Horse Archer rush. Now what?

Rancid Sushi

Last year's catch
Joined
Dec 7, 2006
Messages
414
Location
The OC
Warlords
Monarch
Mehmed II
Continents
Epic


Well, this certainly has been an intriguing game. I managed to pop HBR from a goody hut fairly early. I made the obvious choice of whipping up a horde of Horse Archers and quickly wiped out Huayna Capac, my closest and potentially most dangerous neighbor. What a glorious undertaking, to trounce that snooty, fast-teching, wonder spamming fiend before he even got access to copper.

Anyway, that was the easy part. Now I find myself a bit overwhelmed. I wasn't expecting to get such a fast jump in the game and I'd like to avoid any hubris, so I've come to you guys for help. As you can plainly see from the save, my economy is in bad shape. I'm just out of range of having my units go on strike, so at least it isn't too bad. My remaining neighbors are weak little Asoka and strong, threatening Saladin. Should I switch from researching Construction to something like Currency, or should I just keep spamming libraries for scientists? Saladin founded Buddhism in Mecca, and it's currently the only religion on our island. My next plan of attack would be to go catapults/axemen/horse archers to take the holy city and eventually build the shrine to keep my war machine running for the rest of the game. That is, unless you guys have something different in mind.

Funny how the RNG finally throws me a huge advantage early in the game and I'm so dumbstruck by it that now I'm at a loss for how to follow up.:crazyeye:

EDIT: Epic speed. Been playing on it so long I assumed it was the default. Forgot about 'standard.'

View attachment Joshmed BC-0460.CivWarlordsSave
 
Nice luck on the goody hut there. I haven't checked your save because my computer has issues but I would probably go for currency and code of laws as I'm assuming you probably took over one or two cities and might have some maintenance issues though Mehmed is organized and that helps alittle. Then you can go caste system for merchants to fund your empire and build your fast courthouses since your Mehmed and he's organized. Then get construction and attack Saladin and get that Buddhist holy city of Mecca if you think you can. I'm not the best player in the world but that would be what I would probably do. You might want to wait for the advanced players to give you some advice.
 
I'd focus on expanding. If you have Pottery and Writing you can run scientists for research and cottages for gold. Stop expanding when the slider gets below 20% or so, in that case.

I'd also probably declare on Saladin. Raze some of his newer cities, pillage everything else. If you have military superiority with your horse arches you might as well use them. The goal wouldn't be to conquer him, just hamstring him by capturing his workers and pillaging his improvements. Make sure you disconnect his metals and just keep him in the stone age. Don't bother with Mecca until you get around to catapults though, he'll have high cultural defense and Protective archers.
 
I had a slightly similar situation in my Warlords game using Russia (peter). Wiped out Victoria fairly early but I was REXing without quite realizing it until my economy was at 10% on the slider (whoops). I spamed cottages (had a gold mine also) and recovered. But now its late in the game pre-riflemen with Ghandi breathing down my neck on the next continent over. Everyone seems pretty well entrenched now except for Roosevelt whose cities are widely scattered on several different continents and is making easy pickins' for my troops...
 
Don't completely neglect your military, but you need to take some time and focus on improving your current cities - cotteges and libraries for specialists. Tech CoL.
 
Thanks guys. I teched Currency then CoL, then back to Construction. Looks like the only thing I did wrong was not following mike p's advice on using my Horsies to pillage Saladin's economy into the stone age. I had to take on his dastardly protective longbows which made the war last a little more than a thousand years. It finally ended after I won the Liberalism race and started drafting Janissaries like mad.

I think part of improving my game is learning to juggle two objectives at once. Pillaging Saladin would've slowed him down and helped my economy, which is what I would have been doing in the meantime by mostly building infrastructure. Anyway, I took my legion of Janissaries from the freshly conquered lands of Arabia and directed them toward India, where Asoka was still using medieval units. Poor bastard didn't stand a chance.

Before Saladin met Allah, he founded Christianity and built the shrine. Later, I built the Buddhist shrine and spread both religions to all thirty cities on the continent. The rest was history, as I was swimming in money and out-teching everyone. The result was a domination win which led to my second-highest score ever. About 50K+ ending in 1826 AD (highest was 81K+ with Cyrus, Monarch, Fractal, 1692 AD). To think, one lucky hut pop was the catalyst for it all. Still, I could have made more use of those HAs. Who says winning can't be a learning experience?:king:
 
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