Need help with Emperor

[Freakz]

So, I've been really trying to go upto emperor, But there seems to be one problem in every game I do.
Wars Just take so friggin long that I fall behind so much that almost always, one AI will run away.
Provided is a save of my latest game as Ghandi.
In this game the runaway AI is Darius on another continent, I've rebuilt and things are going Ok~ish after I guess. Would love some hints on how to perform better and Mainly How to War effectively and effeciently and not a 800year war.

 

[Ghpstage]

Theres a lot wrong here, well beyond just mucking up the war.... Your best bet is to post a save from a much earlier date, 1AD or nearby as the mistakes started close to the start. But I can see a few things to consider.

The first thing you might want to do is to strongly consider not founding an early religion. Religion founding takes away from early worker techs and leads to diplomatic problems, and in cases like this, where you haven't built the shrine it gives you almost no benefit at all.

You also need to engage with the AIs more. Right now the only resource deals you have made have been to sell your resources for low quantities of GPT, you haven't made any deals to trade for resources you need.

Your tech line looks like it needs quite a lot of work too, Monarchy at 115AD and Currency at 235AD are both late.

The war looks like a complete disaster. There was no need to get all of Iron Working, Horseback Riding AND Construction. Did you even have Horses when you researched HBR?
Horse Archers do not work very well alongside catapults swords or axes, they work best alone. Iron Working was a big and pointless gamble, axes will do fine with catapults and you didn't have any jungle to clear. Teching in all sorts of directions like that will seriously delay warplans, and it likely explains your late declaration date of 385AD.

I don't see the point of running Caste here either, your only running 1 scientist in your GP farm.

 

[coanda]

Bring enough siege. Bring along a medic - ideally a Medic III great general. Don't wait for all your units to get fully healed - a couple fully healed units plus the rest of your units mostly healed is plenty. Accept a capitulation if you've taken the cities you want and they aren't a cultural victory threat.

 

[Habitus]

Best bet, post a game and play 50 turns aday and ask advice after you play each day, and read it before playing the next day. With SS you will probably get alot of advice, or you could wait for the next forum game (i think the Emperor series will be posted soon) and use that in same way

 

[west45]

This game won't be that hard to win.
edit: as others have said if you want the best advice, post a game on the forum and play it slowly. Include lots of details, screenshots, and reasoning behind your decisions.


Tech to cuirassiers and stomp ramsess. Grab his best cities and vassal him.

You can use cavalry and galleons to roll over caesar and babylon. If darius doesn't have rifles, it will be no problem to take him out.


The easy alternative for the other continent is using Marines+destroyers/battleships+fighters. Bombard with your ships, attack with fighters to wound defenders, capture the city with marines. Leave a few garrisons and move to the next town. Capture enough coastal cities and it's an easy capitulation. Have one city on the mainland producing machine guns nonstop that you can airlift to captured cities. This method is extremely effective and easy to pull off.





Your game overall needs some work.

National epic city: why is this working all mines and building a hindu monastery? you are playing ghandi! the best leader for making gps. Spread irrigation to this city and windmill all the hills. Switch to all scientists (starve it a bit, only working the iron fish pigs), get a gs for edu and bulb it. Tech nationalism in the meantime. Once GS bulbs lose their usefulness (chem, astro, scimeth, and maybe biology), switch to merchants for trade missions. You will want some more GPs for golden ages later too.

Techs/resource trades: you need to trade more. Guilds from caesar, engineering from bismarck. Don't forget to tell bismarck to research something you can trade him for (also I would capture that barb city near his borders and gift it to him). There's alot of resource trades you can do, don't forget to check this often, even if its just to renegotiate selling a resource for a few more gpt.

Workers: you have less than 1 per city. Playing india you can get away with less IF you are efficient with your workers, but in this case you do not have enough. Do not automate automate your workers (until initial improvements are done in your cities). Do not let them destroy old improvements

misc stuff:
-2 cities missing lighthouse working seafood, 1 missing a workboat
-lots of cities need irrigation, do not ignore this...
-berlin captured hundreds of years ago, just now getting a garrison to it, try to avoid this in the future.
-palace needs to be moved as delhi doesn't have many developed cottages. Vayajanra is the best short term location, hamburg best long term.
-that chariot west of your capitol is obviously camping at a future city site for ramsess, there's likely seafood there. use a wb to scout in the bcs to avoid this kind of thing happening.
-spread the ap religon and build the religious buildings. they are even better with spiritual.

 

[Freakz]

won via space but some silly date like 1950, was so close I think I won by 1 turn difference on the ship
I got all of ramsess' lands and tech'd like a madman trying to catch up, Which I actually did but abit too close.
Also You really don't automate your workers during warring? I stop them ofc if they are doing something Dumb but Honestly I just run out of stuff that I can think of for them to do after I Secure resources Build the cottages I will mature and roading to the enemy/settlers spots.

Edit: Just an afterthought, This is really the biggest Jump in difficulty I've had since I started playing this game, Is Emperor to immortal anything like this aswell? :S

 

[Ghpstage]

Just an afterthought, This is really the biggest Jump in difficulty I've had since I started playing this game, Is Emperor to immortal anything like this aswell? :S

Its much bigger than the Emperor one, the AIs start with a worker
The Deity one is bigger again, worse than a jump from noble to Immortal

 

[MarigoldRan]

Ok. The plan:

1. Egypt needs to die. Curraisers/Cavalry was one choice. I chose Rifles because:
a. Rifles don't die against medieval units.
b. I will need the Rifles that killed Egypt for Darius.

2. Darius needs to die. This was going to be tougher because Darius WILL have Rifles by the time I'm ready to attack. BUT most of his cities are coastal. If I can launch a massive amphib assault of death, with suicide cannons and rifles, I can pretty much take him out in one turn.

3. Hammurabi needs to die. This should be easier. Once Darius dies, Hammurabi is next.

Hence, the tactics:

1. Screw Education. My people don't need to be educated. They're stupid anyways. They shouldn't go to Universities. Instead, they should learn how to pick up a gun and shoot people. Hence, gunpowder first, followed by beeline to Rifles.

2. My people don't deserve Caste System. They're better off and HAPPIER as slaves. So I switched to slavery and immediately whipped up some infrastructure.

3. I need Banking. And Nationalism. Do I tech them myself? NOOOOOOO! Tech trades for them. Along with Guilds, Compass, etc.. Granted, this speeds up Darius's tech, but I need these techs.

4. Prior to getting Rifling, I build muskets and trebs. I also build lots of banks and grocers. Why? The moment I get Rifling, I will upgrade all of my muskets to rifles, AND THAT WILL TAKE MONEY. Once Rifling went online, I immediately turned tech to 0%, and money to 100%, utilizing the banks, and grocers I built.

5. Once I had enough, I had three groups: Army Group North, Army Group Central, and Army Group South. The first targets are obvious.

6. The war started in 1475 AD. It ended in 1550 AD. I lost maybe eight trebs due to suicides, and 6-8 rifles, total.

7. Next step: Get Assembly Line (infantry!), Astronomy, and Galleons/Galleys. I'm behind in tech, but with beelining I can probably catch Darius in time. Otherwise, I will have to wait for tanks, marines and fighters. Either way, Darius is going to go down long before the space race.

8. Once I have overwhelming force, I destroy Darius.

9. P.S. Eventually I do get Education. But that was during the war on Egypt.

10. P.S.S. Egypt had the Pyramids? OMG. I guess looking at it from a historical perspective, this shouldn't surprise me. Police State and Representation, HERE I COME!!!!

11. Now that you have the Mausallos, and a GP, and A LOT MORE LAND, I'm going to GA CONSTANTLY after the newly conquered lands recover.

12. Slavery is very good for newly conquered territories. Whip, whip, whip to rebuild infrastructure. Your cities will starve anyways, so use them by whipping them first.

How I could have done better:

It was sloppy. I'm not particularly good at using Spiritual. Eventually I just decided on Slavery/Theocracy/Bueracracy- with occasional switches to Nationalism for draft.

I need to remember that under Hereditary Rule, it's a good idea to keep units in cities, instead of moving them out PRIOR to the assault.

I probably should have gotten Education and Universities first. Eh well. Rifling took a while to research.

EDIT: Played up to 1804 AD. The invasion is underway.

Universal Suffrage + Lots of Towns + Lots of Cities+ Free Speech = Good.

Should have gotten more destroyers for bombard, and also too much infantry (lacked combustion for a long time), but oh well.

Persia is very, very dead.

 

[Htadus]

So, I've been really trying to go upto emperor, But there seems to be one problem in every game I do.
Wars Just take so friggin long that I fall behind so much that almost always, one AI will run away.
Provided is a save of my latest game as Ghandi.
In this game the runaway AI is Darius on another continent, I've rebuilt and things are going Ok~ish after I guess. Would love some hints on how to perform better and Mainly How to War effectively and effeciently and not a 800year war.

You are not so far back. Just need to make some trades to get Guild, Engineering and other techs and have your HE city build a bunch of trbs and other cities build maces, Pikes and Knights. Also you should manage your workers.

Spoiler :

I played from your save and did the trades I discribed. Then build an army of about 40 units and attacked Egypt. Wiped them out. Then teched toward Steel. After steel it was to Assembly Line and traded for rifles. No I did not trade AL. As for Darius. His empire is very small. He could have been taken out of the game with trebs, knights and maces. Did not have galleons at the time.

I started taking Ragnar att his point. After AL, I am heading toward Communism for SP. In my game Ragnar is down to 3 cities and I am thinking about attacking Augustus to claim Nidaros. That is a sweet city. But have to finish Ragnar first

Spoiler :

BTW Poor choice for the National Epic. 2 food sources are not enough or at least need green flat lands.

 

[Bronze]

When you get up to Emperor and beyond you defenitely lose your margin for faffing about.

 

[MarigoldRan]

Concrete plans. It's all about concrete plans.

 

[Freakz]

I didn't see the need to open a new thread for this, But, as I said, I'm new to emperor but winning to win on "decent starts". One question, How often do you capitulate an AI if you are aiming for domination or conquest? As soon as the option unlocks ?
I know that the typical answer will be once u take their good cities, But the problem is that those cities will be so pressed culture wise that it would be impossible to keep no?

Also, Back on monarch you can pretty much dominate the game tech-wise that your opponents will never have the chance to catch up with you, and you can eventually get units 1era ahead of them without beelining. I'm finding this close to impossible on emperor kinda sad when you have 23~ish cities vs an 11 from an AI.

 

[Zechnophobe]

I didn't see the need to open a new thread for this, But, as I said, I'm new to emperor but winning to win on "decent starts". One question, How often do you capitulate an AI if you are aiming for domination or conquest? As soon as the option unlocks ?
I know that the typical answer will be once u take their good cities, But the problem is that those cities will be so pressed culture wise that it would be impossible to keep no?

Also, Back on monarch you can pretty much dominate the game tech-wise that your opponents will never have the chance to catch up with you, and you can eventually get units 1era ahead of them without beelining. I'm finding this close to impossible on emperor kinda sad when you have 23~ish cities vs an 11 from an AI.

Unless you have checked 'culture flip after conquest' you don't need to worry about cities being retaken by the vassal. And you always will get your 2 rings of culture to work. You may have to worry about occasional revolts, but that can be managed various ways.

As for when to accept capitulate? It depends. Getting good cities is nice, but there is also the ability to press an advantage. I admit I'm not sure when exactly to do which, but I do know that I've managed to keep a military lead by quickly vassalizing and moving on. If you can hit a new target right away, might as well vassal. If you need to build boats or something before you can continue, then there is no point in accepting.

Consider your military... you are paying to have it around. Just like you don't want an idle worker, if you are in domination you don't want an idle military. Sometimes you have to due to it not being strong enough, or because you can't get to an opponent, but barring that, simply eliminate enemies ASAP.

 

[MarigoldRan]

I didn't see the need to open a new thread for this, But, as I said, I'm new to emperor but winning to win on "decent starts". One question, How often do you capitulate an AI if you are aiming for domination or conquest? As soon as the option unlocks ?
I know that the typical answer will be once u take their good cities, But the problem is that those cities will be so pressed culture wise that it would be impossible to keep no?

Also, Back on monarch you can pretty much dominate the game tech-wise that your opponents will never have the chance to catch up with you, and you can eventually get units 1era ahead of them without beelining. I'm finding this close to impossible on emperor kinda sad when you have 23~ish cities vs an 11 from an AI.

At emperor and above, getting techs from the AI becomes progressively more important, either through tech trades or through "Mongolization" (give me the techs or I kill your last city, sort of thing).

 

[Freakz]

Yet trading techs got weirder with this lvl, as apparently civil service is not enough for aethestics and sailing for pleased cathy
the examplr may not be accurate but it is as weird as some stuff I've noticed

 

[Htadus]

Yet trading techs got weirder with this lvl, as apparently civil service is not enough for aethestics and sailing for pleased cathy
the examplr may not be accurate but it is as weird as some stuff I've noticed

All that meant was that Cathy was already in the process of learning it and it was not that valuble and/or most other AI already know CS.

In regards to capitulation, if the civ willing to capitulate can be an asset, then that is the fatest way for war games to be won. If they are not going to be an asset ie they only have one lousy city, then don't take it as a vassal.