REX or Super Infrasctructure?

[Jon Shafer]

What should our priority be? Gobbling up all available land or building up our industry to powerful levels?

I say REX as much as possible...

With our industrious Workers, we won't hardly notice that we're not concentrating on our infrastructure.

[ixnay]

Yeah. REX, and use our industrious workers to build up our infrastructure.

[punkbass2000]

REX, but make sure to defend those settlers.

[statusperfect]

REX.

[Zero]

REX REX REX. Other human civs will nt be able to keep up with our Rexing speed since we can afford to expand while building infrastructure if our worker can interconnect cities rapidly.

That means later in game, we will have HUGE empire that will be industrializing rapidly. Even if other non-industrious opponent even try to match us, they will not be as doemestically well built, thus will be far weaker rural civilization.

[CiverDan]

Some of this may depend on possible nearby opponents, as well potential barbs, remember setting is random. I dont want to see 24 barb horsemen killing and pillaging us. So lets make discovering land a top priority (which we should do anyways). But I agree with explore, then REX with guarded settlers (unless it turns out no barbs and there is land not accessible to anyone else). Also for those who dont know, barbs are smarter in PTW, they will go after settlers/workers as opposed to just attacking your spear on a mountain.

[Zero]

As far as I'm concerned they have always gone for "weaker" opponents. That kind of programming was reason why they never went after fully rested army (now they do). Barb's should never be a problem for us. We start out with spearmen and Barbs seems to have huge disadvantage in combat even at monarch level. So, 1 spearmen shouldn't lose to few stacks of horsemen. Don't know if we can survive uprising, but usually large number uprising is rare occurance. What I'm most concerned is starting right next to GoW team. If that is the case we will be putting ourselves in dangerif we REX too fast.

[BigFurryMonster]

The biggest problem will be the B. uprising when two civs have entered a New Era. We should try to foresee this.

What do you mean by 'REX'? Build settlers like hell? That would be a good strategy. I think our cities should be at least size 4 (depends a bit on the availability of good land) before building a settler to ensure quick recovery.

[Jon Shafer]

Hopefully our REX (yes, you're right... lots of settlers... 'Rapid-Early-eXpansion') will be completed by the Middle Ages... we'll only be on a standard sized map with 7 total civs, so I think we ought to be done by then.

[Vlad Antlerkov]

Mass REXage. We've got Industrious workers, so why not?

For BFM--http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=59146 . This thread contains Lawrence of Arabia's REX essay (and my MSWord version of it, both near the end of the thread).

[Zero]

interCity road network will be important. Not only is it advantageous to hook up cities to share resource, but REX phase will go much smoother.

[Jon Shafer]

Yes... initially creating settler factories, and building roads to prospective areas for building cities should be a priority. I know when I start on a huge or giga map and find some good land in a direction, I always start building a road in that direction.

[Zero]

Here's what I do. I don't improve more than 5 tiles of improvement in my cities. Since they will be rexing, They will spend most of their time in ther 4s and 5s... sometimes as low as 3. All that effort of building improvement and they would not be used so why bother? Instead I manually control them, improve tiles that are on the way to other cities/territory and after that is done I dig a road my way to the new site.

In the very beginning. I let the worker work the two most productive square adjacent to city then square one square away from city which is on its way to new city location. Sometimes timing isn't met and worker ends up finishing building roads to new site before settler gets there. Then I just let it plot mine on the road and by the time settler settled the new city is linked with a mine shortly coming for it.

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by Calc II
Here's what I do. I don't improve more than 5 tiles of improvement in my cities. Since they will be rexing, They will spend most of their time in ther 4s and 5s... sometimes as low as 3.

That high? I would only bother improving two tiles in any city that is going to be a settler farm (one if it's aworker farm). I almost always time my settlers to pop as the city grows to three, so it will always be size 1/2. The only times I don't time it is if it doesn't matter if the particular city grows to three, in which case the settler will be built a couple turns later.

[WarriorPoet]

Again, I say the strategy shouldn't be so overly simplified...."Mass Rexage" leaves you open to attack...I will have to play on a Standard Map to figure out what a good number of cities is for the ancient era. However, I'd say no more than 10 probably.

I say, mass rexage will leave you with about this number, but you'll have a bunch of innefficient small cities, while a player with a slower expansion path, might end up with a military twice as large as yours, and with half of your cities. If he is your neighbor, then what do you think he's going to do?

If I were him, then I'd take half of your cities, if not more, and capture a bunch of worker slaves.

In another thread on this forum, I posted a great alternative strategy. This is what I think we should follow, it's a variation of mass rexage, that leaves you with a better infrastructure, a wonder or two and enough military to fend off any rampagers.

Capital: Warrior, Warrior, Settler, Archer, Settler, Archer, Settler, Spearman, Temple, Wonder....

New Cities:
Warrior, Worker, Archer, Settler, Spearman, Settler, Temple, Settler, Archer, Settler/Wonder