Newbie questions

[onejayhawk]

I have had some luck at diety by staying far away, building tech, and bribing my way through. This works fine if I have the Americas and all the rest are in Asia. How do you deal with having Celts on one side and Zulus on the other.

I also see a lot of people talking about building Marco's journey. How do you use that?

J

 

[kmad]

marco polo's embassy gives you a embassy with all the other dudes, so you go up to Foreign Advisor and send emissary to the guy you wanna talk to

 

[Dark Ascendant]

Marco Polo's embassy is pretty good, especially when you don't want to send your own expeditions abroad or build dips for accurate intel. I don't like isolationism, you miss out on great knowledge exchanges, trade, and political backstabing, my favorite.

 

[duke o' york]

With Marco's a nice technique for the warmongers among you is to gift techs to the other civs until they reach "Worshipful" and then ask to trade maps. This will allow you to plan your next conquest . When gifting techs then try to avoid giving away a tech with a wonder you want but ahve yet to build because the AI will have no qualms about taking Monotheism, switching over from Sun Tzu's and finishing Mike's Chapel the next turn. Fortunately you will always get an option of two techs to give them so you have the "No, but would you like ......" escape clause too. Now and again you will get two techs that you don't want them to have so will have to cut off negotiations but never mind! It is best to do this early in the game because as soon as you get Gunpowder then they will all ask for it straightaway and with musketeers behind city walls then you'll have your work cut out to take cities. Fortunately you don't have to gift to all civs as often some civs' maps will show you the location of others so start off with a civ you associate with quick exploration (the whites and greens are quite good) and get their map first.

 

[starlifter]

With Marco's a nice technique for the warmongers among you is to gift techs to the other civs until they reach "Worshipful" and then ask to trade maps.

Actually, "Enthusiastic" will work as well .

MPE (Marco Polo's Embassy) can also be used for a lot of other stuff, esp. "directing" AI research efforts.

A big thing I use it for is reminding myself what city is working on what wonder, and seeing who is at war with who, and looking at the city progress of the AI. teh Gov't type & gold are also useful.

But the most valuable thing is tech jumping. I like to "jump" early techs, like Warrior Code, Map Making, masonry, HBR, and even Pottery at times. This greatly improves rate of research to what I want at any give moment.

So I guess you can sum MPE up: it give the Human "control", and saves vast quantites of science beakers, esp. if you can orchestrate the AI (Smash is probably the master of the latter, for instance).