akots
Poet
joyodongo said:... My problem when I try to DOMINATE is to handle the cost of so many cities. How can you do it? When I fought Egypt and had 11 cities I was at 0% research for some turns until I recovered to 70%. ...
Code of Laws is the critical tech here. First, it enables to build courthouses. Every city should have a courthouse. Also, it greatly helps to trade CoL to all AIs with which you are planning to go to war. They might build courthouses for you in their cities, so that you would not have to build courthouses there yourself. Also, find some captured city with lots of forest tiles around it and chop Forbidden Palace there. Another critical warmongering tech imho is Banking which enables mercantilism. Also, having Printing press is very beneficial.
It is a good idea also to build many cottages in the core cities early on in the game. This slightly might slow down the growth compared to farming everything but these cottages are really helpful after Printing press. Another point is not to pillage the cottages and their upgrades in the AI territory around the cities which you are planning to capture.
Also, the warring should never stop. This enables the economy to survive in hard times due to plunder.
Of course, having specialists in the cities requires rather tedious micromanagement but it pays off. First, set the luxury slider (enabled by drama) to minimal value required for most cities to have no more than one unhappy citizen per city. Better if there are no unhappy citizens. If there are still a few cities with unhappy faces, these cities need theaters. Then, depending on your position in the game and the budget, hire all merchants or all scientists if you can make the ends meet without merchants. Capturing Pyramids also enables two rather useful civics, police state and representation. Either one of them is good. If you are behind in research and ahead in conquest but still need to face a strong opponent (need a better unit but cannot research normally at more than 30-40%), representation is the civic of choice. If you think that the game can be finished with whatever techs you already have and you just need more units, then police state is a good option.
Another thing, do not stop warmongering, you would need that plunder to sustain the economy before reaching banking. Immediately after the discovery of banking, the economy should be in a very good shape especially if there are a few banks built as soon as possible in the largest cash-making cities.
If you are in a really desperate situation, it mgiht be a good idea to farm for 2 great people and trigger golden age with them. You then would be able to build courthouses faster and may be even research something without going bankrupt. It lasts only 10 turns but still is often very beneficial. Also, and this is very important, have enough workers in newly conquered areas to chop trees and improve the terrain so that these newly captured cities can start growing and can be productive.
All these points are very well covered in the strategy articles forum.