Please help me on emperor.

Will_518

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 24, 2004
Messages
94
Location
earth
I found Emperor to be a real chanllege. If I go for Stonehenge and Pyrimids, and buildings I get eaten alive by Barbs pillaging like hell.

If I go all out on military units, I fall too far behind in tech, the AI civs can get crossbowmen before my swords men can capture a significant amount of AI cities. And the city maintenance from conquered cities push my tech slider to 0%.

Can some good players out there (all are welcome to try) please play this 4000bc .sav on emperor. To show me how it can be done.

I think it's a good starting position, with gold and cows.
 
I may have time to play out the start tonight, but just a general comment...

Will_518 said:
I found Emperor to be a real chanllege. If I go for Stonehenge and Pyrimids, and buildings I get eaten alive by Barbs pillaging like hell.

First off, going for both Stonehenge and the Pyramids is almost certainly a bad idea if you're not industrious with the right resources. Even if you are, the Pyramids alone is a major investment.

As to the barbs, while there are many things I still really struggle with on Emperor, I think I'm pretty OK at this part. You don't need a ton of military early on - you need just enough in exactly the right locations. Barbs only spawn in the fog, so if a neighbor is already at your border, you shouldn't have barb issues there. Second, get some warriors (archers are unnecessary for at least 50-75 turns) out on some forest/jungle hills, where they can disperse the fog and get good defense. When they promote, take Woodsman. That's really almost all the barb defense you need, so long as you keep them from setting up a camp. Also, when you've almost got a settler produced, get two warriors out to the target site (or an adjacent forest) well before the settler gets there. One is not enough - I have effectively lost games by using only a single warrior to guard a site, then having a barb archer kill it, promote, and proceed to kill every other warrior I could send after it, promoting further. Take two - if one gets killed, the other finishes the job.

Cities are really not such a big deal to defend so long as there's open land left for the AI's. As long as I have fog-busters in the vicinity, I'm fine with a single warrior in the city. Maybe two in cities that are surrounded by frontier, but generally one is OK. As the map starts to fill, I go for an archer and a spear in border cities, and once all the land is almost gone then real military buildup begins. But you definitely can't overbuild early on - as you're seeing, the unit costs will kill your tech and you need to be spending hammers on obelisks/barracks/granaries and, more importantly, settlers and workers.

edit: Also, if you haven't already read it, you might want to check the thread I started a week or so back, very similar to this one. I got a lot of great ideas from that.
 
Will_518 said:
I found Emperor to be a real chanllege. If I go for Stonehenge and Pyrimids, and buildings I get eaten alive by Barbs pillaging like hell. If I go all out on military units, I fall too far behind in tech, the AI civs can get crossbowmen before my swords men can capture a significant amount of AI cities. And the city maintenance from conquered cities push my tech slider to 0%.

It's about balance, if you go all out on either you will get eaten in emperor or above. I agree about pyramids this is a big waste of hammers, I would rather use the hammers to hook up bronze asap and get some axemen defenders out early, then barbs are ineffective. The only early wonder I go for on emperor is oracle for the free tech as half the time you get beaten to stonehenge if you are not industrious. Regarding city maintenance, don't keep small cities if your economy is suffering, raze them! Only keep cities that are big enough to immediately add some value to your economy. Send workers along with your army to chop courthouses and don't forget to add artists or chop theatres if the captured city can't expand fast enough.
 
sandman_civ said:
I agree about pyramids this is a big waste of hammers...
I didn't say that it was a waste, just that it was a big investment. In some games, it may make sense - they are godawful powerful if you play off of them well. And the leader here is Industrious (Roosevelt).
 
Hey Will thanks for the map it's making an interesting game for me. Romans didn't get IRON :lol: due to my culture and their stupid mistake so I am about to mass an army and have an interesting battle with them soon. Check out the save and let me know. I could have played it differently and went north for the marble but I had to take over a few Spanish cities to the south as well as block off the Roman/Mali expansion at Boston. Forgive any mistakes as it's 4am here, speak later when I get up :)
 
You guys may well be right about not going for too many wonders. I'm now leaning heavily on just building the pyramids and forget all other wonders. The represensentive bonus and great engineer don't seem to be a waste of hammers.

Thanks for the link to the other thread, and the saved game.

How do you guys decide on city placements? is it worth it settling a city with half the tiles being very unproductive (e.g. jungle) if it's a good strategic spot?
Is it worth it settling a city with no resources in the fat x if it's 4,2 or 4,1 away from your capital?
 
Actually that city to the south of the capital is quite unproductive but I already had a settler at that point and didn't know the Spanish were to the south of that, so plomp goes the city in a silly place. It's creating some commerce so it's not all that wasted. Later on with farms and cottages it will be quite a commerce centre. It's always worth settling close to your capital for maintenance reasons but it's not a hard and fast rule, for example if there's a lot of tundra or desert then you will have to divert. Remember you can always move your palace later which is one of the most underused tactics ever; sentimental value I guess. Regarding a strategic spot, yes it's very important and later on there's always methods to pick up the city's production or growth. Lots of the time in emperor you have little choice of city placement due to the AI expanding very fast. Looking back at my savegame, I didn't do things as optimally as I would have liked; I would have liked the area to the north a bit earlier, but I needed to get the new york (copper) and boston (strategic) spots first. You might be right about the pyramids but I still prefer the oracle and then the great library.
 
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