Early game - when to switch govt?

[CarnalCanaan]

Just for the helluvit, play the whole game in Despotism.

Blame the loss on your citizen's poor social initiative.

Worked for the Soviets.

[Cookie Monster]

Originally posted by CarnalCanaan
Just for the helluvit, play the whole game in Despotism.

Blame the loss on your citizen's poor social initiative.

Worked for the Soviets.

I was seriously considering playing the first two ages under despotism but I took the advice of some of the posters here and switched out immediately.

I think I'm going to run an experiment in my next SP game to see if there are any advantages to waiting till later than usual to switch governments.

The 9 turns of anarchy in my current MP game may have just cost me dearly. It will be a hard fight now to maintain parity with my human opponent.

[Cookie Monster]

My current situation.....

I'm the Chinese and my opponent is the French. I am at war with the Aztecs to my south. They have no iron. Am I doing ok?

[fanes7]

Despotism is good for hurrying Unit&Building. I like this characteristic. Before I have enough productivity, I keep my society in Despotism, especially when I have many remote city or when I play in an abundant food map.

I look your map, I find some your cities are not in right or good position, such as Chinan and Kaifeng, these two cities are not cover the whale grid, so they have low population grown rate. I also see you get many diamond mountains, very good, congratulations!

[Theseus]

You are building a lot of Pikes... why? I can't tell if you have horses, but you should be pre-building Horsemen instead.

[Krill]

110AD?

1) more workers. 2 per city. Or more. When EVERYTHING (including unworked tiles) is improved, and them to cities. Insta pop, anybody?

2) more cities. Fill up every tile, each new city gives atleast one gold, no matter about the corruption, and more unit support (screw demo, not worth 2 turns of anarchy, nevermind 9)

3) You have horses (Tsingtao44). Do as Theseus says, and you wan't go far wrong.

4) You are building the Colossus in Xinjian. It has 4 mines within it's radius. It will take 39 turns to complete. Change it to something useful, or mine everything within reach.

5) Why are you in Monarchy? Republic is a much more flexable gov, since the trade bonus gives you enough gold to have a faster tech pace and still support a large army.

6) Your city spacing is OK, but it is better to have 4 tile spacing (City-Tile-Tile-City), so you can work all of your tiles, since each city can only support 12 pop.

7) Bigger armies. by this stage you should have alot of knight, med inf, pikes and trebs. About 8-12 knights, 20+ MI, 15+ pikes, 12+ Trebs, and a fairly good defensive force. (In this position about anothe 8 knights, 2 squads of 4, east and west bases)

8) Statue of Zeus. I really hope you have built that. 3.2.2. units are good until rifles, and in armies are fine until infantry.

Have I forgotten anything?

[Cookie Monster]

Theseus:

Yes I was building pikes but now I've starting building hordes of the Chinese Riders.

Krill:

Yeah unfortunately my human opponent beat me to the SoZ. No matter though, I've recently discovered chivalry and thus have my Chinese Riders now. Waiting to trigger my golden age against the Aztecs to the south.

Thanks for the advice on city spacing and army size. I must remember that for my next game.

I'm hoping to gobble up Aztec cities as they have no iron and I do. Since this is my first PBEM game against a human I choose monarchy because it would be easier for me to fight wars with. That's what I'm hoping anyway.

I'll post another screenshot soon but my opponent is on vacation now and I'll have to wait until the end of the month to continue our game.

[Theseus]

Especially with a UU as powerful as Riders, you might find it beneficial to "pre-build" a whole lotta Horsemen, and save up enough gold for a mass upgrade.

Unleashing 20-30 of those bad boy Riders on your opponents, whether human or AI, the SECOND you get Chivalry, is waaaay powerful.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Theseus
Unleashing 20-30 of those bad boy Riders on your opponents, whether human or AI, the SECOND you get Chivalry, is waaaay powerful.

You mean the turn AFTER you get Chivalry...

[Solomwi]

Originally posted by Dominae


You mean the turn AFTER you get Chivalry...

Not if you go to the big picture and upgrade them each by hand on the military advisor screen.

[Theseus]

You can do that?

[Solomwi]

Yep. I stopped it a long time ago, thinking of it as an exploit, so I don't know if they've fixed it, but doubt they have. Your troops get their movement back as the computer runs through the cities, so when the science advisor pops up and you click big picture, any units with movement left from last turn can be upgraded using last turn's movement. Since, if you're like me, these have usually been sitting in a barracks for at least one turn waiting on the upgrade, it basically amounts to free (time-wise) upgrades unless I have Sun Tzu's and am in the middle of a campaign (in which case I'll just eat the turn, most likely).

[vmxa1]

I thought that was fixed?

[Kloreep]

It might be in Conquests. I know it works in PTW though.

[Solomwi]

It may well be, vmxa. I haven't tried it in forever.