the civ bonuses are kind of dysfunctional (because a civ without early units or any power in mobile units needs to spread out all over the map to use its bonuses). and the units aren’t that special because knight is so overpowered. the elephant stuff is okay in fights, but opponents can just chose not to fight them and they’ll get to 200 pop before delhi does and cover way more of the map while they do it. but the free techs carry everything
you don’t need 9 scholars. you just need enough to mostly finish one age’s techs once you get to the next one (that can be as little as 2 scholars). even with longer research times, you’ll still get a faster return on investment than opponents (because your investment was 0). the only really lagging building is the blacksmith, so you can make extra of those (it’s cheaper than scholars)
this UI doesn’t explain this well, but the mosque speed boost can spread beyond its radius if you chain certain buildings (eg. military buildings and blacksmiths). so you can basically influence everything with just 1 mosque, regardless of how much free space is around the mosque. this helps a lot when your mill and lumber camp and mining camp are spread out
delhi feudal units are awful, so if you don’t make too many scholars and get the tech that lets you garrison scholars in production buildings, you might be able to get to a counter unit fast enough (you might also just die before you can). i don’t know why you need to reach age 3 to counter units from age 2, but that’s the game they made
the annoying thing is that it takes too many clicks to keep buildings going, and the civ is so far behind that you don’t really have spare resources to just make extra scholars and avoid that. in order to not die immediately, you have to keep juggling priests around buildings (and a bunch of other tasks) and also juggling your buildings between incomplete techs and production (so that they’re never idle). and then by the time you do have resources, you no longer have population space, so you have to juggle the scholars to some other task or delete them. it’s just more garbage clicking that gives us arm/wrist injuries. even if you don’t even need a certain tech, it’s suboptimal not to research it during every spare second
i didn’t find a key modifier to start a production or technology at the front of the queue (so that existing research automatically gets preempted), so you have to actually cancel it and remember to add it back to the queue. i didn’t find a way to ungarrison one scholar, so to do something as simple as moving 1 scholar from a mosque to a stable, you have to unload all of them, put 2 back in the mosque, and put 1 in the stable, and they don’t even unload to the gather point you set. every single age advancement brings a dozen different things to click on all at once, and the interface doesn’t let you queue them in advance. the whole UI of the game is inadequate for actually playing it
