The following guide is not for the faint of heart. This way of play can be slow, tedious and is heavily reliant on others as you'll only be producing one of the four Luxury Goods in Wine. Why Wine you ask? Wine is the one Luxury Good that your Empire simply cannot live without. If you run out of Marble, your Building projects are merely delayed until you get more. Crystal Glass runs dry? Well that just means you won't be doing Workshop upgrades, upgrading Temples, recruiting Spies, or conducting Experiments until you acquire more. Ditto Sulfur with respect to Military production. Yet if you run out of Wine, your Town Satisfaction takes a **MAJOR** hit since to keep the populace happy, you have to rely ever more on the Wine Tavern because the Museum, on most worlds, simply isn't enough to keep the masses happy. There is the Temple, which this strategy does permit as an option, but the bulk of your Town Happiness comes from 1 Structure and Luxury Resource(Wine).
Since this is a "Wine-Only" strategy, each town in your Empire will be producing the same Luxury Good. As a result, each and every town in your Empire is self-sufficient. You will **NEVER** have to move Wine around for Tavern upkeep because your Towns can simply produce what they need and then some. If you need more Wine for Palace/GR upgrades, simply bump production up and move in what you need to proceed with the upgrade. The key to this strategy is what to do about the other 3 Luxury Goods. Well, there are really only three options:
1) Trading: This is arguably the most consistent and easiest means of acquiring what you need. If you set up shop in an area with people willing to sell you Marble, Crystal Glass or Sulfur, then this is the best way to acquire it. It will certainly be more expensive than mining it yourself like a typical player would but that is the price you pay for Wine-Only. You can offset this cost by selling surplus Wine on the open Market, often at discount rates to lure in buyers.
2) Piracy: The Pirate Fortress need only be level 1 for this strategy to work. Since you likely won't have a very big Military, if one at all given the lack of Sulfur with this strategy, you would do best to become a Feeder for someone else. Then after every Piracy round, your Pirate, provided they place in the top 50 that is, will cut you some of the loot that you can then use to grow bigger. The more reliable feeder you happen to be, the bigger the cut you'll get. Since you'll almost always be smaller than your Pirate, this is an easy way to gain luxury resources.
3) Pillaging: This is arguably the most profitable but also the hardest given your lack of Sulfur. If you manage to find some inactive to pillage, by all means take advantage of it but typically this option usually resorts to fighting Barbarians or no one at all.
Early-Game Strategy: Now when starting on a world, you're randomly placed on an island. Depending on your start dictates how you will proceed. I find that you take a look at your surroundings and if you find yourself at the edge of the world that it might best to move into the interior or 50:50 area where everyone else happens to be. The Wine-Only strategy permits two ways of playing it: One-Island or Multi-Island. The one-island Strategy means your entire Empire is on one island. All Saw Mill/Vineyard donations are amplified due to every town in your Empire benefiting from it while the Multi-Island strategy means that the impact of donations is lessened but you have access to multiple Wonders(if you so choose to do so).
Best Wonder: Athena. You won't be doing much, if any fighting, so Hades and Hephaestus are all but wasted on you. Furthermore, you're unlikely to find an open Hephaestus spot due to the Wonder's popularity. Poseidon is the next most picked Wonder for Ship speed so you're unlikely to find one sparsely populated if you're going for an Empire on one island. Then there's Hermes, which while beneficial in the late game is all but useless to you until you get your Trade Ports to a high enough level to where that 200% boost to loading speed will have a major impact. Demeter is all but pointless since you're Wine-Only and won't be constantly recruiting Military. There is the Colossus to repel Attackers but that requires that you be online during the fight to stick it to them and even then, there are ways around it given its long cooldown. Ares needs a rework quite frankly so that basically leaves, by default, Athena. Athena can yield 24/7 Safe Storage protection and at level 5 amplifies it by a factor of 400%. If you got 4 Warehouses at level 40(160 total), that takes your 76,900 Safe Storage and amplifies it to 384.5k! Grab the Padlock premium upgrade and you're now at 769k. That's resources that players can't touch, allowing you to stockpile gobs and gobs of resources that you can protect with a Wall, a Ram Ship and a single Spearman to force a prolonged fight for basically nothing.
Ideal Town Layout: The game yields you 14 Build spots(15 with Bureaucracy) and I find the following setup to be the most ideal:
Palace/Governor's Residence
Tavern
Carpenter
Architect
Optician
Firework's Test Area
4x Warehouse
Academy/Dump
Hideout
Temple
Forester House
Flex
Each and every town is going to need at least 4 Reducers. Carpenter and Architect are a given to reach the upper tier Building levels while Optician and Fireworks Test Area drastically reduce the cost on the Dump and Palace/GR upgrades. Since you're Wine-Only, the need to reduce Wine consumption in the Tavern is all but moot since you can simply produce what you need and sell surplus. Hideout is there to deter outsiders since most won't bother attacking if they can't easily find out what you have, although having a **Skeleton Military(or better) is recommended** since 0 MS invites blind-faith raids. The Dump takes the Academy spot only after you're satisfied with your Research or if you need the spot for Storage space on your next Building project. The flex spot is typically one-city wonders: Trade Post, Workshop, Embassy, Barracks. Rest get Winegrowers to produce surplus Wine. With the update granting ever bigger Building levels, the possibility for 1 to 2 Town spots is potentially in the cards. If that happens, a 5th Warehouse is going to take the first build slot with a 2nd Dump taking the 2nd so as to achieve higher building levels. The flex spot will have to be sacrificed for the 3rd Dump if you choose to go for upper tier building levels, hence it's recommended that you do upper tier projects one city at a time.
Is this strategy for me? As i said above and to answer this question bluntly, it's not for everyone. Yet I hope what I've detailed above is enough to give you courage to try it. It's certainly a great pick for Premium Piracy players as they can convert resources and Pirate like no other(with warping and Piracy rewards really giving you a ton to work with).
