- make contact w/ other civs
>That is very important indeed. High priority on this one. Get 1 or 2 galleys to move around the world.
- switch to Monarchy or Republic
>Republic is normally prefered. You may need to pay a little unit support. Get cities to size 7+ and get many more cities from Russia. Also ICS corrupt lands for even more cities and thus unit support as well as scientists.
- switch showing prod. queues (right now they are off-the-cuff place holders)
>Temples are no good really for those border cities. You will capture their border cities by the time your culture starts to accumulate anyway.
- substantially increase military HORSEMEN only??? (current total # units: 34 // Despotism # allowed: 56)
>Keep building horses for a while. When you swich to republic, you can disband those warriors and the 2 spears to reduce upkeep..
Russia should soon be history.
You just add a bunch more horses to destroy russia completely.
Fill the conquered land with cities for unit support and scientists.
Then you decide if you are gonna win this game with knights or not. If you think you can, you just keep building horses and galleys needed to transport them. You can then upgrade horses to knights when chivalry is reached.
If you don't think you can win with knights, you start building some libraries after having enough units to handle Russia. Building libs doesn't mean you are gonna stop fighting though. Just find your next opponent and do all the damage you can do with your horses. Build libs only in cities with 12+ uncorrupted commerce.
Keep your units together. Don't let the horses move around by themselves. Keep them in large stacks so that if there is an enemy near, you can be sure to kill it. If you attack with 1 unit and your horse gets redlined and retreats, it will die next turn in a counter attack. Also, whenever you attack a city, you must be 95% sure you are gonna capture that city in 1 turn. Wasting units on a failed attack is no good.
Oh, and a little tip: be carefull using those spaceholders in your build que. I know exactly how it happens, you are fighting a war, a city is ready with it's production and you don't really want to think about that build que, you want the next turn to attack those damn russians ! So you just choose something random and continu the war.
This is dangerous. Another difficult aspect of civilisation (difficult because of the needed discipline) is to keep thinking about every detail, also while fighting wars.
It is pretty easy to forget about those prebuilds and find out you actually should have build something while you already have way too many shields for that.
I think you are still using some not fully worked tiles. You have many tiles roaded but not mined. You may need a little more workers to do the mining. It also looks like you should cut that forest near koningsberg, it has only 1 grassland tile available now. cut that forest to give it a second one. Try not to use forest tiles or other tiles that give only 1 food before you are in republic where you can compensate by using irrigated grassland.
Oh ye, you say you have 7 workers in your last post. That ain't enough. You need a bunch more.
Berlin 11, Frankfurt 13: That is the proof you are using 1 food tiles or specialists. Don't do that. Always let your cities grow as fast as possible.
This complete focus in food is the difference between a struggle on emperor and a gotm win on deity:
-cutting forests where needed
-not using 1 food tiles
-not using specialists
-irrigating every food bonus tiles when possible
-rexing as fast as possible (for example, when you can choose between completing a settler 2 turns before your cities grows size3 or 2 turns after it grows size3 with a warrior first, do not build the warrior, a warrior is not worth the 4 food you lose by far. You lose 4 food because you could have a new city with 2fpt surplus 2 turns earlier)
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