My fourth start I made Archery my first tech and built four archers as fast as I could, sending them straight to Sukhothai, which fell on turn 45.
Ill try to explain my line of thinking:
Before you start the game, you estimate what should be possible. Prince pangea conquest, the aim is pre turn 100. When you know how long you expect the game to last, you decide how much you want to tech and build an economy. Obviously, the longer you are away from victory date, the more value there is in building an economy.
In this case, the granary is what i chose to build for my economy because it produces 5 food, providing 8.25% ROI per turn. If it had been worth only 2 food i would certainly not have built it, if it would produce 3 food i would probably still not have built it. At 5 food it seemed like a worthy investment to me. Next consideration was the worker. I considered not getting one at all, but i didnt want to risk not being able to steal one and getting it home before turn 50 and not being able to connect any resources. Just for the tile improvements i did not consider the worker an investment i should make in a game this short. Not only is it a lesser investment than the 5food granary, it also comes later than the granary which further reduces its value (The ROI value of a worker is hard to estimate, but it depends much on when you would get to the point where you will have plenty stolen workers so that its value goes to zero. If before that point it has improved 3 tiles, thats just 3 extra food/production you gained and not even all at once and not permanent since the stolen workers would have improved those tiles at some point anyway). No other improvements to production/food were remotely worth considering. Fortunately, a worker can also be gotten for free from liberty. Of course it comes at an opportunity cost, we could have gotten a general from honor instead. But at 15% improvement, a general is only worth the same as 1 unit when it is with an army of 7 units.
late game you dont care about being unhappy, being over supply limit or being at negative gold, and losing your science. So after your initial economy phase which now consists of only a granary, you will built nothing but units.
Similarly to deciding on your economy investment, you decide on your tech investment. Usually that means you invest in tech buildings (and give those priority over almost any other tech) up to 1 era before the actual techs that you want to use to take victory. In this case victory comes with ancient techs so you dont invest in science at all.
You just need: The wheel (chariot), construction(archer upgrade), bronze working(spear). The rest was pretty optional.
You sent out your scout(s) and warrior to scout as far away as you can wasting no time on the immeadiate vicinity. The first produced archers can do that.
Then comes the plan to conquering the world. Dont just attack a random enemy with your first units but make a plan. It does not matter when the first enemy falls, it matters when the last one falls. You dont want armies to travel more than needed. It is nice to have a relatively nearby enemy alive for your last produced units to conquer while it is generally a good idea to aim your first army group for the most remote enemy. If we would be blessed with only 6 enemies, it would clearly make sense for our first army to conquer 3, the second to conquer 2, the third to conquer 1. We have however 7 enemies, so 1 of the armies needs to conquer 1 more enemy. That will be the army that carries the heaviest burden and will decide our victory date.
In this case with the split between east and west enemies as well as the relatively large distance between northeast and south east, i decided on 4-2-1. Thus, the first army could either go monty-england-mongol-denmark, or monty-denmark-mongol-england. I scouted denmark last and chose to go for the scouted route. The path between monty and denmark was still in fog.
Maybe you could also choose for a 3-3-1 plan. In that case the burden was on the second army. Wanting to leave a nearby enemy for the last group and the world being split in 3 to the east and 4 to the west, that would mean monty has to remain for the last while 1 army has to take the east and the other has to take the remaining 3 in the west. The first army then would have to choose the toughest of those 2 chains of 3. In this case the west would have been the toughest so your first army would have to go to england first.
And then there are the details of executing. This is the area where vadalaz is obviously still better than i. Had i not screwed up, i would have probably gotten a 95-98 victory, but i would not have beaten his 93.
Maybe vadalaz (or other very good players like acken and mesix if they played this gotm) could share if there are any things they think different about or want to add.
so I didn't want to rush it.
