Easy way to win on Earth Map

I am sure others have figured out this strategy before, so this is probably for newer players. This is for the earth map, 18 civs. Previously I had thought the Romans were the obvious powerhouse. Now, I have seen how much more powerful the Germans are. I have been kicking butt on Emperor using this strategy.

First turn, move your settler to the hills at the bottom right. This is where the copper will appear in 15 turns. Make sure that until you have bronze, you are always working a tile with three food and one commerce. Produce a worker first. You will get the worker one turn before bronze working.

Immediately use the worker to chop trees, changing over production to axemen. Work the wooded tile with the pigs to get axemen faster. The first axeman goes towards Moscow. The second, towards Rome. The third, towards Athens. About 35% of the time you will catch Catherine with only warriors. She gets archers the fastest. If you don't get her, you can always wait until about 1200 BC or so when you can put some more axemen on her. You will always catch the others with only warriors. After taking Rome, go for Paris and Madrid. Beeline towards sailing to get Paris producing a galley to get London before it produces a settler. Athens should produce a galley too, and with some quickness you can get two axemen across the Med to Egypt, and you will catch them with only warriors about 50-60% of the time. Usually, I can conquer all of Europe and Egypt before 1000 BC.

After this, its really closing the deal. I can usually build most of the wonders, having Paris, Madrid, and Rome at my disposal. Usually oracle towards Code of Laws. Once you got Egypt, you can beeline towards Elephants to have a pretty unstoppable force all the way to China. I've taken China as early as 700 AD.

stratozyck,

I would call that almost cheating. You're using intimate knowledge of a set map, including resources and starting locations, to exploit your close starting proximity to other European Civilizations. Also, note that this won't work once you start playing higher than Noble, as the computer starts off with Archery and Archers from the very first turn.

I'd much rather have a challenge of building up my army proper, rather than quickly conquering every civilization before they have a chance to develop because I knew where resources were in the map before the tech shows up. Earth maps never were any fun to me because they were always the same.

To each their own, I guess.


P.S. This reminds me of the "3 city start" trick in Civ I's Earth. Start off as the Romans, and you had about a 33% chance to start off with two settlers. Immediately build Rome, and move one of the settlers north a bit. France would be there, and you could easily conquer undefended France with a settler. (Settlers counted as military units in CivI.)

This thread started by Mr Felony was basically about the same thing, except with Rome. If you put Rome on top of the copper to the east, same result except a few turns later you have Praetorians. Ouch.

I even tried this with Asoka, moving my settler east 10 turns to settle on top of the copper and axe rushing Qin and taking all of china and mongolia before turn 100. I ended with a strong arm diplo win in 1908 but it probably could have bee earlier.

I am wondering why, even on high levels, the AI starts with warriors on this map. It seems overpowered to simply move your start to where you know copper is and take out the AI, no matter who you are. I think its a bug, but until someone confirms this I am going to keep exploiting it as it is rather fun...

Kesshi said:

stratozyck,

I would call that almost cheating. You're using intimate knowledge of a set map, including resources and starting locations, to exploit your close starting proximity to other European Civilizations. Also, note that this won't work once you start playing higher than Noble, as the computer starts off with Archery and Archers from the very first turn.

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For some reason no matter the difficulty, in BtS 3.13 on the earth 18 civs map the AI starts with warriors. Very strange.

As for cheating, I dunno. I definitely see where you are coming from, but for me the fun of doing something like this is more the challenge of how quickly I can take over everything on a given difficulty, not "can the AI win the game." It's a different kind of game I guess and can be fun sometimes.

You can still play challenging civs like Inca, as an axe rush with Inca before Monty gets archers is out of the question. (Although an axe rush with mansa, another civ with a weak start, is possible as r_rolo1 pointed out in another thread.) Toku is also fun as well.

I actually dont think that that is the best spot to move germany's capital. When/if i play germany (also a power hourse european civ, but mostly becaue of his traits/UB and early copper). I would move it along the river to the coast above the wheat to gain the early trade networks. there are two necessities to being able to keep and rebuild your economy after claiming europe, England, finland/sweden, and whoever else you want. you need the Great Lighthouse, and a moderately spread religion+shrine.

@keshi, I understand why you think it's almost cheating, but I decide to use WB/use my knowledge simply because it's a scenario map where you can gain the knowledge and use it everytime and using WB is simply hours faster than playing a game until i can see all the resources and restarting.

@illram: I also love playing this simply because I can play it competitively on deity while I just started to be able to play normal immortal games

Kesshi said:

P.S. This reminds me of the "3 city start" trick in Civ I's Earth. Start off as the Romans, and you had about a 33% chance to start off with two settlers. Immediately build Rome, and move one of the settlers north a bit. France would be there, and you could easily conquer undefended France with a settler. (Settlers counted as military units in CivI.)

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Wow, that brings me back. If France wasn't there, you could also get Greece that way.

It works on Emperor on BTS. I know this for a fact. I noticed when I went to BTS that the neighbors no longer started with archers.

stratozyck said:

It works on Emperor on BTS. I know this for a fact. I noticed when I went to BTS that the neighbors no longer started with archers.

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Interesting, stratozyck.

I wonder if this is for Earth only. I'm fairly sure that on regular maps the computer starts with Hunting, Archery, and 3 archers at Emperor.

Ya, I recently made the move up to deity and the civs start with 2 settlers, and some scouts, but by the time (4 turns) my warrior got there, he already had a warrior . I think their cities might autospawn warriors or something.

MrFelony said:

Ya, I recently made the move up to deity and the civs start with 2 settlers, and some scouts, but by the time (4 turns) my warrior got there, he already had a warrior . I think their cities might autospawn warriors or something.

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The AI's get a discount for their first warrior on every difficulty to prevent you from rushing their capital in 3800 BC...

works 100% on monarch epic... now there goes my weekend while I try to exploit that to the fullest -.-

if you follow my guide, i'd say 90% on emperor, even for people playing noble.

Jerk AIs. Had an interesting start - my warrior popped a hut, got another warrior before I'd even settled. Figured I've got a few turns before I need to defend my city, so I set them both to wandering off, find another hut real quick and get ANOTHER warrior. I figure with 3 warriors, I may be able to still-born someone, find another civ quickly enough to continue feeling that way, and promptly declare war, all within the first dozen turns or so. Get up to his city, he's got 2 warriors in there already, so I sit around waiting for a new warrior I'd just built to get up there, and in that time, he gets his third warrior, so I just backed off and kept him from developing his city, while I went and developed mine. Eventually he built enough stuff that I couldn't contain him, so I declared peace, but with all that, I got a good head start on him and crushed him later.

Would you please clarify what exactly do you want:

a/ easiest win on Earth map in terms of difficulty to pull off
b/ fastest win in number of turns, in the game
c/ fastest win in real-world hours of gameplay

a: China, space race
b: Persia, domination
c: Rome, domination

were you playing as frederick?