Help me Conquer Emperor Playthrough

[Fippy]

I would have teched AH before writing for sure, and imo your strongest city site if doing so would be sheep + copper (and stone).
(AH also gives 20% discount on writing)

York not doing much for you, and you could really use a city that helps quickly with producing stuff.
FIN can tempt peoples into settling floodplains first, but i would strongly advice against favoring them over cities with power tiles.

Fish east of London are also a very strong early tile
Should be scouted more.

 

[bdubbs]

@Fippy I don't disagree that the sheep / copper / stone is a stronger early early city site than heading into the FPs, but I think it made a lot of sense to settle towards Toku with the first city I settled. I did consider settling that way first, but since I don't have to compete for that land I felt it made sense to settle it a little later.

 

[Anysense]

Another option is York 1W of its current location to have corn in the first ring and next city between cows and copper. This way you'd have everything of importance without monuments; connecting cities and copper only requires 2 roads.

 

[bdubbs]

@Anysense I didn't even consider that option so thanks for pointing it out. As a rule of thumb I wanted to settle on the wine for the bonus commerce and I guess I just got tunnel vision with it. Would I really be able to take advantage of it with only one worker though? I really like this idea because it settles west and picks up city sites that seem pretty good early on.

The cow city would have to take over the corn if it was ever going to grow, and sharing the copper tile can help with respect to the complete lack of hammers the wine site had. It also blocks off the land where I'll want to put my future commerce FP city so I can settle the stone 4th. It I wanted to do things this way does it make more sense to chop the second settler or move the worker to improve the corn immediately and take the 12T settler for the cows location?

 

[bdubbs]

So I was pretty interested in the advice to settle first ring on the corn and split the cows / copper to get those cities up and running faster. I decided the best way to understand some of these different strategies presented would be to play them out. I took it to T75 so far and this is how it looks, I'm thinking I'm going to keep playing off this save.

Spoiler :

York has a granary and a library, I have 3 more turns of unhappy from whipping the library. I need defense so I'm thinking about 2 pop whipping an axe there in a few turns. Nottingham has no infrasturcture and no need for any. It can slow grow to size 4 and stagnate there on a grass hill mine when I push borders. with 1 more chop Oracle should come out in 7 turns if someone doesn't beat me to it, T82 doesn't seem like a very good date. After the oracle I had it in mind to build axes here. I have about half as much military power as the surrounding civs, not to mention I have multiple undefended cities that need a unit to prevent unhappiness so building some units seems like a prudent move.

Spoiler :

London has been making Settlers most of the game. I 2 pop whipped the Canterbury settler to OF into a granary, Going to put at least 1 chop in the library, I want to avoid whipping so it can grow to size 6 and give my research a boost. Right now I'm farming 2 fps in Canterbury and I want to get a mine on the grass hill so I can get enough hammers to whip a granary and library.

Spoiler :

Hastings could be another productive size 4 city. Right now its putting its hammers into the great wall for the bonus fail gold thanks to stone. After that I'm thinking about trying to build the mids.

The question is really where would I take the game from here? My first GS would be coming out before long. If I get the oracle I was thinking about CoL. The mids seem like a good pick up here, I have the stone and I'll be able to run scientists in 4/6 cities once I settle the fish, and most of my cities could comfortably grow larger if allowed. That island next to the fish has my attention. I'd really like to get a work boat over there to scout out that bit of water. If I only expand peacefully to 6-7 cities though what era do I pick a fight in?

 

[SittinDown]

Tip:

Don't slow build wonders for fail gold. Utilize 2 pop whips on Axes with 4 H invested, and you'll get more Gold, and an army with it. Plus you don't have Ivory, or Horses, so if you have any intention of early conquest, Axepult is your remaining option, otherwise you're waiting until rifles.

...though Hastings has a ton of hammers, so that may be the occasional exception.

A 2 pop max overflow whip is ~60 hammers. ...other nice thing is you can bank the overflow into the same wonder across your empire on different turns, so with each city whipping every 10 turns, and 3 cities doing that, you're getting ~ 18 gold banked per turn out of that, and 3 axes.

 

[bdubbs]

I'll keep that in mind. As far as this axepult thing, I realized it should probably be my priority considering I need more land in general. I played ahead a bit and found theres some islands to the east and it even has marble or horses, but I'm not convinced I can pull off a cuir rush with the land I have by itself which is making me reevaluate.

To pull off the axepult though I would probably have to go back earlier than my t75 save, tech math and construction before alpha and build axes earlier to do it right though. At T75 I'm at least 17 turns from construction, and have very few axes so realistically I don't think I can pull off an attack date before 150BC or even later. This is fine in the sense that I'm not worried about his unit tech, but the later I attack the more units Toku is going to have, and the harder its going to be to catch back up in tech / deal with other civs cultural borders

 

[SittinDown]

You have the land and traits to pull of a cuir rush. Are you working scientists for GS?

I think that island to the East should be a priority to get a city on.

 

[cseanny]

Spoiler :

Imo there are better options than Cuirs, which incidently, are very far away. When possible I prefer to get the attacks going as soon as possible to initiate the snowball effect. Prioritizing Toku for a permanent worker pump would be a nice place to start. City placement; I'll gladly settle "seemingly" sub-optimal cities as long as they can provide powerhouse starts.

I.e, an aggressive 2nd city off the river at western corn/copper only needs 2 improvements to whip/build/chop 9 Axe in around 14 turns. This would gain you 2 cities with many forest with great production potential. I'd be thinking many Cata's in very short work, even more so with a few whips. You could easily have 8 cities at around 800 BC (2 captured + 6 of your own) with Construction finished shortly after. Some tech path xxxx towards Math, Alpha, Construction, Currency would be my preference.

Imo population is over rated early game, as is happiness. Your Capital can do minimal whipping while using tile sharing for some cottages (other city/ies). Other than that I'd prefer to be whip,whip, and WHIPPING! A single city with one improved food source, a granary, and say a forest/plains 2h tile can whip 5 Axe/Spear units in 11 turns. Literally 1 improved tile man.

At Construction a city with the same set-up above, in addition to 2 forest can whip/chop 3 Catapults and 2 Axe in 10 turns with around 18 overflow to boot. Both scenarios leave you with around -20 unhappiness. If you had 4 cities producing units (this hasn't even included your Capital) you could have 6 Cata's (fewer forest available) with 14 Axe/Spear or 9 Cata's with 11 Axe/Spear before 500 BC.

 

[bdubbs]

@cseanny

I thought your point was interesting so I went all the way back to the save where my first settler came out and figured I'd try out the axe rush, I couldn't pull it off effectively though

Spoiler :

I launched my attack at 975BC with a stack of 12 axes, no promotions. I had 6 axes already built traveling as back ups, and more in the pipeline. I founded 2 cities. The first on the corn / copper, and the second on the sheep / stone / copper. Every city got a granary, and the cap also built a WB. I also chopped most of the trees in the area.

I got to 475 BC and was trying to accumulate axes to topple Toku's last (very annoying) hill city. All the free promotions he got from traits hurt. I had built a total of 30 axes and lost 17 killing 10 archers, 1 spear, and 6 axes to that point.

 

[Anysense]

Toku being protective is not an ideal target for an early rush and Elizabeth is not an ideal leader for early rushe either, she is more about exploiting lovefest. With all the commerce you have early I think axepult is a lot more reasonable. Anyway 975 BC is a bit late for axe rush; without siege you want to attack very early when AI would only have 2 archers per city. It takes experience to get evrything right and achieve results described by cseanny, so you can just try it again to improve. It will be best if you make a more detailed report next time, its hard to tell where you went wrong with only brief account of the events.

 

[cseanny]

@bdubbs

I'm not sure if you're still active in this game of yours but I've recorded a 4 session play through from your original save. You can find it here

And a quick question for anyone out there, I haven't played Civ4 in quite some time and I've forgotten how to queue multiple production whips so as to finish a building in 1 turn. Didn't come up in this game but in others I've been toying with since playing a bit again.

Cheers to all