I've played a part of a game in practice. Having never dared to touch Emperor before, my eyes were opened to a couple of pecularities of emperor level, like the change up in gears of the barbarians - the instant someone has copper, axemen appear, and as soon as someone discovers ironworking, swordsmen appear. Ouch.
Anyhow, more particular to this game, the quechua rush seemed to work nicely. I found Rome about 15 tiles from my capital, and after having produced 5 quechua as the first builds in my capital, I captured Rome OK, then went on to burn down an English city, and keep London after capturing it. I left Elizabeth with one city and accepted peace.
As it turns out, me, Caesar and Ellizabeth were the only occupants of the continent, and wiping out one of them, and seriously crippling the other worked fine for a while. It hurt my economy running Rome and London at such a distance, but with careful management it wasn't too bad. What was baad was the resulting hoardes of barbarians. With minimal expansion from the surviving civilisations (including me since I couldn't afford more expansion) barbarians just came from everywhere. I had been warned my this thread and produced military, putting out axemen as soon as I could, and horse archers as soon as I oculd produce them.
I spotted my first barbarian archer in 2590BC and from about 1200BC onwards, they just came in waves. I had fog busters out, but because there was very little expansion, all that meant was that I encourntered barbarians further from my own cities. The good side of that was that my economny didn't suffer from plundering barbarians because I killed them before the arrived in my area, but I surely didn't meet less of them. There were swarms of them, and it was all I could do to keep producing the military to fend them off. The instant I discovered iron working, barbarian swordsmen started appearing as well as axemen.
I'd like to ask opinions on this - when you have continents, and you wipe out one or two neighbours, the result is a LOT more space for barbarians to grow in. In this game I played, I couldn't trade techs because I was ahead of the only other civ on my continent, and barbarians don't trade!!
The early quecua rush was good, and worked, but I wonder if I paid heavily for it, in barbariens thereafter. Would I have been better off leaving Caesar and Elizabeth healthy and hopefully happy with me?
). Pumped out 5 quechuas initially and headed north to take out Paris (Bud Holy City) and Orleans, wiping out Louis in ~2000BC. Great start
