Celtic Sword Rush

In that game, my first build in the capital was the granary, then settlers. In the other towns, they need a couple workers of their own to improve the land enough to build the granaries in a timely manner, but I believe I got all my main cow towns a granary relatively quickly.
 
killercane said:
@ Minstrel- DG and DEI rushes work quite well. You need to attack at the right time however. For example, a current deity level standard pangea game inspired by Bedhead's post: 6 cities at 1250 BC, with 4 barracks, 3 Mounted Warriors, a chariot, 3 archers, and a warrior in each city for MP duty (2 in capital). A neighbor demands gold, I tell him to shove it. He has a wandering settler pair close to my capital which I destroy, starting my golden age. Normally I WOULD have waited longer to get more units for the initial invasion push but it worked out decently well. At 550 BC he's gone, along with two neighbors now playing as OCCs, and Im up to about 30 mounted warriors and numerous cities. There is simply no way that the AI will be to pikemen by 1000 BC unless on Sid. I think feudalism was discovered around early 600s BC in the game I mention above, and thats max opponents with 3 scientific civs. With no scientifics, it would be a bit later. Ive also used early archer rushes to take a nearby city with an iron or horse resource pre-1600 BC with very good effectiveness.

I've seen Feudalism before 1000 BC a number of times, and I've never played played Sid. PTW/vanilla goes much faster early on, IME, due to more efficient AI trading (early contact trades being the biggie).

Anyway, my main reason for popping into this thread was to suggest that anyone who wants to look at Gallic rushes should look at the current SGOTM -- with a dozen teams all going for 100K as fast as possible, there should be some good examples. Five teams are playing PTW (or the jury-rigged vanilla equivalent), seven or so playing C3C. The rules limit teams to only despotism or communism as governments, so that'll affect some research strategies, of course.

Renata
 
I've done this strategy before. It's priceless. One thing I did slightly differently was I made plenty of warriors not all of which were veterans (it didn't matter they pick up the promotions), brought back the wandering warriors and upgraded the lot into GS. Upgrading warriors into GS is an absolute dream.
 
@ Renata:

I wouldnt know about Vanilla/PTW deity tech speed; I guess thats another reason to go for fast dominations with C3C. In addition to ToA, the scarce resources in C3C means less AIs with a critical resource (iron). If tech speed is faster on the earlier releases, using Conquests is even more of a no brainer.
 
:worship: :worship: :worship:

budweiser i have won my first demigod game as the celts with your strategy. I had domination at about 110 bc.

however, i modded your strategy a little. you said gallic swordsmen are expensive, so only attack a city if you have enough to take it. one of a fast units main advantages, although it isn't likely to be noticed, is how little time the ai has to send reinforcements to the city your attacking. since you don't see what is going on in the fog, nobody suspects that the ai sends extra defenders to cities when being attacked. except for capitals, every city i attacked only had 2 defenders (yes, even on demigod), because i didn't hesitate. had i waited for others to come help, i might have been up against 3 or 4. and anyway, 10 more shields isn't a lot more, i could still get tons of gallic swords.

i also want to say that the iroquos mounted warrior dosn't match the GS. i got counter attacked plenty of times, and the extra defense was definately worth the cheap 10 extra shields.

just a random note- i counted at least 20 elite wins attacking, and a few defending, and still never got a leader :confused: .

once again, thank you so much for this strategy! it's been my dream for 3 years to beat deity/demigod. i feel so satisfied :cool:
 
handy900 said:
Nice write up. :D

Celts are a fun civ to play in an always war game on a tiny map.

maybe fun, but not very good. though i said before, 10 more shields is junk change, that's in your golden age. in always war, you may have to waste the valuable celtic golden age is despotism. this whole strategy is based on the golden age being a jump start.
 
No no - definitely try to avoid getting your GA in depsotism. What a waste of commerce, food, production etc!
 
I tried this strategy (on Emperor level) and have a few questions and remarks.

What is actually the probability of having a river start as an agricultural civ? I usually take whatever I get, but when seeing the 6-cow-start I also tried a few rolls of the dice. Seems more often than not I ended up dry.

The first few times I tried this strategy with a start where I had a river and a cow (or grass), I started playing only to find no iron to be found within a 1000 miles. In which case it's a strategy without teeth. Is it reasonable to give up at that point on Emperor level? Playing on seems so pointless.

So in the end I went ahead with a unexceptional start: no river, no goodies near the capital and had to make a step to the coast as a opening move. But at least there did turn out to be iron nearby, and some bonus land. My start turned out to be extremely slow, immediately encroached by a civ (Inca) that had twice the number of cities, and I soon was hopelessly behind in tech. So I decided to stick to the predefined plan, building a reasonable force of about 10 Gallic swordsmen to take on the expanding neighbour. The result was mindblowing. They cut through the neighbour like butter. Before my GA was over I was the largest in size and population and at the top of the tech-tree.

After that it still wasn't trivial to go on and kill of the other civs, but I won't bore you guys with that story. But during the game something happened I had never seen before. Since it's a warfare strategy I suppose getting military leaders is common. I built an army, got the Epic History which gave me another army or two soon afterwards. It seems the AI will never,ever attack them, which can be used to great advantage. So I built Military Tradition and Pentagon to make some more armies. There's a limit to the number of armies you can build which in my case was 5 or 6. After that I got another GL through battle, making the total number of armies I had to 9. Number 10 however wouldn't make an army. I also couldn't use it to rush anything I was building. Weird no? Anyone seen this before? Useless good-for-nothing GL, which I ended up using as an explorer.
 
You need 4 cities per army. MGLs in Conquests can't rush Great Wonders, only Small Wonders and improvements.

I'm using this strategy on a small pangea on Demigod, and I crushed the Romans by the end of my Golden Age. Killed the Egyptians with the help of Persia in 350 AD, and I'm shooting for a Domination win by 1000 AD. :cool:
 
Yes, I know that the number of armies you can build is limited to one per four cities. But I'm talking about a military leader, which can still appear when the number of built armies would exceed the maximum. And I'm also aware of the fact that military leaders can't build wonders, but my military leader couldn't build ANYTHING!!!! :confused:
 
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