Help me Beat Saladin and win on Prince

[MaximumPain]

I usually choose fin/Cha/Agg/Imp as my favorite traits. Hannibal and Ragnar are two of my favorites. So with that in mind I wanted to get some time in with other strong traits so I chose Fredrick to work with Phil and Org.

I started on that stringy bit of land to the north and was afraid to over REX in the south so Saladin got both of those horse spots. Before I knew he was the only other AI sharing our massive continent he had me blocked off and was filling it all in. I tried helping Lincoln when I met him but he never was able to get over to the continent to give Saladin some competition for total domination.

I leveraged Cast system early and never did much if any whipping. I used most of the great people in my moved capital to try and make a super city combining Representation from the pyramid with bureaucracy and all the fixings I felt that I got Oxford a bit later then I could have but every thing else felt timely to me.

I wanted to go to war and at least drive Saladin out of the two horse areas near the capital and drive in and burn his support to at least put some hurt on him. Problem is that he and Wang Kong share a religion, are friends, and share a nasty tactical position around me being my only true neighbors.

When I found Justinian fairly late in the game I redirected the cannon/ rifle war against him and took his main area in a series of two wars and managed to force capitulation. This pissed off Saladin and Wang Kon so they declared war on me and I was able to take 2 cities from Wang and kill of Saladins invading army then get peace from them.

I realized that I was making some mistakes mostly with workers and not rebuilding improved terrain when I decided to post this game and ask for advice. Feel free to comment if you like but I think I can fix that one on my own just by being more diligent.

My questions are actually threefold.

#1 What is the best course of action to attack and at least hurt if not kill Saladin. Do I need to wait for infantry/artillery/panzers to be able to crush him or can it be done with what I have now? And will I be able to keep my tech lead if I do go for the advanced military units.

#2 Did I do the right thing with my great people? If not how should I have used them?

#3 Would I be able to pull off a Culture victory with my 3 main cities if I chose to try for one.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

 

[kossin]

You have so many unimproved tiles being worked that it hurts my eyes!
Wake up your workers and improve them. Or at least automate them if you don't want to micro them.
1. Infantry will be enough. Support with cannons to take down the city defense. You can suicide 1/city to damage garrison too.
2. Settling all of them in the same place is a good strategy at times. It's hard to tell now if it was the right choice as there's no way to tell when you got them and what could have be done at that point.
3. Probably but it'd take longer than Domination.

Don't build too many Machine Guns, they can't attack cities. Whipping unhappy citizens is your best friend.

 

[KeloGBites]

Whipping unhappy citizens to make units to garrison when under hereditary rule is even more ridiculous (Learn a lot about whip mechanics from playing China on an Earth map I must say). Saladin is a pretty easy AI to deal with, he's a religious nutcase but his warmongering skills are pretty bad, I'd suggest going till Artillery after Assembly Line and then using Airships, Artillery, and Infantry to annihilate everyone around.

Great People are good when settled, but some are worse to settle then others. I gotta say, and this is mostly opinion based. But settling Great Scientists before the LibRace is won is somewhat redundant to me. It's much better to use them as Bulbs (but I don't know what difficulty this is on so maybe bulbing isn't the best choice aka Noble and below) to speed up your beeline. After the LibRace, you are usually in a strong enough leveraged position that the game is won (Lib-Steel for example is a game-breaking move, or a perfect 2-3 Draft Citys with LibNat-Muskets) so you can just start settling them. Prophets and Artists are best settled, Engineers are an iffy matter in that it's VERY map dependent (Do you need a late wonder that you aren't sure you'll get anyway, is there a key wonder coming up etc..), Merchants and Scientists though..Merchant trade missions are amazing for Army Renovations and Scientist bulbs are great, I get Spies about once every 20 games so..I tend to just settle those.

 

[MaximumPain]

Thanks for the reply's I will give this a go today and see if I can beat Saladin with an infantry war with the artillery coming in later.