All of the Nations are cool. All of them have their special, magical "thing" that make them fun to play. Assyria has the amazing "Focus Pocus, Where'd Your Army Go?" ability. Egypt is all about the nuts and bolts of the economy and building a super strong one. Babylon is all about tech, and so on.
Despite the fact that all the Nations have their own "thing" they all tend to develop in more or less the same way. All but one.
That one is Carthage and it stands apart. It's got its own, wholly unique play style and used well and correctly, it is flat out amazing.
Carthage is the only nation in the game you can get away with not focusing on military. In fact, in my latest tests with Carthage, I don't even bother researching military techs for the first 50-80 turns unless I happen to need something that lies beyond a given miltech.
The secret to building an uber Carthage is to focus on the economy early and relentlessly. Since you don't need to train military units or research miltechs, you can dive deep into the tech tree chasing whatever goodies make the most sense for your particular game, or, if you're a warmonger, you can leverage the power of your hired guns by training lots of your own troops and wind up with a dominant, if odd-looking military force.
I prefer to go the economic route and enjoy being able to focus on specialists early, thanks to not having to bother training troops beyond token garrisons for the -1 Discontent boost.
There are a couple of different approaches here: Normally, I would not recommend founding a Merchant capital but Carthage is a possible exception. If your merchant is male and decent, Dido can marry him and start the game with +100 gold per turn (or more). (I found the capital as a Merchant city to see who the merchant is, on the thinking that Dido would know who she's traveling with and if I don't like him/her, then I'll back that out and usually found the Capital as the Artisans).
With a decent monetary base in hand, the rest is cake. Start as you normally would, by developing tiles that boost growth for faster workers and settlers, build an "extra" worker for each of your first four cities to speed economic growth, and take a more measured approach to expansion, mixing specialists into your early game builds for even faster economic growth.
I'm also usually pretty careful when playing Carthage to be sure that once I've got my three family seats, when I'm ready to give a specific family a new city, I have that family's best growth city churn out the settler to get the additional +1 citizen for founding a "same family" city - since I can almost always train specialists super early, I can make nearly immediate use of those extra points of pop.
You don't even need your starting slinger to help you take barbarian/tribal sites. Just wait till there are 2-3 units milling around the camp you want, send in your "talent scout," hire everybody and have them beat the hell out of their own camp. Done and done.
I've got a vid series over on the YouTube channel that explores this strategy. Was a fun game.
Despite the fact that all the Nations have their own "thing" they all tend to develop in more or less the same way. All but one.
That one is Carthage and it stands apart. It's got its own, wholly unique play style and used well and correctly, it is flat out amazing.
Carthage is the only nation in the game you can get away with not focusing on military. In fact, in my latest tests with Carthage, I don't even bother researching military techs for the first 50-80 turns unless I happen to need something that lies beyond a given miltech.
The secret to building an uber Carthage is to focus on the economy early and relentlessly. Since you don't need to train military units or research miltechs, you can dive deep into the tech tree chasing whatever goodies make the most sense for your particular game, or, if you're a warmonger, you can leverage the power of your hired guns by training lots of your own troops and wind up with a dominant, if odd-looking military force.
I prefer to go the economic route and enjoy being able to focus on specialists early, thanks to not having to bother training troops beyond token garrisons for the -1 Discontent boost.
There are a couple of different approaches here: Normally, I would not recommend founding a Merchant capital but Carthage is a possible exception. If your merchant is male and decent, Dido can marry him and start the game with +100 gold per turn (or more). (I found the capital as a Merchant city to see who the merchant is, on the thinking that Dido would know who she's traveling with and if I don't like him/her, then I'll back that out and usually found the Capital as the Artisans).
With a decent monetary base in hand, the rest is cake. Start as you normally would, by developing tiles that boost growth for faster workers and settlers, build an "extra" worker for each of your first four cities to speed economic growth, and take a more measured approach to expansion, mixing specialists into your early game builds for even faster economic growth.
I'm also usually pretty careful when playing Carthage to be sure that once I've got my three family seats, when I'm ready to give a specific family a new city, I have that family's best growth city churn out the settler to get the additional +1 citizen for founding a "same family" city - since I can almost always train specialists super early, I can make nearly immediate use of those extra points of pop.
You don't even need your starting slinger to help you take barbarian/tribal sites. Just wait till there are 2-3 units milling around the camp you want, send in your "talent scout," hire everybody and have them beat the hell out of their own camp. Done and done.
I've got a vid series over on the YouTube channel that explores this strategy. Was a fun game.
