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Is rapid early expansion no longer the way to success?

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  • #16
    In Civ 4, settler rush was still my favorite strategy. In Civ 5, it's a lot harder. Against AIs, it's easy but it takes much longer. The AIs (I play on Noble, so I'm only talking about the normal AIs) build really slowly. Some take until the 300th turn (this is on marathon) to put out a third city.

    There are two downsides to settler rush:
    1: your rep from AIs (and most likely real players too, actually) goes WAY down if you do a huge settler rush. I think this is new to Civ 5.
    2: Unhappiness really can sneak up on you. 2 extra settlers can put you from a decent surplus of happiness to well under 0. Same with gold, but that's much easier to turn around.

    You'll need to make sure you put out lots of workers too (since cities can grow while producing workers now, you should start each new city with one) and develop any luxury resources to counteract this. This also means pathing your early game techs away from military stuff and towards things like Calendar (which is REALLY important for settler rush), so you could find yourself vulnerable during the first 250 or so turns (again, on marathon) if you're not careful.

    All in all, I'd say you should only settler rush if you find yourself devoid of crucial resources like iron or horses, or if you have 5 or 6 luxury resources fairly close by. Otherwise, it really isn't worth it.

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    • #17
      Mass transit systems were one way to combat these problems.

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