How to keep from crashing in Emperor

[Aamto12]

I consistently win Monarch games now, but the jump to Emperor has always kicked my ass. Problem is I can't seem to expand without crashing. I've perused many topics here and a lot of people recommend settling like 8 cities.

How do you keep yourself from crashing? I mean, if I expand too early (peacefully/warring), I die to maintenance and just stagnate for some agg civ to pick me off. If I try to expand too late (like after CoL), the land is already taken for the most part and the AIs are considerably stronger. I don't have a game to show right now, but suffice it to say that is the problem.

I typically play warmongering civs (Hannibal, Boudica, etc) if that helps. Any tips to help me improve my game would be great. I'll try to edit in a failed Emperor game later (I have none saved at this point). Thanks a lot.

 

[Cam_H]

Aamto,

It's the constant Civ dilemma! How to grow and remain strong while not killing off your economy. Here are some of the more common suggestions ..

Cottage very early in the game and make sure you stick citizens on those Cottages.

Look for city sites with good commercial prospects - such as Gold, Silver, and Gems. If a large proportion of your cities can work commerce-heavy tiles from the outset, you should be able to support your empire.

Early game Wonders - several early game Wonders can assist your commercial state or at least keep up the science rate (The Colossus, The Great Lighthouse, The Pyramids > Representation indirectly, The Oracle can provide a 'tradeable' technology and get you further down the technology tree, The Great Library, etc).

Wonder refunds are another idea ... for instance if you're hooked up to Stone, you might not want 'say' The Great Wall, but if you build most of it and then remove it from your build queue, then you will get a gold payout once it is constructed elsewhere.

Get Code of Laws and switch to the Caste System by running specialists. Specialist Merchants may bring about a Great Merchant that can be settled for ongoing gold/turn or go on a trade mission.

Get Code of Laws and whip up Courthouses > Forbidden Palace.

Not a highly recommended one, but ... Found an early religion and build a Shrine while actively spreading the religion about. Further Great Prophets might be settled.

Get Currency for an extra trade route per city, trade gold for resources and technologies, and build Markets in your best commercial cities.

Select a leader with a commercial bias; the Financial and Organised traits are most apparent ones for this.

If going on the warpath, raze poor quality cities rather than keep them for the gold payout, and pillage enemy improvements - especially Cottages and Hamlets. Consider fog busting your border, but also leaving some spots for Barbarian cities to pop up so you can later plunder them.​

I'd say just keep reading 'demonstration'-type games from this Forum, the Succession Games Forum, the Realms Beyond post-game reports, and so forth. Ideas will emerge and you may be more prepared to experiment a little more than you might have in the past.

Best of luck!

 

[Sjaramei]

If you are Organized, beeline Code of Laws for cheap courthouses.

Financial, cottage up key cities, and work their cottages. Do this regardless of traits, (exception if you like SE very very much and hate cottages ) specialize at least one of your first 3-4 cities for commerce/science only. Get currency and trade for Code of Laws when you can. (Settle a couple of island cities to boost trade route income)

Also, you can get great prophets and great merchants and just settle them to pay for some of the expenses Else Cam covered most of it very well.

I've stopped beelining Code of Laws unless I'm Organized, courthouses cost too much to make an immediate impact, trade routes are more important to get up instead. I do this both with Financial and without. Great Lighthouse is the best wonder in the game for REX if you are isolated/have lots of land to settle. (preferably coastal cities everywhere of course ) Every city will pay for itself just because of trade routes

 

[futurehermit]

Good tips so far. Settled GPs can help pay the bills. Currency/Col is important, however, so is getting the land as you mentioned. If you can build cities to block off the AI prior to currency/col then you can back-fill afterwards. If you build your backfiller cities first then you can get boxed-in.

Also, don't forget it is possible to recover. If you expand aggressively via rexing or warfare then your economy may be in a bit of shambles afterwards. However, the tradeoff is now you have the land. So, what to do? Well, focus on good diplomacy so you don't get attacked. Then cottage up most of your cities and focus on recovering your economy until you are at tech parity. At that point you can look at expanding again, perhaps using drafting, etc. to help you out.

If you don't get the land it can be hard to win. The trick imo is after you get the land to develop it and look to recover. You won't start out ahead, but will remain behind for much of the game. However, that doesn't mean you can't win in the long run.

 

[Aamto12]

Nuts. I played what I figure was the best I've played on Emperor, but I still ran into some snags.

Attached file, Gilgamesh declared war on me shortly after the current turn. Now I know that my home defenses aren't that great, but I was gearing up for an Infantry boom. I did much better this game than I did any other game, but Gilgamesh just powered ahead of everyone. Liz, too.

Any comments/tips from that game would be very helpful. Thanks a whole lot. Also thanks already for the previous help. Very useful in going through this game.

 

[JBossch]

As for preventing economic collapse on emperor:
I think developing the territory you have is the most important factor. I know I almost never have enough workers in the early stages of the game and I have seen that sin committed far more severely in so many sample games. It is, no doubt, undeveloped cities that can't pull their own weight that are demolishing your economy. I almost always open with worker-->worker these days in order to get a jump on early development.
BTW, I also almost never build a single cottage anymore. You just need to get the food hooked up ASAP and chop anything essential. Start running specialists with representation while warring/building units. The loot from captured cities will help you run a deficit economy.

As for the save game:
-On emperor a good deal of micromanagement is essential. Check your capital and other cities and you will notice that a few of them are working suboptimal tiles.
-Sardis should have been razed IMO, and the same should be done with Zimbir as soon as it can be captured.
-You are way underdeveloped (hence the economic problems, see above) and have workers doing nothing. Tons of forests that should have been chopped 2000 years ago and no winery in 1708? You should also have a city west of your capital. It would never get real huge but wheat and clam would make it a worthwhile commerce city.
-The island in the north should be colonized starting with the barb city. After that you could have a fun naval war/island war with Hannibal.
-Which brings me to military...you're in trouble. As soon as I got assembly line I would have turned off technology altogether to raise money for upgrades. This is real easy to do with a CE though a bank in Boston would help a whole lot. The worst part is your espionage is so low you can't even see how badly you are getting killed on the power graph.
-Gilgamesh has "too much on his hands." Keep an eye on the diplomacy and when they give this reason for not wanting to go to war with other rivals it means they have already determined to go to war (or they're in a war, of course). You could have seen it coming this way for, probably, several turns.
-I really like your scientist gp farm. That is exactly how its done in a CE. If you farm those grasslands you might even squeeze a few more specialists out of it.

This game is probably lost unless you miraculously crush gilgamesh. Hope my comments help you get it next time.

 

[cabert]

Who needs 8 cities?

If you're running into the economy crash I can only see 2 ways out :
- reduce your city number. 4 cities, fully cottaged, running HR, will fuel your technology faster than 8 lowly cities.
- hit the nail on the head. What you need is money. get some. Easier said than done? When do you get currency? currency means gold. Loads of. in many ways.
* I'm a beggar in this game. Every 20 turns or so, I ask each of my AI friend to give me all their cash.
* If you have no friend, you can have enemies. Extortion is fun.
* Between 2 rounds of begging, you can use a few of your 8 cities to build gold.
* before you need to build gold, you can also build markets. I know lots of people say they are worthless because you run 100% science. I don't think that's right. I very often get a tech lead while running 20%. Of course for this, you need a large number of cities, with a large number of cottages.

 

[dragomaster]

edit. ops. posting in wrong thread. i may ad it cous its good to know anyway.

in outher words is it better to promote the greate general unit to strength 1, woodsman 1, 2, 3 and medic 1. with barracks this unit will be one experiance point away from medic 2 making him better than a medic three unit overal. good reading. thanx.

 

[patagonia]

The key city number is six, since that's the number of universities/forges/banks etc you need to unlock national wonders on a standard sized map. However, you don't need all of those cities until you're hitting the Renaissance techs that will unlock these.

Settle your early cities aggressively towards the AI and you should have a couple of worthwhile filler spots available later on if you do get boxed in. Don't be afraid to settle a fair distance away. Early on, it's number of cities maintenance that seems to be the real killer, rather than distance maintenance.

If you're a CE player, it's worth trying to build two commerce/cottage cities and one city devoted solely to military in your first wave of expansion. The capital can act as a settler/worker pump, chipping in with any wonders that you may have your eye on (eg the GLib). As the cottages from your two early commerce sites grow, your economy will get strong enough to add more cities.

FE is a bit more flexible IMO, but only really shines once you've got CoL and MC for caste system and workshops. If you beeline and get some help from the Oracle, you can have both of those techs well into the BCs though.

As far as keeping up in tech's concerned, there are certain techs you can always beat the AI to if you focus on them and use to back-fill what you've skipped. Aesthetics is a good one here, and you can usually pick up alphabet for it fairly easy if you self-research for a couple of turns first. It's then easy to trade for maths/monarchy/IW if you don't have them already.

 

[bluedevil99]

One of the things that helped me make the jump (mind you, I still don't win every time on emperor) is to play a couple of games with fairly random map types with a random leader. This made me realize I was following pretty much the same strategy every time I played; playing with a random leader forced me to better adapt to the map and learn which techs/wonders/strats are better in which situations.

Next I looked at a few walkthroughs, most notably Snaaty's guide. I finally made the jump by using his guide as an outline, but adapting my actual decisions (particularly early) to the map.

Among the things I ask myself now:
-- Happy management: Am I beelining to calendar for resources, monarchy for HR, trying to build the mids, or going religious (dangerous due to diplo)?
-- Gold/maintenance: Do I have high-commerce (e.g., gold/gems or lots of cottagable grassland) sites around that will pay for themselves, can I build a shrine, or am I beelining to CoL?
-- Can I identify an ideal production city site and GPF site early on and settle those in my "first wave" of cities? Or am I going hybird at first, which means for example I'm probably building the GL in my capital and can put off drama?

Above all:
-- SCOUT EARLY so you have the info you need to make these and other decisions.
-- FOOD IS KING especially in the BCs. Those size 1 cities will KILL your economy; the faster they grow, the faster they start paying for themselves.
-- BUILD WORKERS. This is the #1 thing I learned from Snaaty's guide. Having 2+ workers dedicated to an early city can make a HUGE difference in the time it takes a city to become a net contributor to your empire.

 

[Aamto12]

wow I just won a completely unexpected Diplo victory. Was Hindu aligned, Friendly with Alex and had a massive Hindu empire I guess (my vote was worth like 320 votes). Alex voted for me, and I just won a Diplo victory. Not that it mattered, I was ahead in tech (4 turns to Assembly Line and no other civ had Steam Power, only 2 others had Chemistry IIRC) and land. Playing as Lincoln of course. Now I don't think I'll be able to break away from Charismatic leaders. That extra happy is just too much for me early game.

Snaaty's guide which I found was a huge help. I never even thought of beelining Aesthetics and trading it around. But that works real good. Early workers, too. Man to think I've been playing without doing all these little things.