ense7en
n7
Alright, i loaded up that last save again and got to next turn.
Of course, all your swimming riflemen got wiped out, and many of the Artillery.
Here's a picture of your game, the next turn, and why your Artillery are useless.
Spoiler :
First issue is that you are a "larger" civ (you have more cities) than Ethiopia, so they get their 20% boost against you.
Obviously that shows a worst case scenario, as that guy is on a hill beside a GG.
But the tech disparity makes this war a completely lost cause.
Their melee units are TWO levels above yours (due to being behind in tech).
You have no ranged units.
Gatling Guns would still get steamrolled, but less so than artillery, which have no defense against being attacked via melee.
There's really nothing you can do here as quite frankly, the game was long over many, many turns ago, you just didn't know it.
If you want to move up in difficulties, you'll learn to avoid auto-anything.
No auto-pathing; move your units one turn at a time. Then they won't go swimming to their deaths.
No auto workers! One of them is building a railroad (you really cannot afford the GPT and the cities are so small there's no production to boost with railroads).
You have unconnected cities to your trade routes.
Not to mention unworked strategic resources and luxuries.
Not to mention roads connecting cities in multiple ways! You always want roads to take the bare minimum number of tiles to avoid the GPT costs.
I'm not going to attempt to tell you how you can fix this game. It's over; it was over a hundred turns before, and was in trouble from the beginning.
This is why i love this game. I started out knowing nothing about playing optimally, and today i still have so much to learn.
If you spend any time on these forums reading, and watching Madjinn's LP's, etc, you be a drastically improved player shortly
As for too small cities, this is an issue that stems from your early game.
I have no idea what you were doing early on, but what you should be doing is growing your core cities, not forcing production only.
On Warlord, you barely need defense for anything as the AI is pathetically inept at actually doing anything.
A few ranged units is all you need early on, which allows you focus on growing and developing your empire, and spamming every wonder you could ever want.
Keys techs: Writing and later, Education.
After a Monument and Granary (optional, though you almost always want this in your main taller cities), a Library should be soon be erected in your capital.
Same thing with your other cities. Get them up. On this difficulty, you can build the Great Library with ease (but always keep some food tiles locked to keep growing unless you cannot grow much at all, and if that's the case you'd better get farms/granaries/etc going so you can).
After you have a few cities up (or before), get to Philosophy and build the National College in your capital.
Remember you need Libraries in all your cities to do this, so don't settle 10 cities. Settle 2-4, get those libraries up after monuments (and shrines/granaries if needed), and get the National College built. Save gold to rush buy librar(ies) if the timing works out better that way to get the National College built.
Next key tech to get to is Education. Get Universities up in your core cities and once the city is large enough (~7-10 pop+) to grow and produce as well as work specialist slots, you can put a citizen into the University specialists slots to further boost science, and create great scientists from them.
If you do this in every game, you'll be playing on Prince+ in a hurry without issues.
You have a huge number of cities in this game, which is fine once you know how to handle that many. Not fine in your case yet.
ICS style games are much tougher to master and i'd suggest keeping the number of cities settled much lower. If you cannot keep happiness reasonable, then don't settle 10 cities; it's not going to help you out until you figure out ICS style play which i'd suggest worrying about much later.
Settle as many cities as you can keep happiness for, while growing.
If you are happy, cities will grow. As soon as you go below 0, growth is extremely diminished. Keep happiness in mind while settling new ones and while warring.
In your empire, you captured a lot of cities. It looks like you annexed every single one.
I'd raze the crappy ones. No luxuries or resources or good river/production tiles? Probably not a city worth keeping.
Puppet the rest, and only annex when you need to. So previous capitals, or other optimally placed cities are often well worth annexing so you can use them for your own production needs.
Poor cities are not worth annexing; puppet them and build trading posts on everything around them.
Puppets focus on gold, so they will work the tiles with gold, and will build gold-producing buildings, etc, and will increase your GPT.
The more non-puppet cities you have, the higher the cost for obtaining social policies.
So all those really nice policies you want become impossible to reach. You will want to be able to reach certain policies eventually, so keep the number of cities in check.
On Warlord happiness is actually boosted, so if you move to Prince+, you'll have much worse happiness issues.
Personally, i recommend getting off Warlord and moving to Prince ASAP, as playing below that level lets you pick up bad habits that you absolutely cannot get away with on Prince+.
Now about the -38 happiness. This should never have happened. Very simply, you never should have settled so many cities, and when in war, should have razed and puppeted only within what your happiness could handle.
Going to be below -10 happiness?
Find a way for that to never happen.
So either don't take that city, or rush buy a happiness building, or trade for a luxury, etc.
-10 or worse is death, unless you are in a game where you are doing pure domination and already have the game in hand and can continue to plow through all opponents regardless.
So in your case, there is is zero reason for this to be allowed to occur.
To avoid happiness issues in your game you would have wanted far fewer cities, more puppet cities, and more crappy captured cities being razed.
I hope i've managed to convey some insight on how to improve future games.
There are many different ways to play this game, and i've only tried to mention some very basic ideas (which you can definitely go against in certain situations) to try to help. Keep reading here...everything i've learned was from the great people on these forums, and every day i learn more (and usually fail at implementing myself, haha).
