So I tried my first monarch game the last few days and I decided, come hell or high water, that I was going to win via military (something I have not yet done - mac user, just started playing).

I fired up a custom game with only domination and conquest as victory options and played as the aztecs on a standard size continents map with random opponents. so I have basically 3 questions about how people run their military victories:

1) EARLY WARS In the beginning of the game, my continent had only me and egypt so I set my sights on jaguars/barracks and expansion and went after them ASAP. took one city and then had to step back because egypt was starting to build axes. fine, I'll push for axes/horse archers. took another few cities. peace again. finally I beat her to guilds, mass upgraded to knights and wiped her off the planet. so what is the question you ask? why did it take 3 wars to do this? maybe I'm still used to civ 3 where taking one or two cities early would cripple an opponent scientifically but she seemed to keep up pretty well. is this due to monarch difficulty or just how the game is played now? also, is it a symptom that I maybe should have skipped jaguars and gone straight for horse archers and maybe waited a few extra turns to start with over-overwhelming force? (with more than 15 jaguars I thought I was pretty set, she only had 3 decent cities at that point, two more just founded.)

2) ECONOMY!!! how on earth do you keep an economy together if you push for rapid expansion/warring in the early game? I've tried the "cottage spamming" I've read about and my city placements seemed ideal (lots of cottaged floodplains and grassland). WIth 6 cities, I had to pull research down to 30% to not be in the red and capturing egyptian cities made it even worse. any help here would be much appreciated.

3) MID-END GAME so here I am, no more egypt harshing my mellow so I push towards optics (I think) to send off caravels to see who's next on the "soon to be extinct" list. meet up with rome, inca and japan on the other landmass. This is when I discovered, to my dismay, that caravels can only carry one person!! I haven't had much reason to go navy yet so this was quite a surprise, especially as galleys hold 2. How can I run an intercontinental war without galleons? I can't. So I figure, best case scenario is push for military tradition for cavalry and astronomy for galleons. this isn't too hard as I've fixed my economy now that I have the whole place to myself and I have markets/grocers/libraries everywhere and I popped a few free techs from Great people. total of about 15 cities I think at this point. so I try building a huge force of cavs and galleons and I set my sights on inca whose the current low man of the western hemisphere. long story short (I know, not short enough), I end up with one city on the other landmass as a beachhead and now I'm lost as to where to go next. I'm still maintaining a military tech lead but it seems that by the time I put together a decent force, load them up, move them over there, they've caught up with decent defenders. It turns out I eventually wiped everyone out in 2120 by waiting for highend units like tanks, fighters, carriers and battleships and I could have kept a lot of the cities I raised to trigger domination (or conquest, I can never remember which is which) earlier but once I got ICBM's I figured I just had to nuke japan.

So the question on this one? how the hell do you win by either of these victories earlier than I did? I'm at a total loss as to how anyone wins by military before the time limit kicks in. I would have easily won by score as I was more than a thousand points ahead for most of the industrial era on.

I hope that's not too long for everyone to read. thanks in advance!

I'm pretty sure u'll just figure out stuff as u play more. if ur at monarch and ur economy is bothering u, maybe look at things like utilizing bureaucracy/hereditary rule to make a super capital w/ an academy in it.

also it might be useful to check how much science ur actually outputting more often so u get a feel for how badly ur total science rate is going down and not just what is happening to ur slider.

as for the war thing, just another reason jaguars suck:).

I played a monarch game, but it was a great start, (i'll try to get a pic) 3 corns, iron, gems, and two silks, with hills. I build 5 cities, then Monty declared war on me.
My second city got taken then i took it back, but then he took it and destroyed it. I went to peace, then built a army. took monty, then took alexander, then tokawaga. Then i got tanks (1600 AD), i charged into Qin's land taking most of his land. This was all by 1700 AD.

What i think makes a good conquest game, is playing on pangea. This means you don't need to build ships, you've got close neiboughs, and you've got more people to trade with, so your technology is faster. Also playing on higher level, your technology goes even faster, because comps get techs quicker.

I know I'm not the right person to respond to this, as I'm not a particularly great warmonger myself. I'll confine my post to brief responses, as while I grasp your overall predicament, without specifics (i.e. saved games) it's a little hard for me to grasp the intricacies:

1) EARLY WARS ... Catapults? War Elephants? You were right to go with the Axe rush, but any city that was not ideally placed should have been razed. If you were on your own continent with Hatshepsut, settling new cities can be done after the war without fear of land grabs from another AI tribe.

2) ECONOMY!!! ... Raze rather than capture, and get Code of Laws for Courthouses (whip if sticking to Slavery) and/or the Caste System for Specialist Merchants.

3) MID-END GAME ... You're right, Galleons are really the first viable option here. Focus on military technologies (you're right in pursuing Military Tradition, but Rifling and Chemistry should also be in the mix) so you can muster 40 or 50 modern units and hit your intercontinental enemy with a massive mixed SoD (Catapults or Cannons, Grenadiers, Riflemen, Cavalry) that will be able to withstand 'the kitchen sink' attack that you'll get in the first three turns of landing on that forested hill. Keep pumping out units at home, and return with another massive SoD twenty or thirty turns later.

ackkk 3 wars? How early was this war?? 2500bc? 1500bc? 1ad? ( normally like to steal workers from a neighbour AI on Monarch now. This normally leaves them producing another worker and slows the AI down.

Playing Rome at mo on Epic. My science went down to 10% but i have about 10+ cities at 1ad and my science is back to 40%. Taken out Spanish and English with monty and arabs left on island. I did manage to start a religion amd i benefited from organised trait.

On monarch if you have only one AI on island useful to leave alive till alphabet. Steal a few techs like archery off the AI. The AI is a bit better on the military/ expansion side. Although they do still leave 2 archers in smaller cities that axemen can roll over normally. 3-4 axemen should take the average city. You do need to watch demographics on monarchy to note AI military size. I like a few militray producing cities if im falling behind on power.

End game i produce about 10-12 galleons or transports and drop about 20-30 units to start a war. On a good game i normally have a tech lead from large number of cities. Come 1600ad when im looking to channel hop. I dont normally build caravels. The AI normally lets me know where it is once they swap maps.