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These days, I'm a total warmonger at Emperor and above. I just don't feel I can afford not to extort tech from the AI players. Imagine my surprise, then, when I recently won a game with only minor skirmishes, and without extorting a single tech from another player.
Partially this was due to an extraordinary start. The initial location isn't amazing, no hordes of cattle or anything like that. However, I was on a fairly large island all alone. I had enough room to expand to roughly 15 cities on a Standard size map without fighting anyone. More, all the other civs seem limited by neighbors to about 6-7 cities each.
I also had several rivers and no jungles or deserts nearby. Many of my cities were able to reach size 7+ without buying aquaducts.
On the negative side, the entire landmass had only 1 luxury type, Incense.
Normally I consider being isolated a bad start, but in this case I decided go ahead with rapid expansion to see what would happen. I did find out that I was alone well before I was ready to shift to my normal war mode, so I just continued to pump out settlers instead of shifting to barracks and military units.
I fought several serious skirmishes with barbarians, but used only Warriors for the most part. They're very cheap and expendible, so I wasn't diverting resources from expanding. This is a bad idea at Deity, but the mild (25%) advantage over barbarians at Emperor plus the 3 (regular) vs 2 (conscript) advantage was enough.
About midway through my expansion I diverted one city to producing a Wonder. Eventually this became the Great Library, which I hardly ever manage to build. Usually I steal it.
I was able to build the Great Library because I pumped the city building it up to size 12 (it was on a river) with population transferred from other cities via workers and settlers. I ran with 40% luxuries for quite some time to keep that city 100% productive.
This, combined with the enough freedom to build 2 city cores (one around my palace, one around my Forbidden Palace), won me the game.
I focused on researching to Construction once I knew I was isolated, which I was able to trade for Literature once the AI galleys came nosing around. Getting the Great Library allowed me to keep up in tech while pumping everything into moneymaking and marketplaces. When the Great Library gave out, I burned through that money on 100% research to get a short-term tech lead, which I parlayed through trades to money to support my tech lead.
I did have one bad period, about 6 turns before I built the Great Library, when France declared war on me, and then proceeded to bribe England, Korea, and Zululand to declare war. Fortunately, they landed only small ineffectual token forces, which my tiny military was able to handle. Eventually everyone got tired and offered peace.
This did have the nice benefit allowing me to exactly time my Golden Age. I waited until the Great Library gave me Republic, switched, and then moved a couple of Legions I'd been keeping away from the enemy troops over to attack and trigger my Golden Age.
The tech trading really snowballed by the time I hit the early industrial age, much as I recall it doing before the 1.17f patch. I recall at one point I was spending 900 gold per turn for research, and the AI civs were giving me 800 gold per turn. I was essentially nearly completely funding research with AI gold, so nearly all of my gold production went to savings, despite being at 100% science. I ended the game with over 20,000 gold in the bank.
There I was one civ with a comparable number of cities, Greece, by the time the game ended, but for the most part I had a lock on total science and shields produced for most of the game. That, combined with vigorous tech trading, was enough for victory.
I could have gone any number of routes for victory - conquest, space race, etc - but ended up calling it as quickly as possible with a Diplomatic victory. Normally that's an out for weak civs, but I just didn't want to go through the motions of finishing it when I had such an overwhelming advantage at game end. I just parcelled out lots of money for bribes and got everyone up to Gracious.
I found it interesting to discover you don't have to fight to win at Emperor, provided you get the Great Library and have enough room for a competitive infrastructure.
- Gus
Partially this was due to an extraordinary start. The initial location isn't amazing, no hordes of cattle or anything like that. However, I was on a fairly large island all alone. I had enough room to expand to roughly 15 cities on a Standard size map without fighting anyone. More, all the other civs seem limited by neighbors to about 6-7 cities each.
I also had several rivers and no jungles or deserts nearby. Many of my cities were able to reach size 7+ without buying aquaducts.
On the negative side, the entire landmass had only 1 luxury type, Incense.
Normally I consider being isolated a bad start, but in this case I decided go ahead with rapid expansion to see what would happen. I did find out that I was alone well before I was ready to shift to my normal war mode, so I just continued to pump out settlers instead of shifting to barracks and military units.
I fought several serious skirmishes with barbarians, but used only Warriors for the most part. They're very cheap and expendible, so I wasn't diverting resources from expanding. This is a bad idea at Deity, but the mild (25%) advantage over barbarians at Emperor plus the 3 (regular) vs 2 (conscript) advantage was enough.
About midway through my expansion I diverted one city to producing a Wonder. Eventually this became the Great Library, which I hardly ever manage to build. Usually I steal it.
I was able to build the Great Library because I pumped the city building it up to size 12 (it was on a river) with population transferred from other cities via workers and settlers. I ran with 40% luxuries for quite some time to keep that city 100% productive.
This, combined with the enough freedom to build 2 city cores (one around my palace, one around my Forbidden Palace), won me the game.
I focused on researching to Construction once I knew I was isolated, which I was able to trade for Literature once the AI galleys came nosing around. Getting the Great Library allowed me to keep up in tech while pumping everything into moneymaking and marketplaces. When the Great Library gave out, I burned through that money on 100% research to get a short-term tech lead, which I parlayed through trades to money to support my tech lead.
I did have one bad period, about 6 turns before I built the Great Library, when France declared war on me, and then proceeded to bribe England, Korea, and Zululand to declare war. Fortunately, they landed only small ineffectual token forces, which my tiny military was able to handle. Eventually everyone got tired and offered peace.
This did have the nice benefit allowing me to exactly time my Golden Age. I waited until the Great Library gave me Republic, switched, and then moved a couple of Legions I'd been keeping away from the enemy troops over to attack and trigger my Golden Age.
The tech trading really snowballed by the time I hit the early industrial age, much as I recall it doing before the 1.17f patch. I recall at one point I was spending 900 gold per turn for research, and the AI civs were giving me 800 gold per turn. I was essentially nearly completely funding research with AI gold, so nearly all of my gold production went to savings, despite being at 100% science. I ended the game with over 20,000 gold in the bank.
There I was one civ with a comparable number of cities, Greece, by the time the game ended, but for the most part I had a lock on total science and shields produced for most of the game. That, combined with vigorous tech trading, was enough for victory.
I could have gone any number of routes for victory - conquest, space race, etc - but ended up calling it as quickly as possible with a Diplomatic victory. Normally that's an out for weak civs, but I just didn't want to go through the motions of finishing it when I had such an overwhelming advantage at game end. I just parcelled out lots of money for bribes and got everyone up to Gracious.
I found it interesting to discover you don't have to fight to win at Emperor, provided you get the Great Library and have enough room for a competitive infrastructure.
- Gus
Also to pick up some tips on Vikings - our current succession game has JUST hit invention and is about to get VERY interesting! It's in Deity, no less...
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