What do you think of this:
1. Play Bantu and get 3 cities asap. Space them to maximize your national boundries so you can get 3 caravans going right away.
2. Work on maximizing wealth as you go through the ages - build temples, keep caravan limits etc. Use your wealth to get more scholars and maximize knowledge production in 3 universities asap.
3. Scout well. Bantu get a speed advantage in scouting so take advantage of it.
4. Keep building your extra cities as they come available, since they have u discount.
5. Don't research military tech until you need it for age advance. Your population limit will be sky high even if you are two military techs behind your opponent.
6. When you get to enlightenment, build a lot of heavy calv. (i.e. 20 or more)
7. As soon as you can research Industrial do so. Your initial bonus should let you reach Industrial age before your opponent, if you play it right.
8. As soon as Industrial comes up, buy up all the oil you can! This will give you a huge advantage, and make it prohibitively expensive for your opponent to try the same thing when he hits industrial.
9. Upgrade your calv to tanks. Also upgrade infantry, machine gunners and seige. Attack right away, you should have a HUGE advantage over your Enlightenment era opponent.
10. Get your oil production going and keep reinforcing your tanks/machine guns/seige.
11. In Modern era get Eiffel tower for even more oil fun. (Also, supercollider in Information age can take care of your oil woes, but the game should be over long before then). Get Modern/Information fighters, since they have a significant bonus.
Thats it. Wonders which work well for this strat:
- Collosseum. Gives the valuable wealth upgrade.
- Porcelin Tower. Gives market purchasing bonus, to get more oil per wealth. Only get this one, though, if you can take advantage of the primary shipbuilding bonus.
- Eiffel Tower
- Supercollider
IMO, Bantu makes a great Wonder building nation because your population cap bonus allows you to have a band of 20 roaming civilians working on various building projects. The population benefit alone is reason enough to play Bantu, let alone the extra city, cheaper cities, and movement bonuses (and nice special units).
Anyway, thats it. Any problems or counters that can think of for this idea?
pawntificate