Time Flies

[Hundegesicht]

Well, I started playing Prince level and... What!? It's already 0AD? I don't even have my starting wonders done! I only have 5 cities! Apparently, time moves much quicker than in Warlord. Any good stratigies for dealing with this acceleration?

 

[Ace]

The number of turns per game goes down as the difficulty level goes up. Warlord gets 550 turns, but prince only gets 500 turns.

Sometimes you just get "into" the game and lose track of time, both gametime and realtime!! You can lose track of your objectives and just muddle along not getting anywhere....

 

[Hundegesicht]

50 turns less... 50 turns less... *Shudder*. Well, one solution I've found already from veiwing timelines here is to have an industrial-science "kick" in the late 1700's or so where you research most of the modern techs in a few turns... but getting 16+ cities in the ancient ages (BC years) is going to be a pain in the ass...

 

[ElephantU]

If that's your goal, read threads about ICS (Infinite City Sprawl/Sleaze/Something) such as DaveV's here:

http://www.cms.livjm.ac.uk/wittgenstein/davev's_ics_strategy.htm

 

[Hundegesicht]

No, I just generally rush build a good deal of cities by AD 1 so I can have a good core amount of cities and establish a border ring of my area in that map... then I slow down (using most of my settlers to irrigate/build roads and help develop existing cities) and gradually fill it in.

 

[ElephantU]

City spacing and future growth plans would be the difference: ICS sometimes means checkerboard cities (2 tiles apart) and capping growth by switching to low-food/high-shield tiles. Beware as you climb the difficulty levels, though; when you only have one starting citizen content, and exceed a certain limit on number of cities, you will start getting new cities where the first citizen is unhappy. If you are in Rep/Dem then you cannot fix it with martial law. Learn to watch for problems in lower difficulty levels before moving up.

 

[Hundegesicht]

I learnt about checkerboard cities back in my Indian game when I built most of my cities on the Indian Peninsula eventually had massive food shortages because none of my cities had the city squares to support its size... so in this game I have my cities spread WAY out. (I have all of Asia and Africa, and the Romans, my only other neighbor, I have contained at the Turkish Isthmus between the black and Aegean Sea and in the Ukraine so this is possible)

My general reasoning is to build 20 cities by AD1 and then spend the next 2000 years growing them into size 20-36 super cities with one purposely left at about size 12 that can provide the food to support all my engineers. (Who will be busy building railnets and farmland/cleaning up pollution)

Starting in the early 1900's (or whenever I have my spaceship done and am just aiming to max out my score), whenever I happen to have 30,000 or so gold to waste I'll find a good undeveloped resource "area", send it 10 engineers to totally irrigate and railnet the whole thing, and then have one build a city there. Then, I'll rush build all of the improvements and turn it into a modern city. Once I have about 3 of these I jack up my Lux rate to 90% and turn them into full size ~30 cities.

However, I have never used the ICS. It looks too boring and repetitive to integrate as a real style...