zxcvbob
Emperor
I've played several games lately as the Huns on a continents map where I went with combined Honor and Tradition policies. I take the Tradition opener first if my capital has lots of good tiles to grow into -- and it usually does -- or the Honor opener if I'm getting swarmed with raging barbs. But whichever I open first, I open the other one next and eventually I take the full Tradition tree and at least the left side of Honor. I delay Legalism until I've captured 3 cities (I don't settle any myself except Attila's Court). I annex the good cities (but not immediately), and burn the crappy ones (unless I have happiness to spare for some reason, like maybe I built Notre Dame), and puppet the ones in-between.
By avoiding the coasts I can leisurely kill everybody on my continent (except the city states; they love me) with very little risk of meeting civs from other continents. Then abruptly switch to peaceful mode and take Freedom for my ideology, or maybe Order if I have lots of coal. Plus I can build National College, National Epic, and Heroic Epic, etc in my capital before annexing anything, so they are really cheap.
It works great at King and Emperor level. I haven't tried it at higher difficulties than that, but it should scale up pretty well because the AI's will have more units to kill to level-up my horse archers, and better cities to capture. The only downside is I'm guaranteed not to be the founder of the world congress, but more often than not that happens anyway.
By avoiding the coasts I can leisurely kill everybody on my continent (except the city states; they love me) with very little risk of meeting civs from other continents. Then abruptly switch to peaceful mode and take Freedom for my ideology, or maybe Order if I have lots of coal. Plus I can build National College, National Epic, and Heroic Epic, etc in my capital before annexing anything, so they are really cheap.
It works great at King and Emperor level. I haven't tried it at higher difficulties than that, but it should scale up pretty well because the AI's will have more units to kill to level-up my horse archers, and better cities to capture. The only downside is I'm guaranteed not to be the founder of the world congress, but more often than not that happens anyway.
