Bibor
Doomsday Machine
Stalin
Traits: Aggressive, Industrous
UB: Research Laboratory (Replaces Laboratory, +2 free scientists)
UU: Cossack (Replaces Cavalry, +50% vs. mounted units)
Techs: Hunting, Mining
Setup: This guide is based on standard (Continents, Fractal, Terra etc.) map, with standard settings, and works up to and including Monarch difficulty 100%.
Introduction
Stalin was not one of my preferred leaders, but the strategy I found for mr. Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili turned him into a very interesting leader. The key to being a successful Stalin is constantly shifting your economy and general strategy to adapt to the age you are currently in. One can get most out of Stalin with tasting a bit of everything.
On terrain:
Send out your scout to find your neighbours and get to know the lay of the land. Also look out for stone, marble, and gold - your most important resources in the first half of the game. If you're lucky, your empire will border one non-defensive "first target to kill" AI, and one that is strong in technology.
On cities:
Ideally, you will want your fist five cities to be three hammer-heavy sites, one food-rich site (your early science and GP farm) and one future cottage city (possibly riverside), in that order. If the hammer-heavy cities have abundant food - even better - that means these will become your Iron Works and Heroic Epic cities in the future, yielding a hundred and more hammers per turn.
After the fifth, if you have room to REX, your subsequent cities should be mostly commerce cities of some sort, with one or two smaller production ones. If you don't have room to REX, your only choice is to axe-rush your most dangerous (or convenient) neighbour and claim more land.
On early warfare:
A lot of other civilizations have early Unique units. Your only advantage are cheap Barracks and Combat I foot soldiers. Use that advantage if you're forced into an early Axe or Sword rush but don't expect it to be gamebreaking. If you're lucky with stone and/or marble, your economy will be very strong in the ancient age, so you might be able supplement your army with early Catapults.
dankok8 points out - Stalin is the only Aggressive leader in the game that starts with mining, thus putting him one tech and resource away from level 2 Axemen.
On early economy, wonders and builds:
Stalin has a lot of work to do. You shouldn't have a forest standing after you're finished with this phase
You should tailor the early worker techs to your starting location, but Masonry and Bronze working should be high priority. Your first task after getting a worker out is to chop a settler and then chop the Great Wall in Moscow. You'll need Great Wall for two reasons. First, that great spy you'll get will evenually get you most of the early medieval techs from your teching neighbour. Second, you'll have your hands full with building early wonders so you don't want to be wasting hammers on extra military protection.
After the great wall, a food-rich production city should chop out the Temple of Artemis. Even if you don't have marble, you can chop this out in a food rich production city (food rich beacuse trade route yields are based on city size, you you'll want to capitalize on that). Not only does this generate a lot of income, but you'll want that great merchant believe me.
If you have stone, your number of very interesting early wonders extends to:
The Pyramids: for Early Representation and Specialist Economy before you get those cottages on-line.
The Great Lighthouse: If you have or plan to have a lot of coastal cities, this wonder will pay for a large chunk of their maintenance. Best placed in the same city as Temple of Artemis.
The Hanging Gardens: not a very useful wonder in effect (well, it will enable you to whip out some settlers or libraries sooner), but if placed in the same city with The Pyramids, plus an Engineer that will come with Forge, this city will yield you a Great Engineer at some point.
To the middle ages:
After teching Mathematics, especially if you have The Pyramids, I suggest skipping the Literature line and go for Metal Casting instead to unlock your first unique building: The Forge. Okay, it's not really unique, but it's a high-cost building coming for half a price that does wonders. Literally.
If you have a lot of coastal cities and bronze, it might be a good idea to grab The Collosus as well (if nothing else, to prevent a Financial AI from getting it). Manually tech out Polytheism, build the ToA (if it isn't built yet) and trade Metal Casting for the other 3 religious techs which are now all unlocked, as well as for Alphabet.
Create your first spies and send them to the AI you infiltrated your Great spy with.
The early medieval age should be real easy for you. Even if you don't have the Pyramids, you are free to develop the techs you really need and you can steal the rest.
If you can trade or steal for Aesthetics and have gold resource, build the Shwedagon Paya and switch to Pacifism to get out the most of your current SE (while your cottages in other cities grow).
Guilds: The path to your victory
You created a solid early wonder economy. After a while it grew into a stabile Specialist Economy (powered by Pyramids and/or Shwedagon Paya and/or Great Library I hope) that yielded you a lot of great people. In the meantime your cottages grew and now your empire is prepared to pick up the burden of being a world superpower.
Once you get to Knights, its really up to you which path to take. If you want a cultural or science race victory, you can have it by teching and building key wonders and infrastructure (the Great Engineer from the Pyramids/HangingGardens/Workshop city) will help you with close calls.
If you want to pursue a Conquest or Domination victory, its time to switch to Theocracy and to build stables and to build knights. Lots and lots and lots of knights. And trebuchets. Did I mentions knights yet? Techs? Beeline for Cuirassers. The sooner the better.
The thing is, the Russian knights aren't spectacular at all. There are a lot of Unique Units at this period (as well as Elephants ugh) that make them look really bad. However, remember that Great Merchat I was nagging about, the one from your Colossus/ToA/Great Lighthouse city? Send it to the furthest large city you can, and you'll get around 2500 (normal map, epic speed) gold! The thing is, Cuirassers are really cheap to upgrade from knights and Cossacks are really cheap to upgrade from Cuirassers. With one click of a mouse, you can upgrade your swarm of knights into a deadly mounted army that has no match in the field if your enemy doesn't have riflemen yet. If you later go for Steel (and you should), upgrading Trebuchets to Cannons is also relatively cheap.
Isolated starts
I haven't played such a game with Stalin yet, but I guess the strategy would be to skip the Great Wall and to focus on chopping out the Pyramids and either The Collosus or the Great Lighthouse since most of your cities will be coastal anyway. As for the rest, there are two general paths to take (Liberalism race vs. Optics), both discussed into detail in the LHC series on this forum.
Conclusion
Key concepts of Stalin:
- shifting economies (from Early Wonder Economy to SE and then to CE)
- dodging the "weak eras" of economies by always embracing the strongest type
- lots of great people and generals (Pacifism and/or defensive wars with Great Wall)
- strong and instant gunpowder+ mobile armies supplemented with espionage
- excellent tech parity due to Great Wall tech stealing and strong economy
- significant impact of well-planned early wonder positioning (guaranteed great merchants, scientists or engineers): unit upgrading, key wonder grabbing or academy/bulbing.
Traits: Aggressive, Industrous
UB: Research Laboratory (Replaces Laboratory, +2 free scientists)
UU: Cossack (Replaces Cavalry, +50% vs. mounted units)
Techs: Hunting, Mining
Setup: This guide is based on standard (Continents, Fractal, Terra etc.) map, with standard settings, and works up to and including Monarch difficulty 100%.
Introduction
Stalin was not one of my preferred leaders, but the strategy I found for mr. Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili turned him into a very interesting leader. The key to being a successful Stalin is constantly shifting your economy and general strategy to adapt to the age you are currently in. One can get most out of Stalin with tasting a bit of everything.
On terrain:
Send out your scout to find your neighbours and get to know the lay of the land. Also look out for stone, marble, and gold - your most important resources in the first half of the game. If you're lucky, your empire will border one non-defensive "first target to kill" AI, and one that is strong in technology.
On cities:
Ideally, you will want your fist five cities to be three hammer-heavy sites, one food-rich site (your early science and GP farm) and one future cottage city (possibly riverside), in that order. If the hammer-heavy cities have abundant food - even better - that means these will become your Iron Works and Heroic Epic cities in the future, yielding a hundred and more hammers per turn.
After the fifth, if you have room to REX, your subsequent cities should be mostly commerce cities of some sort, with one or two smaller production ones. If you don't have room to REX, your only choice is to axe-rush your most dangerous (or convenient) neighbour and claim more land.
On early warfare:
A lot of other civilizations have early Unique units. Your only advantage are cheap Barracks and Combat I foot soldiers. Use that advantage if you're forced into an early Axe or Sword rush but don't expect it to be gamebreaking. If you're lucky with stone and/or marble, your economy will be very strong in the ancient age, so you might be able supplement your army with early Catapults.
dankok8 points out - Stalin is the only Aggressive leader in the game that starts with mining, thus putting him one tech and resource away from level 2 Axemen.
On early economy, wonders and builds:
Stalin has a lot of work to do. You shouldn't have a forest standing after you're finished with this phase
You should tailor the early worker techs to your starting location, but Masonry and Bronze working should be high priority. Your first task after getting a worker out is to chop a settler and then chop the Great Wall in Moscow. You'll need Great Wall for two reasons. First, that great spy you'll get will evenually get you most of the early medieval techs from your teching neighbour. Second, you'll have your hands full with building early wonders so you don't want to be wasting hammers on extra military protection.
After the great wall, a food-rich production city should chop out the Temple of Artemis. Even if you don't have marble, you can chop this out in a food rich production city (food rich beacuse trade route yields are based on city size, you you'll want to capitalize on that). Not only does this generate a lot of income, but you'll want that great merchant believe me.
If you have stone, your number of very interesting early wonders extends to:
The Pyramids: for Early Representation and Specialist Economy before you get those cottages on-line.
The Great Lighthouse: If you have or plan to have a lot of coastal cities, this wonder will pay for a large chunk of their maintenance. Best placed in the same city as Temple of Artemis.
The Hanging Gardens: not a very useful wonder in effect (well, it will enable you to whip out some settlers or libraries sooner), but if placed in the same city with The Pyramids, plus an Engineer that will come with Forge, this city will yield you a Great Engineer at some point.
To the middle ages:
After teching Mathematics, especially if you have The Pyramids, I suggest skipping the Literature line and go for Metal Casting instead to unlock your first unique building: The Forge. Okay, it's not really unique, but it's a high-cost building coming for half a price that does wonders. Literally.
If you have a lot of coastal cities and bronze, it might be a good idea to grab The Collosus as well (if nothing else, to prevent a Financial AI from getting it). Manually tech out Polytheism, build the ToA (if it isn't built yet) and trade Metal Casting for the other 3 religious techs which are now all unlocked, as well as for Alphabet.Create your first spies and send them to the AI you infiltrated your Great spy with.
The early medieval age should be real easy for you. Even if you don't have the Pyramids, you are free to develop the techs you really need and you can steal the rest.
If you can trade or steal for Aesthetics and have gold resource, build the Shwedagon Paya and switch to Pacifism to get out the most of your current SE (while your cottages in other cities grow).
Guilds: The path to your victory
You created a solid early wonder economy. After a while it grew into a stabile Specialist Economy (powered by Pyramids and/or Shwedagon Paya and/or Great Library I hope) that yielded you a lot of great people. In the meantime your cottages grew and now your empire is prepared to pick up the burden of being a world superpower.
Once you get to Knights, its really up to you which path to take. If you want a cultural or science race victory, you can have it by teching and building key wonders and infrastructure (the Great Engineer from the Pyramids/HangingGardens/Workshop city) will help you with close calls.
If you want to pursue a Conquest or Domination victory, its time to switch to Theocracy and to build stables and to build knights. Lots and lots and lots of knights. And trebuchets. Did I mentions knights yet?
Techs? Beeline for Cuirassers. The sooner the better.The thing is, the Russian knights aren't spectacular at all. There are a lot of Unique Units at this period (as well as Elephants ugh) that make them look really bad. However, remember that Great Merchat I was nagging about, the one from your Colossus/ToA/Great Lighthouse city? Send it to the furthest large city you can, and you'll get around 2500 (normal map, epic speed) gold! The thing is, Cuirassers are really cheap to upgrade from knights and Cossacks are really cheap to upgrade from Cuirassers. With one click of a mouse, you can upgrade your swarm of knights into a deadly mounted army that has no match in the field if your enemy doesn't have riflemen yet. If you later go for Steel (and you should), upgrading Trebuchets to Cannons is also relatively cheap.
Isolated starts
I haven't played such a game with Stalin yet, but I guess the strategy would be to skip the Great Wall and to focus on chopping out the Pyramids and either The Collosus or the Great Lighthouse since most of your cities will be coastal anyway. As for the rest, there are two general paths to take (Liberalism race vs. Optics), both discussed into detail in the LHC series on this forum.
Conclusion
Key concepts of Stalin:
- shifting economies (from Early Wonder Economy to SE and then to CE)
- dodging the "weak eras" of economies by always embracing the strongest type
- lots of great people and generals (Pacifism and/or defensive wars with Great Wall)
- strong and instant gunpowder+ mobile armies supplemented with espionage
- excellent tech parity due to Great Wall tech stealing and strong economy
- significant impact of well-planned early wonder positioning (guaranteed great merchants, scientists or engineers): unit upgrading, key wonder grabbing or academy/bulbing.
