good potential.
but the question would be - when you rush, what is the proper way of doing it in terms of city conquest, distance to capital etc. how to avoid economy crash?
 
when you rush, what is the proper way of doing it in terms of city conquest, distance to capital etc. how to avoid economy crash?

I think a lot of it varies based on the tiles. A city with gold/gems can generally pay for itself and one or two other cities without trouble, so if you see several gold tiles within reach you can pretty much expand as fast as you can conquer. Similarly, it's generally poor play to raze a conquered city that has a tile that yields 4C or more - it will pay for itself right from the start.
 
There are 2 types of early conquest:
  • Conquering for land you actually want, where it gets you to an advantageous position for the rest of the game. (This is mostly what I do).
  • Conquering for an early victory, usually with an early UU.

In the first case, plan out where you want cities. Their outer cities, without much infrastructure or population, raze and settle a new city in the perfect spot, often razing 2 cities to found 1. Their ancient cities, take, and raze anything you don't want that will have its culture overlapping your city on the 2nd culture pop, sometimes 3rd if the cities you don't want are already mature. (This is how you prevent cities flipping). The leader will probably hate you, so he's probably a target for elimination, not vassaling, unless you want his spies harassing your conquered cities. (This also solves the "We miss our old nation" unhappiness).

But it sounds like you're in the second case: Conquering for early victory. In that case, give everything back unless the city pays for itself. Gold or mature cottages? Sure, keep it. Killer production, already up to size? Sure, keep it. Anything else, give it back or raze it.

If you're giving it back, whip it into the ground for more cavalry first.

Also, if you go into anarchy, you stop losing money. One early Deity victory writeup was "Marathon, Pangaea, Julius Ceasar, whip Praets, whip every conquered city into the ground, civic swap for 3-4 anarchy every 5 turns."
 
and then boom my economy crashed so badly... STRIKE and -50 gpt :D
do you keep only the nearest cities and give back the others or what?
how to avoid such crash because it seems inevitable.. like, maintenance of one city is 10-15 G, thats a lot.

Raze all but the cap, or holy cities, or cities with helpful wonders (like 'mids). With Izzy her cap will probably be all 3 and her satellite cities will be none, razeworthy.

The situational execption to the rule is if another AI is nearby and you need those cities as blockers. Rushes tend to be better if there's no other AI that can zoom in and REX into the land you just fought and bled and had axemen die for. Someone out on a peninsula with tasty resources that you can turn into "I'll settle into this post-currency" terrain.
 
It's also possible to setup your economy better alongside the rush so you don't have to raze all those ai cities. I rarely raze an ai city that is build in the right spot.
 
lesson learned. will try to act differently next time.
I struggle with rushing setup a bit, doing idiotic things, need much more practice and to plan it out much better. practice makes it perfect though.
right now I'm doing quite ok on Emperor level, still not really ready for Immortal I think.
way too much builder-mode and mindless rushing with my play.
 
learned a bit more running specialist economy
using cottages in 1-2 cities (capital + another one) seems to work quite ok for me.
lots of food and whipping is wonderful combo. much more production than CE.
wondering if CE is at all that useful... maybe for culture victory. but it is so sensitive to whipping and production is low. hm..
 
cottages provide a balance of production (through whipping and worker/settlers) and research.
Grassland farms are better production through whipping, but of course do not provide research. Unless you consider running 1 scientist for every 2 grassland farms research.
Running scientists provides beakers, but no production.

Sometimes you need your empire to run on extremes (say an axe rush), but sometimes you want to have both research and production (say a fast catapult build, or balancing aggressive expansion with teching). In those cases, you don't need total flexiblity. So incorporating tiles which contribute production+commerce will be more efficient than adding them both separately.
A lot of people prefer small empires which don't require a lot of production because they can't manage more complex, larger scale optimizations.

Or putting it more simply, if you need 50% of your empire devoted to production and 50% to research, with some flexibility, would you rather allocate population to produce 1 research OR 1 production, or use population that produces .75 research and .75 production? I'm making up the numbers, but the point is a more efficient core with some flexibility can outperform unnecessary total flexibility.

I can't think of a great analogy, but here's the best I can come up with: if you buy a car, you might want flexibility in your options so you buy the basic model. But if you want flexiblity and air conditioning, you might include air conditioning in the package rather than buying it separately, because you'll get a better deal. But just because you take some add ons doesn't mean you take the total package and lose all flexibility.

And of course cottages are good in cities that can afford to invest longer in them, like the capital.
 
Farms before Biology are important for 2 things imo:

Units + hammer buildings whipping, like a forge or maybe even a temple in the AP religion.
The size you reach reflects on how many good units you can whip later when they are needed before having to pause for regrowth.

Growing for GP generation during a GA, or for the time when you finish NE and reach Paci, stuffs like that.
If a city has nice food already, cottages are often a waste. More = better.
Food poor cities can be grown on river cottages, if you figure there is no future for whipping or GP here.
 
Guys, guys, you are talking like if you have cottages, you dont have food. Thats is simply not the case in the most situations. Most of the cities must have 1 or two GOOD food sources to be worth settling early on. So growing while using most of your citizens to work cottages is absolutely normal. If you use the specialists - how your city is growing even with a lot of farms if the citizens are busy working in the library?

Although I am a cottage guy, I do a lot of whipping - I whip till it bleeds and use the cottages for slowing growth down while the whip unhappiness goes. As the whip/regrow cycle is most effective in the lower population cities (4-5-6) I cant see how you effectively use scientists, have citizens to work those farms feeding the specialists and growing for the next whip and still have people to sacrifice for slaving to have any production?
 
What do you do in such a situation: start peacefully and go for MT/rifles asap. But you have a warmonger, who vassalizes everyone around until you get there. It's a game lost, ye?
If he starts vassalizing, do you start planning an attack on him immediately ? Or you make him sign peace at all costs to avoid this scenario ?
Happened to me couple of times, once Napoleon vassalized everyone until 1100AD or so.. I just quit.

Tried Immortal yesterday, it's so much faster than Emperor. Had like 3 cities, while GK had already 9 in 1500 BC or so :D insane.. though doing quite ok in that game, have 11 cities, won Lib around 700AD, vassalized Pacal, have tech lead with Cavalry (rushed Pac with cuir/cav) and already getting AL soon then just go for tanks and wipe everyone out hopefully. Problem is Ghenghis has 2 vassals already and he doesn't like to be in peace mode too long, gotta unleash him on someone soon.. Playing as Willem, as he is quite strong and offers easier start - good for adaptation to Immortal level.
 
Guys, guys, you are talking like if you have cottages, you dont have food. Thats is simply not the case in the most situations. Most of the cities must have 1 or two GOOD food sources to be worth settling early on. So growing while using most of your citizens to work cottages is absolutely normal. If you use the specialists - how your city is growing even with a lot of farms if the citizens are busy working in the library?

Although I am a cottage guy, I do a lot of whipping - I whip till it bleeds and use the cottages for slowing growth down while the whip unhappiness goes. As the whip/regrow cycle is most effective in the lower population cities (4-5-6) I cant see how you effectively use scientists, have citizens to work those farms feeding the specialists and growing for the next whip and still have people to sacrifice for slaving to have any production?

I do similar stuff too in some cities. Get some farms, some cottages and work cottages to slow down growth when happy capped. Seem to find balance slowly in this. But I stop building cottages very early and build them only in a couple of cities at most. The problem with cottaging too much is that when I need serious whipping (like cuirassiers), I can't do it effectively due to too slow regrowth.
 
But how do you tech in the latter eras without cottages? :eek:

On the other hand, isn't the slow regrowth a problem when using citizens as specialists too?
 
When you do some serious whipping, research doesn't really matter at that point imo. Like preparing for a cuirassier rush. I whip almost all cities except capital like mad (watched that technique used by AbsoluteZero, tried - it's veeery good). Capital I keep for research purposes, it alone generates 300+ bpt or so with Oxford.

I do cottage some cities, like I said, river tiles only though, grassland or FP.
But I think research is ok until I get cuirassiers and then you can successfully rush someone and take their cottaged cities for research :)
Lots of food early (farms) enables to do rush better (can do HAs or smth).

What I really don't like about cottaged cities, is the lack of production.

I am learning to play though, so my opinion seems to change quite a bit lately ;)
 
Top Bottom