Spain on Earth 18

[Sidney Magal]

I've just played an MP Earth 18 game as Spain and that got me thinking about what the best city placement in the Iberian Peninsula would look like and the best I could come up with was this.




What do you think of that? Please, keep in mind that I have mainly MP games in mind, so I don't really care what the final city size or optimal placement would be in the long term, I'm interested in building a solid foundation to be able to outproduce the other European countries in the short term to be able to benefit from their capitals (those rock, especially Paris).

Regarding techs, I've been thinking that a nice way to start would be hunting (you might need spears) - animal husbandry - the wheel - mining - bronze working - iron working. Start building 2 warriors before the worker and park them in the forests northeast of Madrid to prevent the French from hooking up the horses (if Rome is an AI) and to discourage warrior rushes.

From the Earth 18 experts out there, am I too far off reality? I've only played Earth 18 online a couple of times so I wouldn't know. Thanks in advance.

 

[JoeHollywood]

Your placement is great, but if I were you I'd simplify what you're looking at to the 25 turn rule.

On Earth18, if the rome player ( and there will always be a rome player...heh ) is worth his weight in styrofoam peanuts, Rome's first praetorian unit will enter the world on turn 25 or 26.

As Spain, if you want to have a chance to win the game, you have to either kill rome by then, or have his iron cut off and held by then.

What's worse is there will almost always be a strong England to deal with after that is done.

Now that being said, I HATE spain on this map. I hate the lack of tech parity with the starting two techs. I hate the trait combo. I hate the UB. And if you get to the point you're going to use the UU, it's A...not that good, and B...you'll make about 2 of them before they're obsolete.

Anyway, on to the first 25 turns.

Your tech choice looks right. Your placement is good.

The biggest things you're going to have to look at is the score of all things for the first turn.

You want to watch rome and france and see if their score stays the same ( they moved their settler ), or if it jumps up ( they settled in place )

If Rome settles in place, I'll normally go warrior/warrior, 1st and second, focusing on production, and send all 3 warriors to either warrior rush vs 1 defending warrior of rome, or to camp on his iron.

Once Rome is killed/neutered, I'm sending my chariots to france to take that juicy land.

Then I'm working navy to settle the two tasty north african cities and prepare for a naval invasion of england.

It's one of my least favorite civs to play, but it's definately a good one, and a strong production powerhouse.

 

[Sidney Magal]

Thought it didn't deserve a new thread.

Man, Conquistadores rule!!!

I've been playing earth maps a lot these days and started a game with Spain. I got bored of playing European civs because the script for winning is tedious: rush Europe and win, all you'll have to do is settle a city to claim oil later on, but Huayna Capac is very incompetent in settling South America so, if you play right, you'll have all the resources and the best land.

But I chose to play it differently this time. I was decided to see how well Spain can be leveraged in the right conditions. We know that the Conquistador is a cuirassier with a melee bonus and that also gets defensive bonus. If your enemy has cuirassiers of his own, it isn't that special so you need to get a backwards civ to bully. And what's better for that than our dear crazy warmonger Montezuma on Earth 18?

See, this is all I settled in the early game:


Nevermind the Longbowmen, they were built to fight war weariness. Madrid, Lisbon, Tunis and Gibraltar. Some resources, only a surplus of wine, but decent production. I landed the GLH, TGL, the Parth and also Sistine because Julius settled an annoying city to steal Tunis' fish (by now it 's flipped and been disbanded).

I started building Trebs to leverage the Citadel (free Heroic Epic yay!) and galleons. I prepared a fleet and sailed to America. Monty had made Roosevelt capitulate and Huayna was his friendly vassal. In the end I got this:



The cost? Let's see the units I killed:


And the ones I lost:


I guess everyone will agree that losing 6 Conquistadores, 3 Cannons, 1 Caravel and 1 Galleon is a fair price to pay for 20 cities and 282 kills.

What about you guys? What experiences do you have with the Spanish uniques?

 

[huerfanista]

Yeah, I love playing Spain. Conquistadors are so good that I keep a bunch around even after cavalry, at least until I'm not facing any more pikes. You just need to prioritize engineering and start building 3-promo seige steadily. CR3 cannon rock.

On E18 I usually go for the obvious chariot rush on the romans/french. Nice to see an alternative approach.

 

[JoeMacUnGee]

Last time I played Spain it was on the 40-civ Huge Earth map (noble level). I really hate Spain, but I won with them. Founded 4 religions, won a cultural victory. Was filthy rich. I got it rolling by settling my first two cities in the sounthern part of "France," thereby crippling the French. The one settled next to the grapes and horses in southern France grew huge and absorbed one French city peacefully. The rest were conquered and diplomacy kept me alive until a cultural win.

 

[none]

Nice game and good job taking Monty's lands. I like this map a lot. I agree though that the obvious solution to rush all over Europe early to take out Rome and the French is a bit boring. Once you've conquered Europe you've got a serious headstart but that doesn't make for much diversity as far as different games are concerned.

 

[ICNP]

I played Spain on the 1000 AD scenario. It's fairly interesting as your capitol is where Barcelona is, with you only other city where Madrid is (in the OP). You start off with some knights and archers, and are at war with the Arabs (who are dominating and control Grenada). I managed to capture Grenada and then take my knights and capture all of north africa and Egypt, and then an independent Ethiopia. It was all very silly as the Arabs had insane power and tech, but only a few archers in the cities, and they only upgraded one of the archers to Longbowmen. Eventually I also managed to capture Athens and Constantinople, kinda random but whatever. Eventually the Arabs made a second attack, and I caved in, gifted Constantinople to the neutral France, blocking Athens from conquest. I also caved on my no cheating rule, and deleted the Arab stack that came to take Cairo. So I've abandoned the game out of shame, and because it's difficult to maintain a decent tech lead against a France, Germany, and England that control such a wide variety of European territory (due to the minor powers of Byzantium and Vikings).