I have found a good strat to really lower the enemy's economy at the beggining
:1. Build up 5 laborers at the start. If there's no hunting get your Pharaoh and laborers to get chickens. Keep building laborers until you have around 10 on food (remember to hunt).
2. While your laborers are getting food at the start, put the hyena to Ctrl+1 and the Priest to Ctrl+2. Scout a smaller circular path with the priest and a larger one with the hyena. If you find an: Aurochs, Elephant, Water Buffalo, or a Rhinoceros, immediately convert them.
3. The eleventh laborer and the Pharaoh (or if you converted, one of the food laborers) should start making a house. If the laborer was a food one, bring him back to food. If its a new one, put him to wood.
4. Build 3 or 4 villagers to get wood, also, or 2 if you want to advance quickly. Immediately build 5 more villies and put them on gold. If you run out of pop, take a wood laborer and make him build 3 or 4 houses. Research Pickaxe.
5. Get another laborer with the house builder (and empower the houses if you really have a problem with pop) to build a temple. If there are lots of animals on the map build as many priests as you can to convert.
6. If you are low on gold, get your pharaoh to empower and make more laborers to get gold. You should have a reasonable amount of food now.
7. If you made enough houses you should have a lot of the elephants or whatever big things on the maps. Remember its the pop that really plays the part here.
8. Build obelisks around the big animal areas, just incase some villagers start trying to hunt them.
9. Hopefully this should work. Im not expecting it to be like any guide, or not even a guide that anyone should find useful. But all I know it works for me. You can try this in other ages. It will really stop your enemy from gettting food from hunting and they have to waste wood/gold on farms, and get their food faster (AND use the farm upgrades).
10. Wait about the food, you might want to get 11 laborers and empower only the granaries with the pharaoh. By the way, if you want, you can keep the converted animals with priests if you like for protection. AND you can get some small animals to attack villagers somewhere. It actually helps.
11. If your building laborers have no task, make them build a monument or two. By the time your in classic you should get feral by then.
And um, if you really like converting, your likes will become dislikes if you convert animals in watering hole. There's a large amount of them, so convert the lions so they dont distract your labororers if they are hunting cranes or so. Speaking of cranes, they act as distractions, too. Their armor is probably one of the best compared to other ones. I have never converted one, but i saw the armor of them, and if it's combined with feral, they have around 35% armor. They are also pretty quick.
When you convert it's best to think about getting the smaller attackers, like wolves or hyena's, first. Dont convert giraffes for attack because they give lots of food. Even though elephants do too, you can use them for either hunting or siege (just like war elephants obviously).
Hippos are much better than ellies. They dont have that much of good armor, but they have as much attack, and are a lot quicker.
Lions are basically the cat versions of hyena's and wolves. Believe me, they have only like 60 or 70 HP and hyena's and wolves almost have that.
Try thinking on advancing quickly, if you do, you can get some hyena's to scout for you (or gazelle) or delete the gazelle if you are low on pop. Make sure that you dont convert too many animals. I lost the last game in watering hole because I made too many converted animals and i could barely make any slingers. So I had kind of wasted my time on that.
By the time you are in classical get 3 extra villies for each resource if you like (maybe 1 or 2 for wood) so that you can get more gold to make priests. Remeber that Nephthys can get cheaper priests so you may want to save some favor for that.
Make lots of priests when you are in classical, about 5 or so. If you are thinking on the crowned cranes, definately get lots. If you are thinking on hippos or buffalo, forget it, you'll need less. About number 5, you dont need to build priests in that age.
When your priests are travelling, you should decide whether you are going to leave your animals back at the TC to hunt or protect or just build up on, or make them stay with the priest to protect them.
If there is a map with not too many big animals (around 15-20 aurochs or less) convert them all. Also, remember that aurochs are only three population! They also have 300 food, good attack an armor to actually defend.
When you think you aren't getting favor fast enough for classical and so that feral can be researched, you should never be afraid to use resources on one of the monuments.
WITH ALLIES:
Send a few lions or wolves or something to protect an allies distant gold mine or hunting area. It worked with me! You should do the same for yourself.If you have bears, they are always the perfect villie distracter. If you have found a mining camp/ox cart/store house, destroy it with the bears, and destroy the villagers there too. If they kill the bears, ignore it. Just remember that you got some of their villies and you got some of your needed pop back.If you are waiting to find food with villies, immediately build a house or two and empower it to make it go faster. It's very helpful and will make you able to get the food faster.
Thanks, tomdude102.
Official Member of the Heartless Crew.
Heartless_Lich
[This message has been edited by tomdude102 (edited 01-06-2003 @ 11:03 AM).]