Advice and tips for my first Emperor game.

[kelemvor]

I've had this game for years and I've recently got back into it after my dissapointments with Civ3 and Master of Orion 3. Until now, I had always played on Prince and King. I was reluctant to try Emp or Deity because of the huge leap in difficulty for me between Prince and King. Here are some of my Civ Stats right now.

Normal sized map, 6 civs
Year 1690
Aproval: 63%, 1st
Land Area: (13 cities) 223,000 sq miles, 3rd
Wonders: Collosus, Great Libray, Mikes Chaple (recently completed)
I almost got mad and quit my game after I got beat building Copernicus at the SSC I was trying to build, so I switched to mikes chaple, better IMO anyway.

I had a good starting location and I expanded to 10 cities quickly but then I had a drastic slowdown after switching to republic and encountering a few rival civs. My neighbors are france and russia. I have an aliance with france and war with russia. Also I have Civ MPGE so I have to keep giving techs to france to keep the aliance.

I feel like I made a big mistake having a bunch of small cities wasting shields building city walls, libraries, and marketplaces. Due to my production history I have few settler improvements and military might. I've done a bad job at building enough settlers and that is the next thing I need to work on I think. I'm holding russia at bay but due to unhappiness factors I'm just staying on the defensive.

Also, I'm on par with research with the other top civs, with a slight edge maybe. I just started researching invention and I'm about to start "pre-building" Leonardos workshop by starting Magellans or Shakespears.

Oh and this is my first post here. I'm glad I found some place with a large Civ2 community after searching the internet and finding a small number of Civ2 resources and strategies. If anyone cares to open my saved game, I'll post it here. I feel like I'm an average civ player and I understand all the game concepts but I really want to beat Deity someday!

 

[kelemvor]

Just a little update... It's 1864 now. I did a population boom and most of my cities are in the pop range of 8 to 15. Also I have around 16 cities now. I built several more wonders including the statue of liberty, and I'm going to switch to fundy after I research railroad and tactics. My plan is to produce a horde of calvary before ravaging my rival civs. After I've expanded my territory I'll switch to democracy. Hopefully by this time the industrial age will be in full swing and I'll be close to starting the united nations.

So... any thoughts on my strategy so far? Any constructive critizism is appriciated.

 

[SlowThinker]

About start:
Don't build improvements (only 1-2 barracks after you meet other civs), only pump Settlers and keep cities on size 1-2.
Then prepare for Republic and celebrating: build happiness WoWs (Mike, HG, then Bach), let cities grow to size 3 and celebrate.

 

[Smash]

Did you get Leo's?
If so,start building horses now.You probably have gone to leadership by now so build dragoons but a good plan is stay with normal horseman as long as possible.They only cost 20 sheilds.By the time you get leadership>tactics,you'll have a ton of horses just waiting for Leo's update.

Use caravans for trading purposes more.In a way,the mighty camel is the most powerful unit in the game.

 

[addiv]

Just keep expanding as fast as possible from the start, by building a lot of settlers, and also a few exploration units (for advanced tribes, nomads, science). Do not go to Republic to early, make sure your civ is ready for it. And when some civ is halting your expansion, build an army of crusaders (get to Monotheism early!) and run them over.

 

[Pleasebanme]

Deity is easy, just go straight for mono and theo, build both wonders and you can ICS till you drop.

 

[kelemvor]

Well, I'm in the endgame right now and I just built apollo's. Of course space flight was stolen from me immediately but I have well over 20 cities that can and I'm sure I can win. However, the game has gotten so tedious now I think I'm going to restart without cheating this time. I have a bad habit of reloading games when battles don't go my way or when my spy fails to destroy the city walls

 

[Old n Slow]

Good for you -- enjoy the satisfaction of good play.

Just a few thoughts to help you along:

-- establish a comfortable border -- preferably a fort on a montain or hill at a chokepoint with one or two of your best defenders & an offender together -- saves a lot of military anguish later on.

-- trade more. send a few camels & trucks to far away lands and collect coins (AND beakers for science! -- each coin of yield comes with another beaker towards the current tech.)

-- buy, buy, buy. Once you discover the magic of trade, spend a few coins via rush building (RB) and incremental rush buying (IRB) -- another route to getting ahead of the ai.

 

[Terrapin]

By building Mikes, you fullfilled the main requirement for playing diety... at that level, Mikes is worth all the SSC improvements put together.. which is not to say you will win without an SSC, just that at D, and to a lesser extent at Emp, it is hard bordering on impossible to grow your cities without Mike's to tamp down the riots.

One thing I enjoy and learned a lot from is taking games such as you describe and replaying them from critical junctures (gunpowder, explosives, industrialization) and finishing them using an entirely different strategy. For me, this usually means trying to conquer the world instead of building a spaceship. Doing this really highlights the different strategies which are effective in conquest v. spaceship games. For instance, if you want to build a spaceship, putting Shakes in your SSC makes all the sense in the world. But if you want to conquer the world as a democracy, you might want to put Shakes in a city with massive shield production which is going to be more involved in building and supporting units.

 

[johnnymiller]

I won my first Emp game recently. What a good feeling. Am currently on my first ever Deity game, think its gonna be an even bigger challenge. Wish me luck.