[BTS] Tough Emperor Ragnar game

[reflec]

Hi all, played a game with ragnar that stumped me.

Standard size+speed pangaea

Attaching a t0 save and a t100 save so you can see how the game has gone (probably unwinnable at my skill level )

In short, awkward land around me + getting boxed in by 2 creative leaders, and not good strategic resources which made war unreasonable (at least that's how I saw it)

Start:

Spoiler :

What happened in game (spoilers):

Spoiler :

Moved scout SW and since I didn't find anything I move settler onto PH, which reveals some marble

Settle on marble, weird sea to the north and some FP to E, send my scout E

This is the next save I have. Saw that big desert to east of capital and looped scout W and found that wheat spot before being cornered by barbs and dying.
Built a warrior which found the FP but was unsure how close ai would be to that spot, was worried ai would build something there if I didn't take it early
Settled 2nd city there since I saw I was going to be boxed in fast and I thought I needed that spot if I wanted to stand a chance.

I went for GLH since I thought it would go well with FIN, ideally I'd have a lot of coastal cities to take advantage of 3 coasts (also I have brain damage and both thought GLH was x2 with marble and that I was IND because of a stalin game before this ) At the same time, there's no copper near me and I only have horses, and I feel like if I tried for horse archers, I couldn't build up cottages in the FP city and build HA at the same time, plus HA don't get AGG bonus.


Steal 2 of wilhelm's workers, but then he refuses to cease fire and I get stuck making way more military than I would've liked (common occurrence in my emperor games)
Gilg dows wilhelm but doesn't do enough so I gift wilhelm alphabet to get peace


T100:

I undoubtedly made many dumb mistakes but still curious how other's would've approached this

 

[Nick723]

You have horses - I would go for horse archer attack here. For this you only really need 3-4 cities - definitely wouldn’t bother next time with the one in the far west, in this example.

 

[dankok8]

HA attack on Willem would be quite strong here. Should have a settled an early city 1 SE of Rice to use the rest of the FP's and claim a bunch of land. By this point in time you should have those 6 cities built if not on an early war path and on the way to Cuirassiers to break out. EDIT: I would have settled in place.

 

[ZPV]

Starting out, I'm not a huge fan of where you settled, on the Marble. The plains hill was just fine, and in moving again you moved away from a bunch of forests and river tiles.
However, I would have seriously considered the Spices instead - it'll transform to a 3 tile on the city centre; and Vikings need a lot of early techs to get their empire going.

Once the horses are revealed, I'd probably decide I had "enough" production and not very much to build, so I'd delay Bronze Working in favour of Pottery and Mysticism or Writing.

GLH is generally a good economic wonder, but it probably isn't better than focusing on a really solid core with FIN - and ToA is usually bad, because it doesn't do very much and the ToA city is your prime Great Merchant trade mission target.
Instead I think my priorities would be one of:

• Rushing someone with HAs (Willem seems like a convenient target). I don't care that they don't get free Combat I. You still get cheap barracks, and they are good enough anyway.
• Increasing my happy cap and growing my cities. That means getting hold of Monarchy one way or another, and the capital then would work commerce tiles instead of mines.

 

[sampsa]

Yeh, on the marble loses 5(!!) beautiful riverside grass tiles in exchange for coastal access, which is close to zero value on pangaea. Horses make this problem rather straight-forward - you should go for HAs. Without horses, I'd go for catapults (if you can't get metal via trade, archerpult it is).

edit: oh one more thing, I would go agri-mining-BW. Sheep is mineable, so AH can wait post-pottery. BW and pottery are often the two important early game techs that you should go for asap.

Also, starting save?

 

[dankok8]

What Sampsa said. Generally avoid coastal cities like a plague if they don't have seafood on pangaea. They are basically useless because coast tiles are weak. I guess with Financial, once you have a Lighthouse (which requires the useless Sailing tech and comes much later...) they are a decent 2 3 but a riverside grassland cottage gives you that right at the start and a lot more when it grows. Not to mention water tiles are terrible in terms of hammers.

 

[reflec]

Yeh, on the marble loses 5(!!) beautiful riverside grass tiles in exchange for coastal access, which is close to zero value on pangaea. Horses make this problem rather straight-forward - you should go for HAs. Without horses, I'd go for catapults (if you can't get metal via trade, archerpult it is).

edit: oh one more thing, I would go agri-mining-BW. Sheep is mineable, so AH can wait post-pottery. BW and pottery are often the two important early game techs that you should go for asap.

Also, starting save?

Forgot, added the 2 saves

Also wondering about mining the sheep, I never consider improving something a resource with something else. I guess the idea is it gives you 2 more which are more valuable than the 2 it gives? It looks like that corn could sustain the 2 PH mines + the horses, and then you could rely on grassland cottages to grow more

 

[lymond]

Well, in part it's about improving a tile that makes it strong. Mined sheep is a nice tile - same with hill pigs - both help with worker/settler production. But it's also about the teching. Why go AH for PH sheep if you don't see a lot of pasture food around? It might be different if your scouting revealed some nearby pigs and stuff.

PH mines though are not a priority at all unless nothing better to do

 

[reflec]

Well, in part it's about improving a tile that makes it strong. Mined sheep is a nice tile - same with hill pigs - both help with worker/settler production. But it's also about the teching. Why go AH for PH sheep if you don't see a lot of pasture food around? It might be different if your scouting revealed some nearby pigs and stuff.

PH mines though are not a priority at all unless nothing better to do

Fair enough, but in this case that means delaying finding horses; I wouldn't have even known I had the option of HA if delaying AH more (or maybe I did, not sure on the time frame I had to attack here)

 

[lymond]

Fair enough, but in this case that means delaying finding horses; I wouldn't have even known I had the option of HA if delaying AH more (or maybe I did, not sure on the time frame I had to attack here)

Your talkin' hindsight here

 

[Fippy]

Also wondering about mining the sheep, I never consider improving something a resource with something else.

Which shows you are not reading as many posts as you probably should to thin out your mistakes, cos this gets mentioned fairly often
Peoples are repeating their advice in help threads, if you take some time and sum up the most important info and have that ready while playing you could improve easily (goes for everybody who looks for help).

 

[sampsa]

T67

Spoiler :

So, went agri-mining-BW-wheel-pottery-AH-(HBR)-(archery). Decent 4-city empire, the attack is pretty early and the forests help a lot. Maybe can take out both Gilga and Will.