Divaythsarmour
Adventurer
I've played (or should I say started) about a dozen games in BTS. I found that if I went alphabet, then I was most likely going to follow up immediately with Aesthetics and Literature. By the time I finish literature, the AI's have catapults and longbowmen and I have a long way to go to catch up. It also seemed to be a point in the game where all of the land is spoken for and I need to take some of it to grow.
These are of course only my first impressions.
I did win one game as Ethiopia on noble level (one level below my Warlords baseline). It was really fun. The map was small. I shared a small continent with Ceasar. Louis 14th. had his own tiny continent. Wang Kong and Montezuma shared the largest continent and it was beautiful because they were constantly at war. I basically bee-lined to iron working and it payed off handsomely. I managed to control all the Iron. I rushed a bunch of swordsman and took Ceasars cities. The matter was resolved long before I got to the mathematics vs. alphabet question.
It was also the first game where I was the first to circumnavigate the globe. I was hoping to get a free tech or something, but the extra square of movement was nice.
At one point, I found a long narrow island that could easily accomodate 3 cities. There was just a barbarian city on it, nothing else. It was pretty cool. I almost felt bad taking it, as it was the most developed barbarian city I had ever seen, farms, cities etc.. A marine does really well against longbowmen.
It ended up being a very easy space victory. I can't say the same for my Prince level games. I've had a couple that went pretty well until I would make a big mistake. My mistakes are almost always like this: I wait until I'm hemmed in to make war. I take the first city pretty well and hold it. But then my second invasion wave gets slaughtered. In one case I lost 5 swordsman (city attack promoted), 2 war elephants and 4 catapults after having reduced the defenses of one of Charlemagne's hill cities to 0. He only had 2 longbowmen and a spearman protecting that city. How good is "protective?" It's good enough to enable 3 units withstand an attack from 11 units from the roughly the same era. What I needed was trebuchets and macemen.
Obviously, I was wrong. In BTS the three tech choices off the same path are aesthetics, alphabet and mathematics.
These are of course only my first impressions.
I did win one game as Ethiopia on noble level (one level below my Warlords baseline). It was really fun. The map was small. I shared a small continent with Ceasar. Louis 14th. had his own tiny continent. Wang Kong and Montezuma shared the largest continent and it was beautiful because they were constantly at war. I basically bee-lined to iron working and it payed off handsomely. I managed to control all the Iron. I rushed a bunch of swordsman and took Ceasars cities. The matter was resolved long before I got to the mathematics vs. alphabet question.
It was also the first game where I was the first to circumnavigate the globe. I was hoping to get a free tech or something, but the extra square of movement was nice.
At one point, I found a long narrow island that could easily accomodate 3 cities. There was just a barbarian city on it, nothing else. It was pretty cool. I almost felt bad taking it, as it was the most developed barbarian city I had ever seen, farms, cities etc.. A marine does really well against longbowmen.
It ended up being a very easy space victory. I can't say the same for my Prince level games. I've had a couple that went pretty well until I would make a big mistake. My mistakes are almost always like this: I wait until I'm hemmed in to make war. I take the first city pretty well and hold it. But then my second invasion wave gets slaughtered. In one case I lost 5 swordsman (city attack promoted), 2 war elephants and 4 catapults after having reduced the defenses of one of Charlemagne's hill cities to 0. He only had 2 longbowmen and a spearman protecting that city. How good is "protective?" It's good enough to enable 3 units withstand an attack from 11 units from the roughly the same era. What I needed was trebuchets and macemen.
Obviously, I was wrong. In BTS the three tech choices off the same path are aesthetics, alphabet and mathematics.
