What's a good stratefy for early peaceful expansion?

[Divaythsarmour]

I'm a new player of Revolutions after playing the PC game for years. This is really fun. Right now King difficulty feels right. I have trouble getting cities going early. By the time I'm at 3 cities, there's very little open land around me.

I suppose the capitol should just focus on settlers and protective units early. How do other players do it?

What is the maximum number of tiles for a city to work? It would be nice to know how far apart to build cities. Right now I'm just doing "guess work."
thanks

 

[schongresh]

Optimum separation is probably 5-6 from the center of each city so that each city doesn't share squares. Sometimes this does not work because resources are randomly spaced and placed. Even if you want to peacefully expand--you are at a huge disadvantage if you do not have offensive units (Horseman Armies, etc.) in play "creating space" for your civilization. This keeps aggressive civ's from occupying and squatting near your cities and ******ing your growth. The top players I've seen do not stop expanding (15-20 cities)--this greatly increases your tech;reaching feudalism or combustion first gives huge advantages to any type of victory you are seeking.

 

[MorteEterna]

Optimum separation is probably 5-6 from the center of each city so that each city doesn't share squares. Sometimes this does not work because resources are randomly spaced and placed. Even if you want to peacefully expand--you are at a huge disadvantage if you do not have offensive units (Horseman Armies, etc.) in play "creating space" for your civilization. This keeps aggressive civ's from occupying and squatting near your cities and ******ing your growth. The top players I've seen do not stop expanding (15-20 cities)--this greatly increases your tech;reaching feudalism or combustion first gives huge advantages to any type of victory you are seeking.

Randomply spaced and placed? You can choose your workers and put them where you want. However, if you start in a normal continent, 15-20 cities is pretty easy, I used this a lot of times when I had to expand to win the game, then you have just to defend cities with at least one offensive army to kill enemies before they enter your territory

 

[schongresh]

The resources are randomly spaced. This means that simply placing a city 5 squares from your capital only guarantees that you will not share squares--but in trying to access resources (dye, etc) while optimizing build and growth squares sometimes requires overlapping the reach of cities.

 

[Hertsh]

I guess it is very hard to expand and win peacefully, but if you want to do it, you should use the Greeks. Fighting cannot be avoided no matter how much you want, but starting off with Hoplites is great. Typically the other Civ's don't attack you if you play Greece, because they know you have Hoplites. If I want to go for a less fighting focused game in MP then Greece is the only option (for me at least).

Early strat is to go for CoL quickly, so that you can expand early in the game and then switch back to Democracy again to focus on a tech lead. Key is as Schongresh said, that you have attacking units supporting pushing your boundaries although not attacking cities, just to ensure that you can expand to a good number of cities.

 

[liewt]

I don't disagree with your thinking, Hertsh, but as an alternative I've found it's also possible to win against the AI with hardly any offensive units. I've won on Deity by rushing Settlers to set up my borders, and sending Archers to key choke points to stop the AI expanding, or at least to slow it down enough to give me time to expand. Once I've done that, I hunker down to defend my borders, back-fill the space behind it with new cities, settle as many islands as I can, and focus on rushing Libraries and a couple of Gold cities while the AI spends its time upgrading my defensive armies with futile attacks.

To be honest, I'm still quite new to Deity having floated around at Emperor for a while learning all the different civs, so I'm happy to accept this may not be the best approach, but it's certainly one that's worked for me. I'm a defensive player at heart, and my first instinct is always to build a Spy or a second Archer army than to head for the Catapults!

 

[Hertsh]

I don't disagree with your thinking, Hertsh, but as an alternative I've found it's also possible to win against the AI with hardly any offensive units. I've won on Deity by rushing Settlers to set up my borders, and sending Archers to key choke points to stop the AI expanding...

I was probably unclear in my comment, but I was focusing on the choice of Civ for a peaceful win in MP, not in Deity. In Deity, I agree with you and would also say that any Civ can work.