Strategy observations for a Newbie, FROM a Newbie

[centrifuge]

I know it sound simplistic, but one of the best stacks I've used has been nothing but cavalry. Cavalry can flank and has ranged ablity, a lethal combo for a unit. Before Cavalry, my optimal stack tends to be 6 Knights, 2 or 3 mounted archers, and 3 or 4 catapults. ...but (as Maquiladora said) this has only been in SP, so I have no idea if it could hold up in MP.

[Velociryx]

Glad you guys are enjoying them! I wrote that one for my girlfriend, actually, who got hooked on the game, but had some questions wrt to army construction, and, I figured....having written it, I might as well post it here. New players seem to be wandering in all the time and it might prove valuable....

Maq...I'd prolly SUCK at MP, in all honesty. The thing that does it for me in these kinds of games is the notion of Empire Building. MP games, even MP TBS games are generally the quick "go for the jugular" kind, and it's all about being the first person to get that tactical edge that tips the scale and spells defeat. I enjoy playing that scene now and again, but my real love is with growing the empire....a thing you sadly don't get much of in the MP arena, but just for kicks, sure...I'll volunteer to get my arse handed to me a few times....

Just finished out the Celtic game, btw...will be compiling my notes and such on it...wow...what a game, and what a learning experience!!

And, here's another essay on strategy, just cos....

***

Economics 103 – Public Works

I just finished my first Impossible-level game. Ended with a victory for my sturdy Celts, but upon review of the game, I realized that there were a number of things I could have…should have done differently. Chief among them was the fact that I had no really solid understanding of how expensive technologies are in CtP2….vastly more expensive than they are in Civ, which I am more familiar with.

The end result was that I had far, far more production capacity than I needed, and not nearly enough commercial activity. This resulted in a glut of PW points and nothing to build, while my research was lagging far behind where it could have been.

From this though, I learned a number of important lessons. Rules of thumb that I hope to apply to my next game with even better results (hey, a victory is a victory, so I’m not knocking it, but there’s always room for improvement, and in this case, quite a lot of room!)

As with all my essays, I’m certainly not advocating that my way is the only way, or even the best way….I just know that it works for me.

Stuff I Learn’t

Early Game Expansion
As can rightly be expected, this is THE most important phase of the game. The echoes of decisions made here can be felt throughout the remainder of the game. Good moves here are magnified over the passage of time, and will translate into huge overall gains later on. Bad moves will culminate in disasters of epic proportions, the roots of which can be traced all the way back to decisions made about early settlement patterns.

Location is EVERYTHING! Especially in terms of your first city ( EDIT for clarification: If you have average land or better, build your first city wherever the settler is, but when that second settler is ready, make sure you found the city on a perfect spot....the more "average" your first city's terrain is, the more important it is to make the second city really rock!)

When looking at potential settlement sites, here’s exactly what you’re looking for:

1) Rivers! Commerce is the most important asset in the game, and at game-start, Trade seems like an impossibly distant objective. Rivers are your best source of early game commerce, and as such, control of rivers in the early game is of paramount importance! Even if the terrain is less than perfect, rivers are too important to pass on.

2) Growth potential. The eight tiles immediately surrounding your city MUST be slanted toward growth. That means plains, grassland, or beach tiles. My preference is to have three that fall into this category as a minimum, with more than this being welcomed! If you find some early game city sites that look attractive, but are not on high growth sites, then save them for later! Tyranny has a 9-city cap, and the happiness remedies are few and punishing to a fledgling Empire. There must be a compelling reason for going over the nine city cap by a large, or even a medium margin, and so the placement of each of your cities is of vital importance. You want the most bang for your buck!

2a) Even while growth is the A-numero-uno consideration when placing cities, some consideration needs to be made with regards to production. If you have lots of people, but no capability to DO anything, they don’t do you any good! Thus, when placing your cities in those high-growth areas, consider what the borders will look like after that first bump, and that first bump will happen pretty quickly because you took the time to make sure your city was placed on good, fertile land! Growth is important because you want….you NEED to get your core cities to size seven ASAP! You need this for two reasons…first, because it means a border bump….more tiles worked, more overall potential, and second, because it means that you’re getting 100% use from those eight tiles that surround your city. Growth is so important, in fact, that I advocate the use of farmer specialists, especially to get your cities from size one to size two with all possible speed. After the city grows to size two, you’ve generally got too much stuff to build to continue keeping on with the specialist approach (after all, some concession needs to be given to building—horizontal growth—over city—vertical--growth). Remember though, that there are many tile and terrain types that produce at least some of all three of the factors of production (food, commerce, production), and so, by looking for fertile lands to settle, you’re not denying yourself early game production capability. Look at it this way, a city nestled up in the mountains with no ready supply of food is surrounded by vast amounts of production potential, but has no ready way to tap it. A city surrounded by plains with hills, mountains and forests a bit further out will grow like a weed and grow into ever-increasing production…very quickly, it will outpace the mountain city.

3) Forests! Forests are tremendously good early game tiles because of their balance. Good for a variety of uses. Ideally, if you spy a forested area, you’ll plant your city on the forest edge, just outside the forest. This should, in most cases, give you 3 forest tiles and 5 other tiles (hopefully very fertile ones). A city so positioned is poised to become an early game production powerhouse! Especially good here, is that in the games I’ve played so far, forests tend to come in wide swaths, and so at least a couple of your cities could be built along the timberline, and more often than not, such forested areas come complete with a river for commerce!

4) Defense – Generally, this is a thing I think about, but place on a lower priority than the other concerns. A fast-growing, productive powerhouse of an ancient-era city is its own best defense. True, it carries no terrain modifiers with it, but what it lacks there, it more than makes up for in terms of raw productive power (and besides that, with a few techs under your belt, if you feel threatened, it’s easy enough to build in advantages to your city—walls, towers, etc). Of course, if you spy a hill sitting in a sea of green fields, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, either!

The goal is to get to nine cities with all possible speed, and to have a tenth settler-in-waiting to take advantage of any opportunity that may arise. Settlers carry no upkeep costs, so you may as well have one waiting! In fact, go so far as to prepare a Skirmish Group, and add the settler in as the fifth unit. If you’re running a tight ship and don’t want that many spare units just milling around, then take (one of your) slaver group, and add the settler to it. A little risky, but not much. Exactly HOW you get to nine cities is your bag, and largely dependant on game settings. If you’re surrounded by rivals, then rely on the fact that the bulk of your growth will come via acquisition of someone else’s stuff, rather than building it on your own, and that’s cool, but it means a radically different set of build priorities.

5) A mix of terrains. You do NOT want to be saddled with all tiles that produce NOTHING BUT food. You need food, that's true, but you don't need JUST food. Food by itself does nothing for you.

Early game Empire Settings
Everybody has their preference and these may not be to your liking, but given the above, I think you’ll agree that they work well with the overall plan I’ve got going.

Rations minimized. Make every ounce of food count toward growth. Pay maxed. Gotta offset that food hit. Production as high as the population can stand. Fast build times are key in the early game. 1-2 turns difference here can mean the difference between winning and losing 6000 years later! PW set to 10% to start with (again, my main interest is building warriors, archers, and settlers….it’ll be a thousand years before I’m ready to actually start improving the land).

First city generally is set up with a farmer specialist until it grows from size one to two, and then runs with no specialists. Build order is warrior, warrior, settler, warrior, warrior, settler, granary, settler, see what techs I’ve acquired (note that if I start with ballistics, then half my warriors in the above will be archers).


Early game tech acquisition

Once again, everybody’s got their pet beeline, so this may or may not be for you, but it’s the one I’ve gotten cozy with.

Top priority – Ballistics (if I don’t have it at start). Warrior/Archer combo makes you an early game menace!

2nd – Ship Building – Lay of the land is of vital importance, knowing where your rivals are is too important to adequately express in mere words. Ship building can get that for you, along with the “Net” terrain improvement, which helps you in your number one priority….GROWTH!

3rd – Slave Labor – Also helps growth. Provides you a means to build stuff more quickly. Once you get slave labor, it’s time to bulk up PW a bit (20-30%) so you can begin adding mines into the mix. Slavers can be a strain on an ancient-era economy….tough to crank them out quickly, but sooooo worth it!

4th – Beeline for Trade for two reasons: Roads and Trading posts. Roads should be your first priority where terraforming is concerned, from the moment you get the tech! Roads are life. Roads are speed. Roads are more important than commerce if there’s a choice to be made, one or the other.

5th – Beeline for Monarchy. This will more than double the city cap for you, enabling you to grow and flex those newfound muscles.

I’ve never started a game without religion, but if I did at some point, I’d focus on building troops to relieve the Ramyana builder of his prize, figuring that unless I started with the tech, I’d have next to no chance getting the wonder.

Wonders – For me, the founding city MUST build two settlers before even considering work on a wonder. This is because it’ll take that to ensure the empire’s critical mass. 1 becomes 2, two become 4, and at that point, I can pull a city off for a special project, relying on the fact that 4 will become 7, and then three cities can work on settlers while four others begin to specialize (this gives me nine cities and a settler held in reserve). Good pacing.

Once Trade is discovered, the goal is to make nice with whomever I am near at all costs! Peace means that I can kill my city production by maxing my PW tax, and thus grow at an astonishing pace!

PW Priorities – Post Trade (assumes peace)
1) PW tax set as high as my current situation will bear (50-70% or more!). Disband some unneeded troops if it will help!

2) Top priority is roads. Peace could be broken at any moment, and I MUST be prepared to meet that threat, and fight a delaying action till I can re-organize my economy.

3) Second priority, farms! Gotta keep the growth happening. At this point, I’m aiming for another border bump from my core cities.

4) Third Priority is city specialization. I used to be in favor of making cities with balanced production and commerce. No longer. In my book, there are production cities and there are commercial cities. All cities have a measure of both of course, thanks to the versatile mix of tiles contained inside a city’s borders, but a city should only pursue two of the three with a vengeance. Food is, of course, the top priority, and I’d make, as a rule of thumb, half the tiles inside the city radius farms. The other half, set aside for either production or commercial use. When it comes time to assign specialists and assess the cost-benefit tradeoff, you’ll be VERY glad you structured your cities this way, cos it makes it quite clear which way you should go. A very logical, organized approach.

5) Commercial cities should be more numerous than production cities. If you have nine cities, make three of them production powerhouses, and six of them commercial centers. Subject to terrain considerations, of course. The point is that with a nine-city spread, you’ll have three—likely scattered—production powerhouses, and six support cities. You’ll also, thanks to your focus on growth and commerce, have a better tech level than your rivals who attempt to make good “general purpose” cities. This is because of the fact that specialization is cheaper than non-specialization. Specialization means that you don’t need factories, mills, and such in commercial cities, and you don’t need universities and academies in production cities. You save money on upkeep costs, which translates into rush-build money, which in turn, translates into solid gains. Of course, all of this is highly dependent on prevailing game conditions. If you’re fighting tooth and nail to survive, you may need more production cities, and keep in mind that you can always re-terraform as game conditions change.

Keep in mind that a highly specialized approach to city-building (as opposed to a more generalized approach) means that it’s vitally important to always keep your production cities building. Since you have relatively few, they should be kept quite busy, either building relevant improvements and/or keeping the army up to date! This, as opposed to a generalized approach, which can see all cities running for extended periods with absolutely nothing to build. Commercially-based cities will have less production, and so will generally be kept busy for longer periods of time building their relevant builds. Rushing should be applied to, and reserved for science or production enhancing builds.

-=Vel=-

[Turambar]

just finished my first Impossible-level game. Ended with a victory for my sturdy Celts

Will you be trying Cradle next? Because I don't think anyone here has ever beat that on impossible yet (I could be wrong though...).

Great guide though!

[Velociryx]

Yeppers! Cradle is tonight's fun! I've been working hard on CB all day today, and as my reward....gaming!

Glad you liked my little ramble on PW....the hope is that it'll help new players get a pretty solid feel for the way the game is put together....I know I'm still feeling my way in many respects. I won my impossible level game, sure, but there were TONS of mistakes made along the way!

Looking forward to trying Cradle tonight!

-=Vel=-

[Turambar]

Will the rest of the Celtic AAR be posted soon?

Will you being doing another for Cradle?

[Velociryx]

Well....it'll take me a while to get all the pics prepped and ready (there are about thirty, IIRC), and I'll need a bit to organize my notes on it, but I should be getting another segment with pics out soon! (I'm shooting for Wednesday, but don't hold my feet to the fire! LOL) And as for Cradle....yeah, I'm thinking that an Impossible level AAR for Cradle might just be the thing!@ Gonna have to practice in it a bit like I did with SAP2, but sure....I'm game....

-=Vel=-

[centrifuge]

It's been nice to read all of your observations...
I think it'll be great to see the same type of thing put together for some of the different mods.

Oh, and by the way... If you're starting a cradle game, why not do your "practicing" by playing the SP tournament In fact, you may even be able to submit...considering the latest bunch of posts.

[Maquiladora]

PW set to 10% to start with (again, my main interest is building warriors, archers, and settlers….it’ll be a thousand years before I’m ready to actually start improving the land).

I think setting anything above 0% PW before you have at least 6/7 cities is a waste of production. If you set PW when you have 6 cities you could save the same amount of PW in 5 turns as you could with 2 cities in 50 turns (at a guess ) (at such early times theres not much to build anyway).

While the person with 10% PW at the start is saving PW and building a farm every 20th turn, im building my granaries/shrines early on and giving myself more options later.

[Velociryx]

Ran a couple of tests just to see if something worked or no....this was NOT done using any sort of tight control, so the scientific method was not really observed, but from what I have seen, only very rarely will running PW at 10% increase your build times (my guess is that it has something to do with rounding). From looking at completion times, and what happens when you complete a given build, it appears to me at least that excess production is NOT carried over from one build to the next (could be wrong here, I didn't look *that* closely, but at first glance, that's the way it seems), and so long as the PW amount would be less than the productive wastage, you should actually come out better by assigning nominal PW--cos you would, in some form, re-coup production that would just be lost in overruns).

That's something that deserves a closer looking at from a more scientific mind. I'll readily admit that I'm not the guy for that job.....I always slept thru science class....

-=Vel=-

[Maquiladora]

Thats interesting. I admit i ran no tests whatsoever to see how this actually works, but just through experience, when i raise that PW tax to 10/20% on the building of my first city, it breaks my heart to see the warrior now 2 turns slower than before. Im thinking "i could be 2 turns into my next one now".

Certainly if it turns out true that you can gain the wasted production in PW i might rethink my early game approach. Although at times those early farms only end up getting pillaged by some crafty barb pottering around after turn 19, so i want to get my warriors out quick and burst open those ruins before the barbs start coming out instead of juicy advances.

The barbs aim specifically for tile imps, thats the danger, if you cant hold it yet, dont build it.

[Velociryx]

Total agreement there! If you can't defend it, don't bother. In general, my plan is to keep it at 10% (which usually amounts to something paltry like 3-5 per turn, not enough to significantly alter my production, and easily made up for with selective rushing), let that sum-total build slowly--and slowly increase as more cities are founded--such that when I hit trade, I've got a tidy little sum at the ready to lay down some of the more critical roadways right then and there (with PW tax increasing dramatically, so I can get those roads in place!). In my book, roading is THE best thing you can do in terms of defense (in Cradle, I'd have to put roading second...building fortifications in Cradle is the big Kahuna....most important tech in the game, IMO). Once that road network is in place, a couple well-put-together groups of defenders can really put a hurting on the barbs (in Cradle, my plan is to operate my internal defense force in two teams, leaving a core group of defenders (prolly 4--two spear/two slingers) in the fort I build, and rotate out my damaged troopers to the fort for quick healing. Should see me able to firmly lay down the law to the barbs!)

Good discussion here! I'd be very curious to see what one of the more scientific minded folks can tell us about exactly what happens to that excess production....that's an interesting angle....

-=Vel=-

[Turambar]

I started a new Cradle game last night (Medium) and started using some of your tips regarding roads and fam placement etc. Result is I'm actually doing well in a Cradle game!! I've nearly wiped out my closest (and only as far as I'm aware) neighbour thanks to my huge road network .

[Velociryx]

WhoooHoooo! I'm glad the tips have helped then! And, I've just this moment finished a "Cradle Specific" strat thread. It's bare bones right now, but in all fairness, I'm still on my first game, and only in 3000BC at that! It'll get fleshed out as I play further, but I posted my initial observations down....some really intriguing differences! I love it!

-=Vel=-

[Yolky]

bump

great tips. should be kept to the top. I had to look and dig for this.

Davor

[FrustratedPoet]

Thanks for the bump Yolky. I've recently bought CTP2 and was totally baffled by it. Hopefully Vel's tips will help a little.