Recent content by Scaphism

Indeed. I'm itching to know what's happened.

Looking further at the map of your continent: You have an opportunity to monopolize most of the happiness resources. Happiness sources available: Gold, Gems, Dye, Spices, Elephants, Silk, Wine (only 1) You have all of the sources of gold and you could fairly easily control all of the dye...

I think this is a rather unusual game in the ALC series because one continent has 6 of the 7 possible religions, and Saladin's game focuses so much on having religions available to him. Spiritual gets its power from Civic changes and and half priced temples, but there's been little to no...

Charismatic has another advantage: Your units promote at 2 and 4 XP respectively, instead of 2 and 5. Barracks do not give XP to naval units, which means you lose out on 3 xp. Running Vassalage/Theocracy/Settled Great General will let you pump out Level 2 ships when non-charismatic leaders...

Thinking about it a little further, I think you ought to delay war. As you pointed out, Zara already has crossbows available to him (good vs your potential maces) and he will likely have Engineering for pikes while you're still making Horse Archers and Elephants, let alone Camel Archers...

You seem to be a bit indecisive about where to go with this game, so I'd advise against lightbulbing. In my experience, lightbulbs are best done with a specific goal in mind, and you've been hesitant to commit to a particular strategy. If you do go for a machinery lightbulb, make sure you're...

I agree with all of SB's points, I'd just add that Vassalage is stronger when you have a lot of cities to produce units with. When you only have a few cities, boosting production in one of them matters a lot. Getting to a critical mass of units is more important than going from 1 promotion to 2...

My feelings exactly. I'm not positive if I'd prefer Mining/Hunting or Mining/Agriculture, but I think I'd be happy with either. Hunting probably gets better the higher the difficulty level. Chance of popping barbs from a hut with a warrior goes up, and if you strike out on Copper you can...

In an ideal world maybe that would work. It's hard to synchronize all of that along with timing hammer overflow properly. What units are most needed for a classical age war? Catapults. They're 50 hammers on normal speed, chopping gives 30 hammers, 37.5 with Police State. How many...

I'm not fond of Police State from Pyramids, even when playing a Spiritual leader. +25% military unit production isn't that significant early on. The bottleneck on production still comes from how often you can whip. Happiness and food are more relevant than total hammer production at that...

I strongly agree with these points. You have pretty effectively cut Zara off from the gold, and your chances of successfully rushing are very, very slim. Continue doing what you're doing - expanding, grabbing good land and resources. Your empire will start to flourish once you can run a few...

I guess this belongs in the pre-game or early game posts, but I don't think Saladin has a "magic moment" in the tech tree where he goes into overdrive. There's no particular tech to aim for, but Madrassas + Spiritual give a lot of flexibility. Another lesson I recently re-learned was the...

I'll throw my vote in for Hunting Archery as well. Your workers have a lot of other things they can do besides hooking up copper, and unless you build a road to your expansion, your new city won't be able to build any axes either. I also support going for the sheep-corn tile to your west...

Food is both vital and flexible, because it can fuel growth and has an efficient conversion into production as well. Hammers can never substitute as food. If you're talking about resources as in corn, fish, iron, dye, etc... It's hard to turn down copper, but it's hardly unanimous. There...

Saladin and Justinian are ver similar leaders in my eyes. Both start with Wheel and Mysticism. Both are Spiritual, with a somewhat suspect second trait (Protective/Imperialistic). Both have a UU that replaces the Knight. They both favor War and Specialist economies - Saladin with the...