I love wine in the early game, it only requires 1 first generation tech, it gives +1 food and +3 Gold (or is it 4?, maybe with river). Gold is best of course, but it comes one tech later. Silk is always under forest, so it's a nice 2nd stage happiness boost. Incense requires temples to give happiness, but can be one of the biggest contributors of happiness in the mid-end game. But veil requires reagents right? Both Reagents and incense are nice commerce sources as well. Settling on dye/gems can be nice, but not for the capital, or the 3 first cities, unless you can get little jungle in the city square.
I don't think I've EVER actually had reagents when I've gone Veil. Bastards always show up in my city radius the second I start a Ljosalfur game though. Settling on jungle isn't too crippling, as long as you've got at least one food resource or freshwater grassland, as well as a couple of other non-jungle squares. Build a library, run two scientists, stick cottages where you have to, and have it build warriors. Your happiness cap is unlikely to be much higher than 5 or so before you get religion anyway.
Yeah I like to think of the holy trinity when it comes to my cities. I usually end up with three main cities, when playing on small and standard. These will be my main cities throughout the entire game usually. They usually define my territory, and I plant some additional cities to fill it out and/or block enemy settlers from passing.
I aim for more than three main cities early, so I can have at least one that is just focusing on production rather than GPPs. And it's a strategy that does reward building as many cities as possible, just not expansion at such a pace that it cripples your defense or leaves half your empire unconnected and unworked.
Where possible, I like to space them out just enough that I can backfill with more cities later. The other bonus of heaps of specialists is that you can fit obscene numbers of people into a relatively small land area.
Yeah I did this in the last game (as you can read above), and it was awesome. For the same reason, I find that I get the Sages fast enough to use one like this. You can also add some future sages this way once you got Arcane Lore and Academies in your main cities. And then you might want to add the Crown to this city as I did in my game since I got Veil Holy City in a pretty bad city for it.
I'm definitely starting to agree with this - once I started decently micromanaging specialist production, it's become way too easy to get all those sages. Actually, last game I wanted to hurry GP production in my forge city, so I added the engineer specialist and lo and behold! I had a great engineer pop out. My GP production was so good that waiting for another extra sage didn't end up delaying Arcane Lore by much, and when I got it I had an instant Crown of Akharien!
So you rush Veil then? I guess that's necessary to get it on Emperor. I've recently moved up to emperor, but in my last Monarch game I had so good research I got all religions except the Order.
(which I captured for the Law mana)
Weeeeell not exactly rush, just prioritise a bit (and I've never had trouble being first to either writing or veil on emperor or immortal - it's not like being first to kilmorph or leaves). It's not terribly important that you actually found it anyway - you get religion in two cities instead of one and a better chance at Rosier.
But yeah it's such a rocking religion that you really want it pretty quick smart. The happiness is great, Rosier is worth many times his weight in gold, and Sacrifice the Weak is an amazing civic. StW also takes about 20 turns or so to really reach its full potential so the earlier the better!
Of course the problem is that when you go Veil, all your old friends now hate you and your new evil buddies probably won't be particularly firm friends yet. You still want the tech quick, but there are circumstances where it can be worth it to delay converting until youve done a bit more tech trading and built some temples and sent out missionaries to other civs.
Cardith Lorda could be an alternative.
It would work, but he's not super-suited to the masses-of-specialists-and-heaps-of-whipping approach (kinda wastes the sprawling trait) and the three cities is a major obstacle later on. Maybe run philo early for the science boost, and use great sages to get to sorcery (maybe summoning too) and academies for all three cities. Try to get an engo for Crown too, I guess. I'd probably switch to financial or something at turn 200. Financial/veil/aristocracy/half-farm-half-cottage/whipping-only-in-moderation might work.
