Malarkey
Chieftain
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2006
- Messages
- 52
Note: This article is geared towards competative multiplayer gaming. I've made a few corrections here to reflect that.
The following article will describe my strategy to out-teching the human player on Emperor difficulty. Why emperor you may ask? All difficulties from emperor and above, only give a +1 bonus to health, making it much harder for your cities to grow.
This guide is especially important in MP games where tech trading is turned off. Let me also stress that being a philosophical leader will give you a big edge over other leaders, and I'll give a full explaination as to why. I've developed this strategy while playing with friends who are very competitive players.
We'll begin, as always, with your first city. Your capital is your most important city in the game. This cannot be stressed enough, since your capital will be out-teching all of your other cities combined. The best placement for your capital is always on an area that has multiple floodplanes. This can make or break you later on. If the initial spot isn't in the greatest position, it will have to do. So settle in the first spot that the computer puts you in, unless you can find a much better spot within 1 turn of your settler. Just remember, if your capital's initial placement isn't very desirable, you can always move it later once you've settled 3 other cities.
Ok, so now your capital is settled, and hopefully in a spot which will give it a lot of growth. The next step is to build a warrior. You heard that right, no tree chopping here. Now we have to choose our first tech. Regardless of your leader's starting techs, you want to go for the religious techs first to get as many early religions as possible. You'll want to shoot for polytheism first, and then for monotheism. The benefits are twofold, as will be discussed later on.
Once the warrior has been completed, send him out in the opposite direction of your first warrior. You want to cover as much ground as possible. This will allow you to both gather as many huts as possible, and also give you a good idea of where to settle your second city which is vitally important. The next thing you'll want to build is a settler. You'll want one of your warriors to be near the area where you plan to settle your second city. This way, when your settler is completed, you can send him off right away with the fog of war cleared by your warrior, and he can settle as soon as he gets there with your second warrior defending him.
By the time you've popped out a warrior and a settler, you should be able to start working on wonders right away. I'd recommend building one more warrior in your capital before you do this though. Now remember I said to shoot for monotheism? One of the prerequisite techs to monotheism is masonry which will allow you to build the pyramids. So once you've built your second warrior to defend the capital, start building those pyramids ASAP! From this point on, you should never stunt your capitals growth by building workers/settlers unless you reach a happiness limit, and have no wonders to build. When you get the monotheism tech, switch to Organized Religion right away. This is assuming that you managed to get a religion in the first place. Organized religion will speed up the build process of the pyramids by 25%. While you're building the pyramids, maximize your capital for growth until you reach your happiness limit, then switch to production. At first it'll say something like 300 turns to complete the pyramids, but that number will come down quickly once your capital is at it's max happiness rate.
Now some more details about the second city, which is just as important as your capital. You'll more than likely want to turn your second city into a GP (Great Person) farm. So while you were scouting out the terrain for your second city's placement, you'd want to find a spot that has at least two food resources, a floodplain or two, and a few 2F fresh water tiles for farming. You won't build any cottages in your GP farm. Once you've found such an ideal spot, which is often difficult, you'll want to build your first worker here, then send him back to your capital to start cottage spamming, and building mines. Only improve the tiles that you plan to work though, since for now, we only have a single worker. You may even want to build a farm or two just to get your capital to grow as quickly as possible. Once the happyness limit is reached, convert your farms to cottages. This is all very subjective to the terrain that you have, and if you have a lot of floodplains, it's pretty much useless to build farms at all.
Note: please see maltz post here for more info on advantages/disadvantages of having the parthenon.
Now, provided that you were the first person to build the pyramids, good for you.
Start working on the parthenon in your capital next. A 50% boost to your already existing 100% philisophical trait is really nice. Since your capital should have reached its happyness limit by this time, you'll want to switch up to representation for the extra +3 
. Then grow your capital to the maximum limit again by moving all of your workable tiles to food tiles, then back to production tiles once you reach your limit.
So what other techs should you shoot for after monotheism? If buddhism hasn't be founded yet, shoot for that. I wouldn't recommend shooting for many other religion techs after that, as you may find yourself falling behind in tech. By the time that you've built the pyramids, you should have pottery researched for cottage spamming. Pottery should probably be researched after monotheism/buddhism, but again this is subjective to the terrain that you start with. By the time that the parthenon is finnished though, you should only be a few turns away from literature.
After you've built the parthenon, you'll want to build a library in your capital so that you can build the great library when literature comes around. Now I had to think about this for a bit, on whether it's more beneficial to build the great library in your GP farm, or the capital, since it can be bennificial in either. I've come to the conclusion that it's better to be built in the capital, since this is also where you make all of your money from cottages, not to mention that you'll have other buildings that will multiply its effects, such as Oxford. This also helps to balance out the great people points that you get between your capital and your GP farm, so that both are good producers of great people.
If you were successful in building the pyramids, you'll have spawned a great engineer before the parthenon is completed. Don't use him on the parthenon though! Save your GE for the Great Library, as it can be more beneficial in the early game.
Other important techs that you'll want to shoot for after literature are Code of Laws, Civil Service, Philosophy, and Drama. Code of Laws will give you the Caste System civic. Chances are, you won't be able to use this civic in your gp farm yet, as your GP farm will likely not be large enough to use more than a couple of science specialists. Philosophy will give you Pacifism, which adds an additional +100% GP birth rate to all cities with state religion. When you get Civil Service, this is where your tech rate is really going to start to increase with the Bureaucracy civic.
Finally, drama is extremely important for your capital. Make sure that you have 5 other cities down when you get drama, because you're going to want to build the Globe Theatre in your capital. The Globe Theatre eliminates all unhappiness, which means that your capital's size is only dependant on the amount of health that you have. So once you have the Globe Theatre down, maximize it for growth, until it can't grow anymore! By doing so, you allow all of your cottages to be worked, and this will maximize your commerce. This will also protect your capital from another civ switching to the emancipation civic which gives an instant -5 unhappyness, and can shrink your capital in no time. I know this trick all too well.
And if you remember, earlier I said no tree chopping! This is vitally important to the size that you can grow your capital. For every 2 forests in a workable tile, you get +1 health. So only chop forests if you have an odd number of forests in workable tiles, or if they're outside of your capital's workable tiles. Sometimes you just have too many forests, and you'll have to chop some of them down for cottages. In this case, only chop down forrests that give 2F and 1P. This way, when you put a cottage down, it will still allow the city to grow at a normal +2 food rate when working that cottage. When replaceable parts comes along later in the tech tree, you can build lumbermills on all of your forests in your capital for the added production. A +1 health can make the difference between a size 19 city working most of the tiles, and a size 20 city working all of the tiles.
Alright, I won't make this much longer, but I think I've covered most of it. The reason why you want to shoot for the early religions is so you can build a monestary for each religion in your capital. Don't bother building monestaries anywhere else. Having 3 religions will give you a 30% science boost in your capital. Also, in the early game you'll want to build a temple for each religion in your capital as well, since happyness will be a major factor before you can get the globe theatre. You'll want to build all financial buildings in your capital, such as banks, markets, etc, since your capital will be supporting the rest of your empire. The exception to this is wallstreet, since we'll be building a different national wonder in the capital that I will go into in the next paragraph.
Universities, oh how I love you. Where would we be without them? Once you've shot for the other techs that I've mentioned, your next priority should be Education. I've lost many games just because I didn't get my universities down in time to build Oxford in my capital, while my friend enjoys out-teching me to those nasty destroyers. This has taught me to play with Philisophical leaders only, since they get the double production speed of universities. I can't begin to explain how important it is to have Oxford as soon as possible. So make sure you get the prerequisite universities down ASAP, or you'll be hurting in the long run!
And that's about as far down the tech tree that I'll get into. Astronomy will be important for the extra 25% science, and printing press for the +2 gold per town. Beyond that though, it'll be smooth sailing if you can pull it all off quickly enough. Oh, and don't forget liberalism, but I try not to shoot for it, unless I have the prerequisite techs for economics, so that I can get economics as my free tech, and get a great merchant out of the deal.
Now, back to the GP farm in our second city. The only specialists that you should be adding to your GP farm are scientists. Also, you should build your National Epic (+100% GP birth rate) in the GP farm. After that, build every building that gives a research bonus in this city as well. Hopefully, every GP that you pop will be a great scientist. Use your first scientist to build an academy in your capital for the extra +50% research bonus. Every consecutive scientist after this should be added as a super specialist to your capital. Once in a while, you might pop a great artist since the national epic gives GPP for that type of GP. You can use them for a golden age, or add them as a super specialist to your capital as well. It's all a matter of how your game plays out.
The last thing that I'm going to go into are civics. You'll want to be running under Representation all of the time. Not running under representation will kill your science rate in your capital. Secondly, it can be a toss up on whether to run under Free Speech or Bureaucracy. Whether or not the +2 gold per town outweighs the 50% bonus you get in your capital is something I'd have to do the math on. Though, since your capital will be out-teching the rest of your cities combined, it may indeed be better to run under Bureaucracy.
Now whether to run under the Caste System, or Emancipation can be another tough decision to make. You're again, weighing the difference on whether adding more super specialists to your capital will be more beneficial, than 100% town growth rate. Since your capital should also be your largest city, this also means that it's towns should be the most developed, so is the trade off worth it? In other words, more specialists or faster town growth. Again, someone would probably have to do the math here. The unhappyness that Emancipation provides alone might be enough of a reason for someone to switch to that civic, but that's totally your decision. As for Economy civics, I think that state property is pretty much a no brainer once you're able to get it.
Finally the religion civics. As I said from the beginning, you'll want to switch to Organized Religion ASAP for getting those wonders out as soon as you can. Once I'm able to get Pacifism, I usually switch to it after I have Civil Service, so that I can also switch to Bureaucracy at the same time without going into anarchy twice (since I don't normally play with a spiritual leader). As for switching over to Free Religion, I find it's usually best after it takes more than 2000GPP to pop a great person. When you do finally switch over to Free religion, make sure that you've spread all of your non-state religions to all of your cities for the bonus happyness.
Well, I think that's it. I hope I didn't bore anyone to death reading this, and I hope that someone else gets some use out of this strategy, and maybe learns a thing or two. I tried to keep this as simple as possible, and a lot of what I talk about here is very basic to many people who have played for a while. At the same time, I wanted to keep this article to a level where people who are just beginning to play will get a better understanding.
Enjoy!
The following article will describe my strategy to out-teching the human player on Emperor difficulty. Why emperor you may ask? All difficulties from emperor and above, only give a +1 bonus to health, making it much harder for your cities to grow.
This guide is especially important in MP games where tech trading is turned off. Let me also stress that being a philosophical leader will give you a big edge over other leaders, and I'll give a full explaination as to why. I've developed this strategy while playing with friends who are very competitive players.
We'll begin, as always, with your first city. Your capital is your most important city in the game. This cannot be stressed enough, since your capital will be out-teching all of your other cities combined. The best placement for your capital is always on an area that has multiple floodplanes. This can make or break you later on. If the initial spot isn't in the greatest position, it will have to do. So settle in the first spot that the computer puts you in, unless you can find a much better spot within 1 turn of your settler. Just remember, if your capital's initial placement isn't very desirable, you can always move it later once you've settled 3 other cities.
Ok, so now your capital is settled, and hopefully in a spot which will give it a lot of growth. The next step is to build a warrior. You heard that right, no tree chopping here. Now we have to choose our first tech. Regardless of your leader's starting techs, you want to go for the religious techs first to get as many early religions as possible. You'll want to shoot for polytheism first, and then for monotheism. The benefits are twofold, as will be discussed later on.
Once the warrior has been completed, send him out in the opposite direction of your first warrior. You want to cover as much ground as possible. This will allow you to both gather as many huts as possible, and also give you a good idea of where to settle your second city which is vitally important. The next thing you'll want to build is a settler. You'll want one of your warriors to be near the area where you plan to settle your second city. This way, when your settler is completed, you can send him off right away with the fog of war cleared by your warrior, and he can settle as soon as he gets there with your second warrior defending him.
By the time you've popped out a warrior and a settler, you should be able to start working on wonders right away. I'd recommend building one more warrior in your capital before you do this though. Now remember I said to shoot for monotheism? One of the prerequisite techs to monotheism is masonry which will allow you to build the pyramids. So once you've built your second warrior to defend the capital, start building those pyramids ASAP! From this point on, you should never stunt your capitals growth by building workers/settlers unless you reach a happiness limit, and have no wonders to build. When you get the monotheism tech, switch to Organized Religion right away. This is assuming that you managed to get a religion in the first place. Organized religion will speed up the build process of the pyramids by 25%. While you're building the pyramids, maximize your capital for growth until you reach your happiness limit, then switch to production. At first it'll say something like 300 turns to complete the pyramids, but that number will come down quickly once your capital is at it's max happiness rate.
Now some more details about the second city, which is just as important as your capital. You'll more than likely want to turn your second city into a GP (Great Person) farm. So while you were scouting out the terrain for your second city's placement, you'd want to find a spot that has at least two food resources, a floodplain or two, and a few 2F fresh water tiles for farming. You won't build any cottages in your GP farm. Once you've found such an ideal spot, which is often difficult, you'll want to build your first worker here, then send him back to your capital to start cottage spamming, and building mines. Only improve the tiles that you plan to work though, since for now, we only have a single worker. You may even want to build a farm or two just to get your capital to grow as quickly as possible. Once the happyness limit is reached, convert your farms to cottages. This is all very subjective to the terrain that you have, and if you have a lot of floodplains, it's pretty much useless to build farms at all.
Note: please see maltz post here for more info on advantages/disadvantages of having the parthenon.
Now, provided that you were the first person to build the pyramids, good for you.
Start working on the parthenon in your capital next. A 50% boost to your already existing 100% philisophical trait is really nice. Since your capital should have reached its happyness limit by this time, you'll want to switch up to representation for the extra +3 . Then grow your capital to the maximum limit again by moving all of your workable tiles to food tiles, then back to production tiles once you reach your limit.So what other techs should you shoot for after monotheism? If buddhism hasn't be founded yet, shoot for that. I wouldn't recommend shooting for many other religion techs after that, as you may find yourself falling behind in tech. By the time that you've built the pyramids, you should have pottery researched for cottage spamming. Pottery should probably be researched after monotheism/buddhism, but again this is subjective to the terrain that you start with. By the time that the parthenon is finnished though, you should only be a few turns away from literature.
After you've built the parthenon, you'll want to build a library in your capital so that you can build the great library when literature comes around. Now I had to think about this for a bit, on whether it's more beneficial to build the great library in your GP farm, or the capital, since it can be bennificial in either. I've come to the conclusion that it's better to be built in the capital, since this is also where you make all of your money from cottages, not to mention that you'll have other buildings that will multiply its effects, such as Oxford. This also helps to balance out the great people points that you get between your capital and your GP farm, so that both are good producers of great people.
If you were successful in building the pyramids, you'll have spawned a great engineer before the parthenon is completed. Don't use him on the parthenon though! Save your GE for the Great Library, as it can be more beneficial in the early game.
Other important techs that you'll want to shoot for after literature are Code of Laws, Civil Service, Philosophy, and Drama. Code of Laws will give you the Caste System civic. Chances are, you won't be able to use this civic in your gp farm yet, as your GP farm will likely not be large enough to use more than a couple of science specialists. Philosophy will give you Pacifism, which adds an additional +100% GP birth rate to all cities with state religion. When you get Civil Service, this is where your tech rate is really going to start to increase with the Bureaucracy civic.
Finally, drama is extremely important for your capital. Make sure that you have 5 other cities down when you get drama, because you're going to want to build the Globe Theatre in your capital. The Globe Theatre eliminates all unhappiness, which means that your capital's size is only dependant on the amount of health that you have. So once you have the Globe Theatre down, maximize it for growth, until it can't grow anymore! By doing so, you allow all of your cottages to be worked, and this will maximize your commerce. This will also protect your capital from another civ switching to the emancipation civic which gives an instant -5 unhappyness, and can shrink your capital in no time. I know this trick all too well.
And if you remember, earlier I said no tree chopping! This is vitally important to the size that you can grow your capital. For every 2 forests in a workable tile, you get +1 health. So only chop forests if you have an odd number of forests in workable tiles, or if they're outside of your capital's workable tiles. Sometimes you just have too many forests, and you'll have to chop some of them down for cottages. In this case, only chop down forrests that give 2F and 1P. This way, when you put a cottage down, it will still allow the city to grow at a normal +2 food rate when working that cottage. When replaceable parts comes along later in the tech tree, you can build lumbermills on all of your forests in your capital for the added production. A +1 health can make the difference between a size 19 city working most of the tiles, and a size 20 city working all of the tiles.
Alright, I won't make this much longer, but I think I've covered most of it. The reason why you want to shoot for the early religions is so you can build a monestary for each religion in your capital. Don't bother building monestaries anywhere else. Having 3 religions will give you a 30% science boost in your capital. Also, in the early game you'll want to build a temple for each religion in your capital as well, since happyness will be a major factor before you can get the globe theatre. You'll want to build all financial buildings in your capital, such as banks, markets, etc, since your capital will be supporting the rest of your empire. The exception to this is wallstreet, since we'll be building a different national wonder in the capital that I will go into in the next paragraph.
Universities, oh how I love you. Where would we be without them? Once you've shot for the other techs that I've mentioned, your next priority should be Education. I've lost many games just because I didn't get my universities down in time to build Oxford in my capital, while my friend enjoys out-teching me to those nasty destroyers. This has taught me to play with Philisophical leaders only, since they get the double production speed of universities. I can't begin to explain how important it is to have Oxford as soon as possible. So make sure you get the prerequisite universities down ASAP, or you'll be hurting in the long run!
And that's about as far down the tech tree that I'll get into. Astronomy will be important for the extra 25% science, and printing press for the +2 gold per town. Beyond that though, it'll be smooth sailing if you can pull it all off quickly enough. Oh, and don't forget liberalism, but I try not to shoot for it, unless I have the prerequisite techs for economics, so that I can get economics as my free tech, and get a great merchant out of the deal.
Now, back to the GP farm in our second city. The only specialists that you should be adding to your GP farm are scientists. Also, you should build your National Epic (+100% GP birth rate) in the GP farm. After that, build every building that gives a research bonus in this city as well. Hopefully, every GP that you pop will be a great scientist. Use your first scientist to build an academy in your capital for the extra +50% research bonus. Every consecutive scientist after this should be added as a super specialist to your capital. Once in a while, you might pop a great artist since the national epic gives GPP for that type of GP. You can use them for a golden age, or add them as a super specialist to your capital as well. It's all a matter of how your game plays out.
The last thing that I'm going to go into are civics. You'll want to be running under Representation all of the time. Not running under representation will kill your science rate in your capital. Secondly, it can be a toss up on whether to run under Free Speech or Bureaucracy. Whether or not the +2 gold per town outweighs the 50% bonus you get in your capital is something I'd have to do the math on. Though, since your capital will be out-teching the rest of your cities combined, it may indeed be better to run under Bureaucracy.
Now whether to run under the Caste System, or Emancipation can be another tough decision to make. You're again, weighing the difference on whether adding more super specialists to your capital will be more beneficial, than 100% town growth rate. Since your capital should also be your largest city, this also means that it's towns should be the most developed, so is the trade off worth it? In other words, more specialists or faster town growth. Again, someone would probably have to do the math here. The unhappyness that Emancipation provides alone might be enough of a reason for someone to switch to that civic, but that's totally your decision. As for Economy civics, I think that state property is pretty much a no brainer once you're able to get it.
Finally the religion civics. As I said from the beginning, you'll want to switch to Organized Religion ASAP for getting those wonders out as soon as you can. Once I'm able to get Pacifism, I usually switch to it after I have Civil Service, so that I can also switch to Bureaucracy at the same time without going into anarchy twice (since I don't normally play with a spiritual leader). As for switching over to Free Religion, I find it's usually best after it takes more than 2000GPP to pop a great person. When you do finally switch over to Free religion, make sure that you've spread all of your non-state religions to all of your cities for the bonus happyness.
Well, I think that's it. I hope I didn't bore anyone to death reading this, and I hope that someone else gets some use out of this strategy, and maybe learns a thing or two. I tried to keep this as simple as possible, and a lot of what I talk about here is very basic to many people who have played for a while. At the same time, I wanted to keep this article to a level where people who are just beginning to play will get a better understanding.
Enjoy!
so i guess you have few experience in single emperor on regular settings.
