Greece Alternate start guide

Some tips on alternative start when playing Alexander on high difficulty

Goal of this start

This start is based on making a wide civilization which is very strong in mid game and allows you to snowball easy to late game from that at expense of early game on High difficulty .

Policies

It focuses mainly on liberty early on for expansion but doesn't go straight to it. instead it first adopts honor for bonus damage vs barbarians and bonus culture from defeating them. This allows you to defend your borders with only 1-2 units as well as being able to complete quests for barbarians for CS which this start is focused around. And bonus to culture from defeating barbarian units compensates not getting liberty first.
From there you go into liberty until you get settler and a worker after that just adopt patronage and then finish liberty. from there on you should just take what suits you the best. personally recommend going tradition since I prefer building stable instead of just wide. And since you will be an ally of all CS you encountered by this point you wont be lacking resources.

Building

you should start with monument in your first city since this is a culture heavy start. after that get worker and shrine since you want to form a religion fast. By then you should have your second city up depending on your resources ether get in it start with a building to augment your resources or go warrior, monument and shrine. for 1st city recommend augmenting your growth or getting another settler depending on your situation. At this point you should have 2 warrior units and 2 workers (1 from liberty).

Units

With your first warrior unit it is necessary to meet 2 pairs of CS if playing a large map or at least 1 on smaller ones. after that you just need to actively scout and destroy barbarians all throughout early game since this will boost your culture and gold which plays an important part in this start.
You should have 2 worker units early on which is usually enough but if you feel you need more or just want more you can take some from CS before you start doing their quests.

City States

Since this start is all about allying with CS as soon as you can it's very important to pay intention to CS quests. you should early on have 75% reduction to influence loss which will allow you to become ally fast and gain some of those very important resources to catch up with high difficulty AI. Try to do all barbarian quests since it's two birds with on stone for you. Since you actively search and destroy barbarian camps anyway you should have some extra gold so look for those bonus gold quests. otherwise just get settlers with it. since you build two shrines in your first two cities you should form a religion relatively soon. from then on snowball should start. as soon as a CS adopts your religion you stop losing influence which means 2 quests and you are an ally with it probably for the rest of the game since it will just keep stacking up.

Concusion

If you manage to get through early game with just 2 warriors and 2 workers those bonuses from CS will boost your civilization in all aspects to a point that you will be able to catch up easy with rest of the AI. bigger the map and more CS there are more insane snowball will be to a point that you will be able to go for which ever victory you want.

Note

This is just a small guild in which I wanted to share my experience playing Alexander.
This is the first guide I made so I would appreciate any constructive criticism or simply ways to improve it. I'm playing on doing another playthrough like this soon to maybe improve the guide, at which point I will be checking your comments for improvements

[Peace-enforcer]

Also don't save gold. keep your self as an ally of as many CS as you can since they are your source of culture and science. Unless you want to go domination victory you don't really need gold for anything else. You can usually defend your borders with 3-4 ranged units against even the largest attacks, if you aren't falling behind in tech that is. Also recommend not accepting embassy or open borders from any AI. they usually don't declare war if you don't provoke it and if they don't know your army status.

[Coolcrumbshark]

Ok thanks

[Peace-enforcer]

If you are playing on a large map, try going deeper into patronage to get bonus science from CS before going to tradition. It will let you catch up to AI faster in technology,

[Coolcrumbshark]

(Thats on quick, btw, and it was a good start too...)

[Coolcrumbshark]

Its pretty good, but it doesn't seem to work on deity for me. WIth the two shrines and a faith pantheon i wasn't even close to getting a religion. Turn 74 and still in last place in everything, despite a pretty good guide, so yeah...

[Peace-enforcer]

Just finishing a deity difficulty like this. Don't play if you like a challenge in your games!
Even tho I had a terrible start where just before I got my settler out another civilization placed their new city in a way I was blocked off on a small half island until I got enough military strength to conquer the city while my settler was just hanging around. I was still able to get 100 science, 120 gold and 85 culture per turn when I hit renaissance era, allowing me to snowball the game in every aspect from there on. I'm finishing it now while leading in every aspect except score. And that was on deity difficulty huge map...