Have to disagree with that
When you expand to 15-20 cities in the BCs/early ADs, maintenance is gonna temporarily kill your research rate. Bulbs are required to get back into the game tech-wise, and Bureaucracy is better than ever because your main bottleneck is commerce (maintenance cost only makes Bureaucracy "bad" when you have 40+ cities and not ORG, esp on huge maps). Plus having a lot of land means it's easier to find a city with good food/forests for GLib. I would also advise against the Mids unless the land you have is low on commerce (no rivers), in which case Rep specialists wil be needed to keep the economy afloat anyways.
Bureaucracy without an academy is not very good, imo. I rarely play philo leaders and I need all my GS for key bulbs. Academy only boosts my total tech rate by <10% anyway. My capital often also doesn't have many well-developed cottages since cramming cities next to the capital to share cottages results in minimal land claiming and massive maintenance from # of cities if I do decide to get more land.
I almost never get TGL because it always goes at like 500 BC while I'm trying to get currency.
I agree that mids are not very good on huge maps. I can't afford to work many specialists because I need production for more settlers or building wealth/fail gold wonders. The happiness bonus from rep is largely wasted when you have 30+ cities. Even the beakers aren't that great since trade routes alone will net huge beakers when you run a high slider. Getting enough gold to maintain a high slider is the challenge on huge maps.
Yup..you can found more cities, or conquer them. Research & bulbs help getting better units for that, and you will get the chance of taking more than you could have settled (or taken with worse units).
I doubt huge maps change those principles.
If you play on huge maps with multiple continents, it's a delicate balance between expansion, tech rate, and conquest. A domination win is impossible before astronomy, so you need to get there in a reasonable time to avoid seeing infantry by the time you invade the mansa musa & gandhi peaceful tech trading love-fest. You also need to control most of your own continent because vassals are terrible at assisting with intercontinental warfare. Invading a continent where Shaka has 5 vassals and 70+ cities helping produce defenders is extremely difficult unless you have 40+ cities of your own.
A typical game for me on a 3 continent huge/marathon map goes something like this:
1: Peacefully expand until all the decent land is settled. I usually have 25 - 30 cities before I run out of room.
2: Declare war to get a shrine (usually 50+ gpt!!). This is usually with trebs.
3: Use shrine income to absorb economic shock of capturing many cities.
4: Get optics and bulb astronomy for intercontinental trade routes (very powerful when you have tons of cities).
5. Skip paper, edu, lib path to go guilds -> gunpowder -> chemistry GS bulb -> steel. I don't build that many cottages, so chemistry is far stronger than printing press.
6: Transition to workshop spam economy.
7: Conquer my continent with muskets, trebs, galleons, and frigates while teching steel. The speed of ships is very nice on huge maps.
8: Conquer rest of my continent with cannons.
9: Begin researching toward Printing press -> Scientific Method -> Communism (PP and Sci Meth can be bulbed!)
10: Assemble massive armada filled with cannons, muskets, and leftover medieval units.
11: Invade another continent.
12: Adopt state property to save 700+ gpt. Tech rate will explode at this point. It shouldn't take too many workshop spammed cities to maintain 100% research slider.
13: Keep warring while teching toward either artillery or bombers/tanks, depending on what I feel like using that day.
14: Invade last continent and win the game.
. Sometimes the same AI multiple times in the same spot! It would be even worse with fewer civs and more land, such as a bigger script (Terra is larger right?). This made the Great Wall actually hilariously effective every game I played, and I didn't even get it every time.
