Big into Jaguars

[zorbop]

I've had a lot of sucess with jaguar rushes... even on normal difficulty. I forest rushed my second city and then put both on full jaguar production. For some reason, the ai doesnt build anything besides archers, so jaguars are fairly effective (you can get the +attack and + vs archer quickly)
overall, it doesnt seem much more effective than ax rush unless you dont expect to get copper either.

[Shaka II]

So why are jaguar rushes any better than swordsmen or axemen? They get 1 less strength than axemen, but get 25% jungle/forest defense. Is that right? I suppose a mix of all three would be a good idea, the jaguar providing the defense in the forest, the axemen the bonus against melee, and the swordsmen with strength 6 for city attack against archers.

I think where marathon helps you mostly is that units don't becoming obsolete so fast. You have more moves to make with them, and tech advances more slowly, like real life. Playing a domination game at normal, you build an ancient army up and move them across the map. By the time you get to the other side, your axemen are facing longbowmen. That's no fun. It's nice to get the feel of an era, to see your units get promoted. Also, two can play the game. being next to Alexander and having him pay a surprise visit can cause you to scurry around maybe even lose the game.

The larger the map, the longer it takes to take over the world. Now if your playing for a space win, the speed is not as important, since you don't have take over the world. Marathon is the way civ was meant to be played.

johnmcd - you mst be pretty close to domination with about 40 cities, check the F12 screen.

[player1]

The good with Jaguar rush is that you don't need to wait to connect iron, if you have one at all.

[Shaka II]

Ah, that's what I was missing. You need iron working, but not the iron mine, right?

[player1]

exactly...

[johnmcd]

Or the copper mine even. You can place your cities without refrence to those resources, and, because you have the tech to see all those resources in the enemy cities you know where to go and pillage in a way you wouldn't if you had an early chariot unit or something and wanted to block spearman production.

I've got the domination population and reckon I'm one Ghandi away from having the land. I have a Great Artist to speed things along that way too.

[Shaka II]

I'll have to give it a try in the next game. Aggressive/Spiritual with Hunting/Mysticism. I always wanted to try spiritual, maybe this is the time. Did you found a religion or go straight to BW, IW? I suppose it's more efficient to capture someone's shrine rather than chase religion and get distracted from the main strategy and use of the UU.

[johnmcd]

I grabbed Polytheism as my first tech: knowing what is in the enemies cities is very helpful, especially as the first sign of axemen should spell death for Jaguars.

After that I was beelining to ironworking with a wheel detour to encourage Hinduism spread.