Help me move up to emperor

[guspasho]

I got Genghis for this game and since my neighbors are Pericles and Zara, I thought a good strategy would be to peacefully expand and beeline to Optics and then take over my continent once I made contact with the other AI. The other AI are Wan Kong, Churchill, Stalin, and Charlemagne. However, I'm woefully behind on tech and don't see a way to continue this strategy. Any advice for how to save this game? Thanks.

 

[sampsa]

Clearly your strategy hasn't worked in the way you wanted. I think peacefully expanding was a good idea since there is lots of good land available, but building tons of obsolete units can't be a good idea. You have also overbuilt buildings. Build wealth!

I think even though you have misplayed it, it is still winnable, since you have plenty of good cities. Focus on research (=stop putting your into unnecessary things and start building wealth) and trade yourself out of the hole.

 

[timmy827]

Sampsa has said it already, but the unit builds make little sense if you were planning to stay peaceful early (and presumably should have felt pretty safe, Peri and Zara are fairly peaceful and shared religion).

Don't think Optics beeline is best in most situations. Especially when you delay CS so long.

Biggest thing that jumps out is city placement and lack of specialization. A little hard to say what you should have done exactly (not knowing how your early scouting went), but I would have done some changes:
-delete Almarikh, move Assyrian 1SW (loses corn but uses fish), move Beshbalik 1E
-delete Kazan, bare tundra deer+spice is not enough to justify a city
-combine the two western floodplains cities to one; without any food specials over there 2/3 FP's not really enough for good cities.
-delete Old Sarai, capital can use the plains cow and just plainscow not enough food. Maybe justifiable for horses if you didn't have them at Beshbalike
-not done the far western dye city; too far away for not having a food source.
-maybe moved Samarqand 1N. Without creative you really should have a good reason for not putting a food special in the 1st ring, not sure the southern tiles at samarqand were good enough.

generally not worth building nonfinancial cottages unless a city can be a really good cottage/commerce city. The capital is generally one (Buracademy), but you've not managed it well - a few cottages, a few farms, a few specialsts doesn't make a lot of sense. Beshbalik is solid cottage terrain (lots of river). turfan makes some sense to go with the gems. Assyrian and Samarqand are marginal - rivers, but a lot of plains. The cities working 1/2/3 cottages are just bad, they likely never pay back their own maintenance costs.

No National Epic/GP farm either, although to be fair I don't see a slam dunk location and you have no marble. Running a few specialists here and there w/o Pyramids for early Rep is generally not useful. What were the first two GP? no early academy is a big hole in tech rate.

Workshops need to have at least two of their boosts (caste, guilds, chem, State Property) before you even think about building any. Before that farms produce vastly more hammers by whipping.