to answer some questions quick:
at what time was aest researched? some ai go for it around 600 BC. lots of bad luck and a very fast teching ai can get it earlier (3 gems near capital will do
)
you have to block your land via your culture, meaning also the costal tile. if you dont have culture there settlers will get shipped. another quick question: why didnt you simply close boders for 10 turns with the ai that sent the boat when spotting it?
more detailed questions (why you tanked your eco and such):
post a starting save and the save where you currently stand. another quick asumption: having 8 archers, 6 workers and 4 cities before pottery seems like you expanded too fast. you need to reach pottery or writing before you can tank your eco completely, or simply leave away bronze if you have enough archers and only need for 1 blocking city
on a side note:
i never have played marathon speed so far, so no idea if that changes things a bit (more turns might mean more turns upkeep for your army?). and i usually play on normal map size so on big size more ai´s with techtrading on might mean faster tech pace for the ai in the beginning (later also for you, once you enter into the trading aera, so this might be ok...)
I am at work right now, so i can't look at my save right now. I gave up on the game and I now have a game going on immortal that looks promising, but it didn't use your strat. I did a variation that worked better for me.
600 BC for Aesthetics sounds about right. It was charlemagne first and then another picked it up before I got it. I have been noticing this a lot in BTS. If the AI wants a wonder, they will also prioritize the techs for it. I think charlemagne probably had access to ivory, marble, or gold (or all 3, he had a huge empire) and wanted one of the wonders that Aesthetics allows. I also got beat to the great library because the AI teched literature before I could.
Isabella was able to get behind my lines because she was on an island to the southeast. I had the land passage blocked to my southwest, but she didn't need to pass through my cultural borders to get to my peninsula by sea. She sent a galley across the gap between our islands(once her cultural boundaries extended to the intervening ocean squares) and plopped a city behind my lines. I had closed borders with everyone because I wasn't feeling confident they wouldn't just go right through.
I will try to figure out the save posting mechanism for this board when i get home.
As for my economy, I think that the big problem was that I didn't open borders with anyone. That extra 4 gold from better trade routes could have made the difference(and let me get pottery sooner).
I can't seem to get this thing to work. I follow the instructions precisely and build worker, archers to happy cap (usually 4 or 5 archers come out here), then worker, settler, worker worker. By the time I have finished my first settler on standard map size, the AI has taken my nearest copper. horseback riding is far out of my way for teching since I need to beat the AI to literature. So I am stuck with archers and chariots (if I manage to grab some horse) until feudalism...which I never survive to. I get taken out shortly after construction is researched. The first settler just comes really late. You claim it works on standard map size, but in every standard map size game I have played, I can not get more than 4 cities using this strat because the AI expands too fast.
The strategy that ended up working(so far) for me was a worker worker settler build where I rush BW and chop the second worker and settler. If my second city can grab copper, I have my capitol continue making workers while I settle and hook up the copper. As soon as I get copper hooked up, I make axemen for defense. On immortal, I can get the axemen up and running before the barbs start entering my cultural borders. I doubt this is the case on diety, but I am going to check after the next time I fail with your strat. Also that early second city really helps me expand faster since both cities are actually big enough to do something useful. Since you can get archers in time even if your BW gamble fails, it doesn't seem too risky to me.
I did this with Peter on a standard Terra map, and I have 7 cities compared to the AI's 9-10. I am able to keep up on tech and I am pumping GP like crazy in my capitol. I did a variation that involved building some wonders in this game. I started with stone, so I chop rushed the pyramids in order to get representation early. This made sense to me since I am philosophical and A) get more GP from wonders and B) want to run lots of specialists. It meshed well with representation. I didn't have access to marble, but I was able to get the great library and the national epic along with the hanging gardens in my capitol. Unfortunately, light bulbing liberalism may not happen this game. I have too large a chance of getting an engineer. But I have 3 super-engineers in my capitol busily building notre dame.
Anyway, this thread is about your strat, and it looks solid on paper, but I really can't seem to get it to work. Last time I tried it, I had just put my 3rd city put up when the AI put a city next to my capitol's cultural borders effectively leaving my only remaining city option a tundra city on the coast with one sea resource. 4 cities isn't going to hack it. That was a pangea map. The time before that was a continents map where I had AI on both sides of me in a long 3 city wide continent. I tried to block, but I wasn't quick enough and the top AI squeezed along the sides until he couldn't go any further. Then as soon as I blocked him, he declared war on me despite the fact that I had plenty of archers and he had an attacking stack consisting of an axeman and a chariot. If the AI is trapped and the only way for them to expand is through person X, their attack threshold is greatly reduced. Of course, since I didn't have any copper or horse (AI grabbed it all before I had my first settler out), his axeman and chariot combo got two victories in a row against fortified archers and razed my latest city. That's when I quit.
Perhaps you could include in the walkthrough how much one should be chopping early game and how much one should be doing improvements. Like, in those first 3 settlers and 5 workers, how many forests should fall? On marathon, that is 1500 hammers and forests give 90 hammers.
Could you post the years that each of your settlers come out in the demo game? That might help me gauge the right amount of chopping.
Another problem is the initial tech/build does not seem to work as advertised. In your guide, you say get techs to work your capitol squares, then get archery, then BW.
Techs to work squares may include fishing, Ag, AH, hunting, and mining. We probably don't need all of them, but we usually need hunting(for archery) and at least 2 others to keep our worker busy once he is done. You may start with as many as two of these, but still that is at least 1 tech (possibly more) before we can start archery, and researching a tech takes about as long as building a worker. So I build a worker and get techs to give the worker something to do. Now I am done with my worker and I can still only make warriors. So, your guide says that I should actually make a warrior(or scout). My question is....why? I am just going to delete it later ain't I? Wouldn't it be more useful to put some hammers into the barracks. Is a warrior really something worth building? Furthermore, even if you have a completely focused square for food, you still get a warrior in 20 turns. I don't have archery by this time. So now what...make another worthless warrior? Once I get an archer, it is still a long time before I get BW, and my worker has run out of tiles he can improve without knocking down trees. So now my worker is standing around with his dick in his hand. Also, I am at happy cap now, all my archers are out and about fog busting, but I still don't have BW and it is time to make my second worker. I can't chop help him because I don't have BW yet. In fact, I usually get BW about the same time I get my first settler out, which is WAY too late.
I guess what I would like to know is, in your demo game, what year you got each tech and completed each unit. Then I can maybe see how this magics together to make an efficient build. But I don't see how the timing works. It doesn't work for me. I always get stuck building 2 or 3 warriors because I don't have archery in time or have a worker standing around doing nothing for a while. It is always one or the other unless I get really lucky and pick up a couple techs from huts.