Some situational analysis

500 AD or so would be great.

Thanks

 

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/75524/Elizabeth_of_the_English_500_AD.SAV

It is actually a pretty good date for you to work with. You will have to do a little continental housecleaning since all my rivals still had a city or two left, but for the most part you can focus on empire management.

 

Domination victory in 1335 AD, in case anyone cares. Rome had a massive military, the biggest I've personally seen from the AI. It was not too big a deal though since it was almost all medieval infantry and muskets. They only had a couple cavalry that I saw. At first I upgraded mostly guerrillas as I wanted to defend my cavs from Rome's huge military. I later upgraded those cannons and the artilleries were quite helpful. It was a long tedious war and Rome wouldn't even acknowledge my envoy for the longest time.

This game represented a big leap forward for me. I had never won a domination before about 1700 on a standard continent map. I wish I had a better understanding of what I did better.

I did play the game substantially differently. I did much more wonder building this game than I ever did before. I built SoZ since I had ivory, as well as the Forbidden Palace, Magellan's Voyage, the Heroic Epic, and both middle age research wonders (the names are escaping me right now). I missed the republic slinger and wound up going the Monarchy route. I almost never use Monarchy. My research was really starting to stagnate in the middle ages until I hit my golden age from Magellan's Voyage, which effectively put me ahead for good. One thing I did differently was play quite a bit more patiently than many of my previous games. I really tried to avoid war until I knew I could crush my opponent without thinking twice. Usually I rush into war without being properly prepared and it costs me turns in the long run.

Anyways, thanks for everyone's advice. It was duly noted.

 

Cool. Now do even better by using more workers, sooner and taking care on placement of core towns.

 

Town placement is something I struggle with. I am never sure what strategy will work best. For instance, do I try to maximize the amount of cities along rivers or do I go for placement in one of my first settlement that will make a good settler factory? I just don't have a good handle on it.

 

The best way to handle your core cities is to make them as tightly spaced as possible, in order to gain use of all of those tiles in the early game, when size 6 is the limit. Obviously placing cities alongside rivers or lakes increases this to 12, so building there is a very good idea. There's a little bit of room to breathe in this, if you're placing cities two tiles away from one another, but can only get a resource if you place a city three tiles away, do it.

 

I would not worry so much about trying to get perfect locations. Just try to not waste good tiles, use rivers, but not to the point that it means dead tiles.

Being able to cover each other early is more important as you move up, so those CxxxC or wider become less attractive.

 

vmxa is right, I hadn't even thought of that, but yes, the most important thing behind city placement in the higher levels is defence. If your cities are placed close enough together, you can transfer garrisons back and forth as needed. On the lower levels you can often get away without even having a military, but later on you can't do that.

 

Congrats, that was a very early impressive Victory for C3C at that level !

I`ve been playing around with your early 500AD.Sav and what struck me was how you had pretty much cleared the Map of all serious oppositon of 3 other Civs. 2 of them, the Zulu & Aztec usually very aggressive, by just that time, as well as researching up to Feudallsm while building up a massive Army, all in a short time frame.

I know Iron and Ivory ( which you must have got early ? ) and the SOZ Ancient Cav. helped ( allthough the SOZ usually take 28+ turns to build in a big City ? )

Did you Warrior/Archer Rush any of the closer Civs. to cripple them early on ?

Did you take them on all at once or one at a time ?

If you have the time to talk about how you pulled the early Game off , and if some of the highly experienced players who have been posting have thoughts on that I`d love to know ?

Thanks !

 

Okay, some of the early game was like a week ago, so I can't remember everything exactly as I did it, but I'll give you a basic rundown.

I settled in place and immediately recognized both the food bonus (can't remember if it was wheat or a cow) and the ivory. With the food bonus I knew I would set up a six turn settler factory, and I decided immediately that I would build SoZ.

I think there was a goody hut close by that I go a free warrior from, and I think I started with alphabet and pottery, so my initial builds were warrior, curragh, granary, settler.

My first two cities were on the river to build the SoZ, and SW by the food bonuses. In those cities I immediately started building the SoZ (with a pre-build) and a granary.

I tried for the republic slingshot (writing--> code of laws--> philosophy--> free republic tech), but I didn't get it. The Spanish beat me to it. I think I was probably too liberal in my trades, because I was set up perfectly for it. I probably stupidly traded writing away too early.

I traded for Iron Working ASAP to see if I would be able to build swords. The iron was a little bit of a hike to the west, but nobody else claimed the territory, so I sent my first available settler there with some warriors immediately. But I didn't hook up the iron. Instead I started building a bunch of warriors which I would later mass upgrade to swordsmen.

In the meantime, the land was fairly crowded and there was a bunch of useless jungle, so rather than primarily building settlers from my factories, I built a bunch of workers. I used them to hook up roads and irrigate/mine, and then joined many of them into my cities in order to get my population up quickly. This speeds up research and shield production.

Once I researched philosophy (and missed the republic slinghot) I shut off research to build up my treasury for warrior-to-swordmen upgrades at 60 gold a piece. Later on I did the same thing with horsemen-to-knights, though not to the same extent. And I didn't start building horsemen until my cities were producing more shields because 30 GPT can be a little expensive for horses if you build them real early.

I had a pretty sizable military of swordsmen, so the Zulu were easy to take down. They had a town on the other side of the continent which helped keep them alive for a while. Then I warred with the Aztecs, then the Spanish. After a while I had a pretty good legion of Ancient Cavalry as well, which REALLY helped.

I'm not sure, but I think I scored a bunch of late ancient age techs through pointy-stick research. Since I missed the slingshot, I stayed in despotism much longer than I like, and I wasn't able to upgrade my government until I finally beat Monarchy out of someone. I usually prefer Republic, but at that point I just opted for the first chance get myself out of despotism, so Monarchy it was.

You mentioned that I had researched up to Feudalism at that 500 AD save. I am not sure where I was I but I am pretty sure I had some knights when I was fighting the Aztecs, though I guess I could be wrong.

Anyway, there you have it. Hopefully you can gain a kernal of knowledge from my mindless ramblings.

 

Keith, Super kind of you to take the time

Couple key things I see you did that I never do and should:

If a long treck to Iron, I always try and hook it at once to my core cities which take time and those few key road building workers out of the inner core improvments loop too long. Your system on mass building up-gradeable Warriors for later hook up is better.

You started building granaries at start, as well as Wonder pre-builds,
I don`t do that but will try it now.

FWIW, I`ve never pulled off the Republic slingshot and I have stopped trying, being happy to early war in Monarchy if I can get it before one starts.

Very impressive Game Keith, especially as England, who I would not list as a powerhouse Warmonger choice.

 

No problemo. I'm all for analyzing this stuff. Especially when it's my game.

The thing to remember about mass upgrading is that it does cost lots of gold. It is 60 gold to upgrade from warrior to swordsmen. Also, don't start building tons of warriors until you know you can secure the iron. I've been burned on that before.

Granaries are EXTREMELY important. The whole key to the game is rapid expansion, and having a granary halves the time it takes to grow one population point, which in turn allows you to crank out many more settlers. Only build a couple though. You don't need one in every city. Only the couple of towns that you plan to build most of your settlers and/or workers with.

If you are playing on Monarch level, you should almost always be able to get the Republic slingshot. Don't give up on that. Learn how to expand faster with your granaries and settler and worker factories. Get all your tiles roaded ASAP, and make sure you are building enough workers to get that done.

England blows as a civ. But I generally choose a random civ for variety if nothing else.

 

If you can't get access to iron, it's best to build archers and later upgrade them to Longbowmen. They're not as good as Swordsmen would be, but they're still better than warriors if there's no upgrade path. I've never gotten the horsemen rush idea, I think their offensive strength is too weak, even against warriors. That may have been upgraded in C3C so, so don't take my word for it. Building units early and upgrading them later saves on production. That's why getting Leonardo's Workshop is so important.

 

Wouldn't you make life easier if you also tried to SETTLE some extra land? that could bump you up to 55% and make the war much less difficult to get 66%

 

Obviously. I had like 15 settlers. Doesn't change the fact that war was necessary to close out the game.