What do you guys think of this start?:
1) Builder first.
2) make 2 improvements.
3) Delete the builder, then buy a slinger with the money from deleting the builder, plus leftover money
its basically paying 40g & 15 production for potentially +2 production a turn... and the first slinger comes about 6 turns late.
Obviously not worth doing if you can't make two useful production improvements with the builder.
Man you need 3 improvements for Craftsmanship eureka 50% unit production, which in turn makes all your units cheaper as hell (2-3 turns for archer when it's on), so this approach kinda defeats itself.
My current build order have changed btw based on religion.
The plan is to go for Divine right and spam additional units for faith in renaissance.
I just feel like ignoring religion completely is wasteful since you will have hundreds of it with nothing to spend on.
1) Build Warrior - really need a second warrior going.
Early turns scouting is crucial, need to find city-state victims, need to kill 3 barbs+get a barb camp for eurekas, need to catch AI settlers trying to settle in your face - it is just too much for 1 starting warrior to handle, tbh.
Research - Animal Husbandry -> Archery
Culture - Code of Laws
2) Build Builder - by the time this boy is built, you have done code of laws and started on craftsman. you research roughly half of craftsmanship, and this boy builds 3 improvements and finishes it
Researching Archery still
Culture - Code of Laws -> Craftsmaship.
Soon as Code of Laws done, activate +5 for barbs and +1 faith/gold to get your pantheon (if you don't care about religion, +1 production then).
3) Build 3-4 Slingers/Archers
Research - Astrology if u wanna religion, Mining and so on if not
Somewhere here Craftsmanship is done and you activate Agoge to keep spamming those archers faster and send them after your warriors, who already on the way to make someone's day worse.
4) So, if you wanna get bothered with religion here you should start building a Temple district as soon as Astrology is finished and you have 3 archers ready to go with your initial 2 warriors to capture some city-states. More often than not, I have to race AI in capturing because they have no shame whatsoever and hit any city-states they can get to if you don't.
Especially important to capture religious city-states as soon as they finish building temple district (wait for it to complete, otherwise it's build progress is just gone if you capture the city).
If some AI yahoos are already nuking the city-state, join the party, but make sure to put a unit on top of the temple district, so those idiots don't pillage it.
If you don't care about religion - just ignore astrology/temple and keep spamming units for second army (some warriors and archers) and send them to rape and plunder, or, more likely, to defend what little you have.
In general, while your bunch of yahoos is assaulting some city states or a neighbor - make sure to patrol around with 1-2 warriors and catch AI settlers coming your way.
Even if you didn't plan to invade that civ - declare war, expropriate the settler, stuff their warriors with arrows and they will quickly flop and ask for peace, take all their cash and relics. I do the same if they send missionaries my way as well. Basically you run a racket here.