What settler flood tactic?
Well, I wrote this in the HoF thread, but I'll post it here to explain what it is:
quote:
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BTW, Bamspeedy... and all of the other high scoring players... How do you get so many cities SO QUICKLY!?!? (like in Bamspeedy's post for the 500 AD game...)
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I'm using a variation of Aeson's settler flood. You can read his article here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showt...&threadid=20422
JuicycivNewbie also wrote an article explaining some more details and a slightly different variation of it:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showt...&threadid=25817
And in case you didn't see it, you can see a screenshot of the settler flood in action on this page:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showt...=&pagenumber=19
(towards the bottom of that page, my response after God's)
Works best on huge pangea maps. Expansionists, so you get a huge tech lead, and either industrious (fast workers), or Religious (cheap temples). Build cities real close right at the start. It seems like your territory starts off small, but it will quickly expand like crazy. All cities basically just build settlers or workers, build chariots/horseman (for later upgrade to knights) in between the production of settlers when possible. On a huge map, you should have 50-100 chariots built by the time you get chivalry. The hard part is deciding how many workers to build, because the more workers you build the fewer settlers you are building. But if you don't have enough workers laying down roads, that will slow your expansion alot (wandering settlers).
You first of course want to pump out about 20 scouts as soon as you can, to grab all the goody huts.
At the beginning of the game check with your opponents EVERY turn, to sell maps and to check if they have any workers for sale. On the lower levels there is less of a chance of getting workers. In the first 100 turns or so, I only had the chance to buy 2 workers.
At the start basically all you want workers to do is mine grassland (around your productive region only, irrigate everything in your high-corrupt areas) and build roads, roads being the most important. The longer a settler is wandering around, the longer it takes for it/the future city to build another settler. When done properly, you nearly double your territory every 15-20 turns or so. I had 141 cities at 10 A.D. and 331 at 500 A.D.
Normally after you have a big power lead on the AI you can start demanding cities from them and have those cities building you more cities. But in the game I'm playing now I had those cities just build me more workers, to lay roads to help my future expansion. But, the downside to this was that the roads also help the AI expand
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Give your neighbor Masonry ASAP, so he can build the Pyramids for you (take him out with swordsmen/horsemen/or knights depending on what you have). You might have a bunch of warriors built before you hooked up your horses, so all those warriors you can upgrade (you only need 1 barracks for this).
Gotm notes: This should work well, since this month it is a large map with few civs. I'm not playing the game so I don't know the landmass, but pangea is best for this, but continents will work. Remember GOTM6, where we started on another continent than the rest and Aeson got domination with this (without warfare!). You would need to build a navy to ferry all your settlers if this is the case. Emperor level will be alot harder to pull this off. Egyptians are industrious so that will help ALOT with laying down roads, but they are not expansionists so you won't get the huge early tech lead from goody huts.
This tactic is best if you can use the scout blocking of iron (NOT ALLOWED IN GOTM), but it will still work. This tactic is basically using ICS, which is unregulated by the rules. ICS is a little more complex than just putting cities two tiles away in every direction, read JuicyCivNewbie's article for details of city placement.
