Tips from v18: (played at eternity on nobel to monarch, 50 Civs to start)
1. Once you have time in game and can make settlers and such in like 4-5 turn make some you don't need. Send them out to useless squares outside your workable range and build a city... the imediately go into the 'examine city' screne and abandon it. You now have city ruins and treasure and
boosts shall come from it. Spam this tactic for faster results. Doesn't work on some tiles.
2. Don't burn cities... 'Examine city' then abandon it with Cntrl+A, though sell everything possible first... the city is now gone and you may get workers/settlers. For added fun this doesn't add that negative diplomacy hit. Also, for some reason, even though you apparently don't kill them all those people stop existing at that point... and the ever helpful city ruin remains intact.
3. When you get to the point you can build caravels, build on an ocean access tile and spam them (they get better once they can enter oceans). Then send them to kill stuff (like giant squid) and/or they explore, kill stuff, and get you hoards of xp for great generals. I find navagation then the promotion for bonuses vs.wooden ships and -1 terrain movement costs, then hunter promotions helps to speed things along.
4. When playing with 'raging barbarians' and 'surround and destroy' never attack anything, but birds and such, with your theives. Instead put them in spots adjacent to your city and it will cancel out much of the Surround and destroy bonus. This will let you surrvive the Neanderthall rushes with much greater reliability. Just remember to check under the theives for Neanderthalls while doing clean up.
5. When playing raging barbarians, never bother with gathers until you can build/train units that trivialize neanderthals. Your simply making things for them to trash for xp. Feel free to use free gathers though... they cost
to have sitting around.
6. Take over nearby cities early on. Tribes are mostly not worth the time to build them when alternate options exist. They prevent you from using your
to build other things and stop all
growth. They also lose
if you build other stuff at the same time over time.
7. When actually taking over said other people's cities, take the time to build roads towards them while doing so and not after the fact. If you can't spare the time/resources/units to build the road... your not going take it easy. Your economy probably with have issues absorbing the hit anyway.
8. Because of influence driven war... the time building the roads should be used for fights inside the target's borders. This will allow you to impress their people and makes the take over much smoother. Also, the Ai will gleefully cripple its economy with massive hoards of units and this will massively slow down their
rate. By chipping away at their hoard you can get xp heavy units and crush the city itself.
9. While fighting in the city seems like a great idea to get more influence, try to lure the most units you can outside. The lack of defenses buffing them and the spill over influence will speed things up with less loses for you.
10. Start as minor Civs opion makes it so you don't have to listen to begging and threats from other Civs. Your turn speed with be insanely fast at that point from the lack of 'diplomacy' options. Also, with the writing needed for diplomacy most of the other Civs will either stall out from massively over building armies and having to tax their population into oblivian to cover it or have someone to spam units at and actually be worth your while to trade with. As a bonus most of the grunt Civs will not be advanced enough to do diplomacy... meaning far far less 'join my war that utterly fails to benifit you' demands.
11. When playing raging barbs, make a B-line to club men then slingers... the only thing production bonues at higher difficultly levels do for AI do at this point is help them unit build into oblivian faster they will stall out with rock throwers and maybe clubmen... then the Neanderthalls will eat them. Any research bonus from oral tradition is worthless as the Neanderthals will kill you before you can defend yourself. Turtling first (3 clubmen and 3 slingers) will make you actually survive.
12. Always save before any combat in which you have 95% win chance or more... the AI seems to increase the unit instantly dies uselessly chance the higher your unit level. This may be paranioa... but it saves rage quiting later on.
