yanner39
Emperor
Some early game things to notice:
Identify the map
By that I mean figure out what is the bottleneck/troublesome part of it. For simplicity let's narrow it down to builds/economy and keep AI/diplomacy separate now.
This game was clearly low on commerce which everyone identified. In such situations you need to be careful with when and where you settle. It is crucial to reach writing and alphabet to be able to power out of increasing maintenance. When I said that I needed to watch out for "crashing my economy" I did not mean going on strike or getting negative income. What I meant was delaying the big techs by many turns.
If you swap the corn in the capital with gems I would play very differently. I would be able to expand more freely and still reach the important techs in a timely manner. Here I did not have this luxury so I was forced to squeeze out commerce from hills.
Spoiler :
It can be tempting to keep settling cities until you reach 0 gold, but this can have a very detrimental effect if the cities are not exceptional. While working cottages ensure that you won't go on strike it will take a long time for them to get you to the "big" techs (Alphabet, Currency, Monarchy). Once you have reached these "threshold" techs there's a while before the next crucial one -- meaning that you can afford to let the economy slide a bit again. Furthermore, you now have tools to make almost all cities productive instantly by producing research/wealth. In this game I chose to prepare for war, but if there were more good cities available you would see me expanding a bunch after currency.
Some might say I've been running a CE here, but that would be misleading. What kick-started everything here was hammer economy (which I've now transitioned out of). Now I am bureaucracy based (if only I could remember to adopt it).
2: Population.
When you expand in the BCs, try to think of your empire as # of population points -- not as number of cities. It is far more useful to have 15 pop divided over 3 cities than 12 over 5 (assuming there are decent tiles to work). Always grow your cities to the happiness cap and take advantage of hereditary rule -- you want double-digit cities in the BCs if health allows it. Growing early helped bring me a 50 base commerce and 22 base hammers capital now.
City examples:
Spoiler :
If I had expanded more I would not have gotten monarchy as fast, which would mean much slower growth -> less cottages matured and the city would not look like this until much later.
Rusten,
Thank you for this post. It's great that you take the time to explain the finer points of this game. I win regularly on Monarch but I know that I am far from knowing everything. I also appreciated your advice from a few posts ago when unhappy citizens don't eat food when building a settler/worker (I never thought about that).
When you say this map is commerce poor, this is an issue I have sometimes trouble identifying. I usually cottage-spam to over-come this. I know it isn't optimal, but that's how I try and compensate. I haven't mastered getting over commerce-poor starts.
When you say commerce-poor, I assume you mean:
- lack of riverside grassland?
- no gold, gems or silver or calendar resources?
By building the GLH (which even I can see was a good call), you addressed your lack of commerce greatly. Let's say you don't have 4 coastal cities, the GLH wouldn't have been a good idea.
I think alot of players say REXing is the way to go and that you should have x amount of cities by 1AD but they sometimes forget the fact that based on the map, REXing isn't always a good idea (like you've demonstrated).
). Just get your hands on monarchy if you want HR.
buildings are up.
