Brilliant Victory on Hard with Sparta no Civ Points

[mynameschamberlain]

Just wanted everyone to know this is possible. After 90 hours playing the game I finally cracked it. Happy to give advice to anyone feeling it is impossible.

[SwartzMaster]

I play SO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good with Athene but so useless with Sparta, I literaly use the points almost every time they are available but still can't achieve brilliant victory.

How do you deal with the over population from level 3 Messini conquer without losing your precious Spartans, should I wait before I capture it until i have enough production for bigger farms?
What cities are best farmed before conquering?
Do use tax collectors or just skip that entire tree and sell soliders?
When do you unify?
Trades comes in play before unification?

[mynameschamberlain]

My biggest pieces of advice are these:

Choose the production bonus before you begin. You need this in order to build the 500 person farm on Turn 6. Also do all the Spartan bonuses except the one about tax collectors: you should be selling your army whenever you don't need it so that you won't be spending upkeep on them.

You should make Messinin your colony on turn 5 (or 4) and you should have enough culture at that point to at least make the wheel and the mining tech. If you didn't win tech in your battles you can sell half your army for envoys and cultural exchange with athens (quickly allying with athens is also important because of their alliance bonus). Once you build the first mine you can fill it up and next turn thanks to your production bonus you can build the bigger farm. About the plague: I've discovered that for some reason, if you save and quit on turn 5, then come back in and play the turn, you won't always get the plague on turn 6, and then you will have all ~700 pop on that turn.

On turn 6 immediately start pumping population followed by production. Your goal is to get Roads and Well by the time the first dudes get ready to attack. Keep making population and production but make sure you make about 775 troops before the attack comes, then stay inside the city when they do. Then focus exclusively on production and population until you create all the available buildings: do not invest in any culture or gold buildings, but do use the generals you've acquired for cultural exchanges and alliances. Once your population is huge you can make troops crazy fast run over the six people necessary for first unifying mission.


I'm not sure what you mean by which cities are best to "farm." I never use the plunder option if this is what you mean, I just ally with two or three of them and conquer the rest after building all of the farms and population buildings available andthen making a ton of soldiers.

You hve to use tax collectors imo in order to get enough gold to bribe the scythians and the huns and then to win out at the end. But I do not focus on gold or culture until I have to; that is, first comes production and population, then military, then culture and gold once six nations are united and you're just waiting around to get tech level 30.

I also sell troops through trading (before unification, as soon as there is no tech I need more urgently), and also sell them by dismissing when I need gold or envoys, and ALSO frequently let the kingdom go bankrupt! This gives you a huge cash bonus and the negative trade off is minimal--in a typical game I will go bankrupt twenty times or more easily. It is all or nothing with gold: you should either be hoarding it ruthlessly or ignoring it completely imo.

In the game I won brilliant victory I unified the first turn I could. I had so much money when Scythians showed up that I mowed them down that first turn, then united as soon as the 10th nation showed up. However I have since heard that if you wait until After the Scythians 20 turn clock runs out, you get 1 million cumulative bonus upon transitioning for every turn you wait after that. I haven't experimented with this yet.

[mynameschamberlain]

One more thing: there is a tactic for alexander's invasion where you donate 2K gold until you are almost bankrupt, go bankrupt, then use the money you get to do it again. This way you can assure 100% chance without ever having to sacrifice troops or population