So, I find I can beat prince fairly handily, but I'm still struggling a bit on Monarch. I had a game come up tonight which presented an interesting strategic question.
Playing as Pericles, Hemispheres, standard settings except random number of continents. I quickly discover that I am on a somewhat smallish continent with our glorious Greek civilization on the SE corner and Pacal on the NW corner. No copper within sight, but I do find horses within my 3rd city. the land around me is medicocre, with a fair amount of jungle to the west and a little to the northwest. However, there are some rice and cow tiles, and a decent amount of grassland hills for production. Also, Pacal has access to TWO sources of copper very early in the game (discovered through diplomacy screen), so he has in the BFC of at least two of his first three cities. I build chariots and archers to fend off barbarians and to hopefully counter the axes I know Pacal will be sending eventually, as land is somewhat at a premium.
Around 500 BC, Pacal declares war, and with mixed stacks of spearmen and axemen, there is little I can do to survive. So my question is this: with access to so much early production in addition to better land for Pacal, is there anything that could have been done to salvage this game? I had access to no luxury resources, which also stunted my city growth.
In retrospect, I think the only way to counter might have been to forgoe much of the top half of the tech tree and beeline through iron working and MC to machinery for xbows while also possibly trying for Monotheism for the religion or failing that, HR to help my hapiness woes. I was going for calendar to access my dyes and later spices in the jungles, eventually forgoing that for HR when I realized that +1 happiness for Dyes wasn't gonna cut it. Chariots just weren't enough for me to defend from pillaging. Is devoting that much of the early game to the bottom half of the tree a viable strategy? I'm much more used to running through writing for math, currency, CoL, etc.
A view of the continent:
Thanks!
Playing as Pericles, Hemispheres, standard settings except random number of continents. I quickly discover that I am on a somewhat smallish continent with our glorious Greek civilization on the SE corner and Pacal on the NW corner. No copper within sight, but I do find horses within my 3rd city. the land around me is medicocre, with a fair amount of jungle to the west and a little to the northwest. However, there are some rice and cow tiles, and a decent amount of grassland hills for production. Also, Pacal has access to TWO sources of copper very early in the game (discovered through diplomacy screen), so he has in the BFC of at least two of his first three cities. I build chariots and archers to fend off barbarians and to hopefully counter the axes I know Pacal will be sending eventually, as land is somewhat at a premium.
Around 500 BC, Pacal declares war, and with mixed stacks of spearmen and axemen, there is little I can do to survive. So my question is this: with access to so much early production in addition to better land for Pacal, is there anything that could have been done to salvage this game? I had access to no luxury resources, which also stunted my city growth.
In retrospect, I think the only way to counter might have been to forgoe much of the top half of the tech tree and beeline through iron working and MC to machinery for xbows while also possibly trying for Monotheism for the religion or failing that, HR to help my hapiness woes. I was going for calendar to access my dyes and later spices in the jungles, eventually forgoing that for HR when I realized that +1 happiness for Dyes wasn't gonna cut it. Chariots just weren't enough for me to defend from pillaging. Is devoting that much of the early game to the bottom half of the tree a viable strategy? I'm much more used to running through writing for math, currency, CoL, etc.
A view of the continent:
Thanks!
