Strategy Tips
Better to build your vassals near (or better to say surrounded by) hills and woods (even placing them on those hexes is valuable), starting capital do not really need extra food, but they need production to build all the building to expend (unless you are a seafarer and you have great spots for fishing regions – there is a lot of gold from them).
You can establish an outpost in a deep wood region, surrounded by 5-6 hexes of wood. If you need to claim adjacent hexes to connect with the border, use a cultural option to upgrade that outpost to your level 2 town for the region. Upgrade all the wood hexes with logging camps and designate the town as a lumber town. Each logging camp passively produces x (level of town) Hammers per adjustment, so with 6 camps in the 3rd age, that’s 12 passive production without needing any population. This can be boosted by an additional 50% using “local reforms.” So, yes, woods are not just useless blobs.
Similarly, you can do the same with 6 grass/hills hexes, upgrading them with clay pits/quarries/mines. However, this will require more improvement points, and the upgraded versions are much further ahead in time compared to wood. Upgraded logging camps provide an additional 4 production each, which also multiplies when occupied by populations. For example, a cloversix upgraded may produce 6×3 (town level) + 6×4 (raw hammers) + 6 logs (12 hammers) = 42 raw hammers (+21 extra from local reforms buff) + 6 logs for books.
You may build an outpost anywhere with no hills and woods to upgrade it into castle in middle ages and after orgonized religion reaserched you may build abbeys at those castle hexes as many as you want (3 max you will need from one castle) and chain it to any region that need sacred scripts…(cause you know, why you should pruce them in hard way by pops when you may let virtual monks do the job done?).
Easiest way to achieve victory by far for any difficulty (master at least) is taking +culture=>spartans=>kill a neighbor (spartans are unstopable)=>(extra step if you fail to claim 3 wonders and killed 6 enemy units before you start researching a normal/golden age – just wait for an ai to get a normal)=>age of conquest =>pick a religion asap=>build castles with abeys if you need=>take crusaders asap=>conquere the world with “Deus Vult” all over the map (you know…you can just popup an army of 4 crusaders by culture event on any your soil (outpost/castle)…~300 power army…nothing can stop that in that time period…and you get insane culture bonuses from religion and conquered holy places)=>age of harmony is apon us (done on master difficulty) (tried few others – didn’t like them, not as broken).
Very pro tip
Use merchants! I mean it use them on best ai and build markets…and do not forget! To change goods for bricks (2hammers2shovels)=>iron(5hammers)=>instruments (8hammers) in each region!…and then even reroot them to new developing regions (I had a 200 hammers per turn at some point in developing new region).
Bonus Tips
Scout Cavalry sometimes has greater visibility range than Warbands, and make for excellent “screening” units to give you a few turns heads up on approaching Barbarians.
Scout Cavalry has a “teleport back to your territory safely” ability for 5 Exploration XP
Don’t defend your Towns with Cavalry units: they have a chance of automatically retreating if they are losing a battle, which lets the enemy destroy your Town.
Local Reforms is massively powerful on your Capital, and the extra Culture income will make the next Culture power happen sooner.
You can “bank” Negative Chaos by triggering the Propaganda Culture Power. The accumulated Negative Chaos acts as a buffer, delaying or prevent Chaos events like Rebellions.
Towns will automatically create roads to other Towns, Capitals, and Independent Cities within a certain range. If you garrison your towns, you can daisy chain units, moving the garrisoned unit from Capitol->Town 1, Town 1’s garrison->Town 2, Town 2’s->Second City, letting you move a unit 2-3x further in a single turn.
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