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I finally got around to trying this strategy, and let's just say there were a few flaws in my attempt. This will be a mini-DAR of the first 60-odd turns.
At start:
Paris is in a river valley with a nice mix of terrain and two adjacent luxury resources: cotton and spices. That’s a spot of jungle in the upper left. The starting Warrior is about to go exploring, and I’ve started work on producing a Scout. Then 34 turns later:
We have a Worker, a cotton plantation, a Warrior safely home from exploring, contact with two city states (cultured Brussels to the north and militant Budapest to the southeast), and contact with Russia to the south, probably too close on the south since that’s my only direction of expansion. This appears to be a peninsula unless there’s more land past Brussels , that makes it both easy to defend and not so easy to expand (“Hello Catherine? I know you’re great and all, but we’re comin’ through!”) Our first Settler is ready to go, with a nice city site almost straight south, only there’s one minor problem. Not much of a problem, given bombardment from Paris and followup from an experienced Warrior. Oh, and one other problem: the Scout got killed after discovering very little. This time it was a waste of resources. Now jump 27 turns after this:
France just founded its third city and first port, one which will have nice aquatic resources: whales and fish (the former is a luxury resource, the latter gives food and gold). Lots of tasty cattle, lots of frisky horsies to ride down our foes, some Ivory on the hoof, more spices to sell...now if I can just find some maritime city states to help feed my people… The units you see are from Brussels and Budapest , so they aren’t a threat. Russia is not bellicose…yet. OTOH, I got skunked on trying to build Stonehenge (and the Great Library is long gone), but I’m reluctantly going to make a stab at the Oracle. At least when you get beaten to a Wonder, your production comes back as gold and isn’t entirely wasted. That’s part of why I have so much gold (791). Another fly in the ointment: my people are a tiny bit unhappy. I need to tap more of the resources, for which I have two workers under construction, one on the verge here.
At that point I was feeling uneasy, mostly that things were going so slowly relative to AI wonder projects. However, I did manage to bag the Oracle. But then I went far astray, and you may suspect my worst sin from my remark above about Catherine...I got involved in a land war in Asia, er, in Russia. I thought I could leverage my four cities into a delayed horse rush to take out Moscow. Memo: if you delay it, it's not a rush, and gives the AI too much time to arm. By the time I got there, Russia had multiple archers and some spearmen. My army bogged down. (Napoleon into Russia? What was I thinking?)
I did build a fifth city over on the water to the east, but I've lost all my momentum, and in any case I seem to be quite hammer-poor. Oh, and one minor thing: I aggressively sold resources to build up a fund for bribing city states, but not one of the city states on this continent was maritime, just one cultured and three militant, so I had to produce my own food.
So anything (else) obvious that I did wrong? Did I have the basic idea?
p.s. Is there a way to suppress the interface for screenshots, or at least to make it smaller than for a console game?
At start:
Paris is in a river valley with a nice mix of terrain and two adjacent luxury resources: cotton and spices. That’s a spot of jungle in the upper left. The starting Warrior is about to go exploring, and I’ve started work on producing a Scout. Then 34 turns later:
We have a Worker, a cotton plantation, a Warrior safely home from exploring, contact with two city states (cultured Brussels to the north and militant Budapest to the southeast), and contact with Russia to the south, probably too close on the south since that’s my only direction of expansion. This appears to be a peninsula unless there’s more land past Brussels , that makes it both easy to defend and not so easy to expand (“Hello Catherine? I know you’re great and all, but we’re comin’ through!”) Our first Settler is ready to go, with a nice city site almost straight south, only there’s one minor problem. Not much of a problem, given bombardment from Paris and followup from an experienced Warrior. Oh, and one other problem: the Scout got killed after discovering very little. This time it was a waste of resources. Now jump 27 turns after this:
France just founded its third city and first port, one which will have nice aquatic resources: whales and fish (the former is a luxury resource, the latter gives food and gold). Lots of tasty cattle, lots of frisky horsies to ride down our foes, some Ivory on the hoof, more spices to sell...now if I can just find some maritime city states to help feed my people… The units you see are from Brussels and Budapest , so they aren’t a threat. Russia is not bellicose…yet. OTOH, I got skunked on trying to build Stonehenge (and the Great Library is long gone), but I’m reluctantly going to make a stab at the Oracle. At least when you get beaten to a Wonder, your production comes back as gold and isn’t entirely wasted. That’s part of why I have so much gold (791). Another fly in the ointment: my people are a tiny bit unhappy. I need to tap more of the resources, for which I have two workers under construction, one on the verge here.
At that point I was feeling uneasy, mostly that things were going so slowly relative to AI wonder projects. However, I did manage to bag the Oracle. But then I went far astray, and you may suspect my worst sin from my remark above about Catherine...I got involved in a land war in Asia, er, in Russia. I thought I could leverage my four cities into a delayed horse rush to take out Moscow. Memo: if you delay it, it's not a rush, and gives the AI too much time to arm. By the time I got there, Russia had multiple archers and some spearmen. My army bogged down. (Napoleon into Russia? What was I thinking?)
I did build a fifth city over on the water to the east, but I've lost all my momentum, and in any case I seem to be quite hammer-poor. Oh, and one minor thing: I aggressively sold resources to build up a fund for bribing city states, but not one of the city states on this continent was maritime, just one cultured and three militant, so I had to produce my own food.
So anything (else) obvious that I did wrong? Did I have the basic idea?
p.s. Is there a way to suppress the interface for screenshots, or at least to make it smaller than for a console game?
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