Disclaimer: I, in no way whatsoever, claim to be an expert on Civ games. So please limits responses within this thread to constructive cticicism as opposed to telling me I am an idiot, that is the exclusive domain of my girlfriend.
The ticking timebomb strat is a combination of a lot of city developement and some late game warmongering. I do not know how it will work on higher difficulties since I never play above Nobile, I like an even playing field. I play without barbarians for the same reason as they tend to ignore the AI and just beat up on my poor little cities. (truth be told i just find them annoying and since i shelled out 50 bucks for the game and they didn't they have no choice) I also always disable diplomatic and space race victory conditions because they just bore me. So for the sake of discussion assume a large or huge map with 12 players on continents/Epic speed.
step 1: Crawl out of your caves and build a city. Immediately start building a worker and researching bronze working for the chopping. Use your starting unit to go look for a second city site and find goody huts. Bronze working takes 21 turns and the worker 23 (I rarely found my Capital on a plains hill because i want to be able to mine it later) second research should either be animal husbandry or agriculture depending on whatever resources are nearby. Once your worker pops up start a settler and chop him out. Both the worker and settler go off to city site number 2. Once you get there found a city and start building another worker. Chop him out too.By now you should be ready to pick your 3rd Tech, start heading for your religon. Bhuddism should already be founded and you will never get hinduism at this point. So start shooting for Judaism, I usually get it but sometimes I don't. If you have stone nearby then start with masonry, otherwise mysticism. Then start a new settler in city 2 using the new worker to chop him out. If you have stone in the either city radius have the original worker start connectting it to your capital, if not then start chopping out stonehenge. City 2 builds it's settler and founds city3 repeat chopping out a worker with city 2's worker at city3. Repeat until you get you have 5 cities. at this point you are losing 4 gold per turn usually and eating into your goody hut cash. After all 5 are built then start connecting them and improving terrain as needed.
Step2: Research preisthood as soon as you finish monotheism start resaerching preisthood Once this is done your have to decide on what you want from the Oracle, if you Founded Judaism then shoot for Machinery, researching the prerequisetes while the oracle is building ESPECIALLY if you are playing the ind/fin leader for the chinese. If you didn't get judaism use it to found Chistianity with Theology. after that backfill the worker techs and start building libraries. You should already have some barracks since you had nothing else to build with this research line except maybe some graneries.
Step3: If you have lots of room to expand due to random starting locations then simply grow grow grow. Most likely you need room currently occupied by the heathens that have not seen the true faith. Enter into a diplomatic agreement with them know as Warrior Aquired Realestate, W.A.R. for short. How you go about this is up to you. Don't ask me since i believe strongly in building a big gob of troops and throwing them around recklessly until I start to run out. Once i have whatever land I could get with the above mentioned gob, i sue for peace. since most civs at this point have like 5-7 cities i usually have a Civ with 2-3 left that really hates me. So i build more units during the ensuing peace. Once my economy has caught up with my new cities i check their happiness. Well lo and behold they claim to yearn for the Motherland. Well I take this as a sign that they want me to finish conquering the motherland...so off I go with gob #2 and proceed to reunite them with their lost brethren. Once this war is over I usually don't start anymore. The AI seem to be a friendly lot and don't beat up on each other, which means I have double their land for quite a while.
Step4: Start researching Literature, The Library always seems to help a lot for the free scientists. then head for education so you can start building your universities and eventually the oxford university, by this time your second great leader should pop up, or maybe your third...the first was a great prophet most likely and you should have a strong chance at a great scientist from the great library, build an academy in your science city and start researching towards rifles so you can throw some dood defendewrs in your cities for the long wait. I rarely build cavalry since i don't plan on going to war anytime soon. I just develop my terrain, let the cottages grow and research research research. Once I have some riflemen, I am ready for Step5
Step5: Head for democracy and the Statue of liberty, if you get the statue then set all the free specialists to science for the next research leg. Which is assembly line and the tanks (or more often than not PANZERS, I usually play Bismark if not the Chinese guy with ind/fin). Once you have assembly line switch all your free specialists to engineers for the production.research Scientific Method while you build your factories. Two turns before you complete scientific method, begin praying for oil in your land so you don't have to start a war to get it. war is just on the horizon anyway but it is much smoother with tanks and battelships. once you aquire an oil tile either through luck or a quick war that you end as soon you get the city that has oil, focus mainly on getting the three gorges dam, once you build it and have factories and barracks everywhere switch to bueracracy, vassalage and theology and start cranking out the Panzers and artillery. I forgot to mention that free religion is a must if yopu want to be left alone for your tank timebomb machine to kkeep ticking. If you don't have a state religion they tend to not hate you. Once you have an pile of tanks/Panzers and arillery plus a whole bunch of battleships start destroying everyone on your continent. I also like to load up two or three transports per remaining continent with 6 tanks each. Once i start my rampage I send them off and declare war with the everyone else. The tanks just run around the place in pairs and pillage pillage and more pillage. you MUST have battleships with them to patrol around the other continents and sink the galleons with their attacking armies. I usually am so far ahead in tech they rarely have anything better than rifleman. I jusat pillage them into poverty so they can't catch up. If you never let them develop their oil tiles then the most you will ever be up against is Infantry.
RAZE everything. by this point in a large or huge map I have been playing for about 10 hours and am bored with the current game. to date I have never finished a game once it is apparant it's just mopping up. perhaps i should go to a higher difficulty but i like my little world.
The ticking timebomb strat is a combination of a lot of city developement and some late game warmongering. I do not know how it will work on higher difficulties since I never play above Nobile, I like an even playing field. I play without barbarians for the same reason as they tend to ignore the AI and just beat up on my poor little cities. (truth be told i just find them annoying and since i shelled out 50 bucks for the game and they didn't they have no choice) I also always disable diplomatic and space race victory conditions because they just bore me. So for the sake of discussion assume a large or huge map with 12 players on continents/Epic speed.
step 1: Crawl out of your caves and build a city. Immediately start building a worker and researching bronze working for the chopping. Use your starting unit to go look for a second city site and find goody huts. Bronze working takes 21 turns and the worker 23 (I rarely found my Capital on a plains hill because i want to be able to mine it later) second research should either be animal husbandry or agriculture depending on whatever resources are nearby. Once your worker pops up start a settler and chop him out. Both the worker and settler go off to city site number 2. Once you get there found a city and start building another worker. Chop him out too.By now you should be ready to pick your 3rd Tech, start heading for your religon. Bhuddism should already be founded and you will never get hinduism at this point. So start shooting for Judaism, I usually get it but sometimes I don't. If you have stone nearby then start with masonry, otherwise mysticism. Then start a new settler in city 2 using the new worker to chop him out. If you have stone in the either city radius have the original worker start connectting it to your capital, if not then start chopping out stonehenge. City 2 builds it's settler and founds city3 repeat chopping out a worker with city 2's worker at city3. Repeat until you get you have 5 cities. at this point you are losing 4 gold per turn usually and eating into your goody hut cash. After all 5 are built then start connecting them and improving terrain as needed.
Step2: Research preisthood as soon as you finish monotheism start resaerching preisthood Once this is done your have to decide on what you want from the Oracle, if you Founded Judaism then shoot for Machinery, researching the prerequisetes while the oracle is building ESPECIALLY if you are playing the ind/fin leader for the chinese. If you didn't get judaism use it to found Chistianity with Theology. after that backfill the worker techs and start building libraries. You should already have some barracks since you had nothing else to build with this research line except maybe some graneries.
Step3: If you have lots of room to expand due to random starting locations then simply grow grow grow. Most likely you need room currently occupied by the heathens that have not seen the true faith. Enter into a diplomatic agreement with them know as Warrior Aquired Realestate, W.A.R. for short. How you go about this is up to you. Don't ask me since i believe strongly in building a big gob of troops and throwing them around recklessly until I start to run out. Once i have whatever land I could get with the above mentioned gob, i sue for peace. since most civs at this point have like 5-7 cities i usually have a Civ with 2-3 left that really hates me. So i build more units during the ensuing peace. Once my economy has caught up with my new cities i check their happiness. Well lo and behold they claim to yearn for the Motherland. Well I take this as a sign that they want me to finish conquering the motherland...so off I go with gob #2 and proceed to reunite them with their lost brethren. Once this war is over I usually don't start anymore. The AI seem to be a friendly lot and don't beat up on each other, which means I have double their land for quite a while.
Step4: Start researching Literature, The Library always seems to help a lot for the free scientists. then head for education so you can start building your universities and eventually the oxford university, by this time your second great leader should pop up, or maybe your third...the first was a great prophet most likely and you should have a strong chance at a great scientist from the great library, build an academy in your science city and start researching towards rifles so you can throw some dood defendewrs in your cities for the long wait. I rarely build cavalry since i don't plan on going to war anytime soon. I just develop my terrain, let the cottages grow and research research research. Once I have some riflemen, I am ready for Step5
Step5: Head for democracy and the Statue of liberty, if you get the statue then set all the free specialists to science for the next research leg. Which is assembly line and the tanks (or more often than not PANZERS, I usually play Bismark if not the Chinese guy with ind/fin). Once you have assembly line switch all your free specialists to engineers for the production.research Scientific Method while you build your factories. Two turns before you complete scientific method, begin praying for oil in your land so you don't have to start a war to get it. war is just on the horizon anyway but it is much smoother with tanks and battelships. once you aquire an oil tile either through luck or a quick war that you end as soon you get the city that has oil, focus mainly on getting the three gorges dam, once you build it and have factories and barracks everywhere switch to bueracracy, vassalage and theology and start cranking out the Panzers and artillery. I forgot to mention that free religion is a must if yopu want to be left alone for your tank timebomb machine to kkeep ticking. If you don't have a state religion they tend to not hate you. Once you have an pile of tanks/Panzers and arillery plus a whole bunch of battleships start destroying everyone on your continent. I also like to load up two or three transports per remaining continent with 6 tanks each. Once i start my rampage I send them off and declare war with the everyone else. The tanks just run around the place in pairs and pillage pillage and more pillage. you MUST have battleships with them to patrol around the other continents and sink the galleons with their attacking armies. I usually am so far ahead in tech they rarely have anything better than rifleman. I jusat pillage them into poverty so they can't catch up. If you never let them develop their oil tiles then the most you will ever be up against is Infantry.
RAZE everything. by this point in a large or huge map I have been playing for about 10 hours and am bored with the current game. to date I have never finished a game once it is apparant it's just mopping up. perhaps i should go to a higher difficulty but i like my little world.
