• Civ7 is already available! Happy playing :).

Conquering Emperor: Tactics, Tricks, and Lessons

Feralminded, thanks. I started an emperor game after reading this article. It's probably my 8th or 9th attempt. I'm at 1800 and not everything's gravy but I feel like I have a fighting chance - which is the first time I can say that about Emperor. I found the city placement guide and the advice not to farm regular grasslands most helpful.

Thinking a culture victory might be possible.

Hey man I'll check out the save tonight or tomorrow at the latest and see if I can't give you some tips. That said I am currently running an Emperor Tutorial series in the strategy forum if you would like to participate. We are still on the first segment and won't be moving on until Friday so if you have time it might be worth a look to get kind of a community consensus on things.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=308986
 
Something I realised today: dogpiling Asoka with an annoyed Monty netting me the worlds top holy city is better than thinking about backstabbng monty as he invaded (with him 6 turns away from steel).

(Darius, Immortal level, big & small, hopefully my first immortal win)
 
Cool man, thanks. I might do that tutorial link as Ramsses, but be a bit late.

I have a newer save - 1906. I have CC. I might have to be the one who sacks one of Wilhmelm's top 3 cities - something that would be a bit hairy, but if I want to win on Emperor maybe I'll have to.

I neglected my top 3 cities - didn't start going for culture in all 3 soon enough. But maybe, maybe, I can still do it.

I'm researching fission because I don't have coal and I want the production. I know this goes against your advice but I'm desperate. Also maybe I'll be able to trade it and electricity for something useful like flight or medicine or both(which would be awesome if my next great person is a merchant.)

Oh, I also forgot - your advice on bulbing great scientists was fantastic. I was running the rediculous combo of PHI + Parthenon + National Epic + Pacifism. I was pumping out a GS every 9 turns. That's how I stayed a tech leader (Caravels in 1250 - I've never even done that on Monarch or less.) Now I'm more or less middle of the pack - which is still far greater than any other emperor game I've played.

I cracked Monarch initially by bulbing things, founding religions and making shrines with Great Priests as Ramsesses - it never occured to me to try something similiar with scientists.

I might not read your advice while I'm still playing. I kind of like to win or lose on my own (in the midst of a game that is.) But I will defenetly read whatever you have to say when I'm done if you don't mind giving advice.

Thanks again.
 

Attachments

Cool man, thanks. I might do that tutorial link as Ramsses, but be a bit late.

I have a newer save - 1906. I have CC. I might have to be the one who sacks one of Wilhmelm's top 3 cities - something that would be a bit hairy, but if I want to win on Emperor maybe I'll have to.

Your cities aren't specialized enough. You shouldn't have cottages and lumbermills or workshops in same cities in that point of a game. The most efficient way to culture victory is to have 3 all-cottaged cities with culture multipliers (Hermitage, Cathedrals) and rise the culture slider.
 
The sea patrol mission I do not believe will affect barb pops. Ultimately at the end of every turn a barbarian has a chance to pop in any tile that is gray. The only way to be certain there's no barb pops is to have all the fog busted ... which is usually accomplished with a combination of sea units (can even be fishing boats if you like) and cheap units along the coast covering what your coastal units can't see.

Even if your seafood is butt naked, barbs will not enter your territory to pillage it (or at all) unless it has a valid target within its sight range. If the pillage-able seafood is more than 7 tiles away from the border the barb galley would enter to head towards it, it won't enter.

Abuse-able? Yes, and to hell. I've had LHC games where due to my settling I had 4 barb galleys running in circles at the corner of the island doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, and my coastal defenses? ZERO. Haha!
 
Your cities aren't specialized enough. You shouldn't have cottages and lumbermills or workshops in same cities in that point of a game. The most efficient way to culture victory is to have 3 all-cottaged cities with culture multipliers (Hermitage, Cathedrals) and rise the culture slider.

I have a feeling you're right, but sometimes I don't know what to do about it. My capital, for instance - it's my science city and my great person farm. I have towns and lumberyards. It seems like I shouldn't change either of them though. A plains farm wouldn't be better than a lumberyard and a regular grass farm wouldn't be better than a town in my science capital with Universal Sufferage.

My financial city has one cottage, maybe I should farm it, as the cottage will develop too slowly this late in the game.

What cities are we talking about?

I'll try messing with the culture slider, but I really hate giving up science or espionage. None of my previous cultural victories have had anything to do with the slider - but maybe with Universal Sufferage it's different.

BTW - a cottage economy is what has kept me afloat this game.

Thanks for the input. Hopefully next time I post I'll have won. Basically I have to raze Amsterdam and hope I don't get nuked for it. A friend says I shoud try espinoage in his 3rd city, but I'm thinking I should raze Amsterdam in about 40 turns.
 

Attachments

Yeah one thing that maybe I should put up a note about is that under a CE your SSC cannot double as your GP farm. Under SE this is possible but under CE you really need a dedicated farmed to the nose GP farm. That said I HAVE doubled my Wall Street city as a GP farm under CE but that's not ideal either. Really you just need to set aside a high food city for it and farm it up. I know this is hard under CE since high food cities are also prime candidates for cottage spam but believe me ... its almost always worth it.
 
Yeah, I did it! My first emperor win! It seriously felt like an impossibility 2 weeks ago. Cultural victory in 1999.

I should note I had some luck

- Early access to marble allowed
Oracle (and my COL religion, which I never converted too but used to make bank and culture)
Parthenon
Sistine Chapel (never went free religion in part because of it)
Great Library
(which lead to ridiculous PHI + Parthenon + Pacifism + National Epic + 2 constant scientists)

-Shaka and Breneus deciding to attack Sitting Bull instead of me.
Gave me 2 cities and I was on good terms with Shaka and Breneus the whole game. Especially Brenus, we were buzum buddies. I forgot to count the totals at the end, but it was ridiculous. We had a defensive pact for centuries. I never got along with those 2 before.

-The early marble went so well with Pericles. The Odeon is nothing to sneeze at. +3 extra culture, +2 happiness, +2 slots for artists. And if you take over a city with a Colosseum you get automatic starting culture (in addition to the +2 creative culture.) Not to mention it's a cheap building atainable early (and along a tech path you probably want anyway) and it's doubly cheap with Pericles. The cheap libraries and unis helped with culture and with taking the science lead / not falling too far behind.

-An aggressive Monty and Shaka always starting beef with the true tech leaders Wilhelm and Frederick on the other continent.

-Got an engineer 20 turns before combustion (not all luck, as I was always running an engineer in my GP farm. That + PHI means you should get one eventually. Still not a guarantee though.)

-Got a great merchant in time for Sushi (again not all luck, I was running all merchants, but there was still a chance it could have been something else._

-Dido with artist for Jewelers. Again, not all luck since National Epic and Sistine chapel and running artists made it the most likely GP. Still it was serendipitous that I got all 3 in the order I wanted.

-Sitting Bull, the complete joke of the world, founded Mining Inc. - meaning no one else could so I eventually took the production lead.

Some notes

-MKLh was right, I wasn't specializing my great person farm enough (Athens). So...I take it your GP farm should always be a farm over cottages city? Part of the reason I made Athens my GP city was that it had great library and it already had 3 wonders, which for great person purposes, acts as specialists, right? That's a hard thing to ignore. Also, since it was my great library city (and my secondary money city) I liked all the coins coming in from the towns. Not the ideal situation perhaps, but what would have been better? Should I have made Argos my GP Farm?

-I busted the security bureau, the broadcast tower, and two religious multipliers in The Hague (the Dutch's 3rd culture city.) This had them drop from 500 culture a turn to 300 - pretty significant seeing how close the race was.

-I eventually put my slider to 40 or 50% - but i couldn't get myself to do it until after advanced flight and laser. I eventually became UN Head and the world never voted on Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty (did this have something to do with the difficulty? The AIs usually go for it - less than half of them were in this game - funny enough it Shaka, Brenus, Monty and me wanted it to pass.) I thought it was possible that I would have had to raze Amsterdam, so I really wanted these two techs. After I did up the culture my weakest cities went from 28 turns to 18 or something like that which was huge because ...

-Brenus launched his spaceship when my weakest city still hd 7 or 8 turns to pop to legendary. Good thing I went in and busted his cockpit with a spy a few turns earlier - that slowed him down a little bit. Needless to say that 007 saved the day.

-I foolishly was trading uranium to Wilhelm for bonus fish and iron (to make Constructions and Sushi more culturally potent). I stopped this trade eventually, after realising he didn't have any uranium of his own. How dumb would I have felt if later I went to war with him as I was anticipating and got the bombs dropped on me?

-I built nuclear plants in all my cities. My capital had a melt down (the same turn it earned legendary culture, funny enough.) It would have been disastrous if it happened to one of my 2 weaker culture victory cities. All in all though, it was a good move. This is the second game where I had nuclear plants in all my cities. So that's 2 full games with nuclear power plants and one melt down - well worth it. I made it a point to get ecology earlier than usual, which was actually fine because I was doing abnormal moves on the tech tree anyways to trade. It seems no one trades coal, ever. So what options are there besides hoping for 3 Gorge Dam or taking over some coal? On higher difficulties this is not often plausible. I realize maybe I've been lucky with this 2:1 games played / meltdowns had, but still, I didn't see any other choice.

Thanks again Feralminded and MKLh.
 

Attachments

This article has given me the impulse to move from Monarch to Emperor. Thank you!
 
Top Bottom