(August 12th, 2013, 00:41)Merovech Wrote: I agree with most of what you posted, though I'm not a personal fan of Elizabeth. Actually, I'd rate her as the 7th best Financial leader and probably the 10th best leader overall. The only place other where I'd disagree with you is I think that you are overvaluing the Hamman and undervaluing starting techs, or at least not mentioning them. The Ottomans are good, imo, but not as good as, say, Egypt.
Interesting claim about your financial leader rankings. Would you mind posting your full list? I'd be interested to see who you have higher over Elizabeth.
True, starting techs are important, but I'm not sure if they should carry as much weight as the UU and UB for a civilization. Both the Ottomans and Egypt start with Agriculture and The Wheel, which are excellent anyway. I'm not sure if I'd rate Egypt over Ottomans ... they're roughly equivalent (in my opinion) in games like this one because while the Egyptian war chariot is clearly better than the Ottoman janissary, the Ottoman Hammam is clearly better than the Egyptian obelisk. To me, the gap is wider with the buildings, since monuments are generally crap and I don't see myself needing prophets, while Hammams are auto-builds in any cities after Mathematics (an early technology). Again, these maps aren't really conducive to early warfare, but I do concede that even a few war chariots could be useful to surprise an opponent.
Then again, the obelisk would be useful if we found an early religion ...
(August 12th, 2013, 02:52)Fintourist Wrote:(August 12th, 2013, 00:41)Merovech Wrote: The Ottomans are good, imo, but not as good as, say, Egypt.
Well, it's situational. When nothing is known about the map, yeah, Egypt is a stronger bet. But e.g. in PBEM45 (not really a spoiler) it was to be expected that map is water-heavy, early aggression unlikely and therefore I have never regretted picking Ottomans instead of Egypt.
Well, hopefully we won't have to resort to early aggression and can focus on building libraries and granaries instead. But war chariots might be useful as a deterrent to other teams for not attacking us.