No Horses / No Iron

[Uncle_Woody]

I have a game going that I have no access to iron or horses in my territory. Does this pretty much make it so I should just scrap it and restart?

If it helps, my nearest rival is Caesar and he has declared war once already (we made up ).To get to the nearest iron mine I would have to go through him to get there. It is occupied by the Koreans. I could probably make a deal with them, but it seems to me that getting iron in trade is a bit unreliable.

What do you guys generally do when you do not have access to iron or horses?

Thanks

[Addled Platypus]

never give up...unless you get nuked

the whole map is explored ?


could always try:
adopt the religon of whoever has the iron, see if that helps trading for it

[DrSpike]

Elepult!

[Tattila the Hun]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Elepult!

Cataphant!

[Uncle_Woody]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Elepult!

No ivory either

[Harovan]

What about copper?

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Uncle_Woody


No ivory either

Well then pultapult. You'll attack with less efficiency than you would with a few stack defenders but 'pults own and they don't require resources.

[Lord Avalon]

Longapult?

[DrSpike]

If you have time, sure, but feud is pretty expensive.

[Autotropx Sox]

'pults own

Yea, if you have about 20 of them going after a well-defended city.

Why not just turtle it out until Chemistry and Steel? You could probably build long bowmen and upgrade them to Grens and use the catapult to knock city defence and soften defenders. I mean, unless you were only able to secure only God-awful terrain, I don't see why going on an early war is so important.

[DrSpike]

Turtling that late is rarely a good strategy. Whatever your victory goal you should always aim to control a good deal of land before then, and there is just no reason to wait once you get cats.

[gdijedi7]

You'd better have a lot of units...

[sjm]

You've not really said what year you're in, but if you've got copper, what's the problem?

You really don't need iron and horses until at least knights (you can probably last longer if you have ivory). Use axemen to conquer iron if there's any on your continent.

In every game I've played, I've relied on either City Raider or Shock axemen (in the field, especially vs swords), a couple of spearmen and stacks of catapults in the early game (+Longbowmen/Crossbowmen for defence). You only need copper for that.

Remember that your opponent only needs one axemen in a city to make your swordsmen a waste of resources... An axeman with CR stands a much better chance in the same situation. Of course, for this reason, it makes sense to knock out your own (copper) axemen to wreak havoc on any enemy stacks containing swordsmen. Axemen eat swordsmen for lunch.

It's only when knights turn up that you really want iron and horses (unless you're the romans of course - then you want iron ASAP). And even so, you can still survive on just copper, if you really, really have to.

I personally just make sure that I have one of either copper or iron at the beginning. If you have neither, that's when you have real problems

And you can trade for resources too... They might be expensive, but you only need to trade for the resource for as long as it takes to build your invasion force. Then you take the resource for yourself instead.

Of course, if it's already pretty late in the game, and everyone has loads of knights running around, you've left it too late to use your axemen; beeline for chemistry and promote all your CR axemen to grenadiers instead. Then take the iron by force. Save some cash for the promotions, and churn out excess axeman if you can afford it. If you promote 20 units in one turn, it's unlikely that anyone will be able to stop you - just don't forget the catapults!!!

[zeace]

You can survive for a long time on just copper, but sometimes you need to grab some iron for prevention...

My last game was a shuffle map (ended up being islands). I find myself on a medium sized island, sharing it with the Romans who were about 10 squares from my capital. I researched bronze working and found some copper between us and got a city next to it.

Normally I'd be happy with that and would focus building and research on my economy for a while, but not next to Romans...

I kept researching Iron Working and sure enough there's a chunk of Iron right next to Rome. There was a farm on it so I knew the Romans hadn't research Preats yet. Good for me...

10 axes later it's my iron now