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One strategy which I have found sometimes works surprisingly well, but I have never heard mentioned before, is my 'no settlers strategy' or perhaps better 'let the AI build the cities strategy'.
How this works is that you don't build any settlers, and hence in the very early game just have the one city. This city can therefore become very powerful, you can catch an early wonder or two, build and army etc. Meanwhile the AI is filling in all the wonderful terrain around you. Yes, perhaps some expansion from other civs, but in partiuclar barbarian cities will spring up. In the past Ai city placement used to be so bad, that their cities weren't worth having, but now, they are normally exactly right. So let them build them, and then i go and conquer.
I know it sounds an odd strategy, but its surprisingly effective. Settlers are just quite expensive to build. On this strategy you can get seven or eight cities (obviously yes depending on map size etc) by war at a time when you would have found it difficult to expand to that size by buildin settlers. You also then have an experienced military for the future. And, because you haven't bothered with settlers, you start this war long before most AI are geared for war so, at the least, they haven't started picking off the Barb cities and if you are lucky they are so weak you can trim a few cities off them.
This is obviously map depended, since you need to be able to build an arm from the resources you start with. And it doesn't work if the AI neighbours are close (well it then turns into a conventional rush, but AI rushes are so much harder than Barb rushes). And it takes nerve - letting all those good places be taken as you build the metropolis and the all-conquering army. And of course its only a strategy not a rule - later in teh game it can sometimes be necessary to build settlers, or you could vary this strategy by builing one city to get the necessary resource.
Anyone ever tried this as well? Anyone fancy giving it a go, despite the fact it is so counter-intuitive?
How this works is that you don't build any settlers, and hence in the very early game just have the one city. This city can therefore become very powerful, you can catch an early wonder or two, build and army etc. Meanwhile the AI is filling in all the wonderful terrain around you. Yes, perhaps some expansion from other civs, but in partiuclar barbarian cities will spring up. In the past Ai city placement used to be so bad, that their cities weren't worth having, but now, they are normally exactly right. So let them build them, and then i go and conquer.
I know it sounds an odd strategy, but its surprisingly effective. Settlers are just quite expensive to build. On this strategy you can get seven or eight cities (obviously yes depending on map size etc) by war at a time when you would have found it difficult to expand to that size by buildin settlers. You also then have an experienced military for the future. And, because you haven't bothered with settlers, you start this war long before most AI are geared for war so, at the least, they haven't started picking off the Barb cities and if you are lucky they are so weak you can trim a few cities off them.
This is obviously map depended, since you need to be able to build an arm from the resources you start with. And it doesn't work if the AI neighbours are close (well it then turns into a conventional rush, but AI rushes are so much harder than Barb rushes). And it takes nerve - letting all those good places be taken as you build the metropolis and the all-conquering army. And of course its only a strategy not a rule - later in teh game it can sometimes be necessary to build settlers, or you could vary this strategy by builing one city to get the necessary resource.
Anyone ever tried this as well? Anyone fancy giving it a go, despite the fact it is so counter-intuitive?
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