8 Cities by 275 B.C.: Is That Typical?

[MoRtAl]

At higher difficulty, the AI would steamroll you.

Of coruse you have really bad locations for half of those.

[Common Sensei]

Originally posted by yin26
I'm curious to see if pushing this hard as a general rule opens me up to attack. I'm trying to cycle in defenders (War Elephants, Axemen, etc.) now. Any growth in city numbers from here will have to come from taking enemy cities, so it looks like 8 cities for a long time.

I find that it depends on if you have neighbors with an Aggressive trait, and how close they are to you.

[Solver]

8 cities in 275 BC? I usually have four at that point .

[cribgod]

you obviously dont have barbs on, try expanding that quick with 3-4 barbarions streaming in from 2 or 3 directions every other turn even without the "raging" barbs those guys are relentless. i love how they can spawn an axman, an archer, and a warrior, from a level 2 city in just 2 turns

[yin26]

I have barbs on (whatever the default setting is), and they did come in hard a few times. Almost lost a city, in fact. I find, though, that this expansion actually helps squash barbs because then they have much less space to pop up in.

Speed setting is Normal, and this is, indeed, a large map. About all I can say here is that I pushed hard mostly to contain the orange AI. Learned my lesson. Also, since I only had one AI to my West and none above, below or to the East of me, this was relatively easy to set up. Otherwise I'm forced to make due with 5 or 6 cities by that point.

It strikes me that there are a lot of "interesting decisions" (Sid quote) to be made precisely depending on all this early game setup. I do plan, in fact, to go strong with culture and religion to eat up a lot of Oranges dead space. It's also clear, though, that unless I want a peaceful build to a score or space victory, I'll need to eat up the Orange AI. Again, the water on 3 sides of me really helps here (and I might stick with Highlands maps in the future to avoid this setup on Pangea).

As for a number of my cities being on less than ideal spots, this, too, I've found is an easy thing to dwell on too much: cities can specialized to be useful on most any tiles! It seems to me that in the early game against the AI the most important thing is to get some kind of volume so that you can focus on quality down the road.

Finally, I went back down to Noble from Prince after realizing I wasn't quite handling my early game well (just lost my game on Prince because of the Space Victory). Hopefully I'll do well here and bring some lessons back up to the next difficulty level.

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Solver
8 cities in 275 BC? I usually have four at that point .

Me too.

[Volstag]

Originally posted by yin26
The gold should go positive fairly soon with the added workers and growth phase. Is this your normal pace on cities? I'm trying to get a feel for how far people are pushing city numbers.

I only have two games under my belt, but eight cities that early seems pretty good to me. I'd probably have 3 - 5 by that point. Time to work on my expansion.

[Volstag]

[SIZE=1]2. Just finished a game on Settler where I scored 30000+ points. Kinda skews the whole Hall of Fame.

Eh? How is that even possible? That seems absurdly high given my noble scores.

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by Volstag


Eh? How is that even possible? That seems absurdly high given my noble scores.

I randomized everything. Ended up on a duel setting against one other player, got a domination victory at about 1300 AD. I will post a screen shot.

ACK!

[Tuberski]

Screenshot:

[vmxa1]

It is a large map, so you cannot compare it to std maps for the amount of cities.

Barbs are not a problem until they show up with archers or axemen. Then if you have only those units or less it can get hairy.

[Foxhawk]

-5 is fine at the beginning as long you have explored a bit and can use the money from villages to pay your way through a negative cash flow for a while.

[My PitBull Tank]

i always make warrior units in my new cities until they get to size three, and send the warrior units out exploring, this seems to cull the barbarians while i expand, and i build settlers (usually 2-3 per city) after size 3, until i have filled out the space, if the space is available.

that's why it is good to not only have a civ like kubla khan that you get free culture with, but also to expand before the barbs get axemen and archers, bc at that point, they get really nasty..

[Jon Shafer]

Default settings at Noble is for weenies. Gimme Emperor, Aggressive AI and Raging barbs any day.

[Arrian]

Snob!

-Arrian, weenie for the moment