Plains-Cow
Best Resource; Always Wins
So you always go archery on deity? When do you typically like to go for the tech?On non-deity, you don't need to go archery in general. It's safer to do so though and safety is good.
No.
I remember once playing a game where rush buying came into play. I wouldn't put a lot of emphasis on it.
Never culture? Fair enough.
I've played with it a little, but rush-buy seems to clearly benefit from any financial building. Therefore, I was thinking about the possible benefits of waiting to build the more expensive markets and grocers until later so I can stack their gold bonuses with banks for the strat.
I would like to backfill as much as possible in order to have as many cities possible, and since most tiles will never be used before a game is decided (especially with whipping), I do what I can.Backfilling is not a bad thing. Land grabbing near your closest AI to choke or plan an early attack is good. On Immortal they can have a second city before 3000bc. On a good game no reason not to have 4 cities by 2000bc. With imperialist 5+ can be possible. With warfare 10 or so by 1ad. Maybe less if you wait for cuirs and stay peaceful. 6 seems low.
I don't get this culture thing and trolling AI borders. If you take out an AI city and it's still covered in it's culture from nearby cities its more likely to revolt. Chances of cities revolting due to your culture is low. You would need to control most of the city tiles with your culture. It won't win you games.
If I was playing Mongols maybe withdraw. Normally just combat promo. Current game 18 cities 1000ad huge map. Normal map maybe less. I could easily spam 100 cuirs quickly on huge maps. With 8-10 cities it takes longer whipping units.
The culture thing is just personal. It's nice to have the AI load it up with goodies and flip it. I also like to flip cities that are on islands because it saves the the hassle of making a navy lol. It's literally just a fun mechanic that I like to work with to win sometimes as a peacemonger. Like a personal challenge. I like to make challenges here and there, like seeing if I can win with an all-pike or all-spearman army, and seeing how far up the difficulty ladder I can go before it becomes impossible for me.
Yeah, I always go combat line, too. Winning battles is more important than withdrawing only to just get killed next AI turn anyway. How much do you stack whip anger for your cuir rush? Into oblivion?