(July 7th, 2015, 10:31)T-hawk Wrote: Oxford Dynamite for Artillery is the standard play for conquering. Rifles aren't super important, siege is where the real military breakpoints are. Although it may not be feasible to delay Oxford that long against conquered lack-of-universities. So just Oxford whatever gets towards Dynamite the best, if that's Fertilizer.
Yeah, its about 50 turns of research until we could Oxford Dynamite. The RA and possibly bulbing the great scientist might bring that down to 40 but that's still too long.
BUT, we have a big problem with eras. Originally I was thinking take Fertilizer not just for itself, but for Industrial city state bonus.
Our muskets and treb now cost 3x hammer cost in faith. Apparently they are subject to the same era-cost-ifnlation as missionaries and pagodas. I was not expecting that since the base hammer costs go up as well for more advanced units...
That would mean 900 faith for a rifle (which we may skip anyways) and 1000 faith for an artillery. Just entering the industrial will raise muskets from 450 faith to 600 and cannons from 540 to 720 I think.
Also, Mandate of Heaven is useless for us. Now that I read the fine print, it does say "religious units" but I sure missed that before, and I bet rest of the team did too (it seemed we were all in agreement this was a key policy).
This makes things MUCH harder than I thought. It's drastic enough I wonder if we should relax the variant rule on upgrades some? Any other ideas?