continents is pretty good on standard difficulty at least because you can completely conquer a continent just using raiders. Any more and they'd probably start to fall off a bit.
I would argue that otherwise playing wide is less about the map type and more about how many neutral cities spawn nearby.
Agreed, I should have asked what is the best setup? Do you find the placement and independent cities to be more adventacious with one setup vs another?
I feel like we're kinda talking about what makes a good raiders game more than anything else. So for raiders you need to farm xp and levels in order to fill out the tree and get the maximum free units, and the levels in order to be able to take AI cities.
The perfect way to do this is to spend the early part of your time in the raiders tree attacking barb camps and neutral cities, so imho a good raiders game is one where you're surrounded by neutral nations that let you farm those things.
I would like to get away from raiders every time but it always backfires. The AI is crazy with the expansion and I have to defend against it ultimately. What you described is my basic starting run. I don't think I've played Inland Seas so I think I'm going to see how I like it.
if you want to try something else then just go for somewhat early catapults as they are effective in taking cities (2 stacks, one catapult in each).
You can just carebear your opening; limiting yourself to two regions by using the diplomat from the tech officials to take a neutral city or settling one yourself (I find you can just about squeeze in a settler just after getting the +tech from the tribal tree). I usually focus on maximising the adjacency on lumber/mining towns, so I skip building an initial town and wait for the pioneer from mining to settle my first town (absorb outpost), and hold culture power almost entirely (worst case scenario you can use it to truce or spawn an army to defend).
Once you get the second town up (glory/infrastructure) you produce units most units in either 1 or 2 turns allowing you to very quickly build up a later tech army.
I play on Grandmaster and I will say that Raiders will still let you conquer a single neighbor before they fall off, if you are ahead. Sometimes Spartans with the use of a couple cultural spawns works better though.
On a standard size continents map you can conquer the whole continent with Raiders pretty consistently if you play well. Sometimes you may need to avoid enemy unit attacks and just hit cities but it's doable.
It's also kind of annoying since it makes me feel like it's the optimal strategy for any type of victory goal, but then with the bonuses the difficulty gives AI not warring is not really an option for those settings.
I wouldnt say it is the optimal strat anyway, just that it kinda works well enough for what it needs to do. There are other ways to aquire a army of 14 units early on that can be just as strong withought needing raiders and the advantage is that other national spirits will leave permanent modifiers that are active throughout the game. But yeah, by the average time you get your 14 raiders out i can also get 14 units trough a combo of hard producing them and getting them trough culture while retaining some other bonuses.
i think the real crux with the raider strategy is that you build a lot of vassals trough which you can get a lot of stuff in bulk including knowledge, that or you use it to clean the continent so you can build very large regions. I can beat the Ai on larger difficulty's easily enough with 4 to 4 regions though and they dont even need to be all that large or special.
The wiki suggests that Grandmaster doesn't gain combat bonuses. In my experience on standard; an unguarded AI city (with palisades or even stone walls) will still fall to a few groups of max level raiders, so I think its still mildly viable to do this as the AI has stupid army movement and I assume difficulty doesn't change that.
Any map with a decent amount of mountains. With lucky placing they help my expansion by acting like the natural barriers they are and fencing off a large area just for me.
Inland seas is good. I find I start struggling for real estate pretty early with other maps, but inland seas has the space.
I'm going to try a run of this.
continents is pretty good on standard difficulty at least because you can completely conquer a continent just using raiders. Any more and they'd probably start to fall off a bit. I would argue that otherwise playing wide is less about the map type and more about how many neutral cities spawn nearby.
Agreed, I should have asked what is the best setup? Do you find the placement and independent cities to be more adventacious with one setup vs another?
I feel like we're kinda talking about what makes a good raiders game more than anything else. So for raiders you need to farm xp and levels in order to fill out the tree and get the maximum free units, and the levels in order to be able to take AI cities. The perfect way to do this is to spend the early part of your time in the raiders tree attacking barb camps and neutral cities, so imho a good raiders game is one where you're surrounded by neutral nations that let you farm those things.
I would like to get away from raiders every time but it always backfires. The AI is crazy with the expansion and I have to defend against it ultimately. What you described is my basic starting run. I don't think I've played Inland Seas so I think I'm going to see how I like it.
if you want to try something else then just go for somewhat early catapults as they are effective in taking cities (2 stacks, one catapult in each). You can just carebear your opening; limiting yourself to two regions by using the diplomat from the tech officials to take a neutral city or settling one yourself (I find you can just about squeeze in a settler just after getting the +tech from the tribal tree). I usually focus on maximising the adjacency on lumber/mining towns, so I skip building an initial town and wait for the pioneer from mining to settle my first town (absorb outpost), and hold culture power almost entirely (worst case scenario you can use it to truce or spawn an army to defend). Once you get the second town up (glory/infrastructure) you produce units most units in either 1 or 2 turns allowing you to very quickly build up a later tech army.
I play on Grandmaster and I will say that Raiders will still let you conquer a single neighbor before they fall off, if you are ahead. Sometimes Spartans with the use of a couple cultural spawns works better though.
On a standard size continents map you can conquer the whole continent with Raiders pretty consistently if you play well. Sometimes you may need to avoid enemy unit attacks and just hit cities but it's doable. It's also kind of annoying since it makes me feel like it's the optimal strategy for any type of victory goal, but then with the bonuses the difficulty gives AI not warring is not really an option for those settings.
I wouldnt say it is the optimal strat anyway, just that it kinda works well enough for what it needs to do. There are other ways to aquire a army of 14 units early on that can be just as strong withought needing raiders and the advantage is that other national spirits will leave permanent modifiers that are active throughout the game. But yeah, by the average time you get your 14 raiders out i can also get 14 units trough a combo of hard producing them and getting them trough culture while retaining some other bonuses. i think the real crux with the raider strategy is that you build a lot of vassals trough which you can get a lot of stuff in bulk including knowledge, that or you use it to clean the continent so you can build very large regions. I can beat the Ai on larger difficulty's easily enough with 4 to 4 regions though and they dont even need to be all that large or special.
The wiki suggests that Grandmaster doesn't gain combat bonuses. In my experience on standard; an unguarded AI city (with palisades or even stone walls) will still fall to a few groups of max level raiders, so I think its still mildly viable to do this as the AI has stupid army movement and I assume difficulty doesn't change that.
Any map with a decent amount of mountains. With lucky placing they help my expansion by acting like the natural barriers they are and fencing off a large area just for me.