Expansionist Chariot Gambit with ICS topping

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Arrian
If you're the Iroquois, why wait for Knights? Won't you be facing pikemen (4 vs 3)? Why not hit the first civ with Mounted Warriors (3 vs 2), pause & upgrade, and continue? What makes waiting all the way until Chivalry more attractive?

I did mention that the Iroquois should upgrade to Mounted Warriors for an earlier rush. Sorry if I hid it away too much, I tried to focus on the overall Expansionist trait, rather than the ones it is paired with. As an Expansionist Civ you never have to fight against Iron units though! If you want to let the AI have their Iron (read: aversion to the Scout exploit) then waiting for Knights makes less sense.

The benefits of waiting to get Horseback Riding sometimes outweighs those of an early rush though. Chariots fit nicely into almost all productive city's Settler patterns, while Horsemen slow it down a bit. If you are doing pop rushing of units as well, the Horsemen cost the same. The most efficient timing of when to switch from Chariots to Horsemen is mostly map dependant.

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
With this approach, you quickly will trigger the corruption treshold. This makes possible to build the FP early in a core city. It ought to be done in somewhat 40 turns or even less. When doing a free palace jump then, you have just optimized your empire's economy/commerce without a leader.

Thanks for mentioning that Sir Ralph, I forgot to include it.

Originally posted by Arrian
I don't know that early warfare really slows down growth. Temporarily, yes, of course it does. However, a successful war will gain you cities, and if you're lucky, you will get a GL for a forbidden palace. *poof* you've just doubled your number of productive cities.

I see where you are coming from. I meant to include everything I felt was 'exploitative' in this thread. The free Palace jump is one of those things. Sir Ralph's explaination of how to build the FP covers it nicely. If you space the FP about 10 tiles, this along with ICS will mimic a traditional Palace/FP 'dumbell', just on a smaller, more tightly packed scale. The Palace jump in this case isn't especially needed.

Another point is that ICS reduces the need for the FP. The FP doesn't add any more 'productive' cities AFAIK, it just reduces the corruption by distance factor. With (small) cities tightly packed together, you get a similar benefit with ICS when compared to more traditional spacing. By the time you stop building Settlers and start building up and spacing out your core, you should have started the Knight rush. And leaders will be available to reposition the Palace as needed.

[Aeson]

What's a free palace jump?

When you disband your capitol (or lose it to the AI) your Palace will automatically be built in another of your cities. In the early game when all your cities are building Settlers, it's pretty easy to move your capitol this way. It almost always will hit the 'target' city if it is the only city size 3+. With multiple larger cities it becomes very hard to predict exactly where the Palace will end up though.

Very useful in situations where you start out on the coast, on a peninsula or isthmus, or on the edges of a high food area. I almost always start out my games planning on jumping my Palace. If it ends up my capitol is nicely centered, great! If not, I'm prepared to make it so.

As Sir Ralph mentioned, this can be used to build the FP in a productive area, and then jump the Palace to a new city. You have to be careful though, sometimes the Palace will jump to the FP city, make sure it's at size 1 when you do the jump.

[Harovan]

The free palace jump is quite new for me, although I've heard about it already a few months ago. I have done 3 jumps so far, and all ended in the city I targeted. All I did was to make sure, that all other cities have size 1 or 2, or 3 at most. The city I target I usually choose at a fresh water source, and I add a few workers or even spare settlers to make it as big as happiness allows, usually size 7-9. Worked great so far, and the lots of settlers and workers I build to adjust the city sizes come at hand for further expansion or road building. Usually I make the jump, when I have about 60-80 cities. This number is still manageable, it will be a lot harder to hit the target with twice as much cities.

The turn, when I make the jump, is an adrenaline kick though .

[Hurricane]

Great post, Aeson! I actually tried this strategy, but with a random map I ended up with an Archipelago map, so the game turned out quite differently. And now patch 1.21 is coming out... Seems I can´t try this strategy before next week.

Nice to see you used the ROP exploit. I always use it extensively, but I haven´t seen many other players mention it.