Hypnotoad
Prince
I've been thinking for a while that it would be nice to start strategy threads. I thought I'd start with one on early game strategies. Feel free to post additional ideas on the early game or to take issue with the ideas I have.
So one question you'll need to ask yourself is what your goals are for the early game. Do you want to focus on military might? On creating wonders of the world? On founding religions?
There are certain technologies that I think are pretty crucial to get early on: hunting and pottery are perhaps the two most important. Hunting lets to create Javelineers. These units are strength 3 and so will do a good job defending you against barbarians for most of the game. They also have a healthy bonus against heavy units and so can be quite useful (against spearmen, e.g.) later in the game. Pottery lets you create cottages. Setting up early cottages is crucial to staying in the tech lead later in the game.
If you want to go for military might, hunting gets you pretty far. You can take over Civs with just hunting (even if you don't rush them immediately). After that, you can either go down the horse route or the Copperworking/Axeman route. I prefer the Copperworking route unless I have a unique horse unit and even then... Copperworking not only gives you great combat units (Probably most of the cities I've captured have been by Axemen -- who are medium units and so Javelineers don't have a bonus against them), but also gives you the forge, which allows you to give all your melee units free upgrades and allows you to create the all-important engineer great people.
In fact, I think one of the most important decisions to make when pursuing wonders is whether to try to go to copper working, build a forge and then research Masonry try to get a wonder for free (with a great engineer) or to just go straight for Masonry and try to build the wonders from scratch. I normally play on immortal and I have to say that I normally don't succeed in building the Sphinx before someone else if I go the copperworking route. The only way I've reliably succeeded with the copperworking route is as a philosophical civilization. It's just faster to go straight for Masonry and then build them from scratch.
If you want to found religions, the associated techs often aren't that great. So you'll need to decide how long you think you can wait before you start researching the techs. There is a delicate balancing act here. Think about how many religions you want to found and which ones. As Egypt I've managed to found all but one, but this takes very careful play. Much easier to give some a pass.
Overall, I'd say the key is to think about what techs you can pass up at first to get at your real goals. For example, fishing is quite nice in some situations, but I almost always find that it slows me down too much. Those 20 turns spent researching it could be better spent getting you to pottery and on to Masonry or Copper working. Similarly, part of the beauty of the best techs (Hunting, Pottery, Copper working) is that they provide a couple different important benefit on their own and they lead to yet further quite good techs. Time spent carefully choosing your techs will be amply rewarded.
So one question you'll need to ask yourself is what your goals are for the early game. Do you want to focus on military might? On creating wonders of the world? On founding religions?
There are certain technologies that I think are pretty crucial to get early on: hunting and pottery are perhaps the two most important. Hunting lets to create Javelineers. These units are strength 3 and so will do a good job defending you against barbarians for most of the game. They also have a healthy bonus against heavy units and so can be quite useful (against spearmen, e.g.) later in the game. Pottery lets you create cottages. Setting up early cottages is crucial to staying in the tech lead later in the game.
If you want to go for military might, hunting gets you pretty far. You can take over Civs with just hunting (even if you don't rush them immediately). After that, you can either go down the horse route or the Copperworking/Axeman route. I prefer the Copperworking route unless I have a unique horse unit and even then... Copperworking not only gives you great combat units (Probably most of the cities I've captured have been by Axemen -- who are medium units and so Javelineers don't have a bonus against them), but also gives you the forge, which allows you to give all your melee units free upgrades and allows you to create the all-important engineer great people.
In fact, I think one of the most important decisions to make when pursuing wonders is whether to try to go to copper working, build a forge and then research Masonry try to get a wonder for free (with a great engineer) or to just go straight for Masonry and try to build the wonders from scratch. I normally play on immortal and I have to say that I normally don't succeed in building the Sphinx before someone else if I go the copperworking route. The only way I've reliably succeeded with the copperworking route is as a philosophical civilization. It's just faster to go straight for Masonry and then build them from scratch.
If you want to found religions, the associated techs often aren't that great. So you'll need to decide how long you think you can wait before you start researching the techs. There is a delicate balancing act here. Think about how many religions you want to found and which ones. As Egypt I've managed to found all but one, but this takes very careful play. Much easier to give some a pass.
Overall, I'd say the key is to think about what techs you can pass up at first to get at your real goals. For example, fishing is quite nice in some situations, but I almost always find that it slows me down too much. Those 20 turns spent researching it could be better spent getting you to pottery and on to Masonry or Copper working. Similarly, part of the beauty of the best techs (Hunting, Pottery, Copper working) is that they provide a couple different important benefit on their own and they lead to yet further quite good techs. Time spent carefully choosing your techs will be amply rewarded.
, and not even that on a regular basis.
