How to leverage imperialistic, Strat #2: Settler first into fast oracle alphabet!

[nate46]

The other thread I posted my "Four one pop cities" imperialistic strat -- a good strategy, but sometimes you want to be more flexible and build wonders! That's OK! Imperialistic also helps for early wonder strats!

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In this example game, the goal is to get the oracle ASAP and use alphabet to backfill techs, without sacrificing development time or production capacity!

Also, I'M PLAYING CHARLEMAGNE, SINCE EVERYONE IRRATIONALLY HATES HIM AND THINKS HE SUCKS

...

Do your starting techs suck? Does your worker have nothing to do? Do you think mysticism is useless? Have no fear! With Imperialistic, you don't need to build a worker, or have any economy techs at all to develop quickly! Just build a settler and oracle the alphabet! And once you get the alphabet, your bad starting techs cease to matter! No gold mine needed.

Fact: With non-imperialistic civs, worker first is almost always the best play, because it is more cost effective than a settler (You probably already know this)
Fact2: With imperialistic civs, your settler will come out almost as fast as a worker would! its easy to get a 15 turn pop 1 settler, all you need is a plains hill city spot and a plains forest. Settler first on imperialistic gives comparable development speed to worker first, which makes for some interesting development options! (You probably didn't know this!)

Can this be used to your advantage? Yes, it can!

In this example game:

Spoiler :

Playing Charlemagne I built a settler first in cap, while teching towards meditation and priesthood, then mining, then writing. The second city begins growing and building the oracle as soon as priesthood comes in. The first city follows up with a worker to build mines, then grows on flood plains, then builds a settler.

By turn 47, I have a two pop cap, a three pop 2nd city with the oracle, an unused settler that's ready to build a 3rd city somewhere, and i've traded with the AI's for every early game tech I need, including bronze working, archery, and animal husbandry! Once I get some cottages, a library and and a few more cities, i'll be well on track for a pre-1000 bc horse archer rush, despite not having a gold mine!

Log of production times for this strategy:

CAP:
turn 1: founded on plains hill
turn 16: settler completes
turn 28: worker completes. Moves to second city to construct mines.
turn 36: Cap grown to size 2, while building warrior, overflowing into a settler.
turn 47: completes a settler. City #3 will be up and running soon.

2nd city:
Turn 18: City is founded.
Turn 26: grow to size 2.
Turn 32: grow to size 3. Switch to max production.
Turn 47: oracle is complete.

 

[georgjorge]

Hmmm. Interesting. You seem to be on a crusade to promote Imperialistic leaders and "Settler first", let's see how it will turn out...

Worker first is good if you have the resources to improve. A plains hill city without improvements will only produce 6 extra food/hammers at size 2 when not producing a Settler while your capital on its own with improved resources would produce 10 extra food/hammers at size 2. So the extra city you have early on gives you slightly more production than just working the Corn + Horses (12 vs 10 a turn), at the cost of significant commerce loss from upkeep. The real bonus is claiming land that you wouldn't get otherwise.

So if you are worried about getting enough cities it can be good IF - as I said in the other thread - you have a way to get out of the commerce hole. On the other hand, if you are planning a Horse Archer rush you really only need two or three cities to pull it off so I don't see the synergy between REXing and Horse Archer rush here.

 

[nate46]

i'll be well on track for a pre-1000 bc horse archer rush, despite not having a gold mine!

actually... probably closer to 850 bc... my estimate was probably off.

The real bonus is claiming land that you wouldn't get otherwise.

hmmm in my view, the main advantage of settler first is the ability to go priesthood/sailing very early for wonder plans, without worrying about your worker not having enough techs to do anything. Its also good for situations where you have a pasture resource but don't start with hunting or agri, or for when your starting city area is straight garbage. Can also work well if your cap is mediocre and you have a natural trade route connection to what looks like a better 2nd city spot... The trade routes will cause the new city to give you +1 net commerce rather than -1 net commerce, which can sometimes make the difference.

On the other hand, if you are planning a Horse Archer rush you really only need two or three cities to pull it off so I don't see the synergy between REXing and Horse Archer rush here.

Whats wrong with 5 or 6?

Here's my mentality: any 1 pop city working a flood plains cottage can be 1 pop whipped for a horse archer every 10 turns about. Since a settler is effectively ~70 hammers with imp, you can build these cities before horsebackriding comes in and then once they hit pop 2... its horse archers in the bank for when the rush starts. And the cottages are what gets me out of the rexxing hole (this is why i really like Victoria, the synergy between fin cottages and imp rexxing is amazing).

With a trade route (2c), a river hamlet (3c), and 1c from the base square, plus 0-2c from say a plains cottage that you're only working some of the time. they're paying you about 7c, which makes them profitable up to about 6 cities. Later you can grow them out pretty easily into decent cities if they have other tiles to work besides that one flood plains.

 

[georgjorge]

Whats wrong with 5 or 6?

That depends entirely on difficulty level. On Deity you REALLY want to start your rush before 1000BC because the AIs will just build too many units otherwise (not to mention the risk of Longbows). You will hardly ever make it by that date if you settle 5 or 6 cities beforehand. On lower levels (don't know about Immortal) and if there's enough land available, I agree with you.

Here's my mentality: any 1 pop city working a flood plains cottage can be 1 pop whipped for a horse archer every 10 turns about.

I hear what you're saying here. 10 turns for a Horse Archer is very slow for an effective rush though. The question is, can you settle all those cities + make all those cottages/roads you mentioned + improve all the strong resources that you have before Horseback Riding? If you can't improve all the resources, would you get more Horse Archers out of fewer cities but with stronger production? I don't know either. This really calls for a forum game...

 

[nate46]

Well the thing is, if its a 2 pop city, you switch off the cottages onto hammer tiles (unimproved forests maybe, i probably don't want to bother with mines)... if you can get 5h/turn, you can whip a horse archer 4 turns after HBR comes in, and then, ideally, whip it again soon after it grows back to size 2. I say every 10 turns though cause that'll be the long term average...

But I think we're getting too caught up on horse archers though... I play immortal, not deity and i also play pretty bloodthirsty. There's lots of strategies i could do here besides horse archer rush if it were deity...

I might just peacefully expand until i get boxed in, and with so many AIs around, Imp would really help me out to not get boxed in...

for example, If i can get to 6 cities, that's enough land for a peaceful cultural victory, and i might not get that without imp if it were deity difficulty.

 

[nate46]

The question is, can you settle all those cities + make all those cottages/roads you mentioned + improve all the strong resources that you have before Horseback Riding? If you can't improve all the resources, would you get more Horse Archers out of fewer cities but with stronger production? I don't know either. This really calls for a forum game...

I think to improve fastest, i'd want to chop 2 workers asap before doing anything else...

I've attached the 4000 bc save if you want to play it.

Note that I just ran this map purely as an example game. You actually have gold in one direction and silver in another, if you explore far enough, but i didn't settle either since they're unnecessary to the strategy i wanted to demonstrate... I didn't really plan any further than oracle, as you can see by my settler not knowing where to settle and not having the warrior or scout to escort him..

 

[sampsa]

To point out the obvious, not having your 3rd city settled by T47 with an imperialistic civ is super slow. I kinda like imp, because the boost in the early game is so huge.

It would be interesting to compare your line with a normal worker first, alpha-beeline -strategy.

 

[nate46]

I'd be surprised if anyone can get alpha w/o oracle before 60 or so on this map without working the gold mine to the east (which is a bit far even for a second city, although maybe its worth settling...). You're going to be at around +10 beakers per turn for a while.

agriculture -- ~10 turns
wheel -- ~9 turns
Pottery -- ~10 turns
writing -- ~10 turns maybe, after you build some cottages to get yourself up to about +15.
alphabet -- ~25 turns. Can't build a library to speed this up without teching mining or bronze working first, which defeats the purpose of backfilling...

so that's 64 turns, maybe? but that's skipping mining and BW in favor of cottaging up everything, which is going to really slow your production. I doubt you're going to be any more developed than I am by that turn. Not worth it IMO to skip mining... not having hammers defeats the purpose of this trait... but if you're working mines, then you're not working cottages, so add another few turns to that alphabet time.

Feel free to play the map yourself. Let's see what you can do with it

 

[sampsa]

Fair point, but having alpha pre T50 vs having it ~T70 isn't a huge deal (assuming immortal difficulty), as the AI is so slow that you won't get good deals early anyway. You do get them prophet -points, but you'd rather take a GS as your first .

I'll play if I get interested in cIV again.

 

[Fippy]

I think overall let's not forget that quick settlers also help a bit later,
with Aachen not on the river there are also no trade connections without a worker and wheel?

 

[Izuul]

I got T50 Oracle Alpha going worker first and AG > Mining > Oracle techs > Writing. Settled the SE gold + sheep and worked gold while building a monument then started on a 17T settler. Can improve the sheep and let the city grow after trading for AH.

Being able to build a couple early warriors is pretty important for being able to settle something like the gold city.

 

[Izuul]

Alpha Oracle with Charlie is really nice though since it alleviates some of his bad starting tech issues.

I think if you had a river for a 2nd city connection the settler first play would be really strong. Pretty solid even without.

 

[MegaLurker]

I think you could have parlayed this same opening into a much stronger position ~50 turns later by taking HBR with the Oracle instead of Alpha. That would be early enough to take on multiple targets in a row, with a good chance of being able to extort Alpha from a neighbour for peace. If not, capture gold on it's own will be more than enough to reach Currency by the time your economy needs to be resuscitated.

With Alpha being taken your HA attack date is a bit late. So unless you get lucky with a neighbour who has no metal you'll need and lose a lot more units and will not have the same opportunities to claim land and cripple additional opponents. I suppose the problem here is a lack of worker techs, which you then trade writing for?

I like that sort of strategic thinking, but I would skip the HA rush entirely and put off military expansion until elepults or engineering. HA rush really loses a lot of it's strength when you don't focus on it. And one of the strengths of the HA rush is being able to trade HBR for Alpha. Getting both yourself is counter-intuitive for me unless you have a really high commerce start.

 

[nate46]

the earlier alpha date matters because i'm using it to backfill techs... the sooner i get alphabet the sooner i get bronze working and AH, and the better my overall tech situation will be.

gold mine helps for oracle, yeah.... but part of the point of this post was to demonstrate that you don't need gold to get oracle with charlie in a reasonable time frame... i should have just deleted it from the worldbuilder! But i guess it can stay because we get the "what if i had a gold mine" comparisons. edit: although i suppose a gold that far away probably doesn't speed you up much if, if any... although it would if you had to self-tech mysticism.

I think alphabet into Horse rush would work here. Don't see why it wouldn't. I'm a bit behind on production but cheap imp settlers should make up for that. I should replay the map to 500 bc or so ... later today maybe.

I don't think oracling HBR is a good idea... It means i still need to self tech bronze working (to chop/whip HAs), agri, wheel, pottery and archery... that's going to really set me back, esp since (assuming i ignore the gold mine), pottery is the tech i need to tech the other things quickly, and i'm 3 techs away from it. This is immortal so i probably won't be able to trade around HBR for a while.

edit: also, by that point, i don't even know for a fact that i have horses since i won't have AH until ~4-5 turns before oracle. so oracling HBR rather than alpha is a huge gamble.

 

[pandamancer]

^ i tried your savefile, i can say that turn 47 oracle is highly influenced by luck (you met many AIs in the turn 10-20ish hence speeding up priesthood). On the other hand, i did another run using worker first while placing the same city spots as you. Oracle came out 5 turns late but the 3rd settler came out 2 turns earlier. I don't know, I feel settler-first is not very justifiable.

For the hbr rush, i believe that a high commerce start is one of the requirements. And traits like fin helps a lot so charly is not at it.

 

[nate46]

^ i tried your savefile, i can say that turn 47 oracle is highly influenced by luck (you met many AIs in the turn 10-20ish hence speeding up priesthood).

No, that's not true. I doubt many of the AIs have meditation or priesthood by turn 20 or whenever i got it, and none of them had writing. And even if i get priesthood one turn sooner, that only saves me 2 hammers since i grew to size 3 before putting production to max. (which is overflow hammers IIRC).

what were your citys' pop with worker first? i did it worker first one run and got the 3rd city up sooner, but with less overall population. I feel the settler first strat is superior for fast oracle. Also, saving 5 turns on oracle is nothing to sneeze at... you could easily miss it in those 5 turns...

 

[nate46]

played it a bit further... made a lot of mistakes but managed to HA rush izzy with about 8 horse archers at 825 bc...

mistakes i made:

Building a library. It comes the same turn as HBR and doesn't help at all. I didn't even end up running specialists. I also didn't take barbs seriously enough, so had to whip an archer in cap, which slowed me down. then i built 4 archers, which was too many... Only got to 4 cities, but coudl have had 5 if i had built less archers...

in retrospect, i think this map works out better for an axeapult rush than for HA rush... if you do that you can actually make use of the library and be better developed in time for a more reliable rush...

 

[pandamancer]

No, that's not true. I doubt many of the AIs have meditation or priesthood by turn 20 or whenever i got it, and none of them had writing. And even if i get priesthood one turn sooner, that only saves me 2 hammers since i grew to size 3 before putting production to max. (which is overflow hammers IIRC).

But i tried settler first and still lose the oracle by 1 turn? Oh i get it priesthood before mining. You sneaky guy

what were your citys' pop with worker first? i did it worker first one run and got the 3rd city up sooner, but with less overall population. I feel the settler first strat is superior for fast oracle. Also, saving 5 turns on oracle is nothing to sneeze at... you could easily miss it in those 5 turns...

One less pop.

I tried another run, this time playing like i used to and worker first. Completed the oracle by turn 60ish but i got 4 cities also 3 hamlets. Not really better though but i am sure i can catch up later on