Le Roi Soleil
Warlord
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2010
- Messages
- 122
I'll share a strat that has worked quite well for me at immortal level post-patch. I'll add that I have beaten the game on deity a couple of times (science and domination), but that I generally find the necessary strategies at that level so narrow that it takes much of the fun out of the game for me. Immortal is my favored sandbox for playing around with anything other than über-optimized strats, and I have not tested this one on deity.
1) Try hard to settle a hill.
2) Start with two scouts. I don't know why this isn't considered a standard strat. Scouting is hugely, hugely important in the early game, both for ruins and for making early contact with civs and CSs and seeing what the map has given you and planning expansion. And of course upgraded scouts (should you be so lucky) will be your best units until Rifling, at least. The ability to move and shoot through rough terrain is unbelievable, and can make chokepointing large armies in hilly areas an absolute breeze.
3) Go hard after the Great Library. Develop production potential as much as possible (mining) in the early game and beeline Pottery - Writing. If you are lucky enough to pop a ruin which yields you any of Pottery, Mining or Writing early, you're pretty well set. Research Calendar while building the Library, get the GL up and research Philosophy when it completes. Immediately construct the National College. This is all boilerplate stuff.
4) In the meantime, go Liberty. If you're playing France or the Aztecs or are lucky enough to pop one or two culture ruins early, just go straight down the Liberty track and never look back. If not, take the Tradition opener and then go Liberty all the way through.
5) Don't build any early workers. Use your second Liberty policy on a worker and steal one from a nearby city-state that you find useless (like a hostile military CS).
6) Build a force of at least four archers. 5-6 is better if you've got the hammers. Be active with your archers. Build at least one more warrior. Ideal battle groups should be 2-3 archers and a warrior. The meat shields are mainly used for ZOC to protect the archers, and single warrior can realistically support three archers.
7) Settle the best site for a second city you can find using the free Liberty settler. Don't be afraid to move a good distance away from the cap, keeping a battle group near your fledgling city. The reason for this will become clear.
8) Whenever possible, use great people to make great engineers, and use your great engineers to settle hills near the capital with Manufacturies. I've gotten up to three Manufacturies in my capital (one Liberty finisher, one from HS and one hard build), and it was grand.
Here's the important part:
9) Don't immediately spam 2-3 more cities after the Liberty Settler, even if you want to go wide.
This is the point at which my strat differs from the typical Liberty REX. Take a battle group and camp the spot that you really, really want for your third city if you feel you have to. Generally, you'll also have a 4th site that is somewhat protected that you don't need to protect. If any AI comes into your area with a settler...so sorry. Steal yourself a worker and keep the site pristine for your future empire.
Beeline Machinery. You need to work out the timing on this, but ideally your second city should be finishing its workshop just as you're completing machinery. Build the settlers you want in both cities - between one and three, generally - and while they are en-route (send the first ones to the furthest locations), construct the Ironworks in your capital. You have to work out the timing on this, of course, based on how long it will take your settlers to arrive at their sites and how long it will take the Ironworks to get up. If they have to wait a turn or two on-site, that is still generally better than building the Ironworks first, due to transit time. It's a judgment call.
Do not get greedy and try to build all of the OCC national wonders before expansion. You may manage to work one additional National Wonder into the equation on the way to the Ironworks, but you almost certainly won't have the production in your second city to build two. The Ironworks is far, far better than any other early nat wonder (except the National College), and none of the other national wonders are worth delaying your 3rd - Nth cities. +8 Production without eating up any population is easily better than all of the world wonders at the point in the game it becomes available -and it goes up very quickly - only 125 production. The Ironworks is arguably the single most game-changing building in the game if you get it out early. If you can get an early Heroic Epic (the third best Nat Wonder after Ironworks and National College...the others in this era - Circus Maximus and National Bank - are only ok), great, but if not, don't delay expansion to wait for it. The point is that a beeline to Ironworks functions quite well with two cities (the timing with a second city works because the Ironworks comes in a later tech than the workshop, so there is a built-in delay).
10) Get the Ironworks up, get your other cities out, convert your archers to crossbowmen, and proceed to rage. Your later cities will have the advantage of stiff protection from crossbowmen and quicker growth because you'll have already gathered a few workers and will at any rate have the capacity to produce a bunch quickly once Ironworks is up. I've had a capital pushing around 100 hammers/turn in unit production during the Renaissance.
11) I find that the Hanging Gardens should be prioritized in this strat, as the capital ends up being a sort of mini-OCC. Chichen Itza is also very high up on the list, as the production multipliers from Golden Ages dovetail nicely with a production heavy Ironworks/Manufactury strat. Warrior Code and any of the buildings which add a % production bonus (stable, forge and even...cough, the windmill) which can be built in the capital should all be taken. With Warrior Code, a Workshop and a Forge, that +8 production becomes +11.6 when constructing melee units, or roughly the value of a free longswordsman every ten turns.
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This strat obviously works best when you have a bit of room to work with for your 3rd - Nth cities. The second city needs to be aggessively settled to allow enough space for the 3rd, 4th, etc....allowing you to back build, if you will. I'm also not sure how well this would fly on deity. Population ends up being a bit low during the Ironworks beeline, and you risk falling fatally behind on tech at that level. At immortal, I've never had a problem with this, but on Deity it may be more of an issue. On the plus side, because the empire is more mature when you found your 3rd and subsequent cities, they will grow quite quickly. You'll likely already have Civil Service a group of workers and enough gold to buy fat tiles right off the bat. Kind of "Insta-Cities", if you will.
This strat probably works best with civs that have strong late Medieval or early Renaissance era melee or ranged UUs, because your real military production strength will start to shine in this period. That is fortunately a lot of civs. America, China, England, France, Japan and the Ottomans will all find themselves pumping out hordes of UUs with this strat. Civs that have a strong UU replacement for the Knight (Mongolia, Arabia, Siam and Songhai) will probably have problems with the Ironworks beeline interfering with their standard Chivalry beeline, and I don't see this as being an optimal strat for those civs.
I have done it so far with America, China and France, and it worked in all cases, though in two cases I managed to settle a river hill and in the third I had marble and a couple of stone. It is a super-production-capital oriented strat, and if you have the bad luck of a capital with poor production potential, this may not work (though a production poor capital is a major hindrance in pretty much any strat).
Anyway, have at it. If this strat already exists, my apologies, but I haven't seen anything on it yet. Sorry for the book.
1) Try hard to settle a hill.
2) Start with two scouts. I don't know why this isn't considered a standard strat. Scouting is hugely, hugely important in the early game, both for ruins and for making early contact with civs and CSs and seeing what the map has given you and planning expansion. And of course upgraded scouts (should you be so lucky) will be your best units until Rifling, at least. The ability to move and shoot through rough terrain is unbelievable, and can make chokepointing large armies in hilly areas an absolute breeze.
3) Go hard after the Great Library. Develop production potential as much as possible (mining) in the early game and beeline Pottery - Writing. If you are lucky enough to pop a ruin which yields you any of Pottery, Mining or Writing early, you're pretty well set. Research Calendar while building the Library, get the GL up and research Philosophy when it completes. Immediately construct the National College. This is all boilerplate stuff.
4) In the meantime, go Liberty. If you're playing France or the Aztecs or are lucky enough to pop one or two culture ruins early, just go straight down the Liberty track and never look back. If not, take the Tradition opener and then go Liberty all the way through.
5) Don't build any early workers. Use your second Liberty policy on a worker and steal one from a nearby city-state that you find useless (like a hostile military CS).
6) Build a force of at least four archers. 5-6 is better if you've got the hammers. Be active with your archers. Build at least one more warrior. Ideal battle groups should be 2-3 archers and a warrior. The meat shields are mainly used for ZOC to protect the archers, and single warrior can realistically support three archers.
7) Settle the best site for a second city you can find using the free Liberty settler. Don't be afraid to move a good distance away from the cap, keeping a battle group near your fledgling city. The reason for this will become clear.
8) Whenever possible, use great people to make great engineers, and use your great engineers to settle hills near the capital with Manufacturies. I've gotten up to three Manufacturies in my capital (one Liberty finisher, one from HS and one hard build), and it was grand.
Here's the important part:
9) Don't immediately spam 2-3 more cities after the Liberty Settler, even if you want to go wide.
This is the point at which my strat differs from the typical Liberty REX. Take a battle group and camp the spot that you really, really want for your third city if you feel you have to. Generally, you'll also have a 4th site that is somewhat protected that you don't need to protect. If any AI comes into your area with a settler...so sorry. Steal yourself a worker and keep the site pristine for your future empire.
Beeline Machinery. You need to work out the timing on this, but ideally your second city should be finishing its workshop just as you're completing machinery. Build the settlers you want in both cities - between one and three, generally - and while they are en-route (send the first ones to the furthest locations), construct the Ironworks in your capital. You have to work out the timing on this, of course, based on how long it will take your settlers to arrive at their sites and how long it will take the Ironworks to get up. If they have to wait a turn or two on-site, that is still generally better than building the Ironworks first, due to transit time. It's a judgment call.
Do not get greedy and try to build all of the OCC national wonders before expansion. You may manage to work one additional National Wonder into the equation on the way to the Ironworks, but you almost certainly won't have the production in your second city to build two. The Ironworks is far, far better than any other early nat wonder (except the National College), and none of the other national wonders are worth delaying your 3rd - Nth cities. +8 Production without eating up any population is easily better than all of the world wonders at the point in the game it becomes available -and it goes up very quickly - only 125 production. The Ironworks is arguably the single most game-changing building in the game if you get it out early. If you can get an early Heroic Epic (the third best Nat Wonder after Ironworks and National College...the others in this era - Circus Maximus and National Bank - are only ok), great, but if not, don't delay expansion to wait for it. The point is that a beeline to Ironworks functions quite well with two cities (the timing with a second city works because the Ironworks comes in a later tech than the workshop, so there is a built-in delay).
10) Get the Ironworks up, get your other cities out, convert your archers to crossbowmen, and proceed to rage. Your later cities will have the advantage of stiff protection from crossbowmen and quicker growth because you'll have already gathered a few workers and will at any rate have the capacity to produce a bunch quickly once Ironworks is up. I've had a capital pushing around 100 hammers/turn in unit production during the Renaissance.
11) I find that the Hanging Gardens should be prioritized in this strat, as the capital ends up being a sort of mini-OCC. Chichen Itza is also very high up on the list, as the production multipliers from Golden Ages dovetail nicely with a production heavy Ironworks/Manufactury strat. Warrior Code and any of the buildings which add a % production bonus (stable, forge and even...cough, the windmill) which can be built in the capital should all be taken. With Warrior Code, a Workshop and a Forge, that +8 production becomes +11.6 when constructing melee units, or roughly the value of a free longswordsman every ten turns.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This strat obviously works best when you have a bit of room to work with for your 3rd - Nth cities. The second city needs to be aggessively settled to allow enough space for the 3rd, 4th, etc....allowing you to back build, if you will. I'm also not sure how well this would fly on deity. Population ends up being a bit low during the Ironworks beeline, and you risk falling fatally behind on tech at that level. At immortal, I've never had a problem with this, but on Deity it may be more of an issue. On the plus side, because the empire is more mature when you found your 3rd and subsequent cities, they will grow quite quickly. You'll likely already have Civil Service a group of workers and enough gold to buy fat tiles right off the bat. Kind of "Insta-Cities", if you will.
This strat probably works best with civs that have strong late Medieval or early Renaissance era melee or ranged UUs, because your real military production strength will start to shine in this period. That is fortunately a lot of civs. America, China, England, France, Japan and the Ottomans will all find themselves pumping out hordes of UUs with this strat. Civs that have a strong UU replacement for the Knight (Mongolia, Arabia, Siam and Songhai) will probably have problems with the Ironworks beeline interfering with their standard Chivalry beeline, and I don't see this as being an optimal strat for those civs.
I have done it so far with America, China and France, and it worked in all cases, though in two cases I managed to settle a river hill and in the third I had marble and a couple of stone. It is a super-production-capital oriented strat, and if you have the bad luck of a capital with poor production potential, this may not work (though a production poor capital is a major hindrance in pretty much any strat).
Anyway, have at it. If this strat already exists, my apologies, but I haven't seen anything on it yet. Sorry for the book.
once the Uni goes up - that's an awful lot to give away.
