Alternative Economies

Making the jump to Emp now and I was wondering if you *have* to go through code of laws and currency. Been experimenting with alternative economies like going through just the bottom of the tech tree and getting great lighthouse, windmills and harbours and from there to guilds and ignoring markets, courthouses and an overeliance on cottages - I have had a few good games with it, a Roman with Aug (kind of like the trading empires of Venice and Genoa), Carthaginians (cothons), and the Chinese (chokonu) but I don't want to spend ages experimenting if its not viable. Anyone experimented with anything like that? How good are customs houses really? An early GP seems to give you room to play around a little with the economy?

Any other advice for the shift to Emp? I want to play on that level now but I get disheartened and retreat to Monarch!

You're going to derive beakers from specialists, hammers, or commerce no matter what you do. If you can arrange for an alternate tech path to at least give comparable yields, then it is viable.

The bottom path is usually weaker in SP only because the AIs tech it on their own, which means if you do that too you won't have anything that you can trade.

GLH makes most things more effective on maps with lots of viable coastal cities, but ultimately you're still going to be using your land tiles for hammers, commerce, or specs.

I noticed that a lot of the AIs go along the bottom path. Is it true of all of them? How do they get by so well without early courthouses and markets?

logofernando said:

I noticed that a lot of the AIs go along the bottom path. Is it true of all of them? How do they get by so well without early courthouses and markets?

Click to expand...

On low levels, the don't. They get blown out. Monarch+, it's more like they start getting massive discounts on production and maintenance that allows the bottom path to be more viable to it. They do still go CS/CoL eventually though. What they REALLY delay forever is the paper/education tech line.

Don't they need education for Liberalism? Some of them rush that as far as I know.