Zozo001 wrote:
I sorta-kinda agree with this, provided that there is some attempt is made at specifying what "relatively low-cost" means.KFGauss wrote:
"I ... contend that when relatively low-cost, city-capture opportunities exist for acquiring needed resources, expanding your military (your units) and using it to capture & hold cities should have first claim on your investable resources."?
Note that what originally prompted my warming up this old debate was a comment of yours (in another thread), which mentioned no cost - but (to me, at least) suggested rather unconditional superiority of expanding-only over building+expanding.
However, at some point I/they either will have become successful enough to start investing in AI because the mobilization queues are full (and it's not time to annex any place), or will have become unsuccessful enough that it's time to archive that game.
For many game-days in every [Public] game I've played (after my first 2 or 3 games)(no Rising Tides, no Apocalypse, no 4X), each time I've evaluated the first phrase of my sentence, my past experiences pushed me (more and more with each game) in the direction of concluding that [public game] low-cost city-capture opportunities are almost always plentiful, not scarce.
So . . . Each game day when you evaluate what's going on, if you conclude that there are low-hanging-fruit cities to be had, and if your mobilization queues aren't full, then that's another day when you don't construct an AI.
When I want to distill this (too many words) story into a short one-sentence piece of advice, it becomes "Aggressively expanding to acquire more resources is better than building Arms Industries". Obviously some nuance gets sacrificed in that shortening process.