I built zero settlers.
Even tho I SIP and have early access to horses, I can't manage to capture a city til like T65
I grabbed 2 of
Isabella's workers really early and then she whipped archers non-stop and built walls everywhere. My original target city became 6 archers on a hill with walls. Fortunately, I stumbled on her iron tile before she finished the mine, so I parked an Immortal there and stayed at war forever doing almost no battles. An occasional archer in the open. But she was stuck with archers forever.
I tried to move on to Joao. He settled all the way up next to me. But the 1st target city was stuck at size 1 and would autoraze
I just kept chopping and building up an army (along with an army of workers)
Then finally let them loose.
I thought
Joao was going to be all archer/chariot, but a sword appeared when I was about to take his northern-most city. I guess there's iron up there.
I guess I'm lucky I went for Joao first after all.
Now I have 14 cities and razed 8 more.
Doing 0 bpt at 0 gpt.
Washington had 9 cities by the time I turned on him. I'm very happy with how I handled him. It was fun. I sent my stack deep into his land to pillage 2 elephants. I could not let him get those military units. He already had HBR and Construction was next. I also knocked out 2 iron and 2 copper. He could still build horse archers, but that's not so bad.
He had a giant stack of metal units in his 60% culture defense capital--with walls. Pass.
So I just circled him and took out his 8 satellite cities first. I really used the fact that he could not cross rivers against him.
Gifted a couple cities back to him so he would send out defenders.
In the end, I took his capital when it had only 2 defenders (axe and archer) which my Immortals ate right up.
His roaming 'stack' evaporated when he died.