Atahualpa
Chieftain
I have attacked the Genghis Khan scenario now and like to give a little review.
First Genghis Khan comes quite close to Barbarians, but is different in a number of ways, for example you do not buy units with gold, but get the camp unit that produces new units every couple of turns. These camps are extremely important units and need protection. In the beginning I let them rest some tiles away from my borders to produce a lot of units, but at the end I raided towards europe with one big stack of doom and I had my camps within this stack all the time. This is also one of those things where the scenario falls a little bit short: tactics. In fact, Stack of Doom is probably the best option to win this as I have seen very little siege weaponry in the AI's arsenals and I only remember to have killed 2 chinese cannons throughout the whole scenario. So the AI should build/have some catapults, especially on higher levels (I played Monarch as usual), which would make you a little more vulnerable. Basically you've got three unit types: Horse Archers (or Horseman can't remember) (11 str, 3 movement), Mounted Swordsman (9 str, 3 movement, +50% against meele) and light Javelin Throwers (8 str, 2 movement, first strikes, hill defense, city defense, 50% retreat). I found Javelin Throwers to be very good city raiders, because your enemies all have spearman and more of them. With a couple of javelin throwers you can soften a city and you'll lose only use some of them, because of their high retreat chance. After you take two cities of the red chinese faction you'll get the possibility for your camps to produce trebuchets. They also have a movement of two, but are quite losers when it comes to attacking cities. I found Javelin Throwers better to use and only used the trebuchets bombard ability to take down the defense. Let your camps rest on wood for some time to get a couple of them.
Overall I had a lot of fun, because when you've finished off China and Korea and heading towards the west you're followed by a massive army of barbarians emerging everywhere where you've killed civilization and the only barbarian unit I have seen were horseman. Rest a view turns with your stack and you get attacked by 3-4 horseman with more on the horizon, so you're constantly pushed west west west to escape the barbarian madness that you've created by razing all cities. Very cool!
Needless to say that you've got to keep an eye on your points (though that wasn't so much of a problem) and your money for which you need to do a lot of pillaging. In the end every turn was around -50 gold and draining cash quickly. And when you leave some horseman back to pillage the barbarians will get them, even when they're highly promoted, they cannot withstand the numbers. You need to be quick.
You can of course keep cities, instead of razing them, but I did not felt like this and as Barbarians wanted to play a scenario where I wouldn't need to care about empire management. It's however great that you've got this choice.
I won a score victory by 1327AD, after playing about 2.5 hours with still a lot of civilized cities left on the map. I got past India and into Turkmenistan / Afghanistan / Iran, where I won. In the end I was glad, because all the fun ends after you've razed the 25th city (I did raze 32 cities) and it repeats itself, although the later civilizations had the nasty camel archers which would destroy all your trebuchets. They weren't protected in a stack as the camel archers pick them out and attack them first.
All in all I can recommend following scenarios:
Genghis Khan, Chinese Unification, Barbarians and Rise Of Rome
If you want Civ to play different or you are up for a different challenge, then give them a try. They're certainly worth the time. Rise of Rome may seem a little bit dull at first, but if you try Brennus, I think you'll see how challenging this can be.
First Genghis Khan comes quite close to Barbarians, but is different in a number of ways, for example you do not buy units with gold, but get the camp unit that produces new units every couple of turns. These camps are extremely important units and need protection. In the beginning I let them rest some tiles away from my borders to produce a lot of units, but at the end I raided towards europe with one big stack of doom and I had my camps within this stack all the time. This is also one of those things where the scenario falls a little bit short: tactics. In fact, Stack of Doom is probably the best option to win this as I have seen very little siege weaponry in the AI's arsenals and I only remember to have killed 2 chinese cannons throughout the whole scenario. So the AI should build/have some catapults, especially on higher levels (I played Monarch as usual), which would make you a little more vulnerable. Basically you've got three unit types: Horse Archers (or Horseman can't remember) (11 str, 3 movement), Mounted Swordsman (9 str, 3 movement, +50% against meele) and light Javelin Throwers (8 str, 2 movement, first strikes, hill defense, city defense, 50% retreat). I found Javelin Throwers to be very good city raiders, because your enemies all have spearman and more of them. With a couple of javelin throwers you can soften a city and you'll lose only use some of them, because of their high retreat chance. After you take two cities of the red chinese faction you'll get the possibility for your camps to produce trebuchets. They also have a movement of two, but are quite losers when it comes to attacking cities. I found Javelin Throwers better to use and only used the trebuchets bombard ability to take down the defense. Let your camps rest on wood for some time to get a couple of them.
Overall I had a lot of fun, because when you've finished off China and Korea and heading towards the west you're followed by a massive army of barbarians emerging everywhere where you've killed civilization and the only barbarian unit I have seen were horseman. Rest a view turns with your stack and you get attacked by 3-4 horseman with more on the horizon, so you're constantly pushed west west west to escape the barbarian madness that you've created by razing all cities. Very cool!
Needless to say that you've got to keep an eye on your points (though that wasn't so much of a problem) and your money for which you need to do a lot of pillaging. In the end every turn was around -50 gold and draining cash quickly. And when you leave some horseman back to pillage the barbarians will get them, even when they're highly promoted, they cannot withstand the numbers. You need to be quick.
You can of course keep cities, instead of razing them, but I did not felt like this and as Barbarians wanted to play a scenario where I wouldn't need to care about empire management. It's however great that you've got this choice.
I won a score victory by 1327AD, after playing about 2.5 hours with still a lot of civilized cities left on the map. I got past India and into Turkmenistan / Afghanistan / Iran, where I won. In the end I was glad, because all the fun ends after you've razed the 25th city (I did raze 32 cities) and it repeats itself, although the later civilizations had the nasty camel archers which would destroy all your trebuchets. They weren't protected in a stack as the camel archers pick them out and attack them first.
All in all I can recommend following scenarios:
Genghis Khan, Chinese Unification, Barbarians and Rise Of Rome
If you want Civ to play different or you are up for a different challenge, then give them a try. They're certainly worth the time. Rise of Rome may seem a little bit dull at first, but if you try Brennus, I think you'll see how challenging this can be.
