My first emperor win

[maltz]

Unlike monarch, apparantly no army + sit back developing never worked... although I can snatch a tech lead, the AIs will suddenly decide not to trade tech with me anymore... then I fall behind.

On this map (emperor) I pumped out tons of axeman supported by chopping, and horse archers later on. The AIs had nothing but archers until later (some chariots and Mongolian specialty). They were totally devastated by my ever-leveling-up axemen. I wiped them out one by one to claim the victory at 78000 score.

I then try the same strategy in the Deity level just for fun. The AIs pump out archers like every 2 turns, and he has 4 cities already. I took down the first city, to see an welcoming archer army swarming from everywhere. I don't see this war is going anywhere. :>

I guess in higher difficulty one has to do a rush... or the AIs always out-develop you anyways. I was hoping the aggressive leaders would kill each other for me, but they stay happy at each other, just refuse to trade with me #@#$@%.

[mutax2003]

Just wondering, how many AI did you have in the game? What is the size of the map?

[maltz]

My game was on a duel map with 3 random AIs. My computer is very slow playing on any map larger than duel.

Playing 1 on 1 on duel seems a little dull to me, so I got 4 to increase some variety (but unfortunately not in a rush game).

[alexti2]

Originally Posted by maltz

I then try the same strategy in the Deity level just for fun. The AIs pump out archers like every 2 turns, and he has 4 cities already. I took down the first city, to see an welcoming archer army swarming from everywhere. I don't see this war is going anywhere. :>

I guess in higher difficulty one has to do a rush... or the AIs always out-develop you anyways.

On Deity that kind of strategies don't seem to work unless you're playing Incas or Romans. The problem is not even that you can't win your first war (or two), but that that war puts you so back behind in tech that you never can catch up and end up losing by the space race (somewhere in early to mid 1800s). The working (sometimes) plan is to sit back, develop a bit and go to war when you get catapults. It works reliably on archipelago, but on other types of maps it works only occasionally, if you get a lucky start.

I'm trying to develop catapult rush strategy (differs from the usual plan by beelining for construction and trying to rush the nieghbour before he gets longbowmen). It may be promising, but if you start near financial civ, the window between you get catapults and they get longbowmen is very small, and at that stage of the game you can't finance enough catapults to deal with longbowmen.