I am 1 week new to this board - just started reading after my late purchase of SMAC and rediscovering my ol' fav CivII. I have to credit reading this board with re-igniting my interest in the game. Having a baby put this game on hold for nearly two years!
I hear a lot about early landings which are EXTREEMLY impresive. What I haven't read a lot about is early conquerings? I'm interested in this because this is the way I usually play. I guess my philosophy in playing the game is to play it as little as possible (do it in as few turns as possible! ie. make EVERY turn count). It seemed to me (at least until the point when I discovered this forum and seeing the truely impressive landing victories) that the fastest way to win the game must surely be via conquering the world. And thus to ensure a quick (few turns) game with some serious action, conquering quickly seemed like a fun way to play the game and challenge myself at the same time. If I heard some testamonials about how quickly you've all achieved this type of victory, I'd be able to judge my own strategy a little better, as I don't play MP.
Originally my strategy has been:
1) get Monarchy ASAP (this is seems to be Universal)
2) get Hanging Gardens (this also seems Universal)
3) get Trade - build Marco Polo - accelerates research by targeting minimal techs & SHARE MAPS! so that exploring is unnecessary and tactical planning can begin
4) expand quickly to 10-15 cities - each ~ size 4-5 with Temples the only improvement - a few mines here and there - build caravans for WoW's until Monotheism.
5) build Sun Tsu's
6) get Monotheism - build vet Crusaders & start attacking (turn off research; clean up small cities in revolt with diplo's after capitol conquered)
7) sometimes need Lighthouse/Caravels to conquer off continent - MP lets you know quickly if you're going to need this - I usually don't get Caravels because by that time I've already made 20 tech discoveries and Navigation takes too long for my tastes (at least with having a comparatively lame sci-effort to all you guys)
8) STAY IN MONARCHY the whole game
9) Sometimes also build Mikes to avoid problems primarily when taking over AI cities but sometimes because I've got all this stored up production (with caravans) - because the only improvements I build are the temples by the time I finally discover Monotheism - I just go ahead an use 'em up.
I can usually conquer by 1300 AD or so on a Medium map, (and I turn off "restart eliminated players"), though I haven't tried this strategy but half a dozen times.
Recently, after not playing Civ for 2 years, I read about the ICS strat. So I'm trying my first ICS game. It fits well with my current playing style and the hint to leave cities at size 2 is something that had occured to me, but I never tried it - and I think the one time when I did, I didn't know that Garrisons don't mix with HGs!! That was a great hint!
Hey - when you have HGs and are about to have all your cities pumping out Crusaders soon anyway - why have a garrison at all!
I haven't completed the game yet, but several things struck me - and I may have deviated from the pure ICS:
1) around 80 turns I had 24 cities - started hitting an expansion lule due to my positon on a moderate sized island - the rest being jungle - or small (2-3) tiny islands off the coast -
2) deviated from pure ICS by building MP - so that I could judge my situation and start thinking about conquering (but also to get some pre-reqs to Democracy - because at this stage I was still commited to the pure ICS strat of SoL->Fund and waiting for Dragoons before conquering)
3) once I built MP I decided that it was time to start pumping out units - instead of further expansion - before Democracy->SoL->Fund and before Dragoons.
4) at 24 cities I had ~46 beakers/turn - 12 turn advances - 3 advances shy of Democracy
and felt that although I could force further expansion to speed up this snail paced tech advance, I felt I would be better served by initiating conquering when all the other civs only had Phalanx's and Archers gaurding their cities (and there were only 2+2+2+5+5+8=24 AI cities which needed conquering)
So sue me - I tried ICS and changed my mind in the middle of it to drop the expansion.
I know from reading that one of the worst things to do is to deviate from your plan.
-Crusaders seem just fine to me if attacking early enough - why wait to Dragoons? Sure - it can be a little bit of a pain having to wait an extra turn or so inside the newly conquered city to heal up - that extra hit point of a Dragoon would be nice.
-SoL seems to take too long to get to. Why wait til FUND to pump out units when you can have 3*#cities units with NO PENALTY; that's more than sufficient to conquer, if done early enough. (You can disband those garrisons at this point - and those useless horsemen -already explored map - too if support becomes an issue - I stopped using Leo a long time ago because the AI never attacks me)
-Hey - if you have enough tech to build conquering units & cities to produce them - why continue the expansion?
OK - So maybe these aren't strict rules - definitely situation sensitive - but I'm sensing that some people out there are draining their resources unnecessarily
My philosophy is to explore the tech tree as little as possible to get what you need to conquer (and Monarchy/Trade/Monotheism seems to satisfy this)
Does anyone else feel the way I do?
I did find a lot of things I liked about ICS.
I like 2 pop - a lot! It's like the perfect little city. I like not wasting time irrigating/mining - at lot! I like crowding cities up - it makes roading them up together infinitely faster! 2 food surplus when size 1 and 5 production when size 2 is fine for pumping out units - why wait til you've got 7-10 production in a size 4-5 city when you can have 2ce as many cities. I already used to play FEW improvements (just Temples); now not needing to build those is awesome. I can see how it would be a total waste of production: for the cost of a temple - you could have built another settler which will grow (ok - just forget the fact that the new city can produce more cities for now) to size 2 and give you 5 production as well as some trade - versus being able to support a higher pop in the same city to squeeze out 3 extra production on average - and it will take longer to build up to the new population too.
I wish I had known about the Garrisons not mixing with HGs a long time ago or I would have discovered ICS on my own (very unhappy people are what caused me to stop my expansion early) - it totally makes sense.
I am definitly going to try this AGAIN and AGAIN until I can judge exactly what point to stop expansion - stop researching - and start conquering. Also I know that one weak area I have is in not exploring the map thoroughly early enough to take advantage of as many goodie huts - in this game I didn't get ANY tech from huts - and only hit about 4 or 5 huts on my whole medium island. It may be possible to establish contact with 6 other civs and thus not have to build MP - but right now MP has to be my FAVORITE WoW. (I hate acronyms - MP is Marco Polo's Embasy, BTW
)
I haven't yet completed the game - but it looks promising that I'm going to beat my old 1280 AD record from 2 years ago with my old strategy. I KNOW somebody out there has a completely ridiculous low conquer date - but how low is it. Has nobody tried it - or does it just not challenge people enough - or is it too much of a random element to make scores meaningless?
PS - please forgive me if I violated a post-protocol - this is my first post EVER.
Except for the sleep part - there hasn't been enough of that. All told, I've played civ much less since the wee ones arrived. However, today my daughter refused to nap, so she zonked out about two hours early, right at my son's normal bedtime. The marchioness works evenings. Guess what I did? 
).
