My stock standard early expansion tactic... crits plz

[frenzyfol]

Hi guys.

Lately I've noticed allot of my games have been using a very similar broad strategy. I just wanted to write down what those similar elements are, and maybe get some opinions on the choices I've been making.

The strategy I use is never set in stone and adapts to the terrain, and unforeseen events.. But what I've listed below is usually how most of my games are panning out. So here it is.

Firstly heres my usual research order
1. What ever I need to improve closest resources and hook them up.
2. Bronze working
3. Alphabet (trade it up)
4. Currency Or CodeLaws
5. Military tech phase 2.

Goal 1. Expand heavily under early game peace to all the good spots I can grab until research is ~ 20%

Why 20% and not lower? Because I'm about to build a massive army and capture some cities that will significantly hit my upkeep.

About this time I hook up bronze or some other military resource.

Goal 2. Build two large stacks and roll over my nearest enemy.

Goal 3. Prevent my civ from going into the red.

Here is the dangerous part. At this point in the game the large military and the captured cities will bring your research down to less than 0% (loosing money)

You desperately need to keep the research coming so you can either get Code of Laws (for courthouses) or Currency (for markets) so you can prevent massive strikes.

The money from the captured cities will give you some leeway but there isn't much time.

At this point in the game I turn to specialists to maintain the research and get me through to those two aforementioned techs that are pivotal to reducing maintenance. I put scientists wherever I can afford them.

I've found that its extremely easy to get out of this rut if you have the pyramids. So if you're industrial, or have stone, this strategy is made particularly powerful through the use of representation.

Alternatively the writing/oracle slingshot to CodeLaws may be a viable alternative route if marble is available.

Once out of the rut, I go for the next war tech, Math (catapults), Iron (swords) and begin the expansion/war expansion yet again.

Thoughts?

[guermantes]

How do you manage to get down to 20% or less research? I usually expand pretty fast to 4-5 cities and never go below 50%. And I am notoriously bad at getting cottages up fast as well so it's not like my commerce is sky-rocketing.

(It usually takes me to get catapults before I feel confident to go to war, perhaps that is why?)

[snoopy369]

You get down to 20% or so by massively building cities until you are required to hit 20% research rate It's quite possible, and requires careful management (only having a 20% buffer is very, very hard if you drop down for a bit, say due to a war). But, 20% of a much larger number is more than 50% of a smaller one, so ...

[frenzyfol]

As snoopy369 suggested, expand, expand, expand

I don't build cottages before ~ 0BC
Food is more powerful through slavery, I find.

In fact, the economic rut I was talking about is usually the indication that its time to spam cottages.

Catapults is too late to attack. You can confidently take out at least 3 enemy cities with an early stack of axemen.

Catapults are used for my second expansion phase, after consolidating the gains and preventing the economy going into the red..

[Asmodeous]

I find that the point at which I hit 20% is where I've already moved beyond the safe point and all hell breaks loose and I reach an unrecoverable bankruptcy.

Me.

[frenzyfol]

Booty from war, peace, tech trading, specialists, cottage spam, selective culling of your military to reduce maintenance, and building of courthouses (especially in distant cities) /markets when available should get you out of that trouble.

Basically the hardest thing about the above strat is choosing the right time to initiate the above points. That fine line between too much expansion and too little is more of a feel than a science. The closer you bring expansion to economic collapse, the more production you will have for the later stages of the game. It's a razors edge though and I still stuff it up now and then.

If you find it difficult to emulate what I have written try a few games where you bring your research down to 50%, then try another where you get down to 40% and so on... soon you will get the feel for what is too much and too little.

In my future games I'm going to try to maintain this level of expansion through out the game, not just the early phases. I'm not sure if thats a good idea or not, I'll see.

[TriMiro]

The above is pretty much the strategy I use. However, I go for the cottages as soon as I get the pottery. The first wave of expansion takes on an neighbor or if there is no neighbor and I have enough room I spawn settlers. The science rate drops to 10-20% but I can usually come out of it in several turns. With sufficient number of cottages I can come on top of the tech tree and stay there for the rest of the game.

On the second stage I go for the calendar and then straight for engineering (trebuchet) and civic services (maceman). I can get there first and thus initiate the second wave of expansion. Afterwards I can keep a steady rate of expansion, the economy is powerful enough to support the army and the newly conquered cities. At the same time the science rate would be going steadily upwards. I can reach as high as 60-80% in the industrial age. 70% science combined with huge territory means that I would usually fight cavalry vs longbowmen, infantry vs riflemen and so on. I only need to watch the WW.

IMHO the cottage is the most important improvement. I judge the strength of an empire by the number cottages it has.

[couerdelion]

As a standard plan I can’t disagree too much with it. Any viable city site that is free is good to take although I tend to find that I will be selective in city sites in the early stages and concentrate on those that are either

a) Too good to miss, or
b) A solid site that can be quickly turned to a profitable site (does not necessarily mean commerce/gold)

This may mean that I tend to avoid sites that I cannot really use until a little later. High value jungle sites might be delayed until I have the techs and worker resources to do the serious terra-forming in that area, etc.

There are two major constraints that I would place in the early game that I look to resolve early. These are the barbarian threats and happiness. You could also include “strategic resource” along with barbs since they are linked factors and this point is all about making sure that your cities and their improvements are secure. The second is all about city growth with happiness being the limiting factor. It’s quite important to get an early view on this so that you know which may you will attack the happiness barrier. The reason why happiness is important is that you will tend to do better with fewer large cities than with a larger number of small cities. Costs go up incrementally with city size but more exponentionally with city numbers. So first see what early happiness resources you can make use of (including Charismatic, Religions, Temples) and then work out how soon you need to increase the happiness cap and which route (Calendar, Drama or Monarchy) is the best way of getting out.

If happiness is not so critical at this stage, I can see the logic in going for Currency earlier for the gold boost. Code of Laws starts to become important once you have 8+ cities but unlikely to be too critical before that.

The one thing I would add about the standard plan is that you probably want to be looking for valuable diversions from it too. In the early game these include wonders and early rushes. Both of these will cut into production that would be used for building settlers so expansion might be deferred when a juicier option presents itself. This is more so in the sort of maps which give more scope for expansion at your own pace (eg archipelago) and less so where there is a lot of competition (continents, Pangaea, Terra),

[Asmodeous]

Originally posted by frenzyfol
Booty from war, peace, tech trading, specialists, cottage spam, selective culling of your military to reduce maintenance, and building of courthouses (especially in distant cities) /markets when available should get you out of that trouble.

Basically the hardest thing about the above strat is choosing the right time to initiate the above points. That fine line between too much expansion and too little is more of a feel than a science. The closer you bring expansion to economic collapse, the more production you will have for the later stages of the game. It's a razors edge though and I still stuff it up now and then.

If you find it difficult to emulate what I have written try a few games where you bring your research down to 50%, then try another where you get down to 40% and so on... soon you will get the feel for what is too much and too little.

In my future games I'm going to try to maintain this level of expansion through out the game, not just the early phases. I'm not sure if thats a good idea or not, I'll see.

I've been trying to pull it to 40% and stop as of late, even before the advice, haha. It's difficult to do though because the AI expands at an alarming rate, too... Part of my problem is I'm too much of a wonder whore, so I'm going to try a couple games where I'm WAY more selective about the wonders I build. Specifically I'm going to try to only put effort into the Oracle, the Pentagon, and the Apostolic Palace for early-mid wonders, and ignore the other ones until Eiffel Tower or so. . .

We'll see how this works for me.

Me.

[couerdelion]

An Early Pentagon eh??

Guess that saves all those hammers needed to build barracks

[Brizey]

The only thing I do differently is that I usually go for BW first before resource techs. That way I can pop or tree chop settlers, workers and axemen ASAP.

One more thing I do:

As the slider ratchets down below 40%, I test my empires cash capability by switching from food production to gold production. In other words, I move city workers to coastal squares, gold mines, etc. to see how much of a economic boost I can get when the time comes to switch gears. I then switch back to food for any more pop rushes I may want to do. This is also a chance to see where and how many cottages will be useful.

[Blaupanzer]

Cottages, gold, and jewels are key to rapid expansion in early period. You can let your opponents build all the trash (non-strategic) cities for you to take post currency/CoL as an alternative. This is less expensive early. I like fractal maps which have lots of water and make the Colossus and GL much more important.

[Blake]

That's a good expansion strategy, also the point about it being an art rather than a science is a good one.

It depends a lot on the map and stuff, sometimes you can easily expand peacefully until you crush your economy.

One of my favorite things to do is to go right down to 0% and then spam axes (going even deeper!) and go capturing and razing cities to extort tech.

When cutting it so fine, what you want to do is use 0% research all the time, and set it to 0% long before you ACTUALLY run out of cash. So you can safely go down to -5, because you have 200g in the bank - good for 40 turns, because you always see how deep in the red you are, and because you have a buffer, you can afford to expand significantly into the red quite safely.

The way to then "pull back up" is usually to extort currency out of someone, like you raze/capture half their cities and then research half of currency and extort the remaining half from them... Currency is the single best tech for getting out of the red, because markets provide masses of extra gold (when you're running 100% gold, hah!), the extra trade route certainly helps, and the ability to build wealth is a safety net.

So the idea is, just run 0% science all the time, and once you build up enough of a gold stockpile (Through plunder for example) you quickly research an entire tech or enough of it to extort it.

Having a half finished tech sitting in your research-bank doesn't help you in the least, it's better to have that couple of hundred gold sitting around as real gold, preventing your armies going on strike.

This kind of strategy is for when you have a lot of scope for expansion... for the very land heavy maps, larger maps, and stuff, on some map types you just can't get into negatives because you have too much floodplains and stuff .

[Asmodeous]

Originally posted by couerdelion
An Early Pentagon eh??

Guess that saves all those hammers needed to build barracks

Read close, I said "early/mid". Pentagon is mid-game.

:P Nerd.



Me.

[frenzyfol]

Nice addition Blake.. pushing it even further than I dared go.