Thank you. Glad to offer a breath of fresh air; I can see my strategy differs significantly from yours.
I suppose you could call it shield based rather than trade based (or maybe "communist", every city gets the same crappy stuff and has little trade with the outside, but collectively they can work).
In fact, trade and republic have been nearly my last priorities, except as necessary for democracy and economics. New strategies I consider mostly involve more units or wonders. Especially units. But responding in order, more or less....
The bottleneck strategy is a great way to not get attacked. As you probably know, as bad as
the AI is at land strategy, they are even worse at amphibious assaults. By controlling the only
one or two land access points you can mostly eliminate all dangerous assaults
(except for the bottleneck cities) until industrialization. Barbarians are the biggest threat. But with
such a puny military (and almost entirely defensive), walls are a necessity along the coasts and frontiers.
As a shield/improvement based person, I find that my build strategy often determines my tech
strategy. Relationships with AI rarely influnce anything, even military deployments, because I
regard them all as potential or real enemies and proceed like that.
I am sure my trade is less than ElephantU's. The idea is the marketplace and library
increase the products of trade (science, tax, & luxury all +50%), so the result is probably more or
less equivalent. Also, the roads help.
As I said, my priority is shields (and science...), so until recently I never even switched to republic
because I couldn't stand to pay support for my units, I just went monarchy-democracy. So happiness
was less of an issue. Even now I don't get Republic until the Chapel. I also never went for trade until
I wanted Adam Smiths, relying on good science and rush buying to get wonders. Since I rarely use
caravans, republic has never been as attractive to me. In fact, as many of my wonders are built without
caravans as with. I will sometimes build caravans for domestic trade, but only in cities I consider to
have everything else useful. As for foreign trade cravans, they are about as common as Old n Slow's walls.
I have formerly tried the SSC strategy, building a city near a river and putting all science and trade wonders there.
Not that I knew of it as you guys do, no internet back then, I rarely traded with it. But as I moved up in difficulty
I couldn't get all the necessary wonders, and abandoned it by the time I was playing King. As you may note,
none of the SSC wonders are in my top three. I can certainly see why you would need caravans to get so many
in one city. I am still dubious about sending so many caravans around, but I will certainly revisit the SSC now that
I am better at getting what I want on Deity. Well, maybe they are things that go together, you can't have your trade
and eat it too. Caravans and SSC's may be dependent on each other, you need both for either to work.
But I'll experiment around. I can definitely fit Colossus in as my second wonder to pyramids, and Copernicus and
Newton both tend to come in wonder-building gaps and I should be able to get them as well, at the expense of a
few libraries
.
