Scouts

I always build a scout right out of the gate because goody huts give huge boosts to your start if your lucky to land in a location where there are several. City-States also give gold and faith bonuses for meeting them which could allow you to quickly purchase an important building like shrine, monument, or granary so that you can jump straight to building something else like a worker, Great Library or even a settler to quickly snatch another prime location before the AI decides to.

That's really bad design if building the GL is required to win on Deity (on immortal it definitely isn't).

That said, I don't even ever bother building the GL early on anyway. Growth is more important (speaking of immortal).
That said, I find scouts essential. The other options are a) not scouting at all and b) scouting with your warrior. Both cases are suboptimal. a) means you aren't getting any ruins (I usually get about 5 per game), discovering possible places for future cities, finding other players/CSs). Scouting with your warrior is slow and make you vulnerable to barbarian attacks.

mrwho said:

This. Sure, you can get the GL if you keep on restarting until you do, but on standard speed it usually goes at around turn 30, and that's just on immortal. When it takes about 26 turns to even finish writing, yeah, you're not going to get it reliably. As I said earlier, I've managed to get it a few times, when I've got lucky and the AI have for some reason ignored it, but the offchance of getting the GL is not a good excuse for no scout.

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Guy, it's not absolutely necessary go for GL, but is still important, for example, when I play with India I always go for temple of artemis instead, it's an option of every player, I can make a video to share my strategy and to show how I play, everybody has his own strategy, and mine is simply not go for scouts. What's the best screen recorder to make a video to show something, to explain my game vision, can you tell me?

Felix953 said:

Guy, it's not absolutely necessary go for GL, but is still important, for example, when I play with India I always go for temple of artemis instead, it's an option of every player, I can make a video to share my strategy and to show how I play, everybody has his own strategy, and mine is simply not go for scouts. What's the best screen recorder to make a video to show something, to explain my game vision, can you tell me?

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No idea. Honestly, how often do you get the GL when you try for it? How often do you have to restart?

And please tell me the map conditions, including map type, game options etc, for I make my video, it may take some days or weeks to do because at the moment my personal life doesn't allow me to play much time, but I can do, and sorry for my bad english...

mrwho said:

No idea. Honestly, how often do you get the GL when you try for it? How often do you have to restart?

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maybe 2/10 I don't get in some maps, but if I go for aristocracy and use production focus when building it I usually have time.

Felix953 said:

And please tell me the map conditions, including map type, game options etc, for I make my video, it may take some days or weeks to do because at the moment my personal life doesn't allow me to play much time, but I can do, and sorry for my bad english...

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The strategy itself for getting it is obvious enough. The issue is getting it reliably.

Felix953 said:

maybe 2/10 I don't get in some maps, but if I go for aristocracy and use production focus when building it I usually have time.

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Well that's odd, because for me it usually goes from turn 30-35, making it pretty much impossible to get usually.

Felix can you clarify, what difficulty level? There is a huge difference between immortal & deity when it comes to GL. Immortal, it is possible. If you can show a strategy that will reliably work on deity, then you will be a celebrity on here.

chazzycat said:

Felix can you clarify, what difficulty level? There is a huge difference between immortal & deity when it comes to GL. Immortal, it is possible. If you can show a strategy that will reliably work on deity, then you will be a celebrity on here.

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From what I hear the strategy is pretty much what you'd expect: beeline to writing, start building GL as soon as possible, production focus and Aristocracy. I tried that tactic many times on immortal and after an unsuccessful track record gave up on it. Never tried it on Deity, but I haven't even attempted Deity yet.

Scouts are usually a good investment, but certainly not always. Scouts are valuable for finding ruins, getting first contact gold with city states, and revealing the lay of the land. Anything that reduces the value of these objectives reduces the value of a scout, possibly to the point that a monument or granary is a better investment.

Such factors include whether the AI starts with scouts (the AI snatches up ruins and first contact quickly), more civs, less land mass, and fewer city-states. A civilization geared towards fewer cities and peaceful play would need less immediate knowledge of the land than an ICS early game rusher.

A scout is always useful, but different circumstance can make other early options a better investment.

I think everyone agrees that if you start on a five tiles big island it is not meaningful to build scouts before optics.
I think everone would agree that if you start on a huge pangea map with 12 civs and 24 city states it would be madness to not build scouts.

What we disagree about is when building scouts becomes worth it. What do you need to get from your scout in order to make up for the lost time building it?

IMO, one extra ruin (not map or barb location) is not enough. Finding a city state or a civ extra is probably not enough either. But if you can find one extra ruin, one extra CS and one extra civ, it must surely make it worthwhile.

Using your warrior as a scout is of course possible, but he moves slowly and is usually needed to battle barbs close to home.

mrwho said:

The strategy itself for getting it is obvious enough. The issue is getting it reliably.

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This is spot on. Immortal: You CAN, provided you have 1) at least 2 forests (no time to chop more) and 2) 1 hill (or plains), say that you will get TGL approx... 75%ish of the time ? You CAN ALSO, if you don't have that, beeline the Hanging Gardens instead and use sheer growth to make up the deficit (somewhat). What you CANNOT do, is go for TGL and miss. I force myself to play those games to the end and they're painful, painful experiences. But it's all about the percentages.

mrwho said:

Well that's odd, because for me it usually goes from turn 30-35, making it pretty much impossible to get usually.

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I suspect the crux of the issue is that the game doesn't quite scale all that well from standard to quick. I left standard at King and back then you needed TGL by turn 45 or so - I strongly doubt 30 is even physically possible and 35 requires extreme luck. This would explain the divergence in our experiences. For us quick players Immortal is essentially the same as Emperor - turn 27 ish(Immortal), turn 29ish (Emp).

bjelar said:

I think everone would agree that if you start on a huge pangea map with 12 civs and 24 city states it would be madness to not build scouts.

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I'm far from a pro, but I won a game today by doing exactly that, under those conditions. And again I suspect it's because scouts offer you far less bang for your buck on quick - he simply isn't scouting for as long before ruins stop being integral to play.

One last thing.

Felix953 said:

You seem to be the only who knows how to play, and yes, you should use the free technology researching philosophy and then, unless you wanna try to pick up another world wonder, build the NC so quickly as possible. After this your priority should be civil service then education, technology is the key to survive in higher difficulty.

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I appreciate the sentiment, OP, but perhaps chill a little - I'm sure nobody here meant to belittle you or your skills Everyone's just here to get better, that's all. Your (our) strat works for you (us) - that's what matters.

I think one scout is a pretty reasonable gamble.

Two scouts depends on the landscape, but you should have a pretty good sense of that by the time you have to make that decision.

I got a culture, population and gold bonus in my last game as the first three and I was cruising.

The time before that, it was upgraded weaponry and maps of local areas.

parts said:

I'm far from a pro, but I won a game today by doing exactly that, under those conditions. And again I suspect it's because scouts offer you far less bang for your buck on quick - he simply isn't scouting for as long before ruins stop being integral to play.

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Sure thing, there is a difference between marathon and quick when it comes to moving units around.

In my experience, meeting the other civs quickly (as soon as they discover writing) will give you 1 gold per turn, selling embassy to them. Meeting CS give you a lump sum and random quests you get rewards for (sometimes by accident) for 30 turns given you pledge to protect. Thats a lot of culture, faith, happiness and units.

You also get a discount for technologies I think, if other civs you know have researched it.

Ruins are random and not the main reason I build scouts.

bjelar said:

In my experience, meeting the other civs quickly (as soon as they discover writing) will give you 1 gold per turn, selling embassy to them. Meeting CS give you a lump sum and random quests you get rewards for (sometimes by accident) for 30 turns given you pledge to protect. Thats a lot of culture, faith, happiness and units.

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THIS ^

OP has to be a joke, btw. Who starts yelling about NOOBS in their own ridiculous thread? Let's let this thread die.

They can also influence how you are planning on building and expanding your civilization.

If you know who is where and how they are building, it should have some impact on what you are doing.

I can't imagine turtling 3-4 cities without knowing what is out there and hoping for the best.

While I'm new to the game, I've recently started being much more strategic about city placement (not just going for resources) and it can make a big difference.

It is map dependent.

If your start has several wheat and a lot of hammers then you can build a worker first instead of scout, bring your soldier home to fight barbs when worker pops out. Research pottery, writing, mining. You have wheat so worker is productive right away, then chop chop once mining.

Build queue is worker, shrine, great library. May be able to squeeze in something else.

Go tradition get aristocracy. When the shrine gets you a pantheon try for monument to the gods, craftsmen, or extra food.

I won't say your can reliably build it, because you need the right start for this. If your worker needs another tech to be useful you won't get it. If you don't have the hammers, you won't get it.

Once you have 140 gold buy the scout so you at least can meet cs and civs but obviously you will likely be second to meet cs and miss most of the huts. Your soldier gonna have his hands full fending barbs that like to pillage, and may even need to buy a scout just to help with that job.

The early tile improvements arguably benefits as much as finding huts. Especially if you can start selling lux early and get your economy up.

You can use scouts to steal AI workers pretty reliable during ancient era. If they upgrade to archer, you have a barb farming machine, which can net you a few nice CS bonuses early, especially culture.

As for GL on 7/8.. easy. I get it on diety 80% of the time, without marble. I chop it, with stolen workers. I also skip NC till late med era, and builf HG after GL, pick up tradition for a free monument, and easy culture.

If you don't DoW to steal workers from the AI, and hard build them, That is why you can't get the GL reliably. Even with marble in a city, it's usually not developed and useable till after I finish the HG, or sometimes when HG is about50%. Priorities.. Bronzeworking isnt one for me.. usually I don't even research it till its 1 turn.

rodrigoq said:

You can use scouts to steal AI workers pretty reliable during ancient era.

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Is this a new feature and/or do I need to anything special to do this? I haven't been able to steal workers with scouts in the past.

CountAccountant said:

Is this a new feature and/or do I need to anything special to do this? I haven't been able to steal workers with scouts in the past.

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Scouts have a melee attack, they can take workers, attack archers. But they cant take 2 workers in 1 turn like a warrior or spearman can.

I may have an old G&K save where you can do it yourself, when i'm stealing Rome's workers with a warrior and a scout.