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Here's the complete section on multiplayer strategies. Study hard, or your next game on the Zone might be a short one.
Cheap villagers and strong walls are great strengths for nations taking a defensive posture. You can use those strong walls to keep enemies at bay while your villagers mine stone and gold, construct buildings, and farm. The Shang make wonderful teammates for nations such as the Assyrians, who have very aggressive attributes.
Once you reach the Iron Age, villagers become a stronger offensive force. Purchase siegecraft from your market, and your villagers will become masters at breaking down walls and destroying towers. Next, make your villagers dangerous with the Jihad upgrade, which is available through your temple.
Jihad will not turn your villagers into centurions, but it will give them a bit more bite. Their attack rating will raise from three points to ten, which makes their attack more powerful than that of an axeman or a standard bowman.
The final step is to build multiple town centers and turn your town into a Shang Horde factory. Train at least three priests, then create as many villagers as you can until you reach your population limit. This deadly swarm will be able to overcome nearly any obstacle.
The best way to use this fighting force is to have your priests convert centurions, cataphracts, heavy cavalrymen, and other non-bow and arrow using units as your peasants swarm them. A healthy centurion will kill five or six of your upgraded villagers before dying, but if you send your priest to convert him during the attack, you can preserve villagers and add a very powerful unit to your army.
The Spiral of Death was inspired by a crowd-control device utilized by banks and airport ticket counters, and it was epitomized by Disneyland. Have you ever been to a crowded airport or visited Disneyland? Remember those spots in which lines of people are herded back and forth through chained areas? What if there were archer towers lining the last row of those chained areas? That's the idea behind the Spiral of Death: you guide your enemies to their doom.
Build a city in a protected location, such as a corner of the map or along a forest, anyplace where at least two and possibly three sides of your city are invulnerable to attack. Next, build a row of at least five towers along the exposed edge of your city to protect it. The reason this strategy works best for Babylonian societies is that they have the best towers.
Now build a protective wall extending beyond all of your towers, and leave a gap on one end of the wall to allow your troops to leave the city should they need to. Once that wall is complete, build a wall in front of your first wall, leave just enough space between the walls for your troops to pass through single file, and make the gap in this wall on the opposite side from the gap in the last wall. Now build two more walls with space and gaps.
If you've built your walls correctly, you should have a corridor that ushers troops back and forth as they enter your city. It's very important to place fast units, such as cavalrymen and horse archers, at the city's entrance. You may need to send them out quickly.
When enemies try to enter your city, your towers will have several opportunities to fire arrows at them because the path you build will force them to walk back and forth. By building this path four rows deep, you not only force enemies to pass your towers four times to enter the city, but you also protect your towers form catapult attacks.
Your enemies will likely attempt to raze your Spiral of Death with their catapults, but that's where your cavalry comes in. When the enemy sends catapults to attack your walls, send your cavalry out to attack their catapults. Your cavalry will have no problem scooting through the spiral and neutralizing their attacks.
If you like these hints, check out the book or peruse the available titles online at: http://mspress.microsoft.com/
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