my economy crashed so damn hard once I liberated the old world.
The problem are the "colonial expenses". The more cities in your colony, the more you pay, per city, in colonial expenses. It's like an additional, non-distance based maintenance cost for
all your cities.
It does not matter how many cities you create on the
new world -- as soon as you build the new palace you turn the
old world into a colony. So it gets more expensive the more cities you have on the starting continent.
Therefore, it is very important to keep the number of cities on the starting continent small.
Another fact about colonies, and it's not obvious (I found out the hard way): you cannot have a "one-city colony". As long as you have not more than one city per overseas landmass, it's not counted as a colony yet (you only pay distance based maintenance for it and no colonial expenses).
You must have two cities on the old world at least, or the game won't allow you to create a colony in the old world.
You can also use it to your advantage by having only one city on the new world at first to avoid the additional maintenance. If you find several good islands close to eachother, keep one city on each of them to avoid some cost.
In one of my test games, the new world was actually divided into two separate landmasses, and it was freaking me out that I could not colony off one of the new cities (it was on the wrong landmass ;-). (BTW I know that we want to colonize off the orld world, but you get the point.)
I defeinitely like the Oracle slingshot for MC although I am not sure the pyramids are worth the hammers as the GP pool will be diluted with GProphet Points.
The Pyramids generate Engineers, not Prophets. You definitely want Engineers! The prophets points are not such a big problem. Running an engineer on top of the GPP from 'mids and Hagia Sophia will get you plenty of Engineers unless you're really unlucky.
If you get Prophets keep them for settling them later on the new continent (Hammers + Gold!).
You should also seriously consider the Hagia Sophia -- fast workers are important because you have to bootstrap an entire infrastructure at around 1000 AD. It also gives even more Great Engineer points.
With all the seafood the Mids are highly desirable anyway, because you can run a specialist economy early. Growing cottages takes long and we want to get independence early anyway to help with the money (losing our initial cottages).
This is an important point I think.
Create loads and loads of Great People and keep them around, they will help kickstart the colonies (especially the Engineers will, but the others are good too, except for Spies and Artists).
I'd advise a oracle shot to MC, and then use the collosus to finish your way to optics.
Good idea. A lot of instant commerce from the Colossus, and it will also help in the new world. The possible Great Merchant is welcome, since we'll be lacking gold at some point in the game.
In my experience it's better to research naturally towards optics, instead of trying some fancy slingshots like using a Great Engineer to lightbulb Machinery. Great Scientists are much easier to get, and it's better to establish an Academy and maybe Great Library and research towards optics the hard way. Keeping what might be the only Great Engineer for building something expensive is better than using him to bulb a technology.
As said above, you should keep as many Great People as you can to use them after you found the first colony. Especially don't settle any of them in the old world, as you'll lose it all when you grant indepence.
My fastest to Optics was when I played it like a One-City-Challenge. Unfortunately you can't turn a single city into a colony (as mentioned above), so you will need at least two cities on the starting continent.
Probably it shouldn't be much more than that! With the seafood you have all that you need to tech to optics quickly and create a lot of Great People along the way. Maybe found a second production heavy city and possibly a third (might be inland) to grab essential resources. You really don't need more than that in my opinion.
Creating a large empire will only bog you down and your economy will TANK COMPLETELY as soon as you move the Palace. It will also be very useless since it becomes an AI civ sooner or later and believe me the AI has no difficulty in ruining what you've built up very quickly ;-).
So, in short, here's what I would do:
- Keep the settlement as small as possible. Two, maybe three cities. The smaller your initial settlement, the longer you can afford to keep it around later.
- Don't shy away from wonders. Stonehenge is not bad (helps in settling the new lands quickly), Pyramids very welcome, Colossus, Hagia Sophia, Great Library, Great Lighthouse.
Let the AI build the Temple of Artemis, since you can run absurdly profitable trade missions there with a Great Merchant.
- Keep as many Great People as possible for later. Try to make Engineers, you can build Versailles with one later on in a pinch on the new world (as well as plenty of other nice things of course
.
- Stay out of trouble. Don't found a religion. Wait for the big religious block to form, then join the club. Staying out of trouble is the hardest thing on terra maps.
Oh, by the way, in the game where I tried the OCC approach, Brennus won an Apostolic victory at around 1000 AD... let's hope such a thing won't happen in this game.
