What I noticed is you can keep on making tribe members after the 5 population required to go to the next age. This means that if you split up and try to get as much food as possible, you can get a good 10 or 12 units before you are too far behind, making 2 or 3 outposts along the way. When you go to the next era, they all get upgraded to scouts. 

Vs the ai in the Lucy open dev setup, you can steam-role nearby cities by sieging them with 5 or more scouts and after a few turn the city should be weak enough for them to take it. You then have plenty of time to pick off their outposts or let them upgrade to cities and then take them yourself. This will then put you far ahead of the ai that are not near you, which will let you overcome them with your stronger econ.

Maybe a balance to this is the have the ai keep a scout or two on the city to defend it(this should buy enough time for the rest of their scouts to return), or nerf the damg scouts do to the city during siege and/or damg they do to the city given units?

Agreed - there needs to be some type of "leveling" of the advantages in delayed era advancement: limits to number of tribes that can be supported when converting to scouts, some kind of exchange ratio, starting defender units in cities - something to balance out the build up of tribes in the Neolithic era, or greater incentive to advance earlier.

YichenZhu wrote:
I went much crazier, having 70+ scouts and 8 outputs, 1000+ influence before going to ancient. I kept ransacking AI outposts and killing AI units in neolithic so that all AI in my continent basically can not even build cities (while AI in the other continent can safely survive until the last era when I can cross oceans)

Hah, nicely done. Pretty valuable info for Amplitude, that you can go that crazy

One way to prevent abusing the Neolithic would be that you can't kill units as a tribe, only chase them off.

I also think you shouldn't be able to spam outposts and gobble up influence during era 0, and instead transition to Ancient the moment you build your first outpost, so there is a tradeoff between continuing to expand your tribe vs settling at the best possible location.

Going to post a vid where you don't have to go *that* crazy and still be ok, basically highlight a couple tweaks they may want to do