Announcement

**Axxaer** · January 30, 2006, 22:40

I am no expert on this, but my starting build order is generally as below. I do, however, sometimes change it under certain circumstances.

Warrior
Settler > City
Worker + Warrior

Depending on difficulty, I will generally use the warriors to explore and gain as many goodie huts as possible early on.

**nullspace** · January 30, 2006, 22:56

I like looking at other people's games and seeing how they play. Here's what I would have done differently:

It's not time for war. There's plenty of room to build new good cities, and the other civs are too far away. Your troops will be obsolete before they get there.

You need more cities and you need to make better choices about where to place them. For the first half of the game, resources make the difference between a great city and a mediocre one. Your settler must have walked right past that cattle/iron/dyes spot to settle New York in a spot that has no resources at all. The next good spot is the barbarian city that has wheat and spices, after that, you could get the horses and chop the huge forest up there. Explore the area to the east for more city sites, you can get there by heading south from New York. Washington doesn't need to grow anymore, so have it pump out some settlers and make some more cities.

**Gherald** · January 30, 2006, 23:50

Spearmen are a total waste of time when you have elephants. Elephants get a 50% bonus v.s. other mounted units.

Yes, spearmen are cheaper, but a small powerful army (say, 5 catapults and at least as many elephants plus a longbow or two since elephants don't get any defensive bonuses) will get you a lot farther than ****ty spearmen.

When you build catapults, I suggest giving 2 of them Combat I and Medic. These will be for bombing city walls and healing your elephants exclusively. The rest of your catapults can take city razing I and II in case you need to soften defenders before your elephants attack.

**Urban Ranger** · January 30, 2006, 23:56

I generally let my first city grow a bit before building workers and settlers. This way you build them faster.

I almost always research Hunting then Bronze Working first regardless of start. On a Highlands map you really do not need Fishing and Sailing, so they should only be back filled later. OTOH, Hunting (scouts) will help you much more.

Micromanage your first few cities for awhile. Coins are nice but you probably need food and hammers more at this point. You can get more coins once you start building cottages.

Two workers at the start without much tech researched appears to be overkill. I think this hurts you more than anything else. If you have lots of forests around getting one out of the gate early for chopping can work great, but two just kills your production and this cascades down the line.

**MightyTiny** · January 31, 2006, 06:21

Here's what I'd do differently:

> Game speed: Normal (!?)

With that idea especially (early conquest), Marathon is what you want, not Normal! Try it, it'll change your game experience totally. Not only will you be able to explore most of the world before really even starting to think about war, but you will be able to go for a conquest war with axmen and swordsmen (before catapults), without having to worry about your troops getting obsolete before you reach your enemy. Once you try marathon, you don't look back!

> 4000 BC - set initial warrior to explore and settled Washington....

Do your early exploration manually, not on auto-explore! A human is much more sensible in selecting optimal paths - the computer seems to double back and waste time on a lot of useless or sub-optimal movement. Doing your early exploration yourself, I bet you'd end up with a larger share of goody huts too than you do with automated exploration.

> 3600 BC - Met G. Khan. Forgot to set my citizen tiles in Washington, so setting them now to sea tiles to reap commerce (2f 3c each).

I let the governor do my tile-management for my cities in all but exceptional cases where it doesn't seem to get it right no matter what I tell it to emphasize. Most of the time it does a very nice job I think. Of course, you probably don't hurt things by managing the tiles yourself, but with the governor off, don't you need to re-check the tile assignments every time the city grows? Don't really know about that, since, as I said, that's one area that I leave to automation.

> Set queue to warrior, worker, worker, and settler.

I think two workers off the "starting gates" this fast is overkill. You are limiting the time your city has to grow significantly.

You can also use chopping more efficiently, if you switch production - what I do usually is build a warrior, and then, if my city hasn't grown yet, start building barracks or grannary, switching production to worker after my city has grown. Then when the worker is done, I continue on the grannary/baracks, and set the worker to chop a forest. But on the turn before the chop comes in (and there seems to be a bug there - when the worker shows 2 turns left to finish chopping, it'll be finished on the next turn!), I switch production to a settler, and the settler gets the hammers from that chop. Then I immediately switch back from the settler to whatever I was building before, and move my worker to the next forest, repeating the process, again swithching back to the settler right before the chop comes in.

This way, you can build settlers while still allowing your city to grow, AND building other things.

I Chop a few settlers out this way, while building the barracks and/or grannary. As for workers, I try to keep it one worker per city early on.

> 3320 BC - research Sailing. I need the Lighthouse for all these sea tiles.

Sure, the lighthouse is nice, giving you an extra food per sea square, but I think researching sailing here is premature - you shouldn't have time to build a lighthouse anytime soon anyway, and personally, I'd build a granary before a lighthouse anyway, unless I wanted to get the great lighthouse early on. I wouldn't research Sailing any time soon on a highlands map where I aimed for early conquest.

As for my research priorities, I get bronze working early, for the chopping, pottery for cottages and to reveal metal casting, then priesthood for the oracle, and finish the oracle to get metal casting - build/chop forges, and with the increased production, then try for either the pyramids or parthenon.. often you can still get one of them at that point, and if you'll miss it, you'll gain wellcome funding for your conquest.

You might have to crank out some military before starting on these wonders though, to fend off the barbarians.

I don't spend time building obelisks. That time I use to build military.

If you get swordsmen early in a marathon game, you can pump out an army of them + some axmen, and use it to conquer your neighbour. At that early time, you'll be likely to catch them unprepared, with just a few archers guarding their cities.

If you do this sort of early conquest, your tech rate might drop low, but that doesn't matter, as with the larger empire, once you get your finances straight, you'll find that the extra commerce generated with your new larger empire will make up for having a very a low tech rate for a while, and you can come out of even going near bankruptcy, re-gaining a tech lead pretty fast. (on marathon, on noble and lower at least).

**Vynd** · January 31, 2006, 08:50

Based purely on reading your description, it seems to me that you're spreading yourself too thin trying to be good at everything. As you describe it you're attempting to build lots of workers and infrastructure, an army to fight an early war, lighthouses, obelisks, libraries, forges, the Oracle, courthouses, and some other stuff.

I think you will do better if you focus more. For example, if your goal is to fight an early war using elephants and catapults, then forget about stuff like lighthouses. Are they nice to have? Sure, eventually. But you need hammers to make your troops and there aren't any of those out in the water. If you're really trying to build an army you probably won't even make much use of a lighthouse. So why waste time researching and building it? Instead, focus squarely on getting the techs you need to follow through with your plan. In this case that means researching Construction so you can build your army. Once you have Consturction, build the army. Chop-rush elephants if you want to chop-rush something, not the Oracle. And once you have the army, go kill somebody.

On Warlord level, if you made Catapults and War Elephants your priority from the start (a perfectly good idea) you could probably have 6-8 of them knocking down Mansa Musa's cities before he's built more than a handful of Horse Archers. Heck you might get there before he's even researched Horseback Riding. You should have little or no trouble destroying him. And that's worth a lot more to you than getting some Lighthouses built early or rushing the Oracle to get Metal Casting for free.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that you should necessarily make military your priority. I'm just working with the comments you made about your intentions. If what you really want to do is build up big wonderful cities then by all means do so. Washington's a good choice of leader for that in fact. Go ahead and research and build lighthouses, the Oracle, forges, etc. But if thats what you really want to do then don't try to build a big army and go on a war of conquest at the same time. Pick a strategy and follow through with it. Your ability to make long-term plans is one of your biggest advantages over the AI.

**Sirian** · January 31, 2006, 09:55

To read numerous results posted from an unfriendly start on high difficulty on a Highlands map, mosey on over to Realms Beyond and check out the Adventure Two reports (starting on page two of the Reports subforum):

Realms Beyond Forum

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=13

Highlands is, on average, the toughest script in the game, fyi.

- Sirian

**EscapedGoat** · January 31, 2006, 11:22

Seems like your first settler is way late. IMO commerce is not so important before you have 2-3 cities.

I think you start well with 2 workers and bronze, I have not yet decided if 2 or 3 workers is optimal before the first settler. You obviously need to chop for a good start.

**eriadoc** · January 31, 2006, 13:31

Thank you all for the replies! I am going to try a few more games taking this all into account. I think I definitely was spreading myself a bit thin, and I don't think I had sufficient forest to do the chop-rush thing. The reason I chose the city site I did for New York was the existence of copper. Of course, Washington's borders ended up expanding over the copper, so that turned out to be moot. I also figured it would put me in a better position in relation to Musa.

Again, the advice is greatly appreciated. I have a lot to digest and work on now. Thanks a bunch!!

**eriadoc** · February 1, 2006, 14:34

Originally posted by Sirian
To read numerous results posted from an unfriendly start on high difficulty on a Highlands map, mosey on over to Realms Beyond and check out the Adventure Two reports (starting on page two of the Reports subforum):

Realms Beyond Forum

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=13

Highlands is, on average, the toughest script in the game, fyi.

- Sirian

OK, I have read through four or five of the reports. Wow. Lots of good info there. How does one go about getting involved in one of those games?

**Simplicity** · February 1, 2006, 17:38

Two workers before the settler is a mistake.
Get one worker out and chop-rush the settler earlier.
You're just taking too long to build your second (and third) cities.

Getting the second city built earlier will help you build the military units you are missing.

Also, when you are building military units, you're also giving your city time to grow. Sticking at a size 1 or 2 city while going through worker, worker, settler is a waste. You don't have enough tiles in use to justify the number of workers.

**One_more_turn** · February 1, 2006, 20:12

I would wait with settler/worker productions until I get a size 3 city.

If you have the G. Khan as your neighbor, you might as well prepare for war right away. Your Fin/Org civ trait should support newly conquered cities nicely. Since the G. Khan has the Keshik, a combo of axeman/spearman rush seems to be in order. I would prepare for the attack after founding 4 cities.

Announcement

What am I doing wrong? (long)

What am I doing wrong? (long)

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment