[Beorn]

I'm slowly getting the hang of food and specialists, although I'm still not quite at the point of figuring wether making any GP's anywhere is good. I know it's got to be, but I don't get how it beats working tiles yet. I'll figure that in good time I guess. I also noticed that this thread has nearly more views than my PBEM spoiler already, so I'll go work on that.

One thing I'm really not sure about is how to handle shields. It seems to me that shields are provided by hills and unworked forests - where unworked forests suck as tiles in general.

9- I am guessing that you put up over-specialized cities, 1-2-3 near hills to push military out, 1-2-3 near food to spam cottages and push science out (using specialists for shields and GP's) and the rest will just try and contribute to the economy. Or is this completely wrong and is there a balanced tiles approach to it all? I know it is more complex than that, but still, there's got to be a mindset to start from.

10- I take it massing one type of units is going to be met with huge resistance in the matter of either axemen or pikemen early, and so forth along the tech tree. So besides the mandatory pike and archer for stack protection, can one actually use combined arms efficiently against an opponent that has both metal and horses available? If chariots hard-counter axes and spears hard-counter horse archers, is it feasible to meet at even forces and pull a conquest, or do you have to wait for the time when you have a ressource advantage or a large production lead? Or would catapult collateral take care of it all?

11- Scout to size 2, then settler or worker first? The C3C player in me read an outrageous number of worker first starts around, but since you don't start with one, it is probably very sensible.