Bugsy said:
80K - You aren't going to sneeak up on too many humans with the victory conditions screen, plus ICS is a recipe for disaster.
OK, let's for arguments sake say that there was a way to hide our intentions until rails and commie is available. What's the cost of having 75 settlers hiding in the cities? Do they cost upkeep? They could explode and turn a perfectly nice set up for an SS into an ICS just like that.
I believe one of the cool things with this is to weigh different alternatives for a long term strat so have patience with my sometimes far fetched plans. I do know that the most important foundation for success is noble art of MM, but I leave most of that to those better suited (I'm no "Beautiful Mind"
).
So follow me on this trip:
AA is about a decent growth and covering iron as #1 prio. If we have that and about 50% of continent,we can have good relations with our cont. neighbour. We research full speed -> IW to settle the iron, then go moderate towards Monarchy (save some gold). We don't have to hook up the iron but just be sure of having it when time comes to up the warriors we're building in meantime. We should aim for a mutual trade partner in the strongest civ on other continent. If we can trade research, agreeing on different paths, that's cool and cost efficient. To make them believe we want a space race with them would be perfect. Our city spacing could at this point be perfectly normal á lá CXXXC. We cannot sign MPP with them until nationalism, but we can agree on joining a wipe out move on our respective neighbours. That could mean a pre set number of troops sent over seas and a promise to make no claim on captured cities on opposite continent + pulling out our/their troops asap when mission accomplished. The timing of "cleaning the continent" would be late AA, after monarchy is in but before muskets. If, and I stress if, we manage to divide the world into 2 monsters with 1 cont each, we could then focus on fastest way to IA beelining to ToG and magnetism. If we can get demo for faster workers, fine for future railing. While doing this, pretending to be a space race civ, we start building settlers. When steam is in we, of course, rail our guts out. This time not focusing on railing the core first, but connecting the realm for defense purpouses. While doing this we go straight to communism. When commie is in and the cities connected, we set out the settlers and launch a 1 turn ICS all over our continent. From there on we focus purely on defense and whipping cult. Now our opponent knows our intention no doubt, but they're probably behind in cult and have only conq/dom or SS as alternatives. Possibly they won't be able to do a sea invasion at this point so only way is running for a space launch. Thing is they have to do all their research on their own and if we declare, fully railed and red, they will have to go commie or fascist too. How fast will that go? We have no hurry in researching except for keeping up defense-wise. We water our land and whip out required units, population beeing our "gold".
or
or just
?
