how to win at the emperor? ,please

[trev]

Religion is unnecessary and counterproductive if you gain it through research, there are better techs to research like military techs and techs to exploit food resources, if a religion is so valuable to you, then get a holy city through conquest, makes much more sense.

[Saurus]

Originally posted by trev
Religion is unnecessary and counterproductive if you gain it through research, there are better techs to research like military techs and techs to exploit food resources, if a religion is so valuable to you, then get a holy city through conquest, makes much more sense.

Exactly. This is why it is so darn difficult to win on emperor whitout warmongering.
Military conquest is always the easiest way to win on the higher difficulty levels. However, my post was about how to win on emperor WHITOUT warmongering since for me that's the challenge - winning by warmongering is much more easy and thus it's not intresting for me I wan't a real challenge.

Cultural victory is more difficult but still easier than the space-race as it happens earlier than the space-race resulting in that you could be behind in tech and still win so if someone decides to give Emperor a try and play it peacefully, then I sugest going for a cultural victory first and then moving into trying to grab a Spacerace victory.

[Dominae]

From a design perspective, warfare is a big part of Civ4 - there's no denying that. So the way I look at purely peaceful games is not as a playstle choice but as a self-imposed restriction. Thus it makes sense that peaceful games are harder at the harder difficulty levels: you're making harder for yourself by avoiding a major component of the game.

If anything, the harder difficulty levels force you to play a more balanced game. You can rig the settings and make it all about conquest (Tiny Pangea), but on standard settings you're not going to get far without knowing how to build a strong economy and a deadly army at the same time.

A good example of this (that the harder difficulties require using all the tools available to you) is the fact that many players get trounced in the tech race on Emperor and above, until they realize that tech trading is not a luxury but a necessity. You might argue that requiring players to do something is not good for a strategy game, but Civ4 actually requires you to do everything; the strategy comes in balancing all your priorities.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by trev
Religion is unnecessary and counterproductive if you gain it through research, there are better techs to research like military techs and techs to exploit food resources, if a religion is so valuable to you, then get a holy city through conquest, makes much more sense.

One the harder difficulties, if you start with Mysticism a Religion is a very efficient way of raising your Happiness cap from 4 to 5 (or 3 to 4 in all your non-capital cities) - that's 20% more population.

Sometimes the the AIs right next to you are secular and the Hoy Cities are not within immediate reach. Going without the benefits of a Religion for such a long time is a major disadvantage.

[trev]

I have found it is much more important to get your food techs learnt, archery tech learnt and bronze working, iron working, and pottery than worrying about religion. Getting your defence in order and food, hammer production in order is a greater benefit than a religion.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by trev
I have found it is much more important to get your food techs learnt, archery tech learnt and bronze working, iron working, and pottery than worrying about religion. Getting your defence in order and food, hammer production in order is a greater benefit than a religion.

Getting good Food and Hammer production is certainly important, which is why I agree with you that the food techs and Pottery plus Bronze Working are key techs early on.

However, extra Happiness does mean better production, significantly so on the higher difficulties. If you start with Mysticism, an early Religion is a very cheap way of boosting your production, and it pays off quickly. Without Mysticism at the start, I tend to agree with you.

Sometimes you start next to nothing but Calendar resources for your Happiness needs.

Archery and Iron Working I'll put off for quite a while unless under imminent threat.

[trev]

Archery and Iron Working I'll put off for quite a while unless under imminent threat.

Archery is a very important tech and deserves early learning, likewise its predecessor on the tech tree, hunting. The archer and spearman are cheap units to build, and vital for defence against chariots and axes, axes will usually lose to an arher with city garrison and chariots, horses always lose to spearman. Iron working can be left to later depending on the game circumstances, but not archery, as cheap units for defence makes more sense than building lots of dearer axes, especially when under attack, a whipped archer with its overrun will usually result in an archer being built on 2 consecutive turns for the loss of 1 pop, this cannot done done with axes.

[Blake]

Wrong on whipping.

It's always better to whip axemen than archers. Make sure you whip such that 2 pop is killed - this means you need to invest between 0-4 hammers (bugged 1.61) or 1-4 hammers (bugfixed 1.61 / Warlords). Using bugged whipping it's dead simple to just switch to axe/spear and whip it right away, no need to put a turn of production in first. No waste, gets the unit out right away. When not abusing that bug, uyou just need to lower city output to 4 or less hammers.

Whipping archers should only be done in absolute emergency because the +1 will tend to make your city unhappy (killing more than 1 pop at once largely nullifies the +1 ).

[trev]

It depends a lot on the circumstances, but I think an archer whipped in a city is a stronger defender than an axemen and also 1st cities assaulted in an early war are often small, it is not possible to whip 2 people out of a size 2/3 city, so axes cannot be whipped from there, but archers can. In an emergency the whipping of an archer makes more sense than that of an axe, but if it is a method of increasing mlitary strength as part of a longer term war, then whipping axes and building archers from hammers would make better sense.