My third go at noble, barbarians are wiping off my improvements all the time, and my units are falling behind my nearest enemies. Any ideas what to do next? (I hope this is the correct forum to ask, and that my savegame are attached here:-)

There don't seem that many barbarians around. Is this the reason Berlin is unimproved? You need more workers to get all the unimproved land into use, especially round Berlin.

The first, and most obvious problem is that you don't have bronze working. There's no point trying to research feudalism (especially given how long it will take you) without this. Bronze working should be at the absolute latest in the first half dozen techs you research, and probably much earlier. You need it for forest chops, to find copper, and to get axemen and spearmen. This is the source of most of your problems here.

You have a fair amount of land under your control, and expanding seems unadvisable until your cash flow is rather better. Try improving your existing cities before further settlers, except possibly to grab the gold/floodplain site on the border north of Munich. By the way, Munich is going to be rather a problem city, due to it's horrendously food poor location. You'd have done better heading further to the South or East to get some more farmable land in range. As it is you won't even be able to use more than one of the gold tiles, or the marble, without it stagnating completely.

1. Berlin have survived several waves of barbarians. Its improvement have not...

2. Bronze: interesting. I have run after religion and easy tech (fast to aquire)

3. 4/5 cities in a box-shape seems to be the best starting position in this game. in civ 3 I tried long strings of cities across continents with success.

4. Munich: agree. this is not good. But the computer gave the site a blue ring... Besides, the aztec city is too close up and will put a heavy cultural pressure on me. Aztecs dont like me already:-(

5. Main lesson; bronze, and that the first 30 minutes of the game are the most important, even more than in civ3.

Thank you for opinion. I retire and try to get better locations of my first cities:-)

1. Barbarians - don't ever, ever, let them bring the fight to your cities. Build enough units to have them stationed on the outlying borders of your empire, ideally fortified on a forested hill. This does three things: 1) lets you intercept barbarians before they get close enough to pillage your improvements, 2) directly suppresses the number of barbarians that appear by pushing back the fog of war, and 3) gives you 'free' experience up to level 4 with these defenders, which will strengthen you in your inevitable disputes with neighboring Civs.

2. Yes to Bronze. The only things that ever get priority over bronze working are: fishing if I have a fish tile to work, and either meditation or polytheism if I think I can get a religion. Chopping forests to crank out your initial settlers and workers gives you a 20-30 turn advantage in early development. Perhaps equally important is the fact that without Bronze Working, you don't know where the Bronze is, and therefore you can't make an educated decision where early cities should go. Without Bronze, in many many games you will be at a huge military disadvantage.

3. Box shapes are good, its true, because the distance penalty to your economy is large.

4. Rarely heed the blue circles. Think about it this way: the AI settles based on its own blue circles; one of your advantages as a human player is being able to ignore them and place cities better.

5. Yep.

For me bronze working is either 1st or 2nd on my list. I may get fishing, agriculture (if I don't have it already) or animal husbandry first depending on resources available, but after that it's bronze. I would go out of my way sometimes to settle a 2nd city just so I can get copper early. The ability to build axemen early is essential to barbarian control.

If you don't see copper anywhere in the vincinity (I have had this happen to me a few times), then get horses and build chariots. If you don't have horses either, then research archery and get archers. Use them to guard outskirts. If possible, place archers in forests / hills / jungle, as terrain defense bonus really makes a difference.