I've played with the Khmer before and I found them... not that good. So I played them again just recently with the Rise and Fall patch and I found them surprisingly a good deal better.
Now, when I play a Civ I prefer to specifically use their abilities. It's one of the reasons I stick to King. I don't care about the time finish (I prefer not to rush), I like to use Civ abilities, but I also prefer to win fairly reliably. I can do that on King.
The thing I noted was as before. Monasteries of the King is better for me now that I know to get Choral Music. Feed the World won't work with Khmer because Grand Barays and Holy Sites already power their food to ungodly levels. More won't help much. They get +3 Housing over other Civs because they build Aqueducts (+2 Housing), and their Holy Site provides +1 more. River Goddess works with MotK to provide +2 Amenity per city with a Holy Site on a River. Basically, bigger cities in the same time frame.
Bigger cities means you can build more Districts in each city, though you'll be hard-pressed to catch up to your limit because apart from food buffs, Khmer don't get extra bonuses for any production of any district. Hilly sites are good for Khmer. You just need two or three tiles around the Aqueduct to get set up for food.
But what you can really do with big cities reliably in R&F is to wage war. Once the big cities are set up, your Loyalty pressure goes through the roof in a Golden Age. It's just the right timing to get out Domreys. You get the Eureka for Military Engineering because you build Aqueducts, natch. The one trick I missed was that I should have built Grandmaster's Chapel, not Intelligence Agency. Domreys have to be hard-built. It's much more convenient to Faith-purchase them, and the Khmer helpfully have outstanding Faith economy, because they have Holy Sites everywhere, because the Aqueduct gives the cities +3 Faith per turn, and because their large cities will benefit quite well with Theocracy's +0.5 Faith per Citizen extra Faith income. The 15% discount on faith purchases doesn't hurt.
When I took France's nearby cities, I had zero loyalty issues. They were barely holding on to begin with, since my cities were so obscenely large ( Kongo level). Once I took over, the populace was only too happy to be welcomed into the right empire. Of course, once I started with the larger cities, France's loyalty pressure plummeted even further. I never saw an empire so willing to roll over and surrender! I wasn't even leaving garrison troops.
My main problem at the moment is that I have 5000+ and building Faith banked and no way to turn them into troops. No other way to spend it, either, since Valleta isn't in the game. The only real option is to turn them into Missionaries...
Now, when I play a Civ I prefer to specifically use their abilities. It's one of the reasons I stick to King. I don't care about the time finish (I prefer not to rush), I like to use Civ abilities, but I also prefer to win fairly reliably. I can do that on King.
The thing I noted was as before. Monasteries of the King is better for me now that I know to get Choral Music. Feed the World won't work with Khmer because Grand Barays and Holy Sites already power their food to ungodly levels. More won't help much. They get +3 Housing over other Civs because they build Aqueducts (+2 Housing), and their Holy Site provides +1 more. River Goddess works with MotK to provide +2 Amenity per city with a Holy Site on a River. Basically, bigger cities in the same time frame.
Bigger cities means you can build more Districts in each city, though you'll be hard-pressed to catch up to your limit because apart from food buffs, Khmer don't get extra bonuses for any production of any district. Hilly sites are good for Khmer. You just need two or three tiles around the Aqueduct to get set up for food.
But what you can really do with big cities reliably in R&F is to wage war. Once the big cities are set up, your Loyalty pressure goes through the roof in a Golden Age. It's just the right timing to get out Domreys. You get the Eureka for Military Engineering because you build Aqueducts, natch. The one trick I missed was that I should have built Grandmaster's Chapel, not Intelligence Agency. Domreys have to be hard-built. It's much more convenient to Faith-purchase them, and the Khmer helpfully have outstanding Faith economy, because they have Holy Sites everywhere, because the Aqueduct gives the cities +3 Faith per turn, and because their large cities will benefit quite well with Theocracy's +0.5 Faith per Citizen extra Faith income. The 15% discount on faith purchases doesn't hurt.
When I took France's nearby cities, I had zero loyalty issues. They were barely holding on to begin with, since my cities were so obscenely large ( Kongo level). Once I took over, the populace was only too happy to be welcomed into the right empire. Of course, once I started with the larger cities, France's loyalty pressure plummeted even further. I never saw an empire so willing to roll over and surrender! I wasn't even leaving garrison troops.
My main problem at the moment is that I have 5000+ and building Faith banked and no way to turn them into troops. No other way to spend it, either, since Valleta isn't in the game. The only real option is to turn them into Missionaries...
