Epic6 – Always War
Pregame Analysis:
Well, it’s Monday morning now and I haven’t started on this yet – been doing silly things like going on Vacation! – so I’m going to aim this as more of a summary than I usually do and see how that goes. First though, I’ll start with the traditional scene-setting pre-game thoughts (written after the game completed).
So, Always War is a concept I’ve not really approached myself, but have read a couple of succession games which provided useful pointers (a shout out to Pholkhero’s Queen’s Men). In addition to being on the nice safe Noble level (at least to a Monarch such as myself), a number of additional settings have been tuned in our favour; no Tech Trading means that essentially each AI is in it’s own little bottle, and without their being able to run collective research if we can generate a tech lead it should be plain sailing (more on this later). The other key tweak in our direction is that Barbarians have been disabled meaning that we don’t have to worry about odd spots of fog spawning irritating enemies – this will be especially important later in the game when (fingers crossed) we will be razing our way through AI lands and won’t need to assign troops as fog-busters.
No goody huts takes the emphasis off scouting somewhat, but knowing the surrounding terrain and locating the other civilisations will be important to early expansive. There are some “Honorable Mentions” to be handed out, but I decided to just let the game progress as it does and not to twist my play to pursue a secondary goal.
The first few turns…
The start position is very nice, with Wheat and Cow resources in range and floodplains to the West. The Scout moves East onto the hill and reveals a bit more
Looks like a corner in the coast to the NE, so the North
should be pretty easy to defend. After much consideration
I have been toying with Capital specialisation in a number of games recently, and have found a lot of value with targeting Commerce rather than Production to take better advantage of the Bureaucracy bonus. With 7floodplains in addition to the Wheat and Cows there will be sufficient food surplus to mine and work the surrounding hills. The added defensive bonus from the Hill was something I considered, but experience in Epic4 showed that to not be too significant and protective cities surrounding the capital would keep the focus away.
Initial research goes into Archery for defense
and then on to Worker Techs, while the city maximises growth and works towards
a Warrior and then an Archer for defense. The Archer
is put on hold (2turns out) when
The Scout finds the surrounding area packed with resources;
Fish and Clams to the NE – which is indeed a corner – Whales, Spices, Sheep
(and Horses) to the SE and Stone and Fish to the NW. They also reveal that
we’re at the Eastern edge of the landmass so we can concentrate our
defence/offence to the West. Before he is killed, he has had a peek at
I set up an Archer cordon on the hills West of Berlin, and Alex and Isabella also wander by. Many scouting units have “Pointy Accidents” encountering my Archers.
This allows me to focus my initial expansion to the East
without molestation;
In Religious News; Isabella has nabbed Buddhism, but Gandhi has both Hinduism and Judaism in Dehli – already a tempting target, this is now almost a priority!
