Cottage economy is not very strong with a late start so SCT must be right in pointing to hammer/specialist economy. It's unclear to me if Oxford is worth the invested hammers but I'm sure there is no hurry to get Education because we need to rex a lot before we have enough hammers and cities to make Oxford feasible.
I think hammer/specialist is looking like the way to go. I hope to play test some this evening and experiment a bit, just to get a feel for it. Oxford doesn't look particularly appealing, I think we'll need other things based upon limited testing thus far, unless we can get it in the Holy City and have spread our religion widely?
NP in the capital deserves serious consideration. This was done with great effect by CRC and CFR in the previous game. This time around we should probably also remember to get an Academy up and running fairly early although the value is somewhat reduced compared to a normal game.
It will be an interesting run up the tech tree.
Are Cossacks better than Infantry? Perhaps due to their mobility. I'm just wondering if we would want Assembly Line anyway to increase hammer output not only for teching but also for building units and nukes faster.
Cossacks look awesome, save for Rifles. I think we'll need Infantry as well, to defend if nothing else. We may need Cannons to reduce enemy stacks that come to get us before we have nukes. Iron Works wouldn't hurt a hammer economy either...
It would be an advantage if we can somehow keep the AI backward as MP suggests. I don't think we can treat the game as an AW game since it's on emperor level and since we are not allowed to capture cities that have not been nuked first. We could perhaps do some worker stealing and pillaging of our nearest neighbors. With different religions it should also be easier to instigate wars between the AI's. If we can establish a naval superiority it should be possible to keep AI's on other continents backwards by pillaging sea food and sending small pillaging stacks. We clearly don't want to engage their SODS until we have nukes.
The sooner we can get Maps of our rivals, the better. In the test game, Augustus loves to trade maps, but the others do not seem to be so eager. Knowing our opponents terrain could help us in determining who should be friend and who foe?
How many cities do we think we need? The terrain may dictate that, but I have been getting squeezed a bit in testing, Slavery may be needed at first to push out Settlers and Workers.
I'll try tonight and see what happens...
@rrau - Have you found the Civlopedia? I found that the button disappears if you have any other interface window open, like one of the advisers.
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