Well things went ok for my first shot at one of these but boy that map was tricky!
Early game - the main plan was to fast tech to iron of course, and in the mean time save up about 800 dollars or so and about 4-6 warriors.
Seeing it was pangaea and small i figured i could just explore with my front lines advanced and take whatever cities i came across, so when i was hemmed in by germany i wasnt too concerned and decided to wait.
My first settler came out half a dozen turns or so before iron working and i set it off to the northern end of the peninsula we were on to wait. Once iron working finished i ran it to the nearest iron deposit and started mining it. Seeing only 4 total iron available made me sad, i needed a second settler asap and more iron for sure later. Iron collected, i upgraded my warriors and proceeded over Bismarcks face to a huge stack of iron, excellent.
Now it was a simple gameplan
- Cities focus on warriors and gold income to pay for upgrades and upkeep
- tech focuses on heading for longswordsmen
- Legionnaires focus on scouting and roading out with my captured workers to the next enemy.
Unfortunately i wasted about a billion years trying to find everyone, especially persia's capital that was hiding behind all kinds of city states and cities to where i thought it couldnt possibly be hidden away so well and had to be somewhere else. Japan were hiding up the top, china and montezuma fell easily enough.
I realised in this game how little it matters if you stomp through a city states territory. They just get mad, they wont get even.
Oh and upgrading is wayyyy cheaper than you'd think, i prolly spent about 2-2.5 grand to turn 10 or so warriors into longswordsmen over the game, which was one hell of an army against what the poor prince ai could field. I could have made it alot cheaper if id taken the cheap upgrade policy in the military tree as well (sorry i dont remember their names at all
).
In the end i had enough money coming in to buy several more longswordsmen to bloster my army in captured capitals - a much better solution than trying to build and walk new units across the map.
Was fun, look forward to the next Game of the month