I can win almost every time on difficulties up to Prince. But for some reason when I hit monarch everything just goes to hell. I've won ONCE on Monarch with Ethiopia but I think that was just a fluke, cause I can't even get close with the other ones. I just had favorable matchups with Oromo Warriors(who doesn't) or something.

It seems like I can't expand far enough cause of maintenance. But the AI can have 500 cities and not miss a beat!

And whenever I finally pull even with techs after countless trades and beelines, a few turns later the AI's have blown by me yet again. They all trade with each other even if they hate each other.

It just doesn't make any damn sense. I know I have to be doing something wrong cause people win even on the hardest one. I've looked up strategies but they seem to be in general and lots of that stuff is harder to pull off(of course) on these difficulties. There's gotta be a lot things I am missing, so maybe some people could post some general higher difficulties suggestions in here and give me some tips on how to maintain that pace.

I know I should use slavery to make up for production and I understand city specialization. Thanks for any help.

Look to the strategy forum and read through some of the Immortal level games. Some of them are very detailed and will give you some good insight into things you can do (a lot) differently.

Playing at different difficulty levels changes the actual game. I'm told on immortal you intentionally research things you can trade to the AI. On Monarch (my current level where I win consistently), doing this isn't optimal, because they tech too slowly for it to be viable. I am probably not a monarch player if I just go building style, but since I war so much I usually trounce monarch AI's, AI sucks at war.

If you want to step up level of play, play shadow games with one that someone is walking through and read the strategies. I can't think of a faster way to learn.

Be prepared to give some things up. Have a look at the wonders you always build on Prince level, the prize-granting techs you always get to first, the religions you always found, etc. Now give some of them up and focus on the basics instead: your economy, your military, diplomatic relations.

Forget religion and most of the wonders! If you really must have a religion or wonder you should crush some fool who has what you want! Make an army and focus on money!!!!! Whip and chop your stupid peasants so you can create a massive army of axes/swords to decimate your close neighbors. Remember if your at war and you cant afford to take more cities, don't be afraid to pillage and burn them to the ground! Just try not to burn any cities with wonders. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS NOT TO OVER EXPAND! You do that and you lose EVERY time.

I will definitely check the strategy forum.

Yeah I usually can't get religions anyway cause they get em so fast. I did once, I got hinduism but your production is so terrible compared to the rest you can't get it spread. YOu'll just end up hated by everyone and youll waste money producing missionaries. Better to hop on the bandwagon of someone else.

And same with the wonders I couldn't get them if I wanted to. I can chop a couple of em at the start, ether pyramids or great wall.

That thing with researching techs just so you can trade em to other guys..I already do that! I always go after Iron Working and Metal Casting and then backload using those. I guess it's zero sum in the end, but it is viable for what it is. They just blaze in front of me.

Maybe I am overexpanding. I hate razing cities though cause then a bunch of their guys come running out at me and they get an instant military boost. And then my tired stack will have to face those guys and I'll rebuilding the military again.

That's the thing, I feel like I understand it all really well it just never works out when I play except for that one time. I guess I should be more aggressive, I am always aggressive on the lower difficulties but it's harder to do so on Monarch cause they'll out-tech you and have much better defense. ANd if you build tons of units you can't maintain em and they'll start disbanding due to low money.

I'll try razing the cities next game I play. That's probably a big reason I find myself in a hole.

That thing with researching techs just so you can trade em to other guys..I already do that! I always go after Iron Working and Metal Casting and then backload using those. I guess it's zero sum in the end, but it is viable for what it is. They just blaze in front of me.


IW and MC aren't real good techs to trade really. I tend to go for Aesthetics as the AI ignores it, and once you research a few turns of alphabet you can trade for it to the first civ that gets it. Then you can trade Aesthetics and Alphabet to everyone for all those annoying little early techs you've missed (inc. polytheism), then you can research literacy and chop the great library. Of course everyone plays differently, there are all sorts of strats that can be successful.

I'm trying a monarch level now since prince does getting too easy and boring for me. So I've played Charlemange yesterday. At first attempt i've researched polytheism, converted my continent to hindu faith, built oracle and pyramids and launched SE. but my buddies bismark and elizabeth pulled me into a war with napoleon. despite of greate distance between my and french empire, huge armies arrived and devasted my land.

at the second try there were an unsuccessfull map with very crazy landschaft/waterways, so my religion was spreading very slowly, thus i got proplems with money and remained far behind my rivals technologically.

as for monarch level, it needs much more planning than prince and micromanaging gets significant. i'll try HRE and monarch level on the weekend once more :) i want to say that hunting is a great starting tech for scouting and getting some free techs from villages, at the last play i picked agriculture, mining, the wheel and sailing %)

My two :commerce: :

The thing i notice in casual players when I observe how they play civ is a wrong attitude towards the game. Details count, remember that.

I.e. when you found your first city and it's a coastal one the first thing you do is to switch your yield to a forest/plains hill and produce the work boat as soon as possible. After you produced the work boat you obviously switch the yield to the work boat. After a second pop is in place, switch it into the hills/plains/forest and eventually switch your first pop from the work boat to a production tile to finish the second work boat. Watch your food reserves. With two pops working on two work boats you have decent research as well as high food production, so you can spawn a worker quickly or build a warrior as a delay activity to allow the city to grow one more pop and then spawn a worker or a settler. ETC...

The same way of thinking you should apply to any first city and any city you have as well as any aspect of the game. Details count.

NEVER use governors and RARELY use queues. And after your empire has grown to a significant amount of cities and you don't know by heart what is going on in each of them apart from ALWAYS investigating a city when finishing production, make routine checks once a couple turns using the <> switch buttons to take a look at every city and to check weather everything is optimized just in the same way you did it in the beginning.

good advice mik1984... time consuming but that's the way this game is... actually i like to push it to the limit playing marathon O_o

another important thing is specialize your cities according to its resources, use cities with hills for production, others for cottages, have a gp farm with lots of food, make a science and a military city, etc. build accordingly to each city's own characteristics.

keep a strong economy and an updated military, try to make some AI friends, you'll have to pay tribute sometimes and watch out to trade with the wrong AI, use spies also to sabotage other civs, focus in weakening the strongest instead of ravaging the weakest all the time, but expand for important resources

Yes, cities MUST be specialized. Common fallacy of casual players is a "I'm gonna need it later on anyway". This fallacy infests their building construction, tech research and even tile improvement construction. If you don't need something now, THINK weather maybe there is something you need now you are forgetting about, like i.e. to build military instead of a market in a 4:commerce: city or you'd rather have the worker march to a different city that needs more attention or you'd rather bee-line something useful if not in a prompt need of any tech.

PS Leave the game in a end-turn situation only and make a routine <> city check after reloading a game after a significant playing pause.

To win on monarch you need to do a few things:
1. Specialize your cities
2. REX like hell at the beginning or an early war.
3. War, war, war.

Even the best rex in the world will only get you even with the AIs so at some point you will need more land if you want to win easily. Get your economy afloat, beeline a military tech (I like rifling for my first major war), ravage your closest neighbor whos been pissing you off. Oh saladin im talking about you, your protective ass is getting eaten alive tonight. :)

(I like rifling for my first major war)

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
And not Iron Working or Horseback Riding?

PS Pleeeeazzze maybe at least Construction...

Nope Im usually to busy rexing at the beginning (emperor, large, fractal or big/small). The way I look at it is like this, if you spend your time building an army you dont spend that time building settlers/workers. At the beginning of the game the most important thing to do is secure land, if the way you are best at is sacking someone capital and then backfilling, then glory to you. But usually those capitals come with a hefty maintenance costs, especially on large maps. I would rather send out a few settlers and block there expansion and backfill. I generally end up on par with the largest land owner AI, so my REXing cant be that bad, eh?

Horseback riding, and iron working are both very expensive techs and I usually dont self research them, unless im in a heavily jungled area or without copper. But since I secure so much land for myself, and my second city is usually planted next to a copper source this is rarely an issue.

It should be noted that I'm an SE player (think obsoletes style with a more open mind about cottages :)), and I like to build some early wonders so my capital a lot of the time gets devoted to that. So basically its rare that Ill do an early rush unless the random leader has an early UU that would just be blasphemy to pass up. The other day I played a game as ghengis khan and wiped out my entire island (HC, and wang kon) with keshiks and later a few war elephants. HC was up to divine right, while I was at construction, but once I had my island all to myself I have never teched that fast. By the time everything was back on its feet I was teching assembly line in like 4 turns on epic speed.

EDIT: I suppose I should note the difference between a major and minor war, by major war I meant the fact that it will be my first war where I'm going for everything the AI has, all his good cities and capitulation are the goals. Minor wars happen all the time, whether it be because of diplomatic reasons, defense, or just to take a city that is poorly guarded that is close by. Once you have rifles and cannons you can cut through the AIs cities like butter.

Are you building enough cottages? This forum has a fetish for specialist economies, but cottage economies were the first way I learned to beat Monarch.

I just won a space race victory with Elizabeth on Monarch. I got three religions, hinduism, conficuanism (with oracle) and islam (bulbed). I got somewhat cramped into a small space in the begininng because of early wonder rushing, but that's how you manage with monarchy. Since everybody adopted hinduism, I didn't have any problems with the other guys (saladdin, gilgamesh and roosevelt). I rushed to rifling, then crushed my neighbor saladdin. By this time gilgamesh finished off roosevelt (actually banished him into overseas colonies) and wage war on me. Then I got Assembly Line and crushed gilgamesh. I also got the cities he got from roosevelt, so I got whole mainland and no overseas colonies (I hate them). By this time I was so over expanded that I couldn't raise science over %50 or something, even with all my three religions spread all around and wall street built and cottages everywhere and I'm financial. But I was pretty ahead of everyone else science wise, thanks to my huge number of specialists and representation. On the other continent, justinian who vassalised hammurabi and isabelle who vassalised ragnar were locked in an endless conflict. Their strengths were balanced, so they couldn't bother me till I claimed an easy space race victory.

I might have even invaded their continent and claimed domination, but I hate modern age wars. Takes too much time to devise and run.

I have to admit I re-loaded to get some early wonders and religions though. I may have rerolled some GP too.

Are you building enough cottages? This forum has a fetish for specialist economies, but cottage economies were the first way I learned to beat Monarch.

Why warmongers run mostly cottage economies or at most hybrid ones?

The answer is simple:

When you are warmongering, your motherland is only a small fraction of your empire. You have what you have captured. AI runs mostly cottage economies.

Now are you going to replace towns and villages which the AI has grown for you with farms just so you can run your SE at whatever cost? I guess not.

Ok I've tried razing the cities, and it worked in that I didn't have to tend to the damn city afterwards or maintain it in any way. And for some reason no guys were swarming out this time which was a relief. Often there's about 50 axemen coming out to finish me off.

But here's the thing, it ends up becoming a game of whack a mole!! When I take the cities, they're a . .. .. .. .. . to maintain but I can contain whichever civilization I am killing. If I raze them they just build another city a few turns later which I have to go about killing. And even if I push them back, another jackass civilization will go building there. How do I control this? If just taking the cities I'd had Charlemagne dead many turns ago.

Mik your suggestion about switching to productive tiles has helped me a lot. I never really even though about that, why have my tiles on a food tile when I am producing a settler or a worker? So I just put it on the most productive tile I have and get my worker or settler or other unit/building done, it saves precious turns and gets the economy going.

Why warmongers run mostly cottage economies or at most hybrid ones?

The answer is simple:

When you are warmongering, your motherland is only a small fraction of your empire. You have what you have captured. AI runs mostly cottage economies.

Now are you going to replace towns and villages which the AI has grown for you with farms just so you can run your SE at whatever cost? I guess not.

Yes. I do. I prefer large, productive cities to small ones that use only a handful of the cottage spam sitting around them.

If I conquer early, I possess plenty of time to impose whatever game style I wish to employ. If I conquer late, then I don't need the money bcz I'm already the pimp daddy.

If it's in the middle of the game, and that conquered city has nice infrastructure (markets, banks, grocers, or settled scientists or academies) to take advantage of those cottages then I might let most of them remain. But to me, for the most part, I prefer giant cities over Lilliputians.

Large cities have :mad: problems, especially the you've got to handle:
"we want to join our motherland"
"we demand emancipation"
"Hell no, we won't go!"
"War, what is it good for?"

And you would like to avoid wasting resources on :culture: slider.
Those penalties grow fast with the city size and difficulty level. Growing cottages - that's not very effective, but rejecting full grown towns, that's UNADAPTIVE TACTICS.
You might start the first expansion early, but this will be the time when your workers will have a lot of more important tasks to do, than replacing hamlets.

Especially in the time before biology: Two farms on grassland = one specialist, two towns = 14(16 if financial) :commerce: and 2:hammers: with right civics.

I sometimes happen to build cottages out of particular situational micromanagement reasons.

2 farms on grassland can equal many different things. They can equal the ability to use two mined copper hills or 4 sea squares or simple flexibility. Greater size is the key to any form of economy.

Food itself is greater than any amount of gold.

Yes. I do. I prefer large, productive cities to small ones that use only a handful of the cottage spam sitting around them.


well, as usual the answer lays in the middle... some cities, depending of its surrounding, have potential for production, others for commerce. I always try to keep cities as big as the happiness factor allows it. if i see a city is underpopulated i would change a village or town for a farm, more people means not only more commerce, but more of everything.

keep your cities as big and happy as possible :king:

I found the jump from prince to monarch to be one of the easiest in the game. I think the thing that improved my game most once i hit monarch was just trading techs more. Every time i research a tech i'm always sure to check to see if there's anything i could get for it. Even between techs I check to see if the AIs finally decide to start trading techs they were holding on to.

Also learning how to rex while keeping my economy from crashing (start working those cottages or running those specialists asap).

I am slowly but surely getting much better at this. I think the reason the jump was so difficult was cause on Prince I could still get by with the old strategies I used but on Monarch they became less doable. Like I'd always automate workers and do an extremely early rush which is much harder when they have archers. So I've had to transition into manual workers, which was tough cause I'd never even thought about their actions before. But now I'm getting much better at it, and it's showing in every game. In my current game I'm the Japanese and I'm the clear tech leader. I even fought off the Koreans who came at me with their fancy hwachas thinking they'd just storm my 3-wonder capital. But I fought em off and razed their annoying cities that were close my borders. Stopped cause I accidentally made peace with em, I was gonna take them out.

And I didn't even realize that food factored into the production of workers and settlers. See you don't have to pay attention these things until you start playing the tougher games.

EDIT: I suppose I should note the difference between a major and minor war, by major war I meant the fact that it will be my first war where I'm going for everything the AI has, all his good cities and capitulation are the goals. Minor wars happen all the time, whether it be because of diplomatic reasons, defense, or just to take a city that is poorly guarded that is close by. Once you have rifles and cannons you can cut through the AIs cities like butter.

Hmm perhaps we should define what a major or minor war is??

Oh i just invaded France. Just a minor war they only had three cities.

Invading the English? Major war as empire covering three quarters the world. :lol: (moi English??? shhhh) It is good you added the edit though for clarity.

I guess it keeps the other civs happier too till the end game if you have not attacked another AI. I think i read somewhere the Ai cant attack you if you have a + rating on the diplomatic ratings thing. I can see why people use religions less on Emperor or above as this is normally one of the top things that annoy AIs.

Moving on.

I think you need to get BTS patched before you start razing all the cities. Took out as French city and they had 5UU muskets pop up. I hope the romans cant do that with prets.

Greater size is the key to any form of economy.

Food itself is greater than any amount of gold.

NO and NO. I wonder what level you play on... monarch??

NO and NO. I wonder what level you play on... monarch??

I would be interested to have more details about your opinion. Seems also to me that size and food matter, but I'm open to hear other opinions :)

Only peacemongers can allow themselves to have huge cities that grow much over the tile cap of a city. Warmongers have to struggle with multiple :mad: modifiers as well as they rather resort to cheap ways of keeping the population happy, which means for most of the game getting it from duly upgraded :) resources and civics. This means a two already needed buildings: market and forge for majority of the game.

Temples and similar cost a lot of :hammers: per each :) they provide and you'd rather have your cities producing units instead. The :culture: slider costs you a lot of :commerce: and it's more and less a waste, since you are not running for the cultural victory anyway.

So in the end result warmongers should resort to medium sized productive cities, while leaving full grown towns and villages that you happen to conquer to provide additional gold. It's a kind of a self regulating system: the further you expand, the more :gold: you need and the later in the game there is and the more villages and towns and the less cottages and hamlets you find.

There is another quirk: before workshops begin to be effective a city that is surrounded by grasslands, flood plains, food resources and with few or no tiles that produce anything else than food, cottages might be a way to stop that city from constantly overgrowing. You may choose to turn the city into a small GP farm, but it depends weather you're philosophical or financial.

If you are financial cottages next to rivers and hamlets deliver 3 :commerce:. This is a nice kick-off advantage. It doesn't count much in the later game, but it can fill an early budgetary gap. If you are philosophical, a city running 4 specialists(forge+library+temple) will spit GP at an decent rate as for end classical-early medieval age, while cottages are less attractive. (BTW I don't remember weather there is a PHI/FIN leader or is it one of the "forbidden" combos)If you have Parthenon, that might influence the decision also.

The problem is that before caste system you actually have to construct buildings to allow any specialists to run in your cities, cottages don't require it. Its not easy to equip an unproductive city with all those buildings.

Liz is phil/fin.

Don't underestimate the warmonger power behind US rush buy, if the game's gotten far enough for your economy to support it.

Late late game you can workshop the hell out of a few cities and churn out units at alarming rates.

Another interesting approach I've seen is a hybrid economy. Most cities are cottage cities, but there's a wealth city running merchants and settling them back in (best if also has a shrine), where the player puts his $ multipliers (cottage cities get science multipliers and use the slider). A powerful wealth city = running the slider higher, or paying for war if you can keep just that one city happy (Lots of crap units in HR + wall street). That's a big deal. There are lots of ways to leverage new money, but my favorite is new cites, preferably enemy cities :evil:.

I love the US rush buy, especially with Kremlin.(Kremlin makes the whip rush also cheaper! - but I usually run caste system at that time)

There is a typology I see in the game styles. People mostly talk about Warmongering/Peacemongering. But I rather see a third option in between: Imperialism.

It differs from peacemongering that you do wage multiple wars in the game, but your aim is still a peaceful victory. You wage those wars only to reap the occasional benefits of expansion.

Warmongering is when you are trying to achieve a military victory or a quasi military victory, which is formally a peaceful one, but in fact it has been facilitated by the destruction of all relevant competition.

Imperialism = expansion for benefits only
Warmongering = expansion for victory

The reason is that you cannot switch effectively from peacemongering to warmongering and vice versa. What you can do is to switch from either of those to to imperialism.

Mik1984, that's a useful distinction (warmongering versus imperialism). I often play as an imperialist, warring not for domination/conquest, but to ensure that another victory condition (space race usually, but also diplomatic or even cultural) is easier--just because you have the necessary production/research centres, income, resources, population, and safety thanks to your large veteran army.

@ OP: never automate workers, at least not in the beginning when every turn is crucial. ideally, you want to finish improving that next tile right before your pop increases to take advantage of it. having worked a tile that you're not going to use until ten or twenty turns later is a big waste. also, if you have a large army and friendly relations, you can get a good amount of gold from smaller civs without hurting your diplomatic relations ("could you spare this for a friend...") also, remember to trade your techs whenever you can. i usually check what's available for trade every 5 turns or so (unless i know i'm so far ahead in tech that they'll never have anything i want). if a civ has a horde of macemen and you only have axemen, and they ask you for 200 gold, give it to them. i almost never target religion as a source of income, and at emperor or deity, i don't even try to build wonders (unless i want to convert some hammers to gold and don't have currency yet).

I disagree about not building wonders. Never build wonders unless you either have the resource or a great engineer to rush it. In my last immortal game I successfully constructed pyramids. Even though I'm a warmonger, they were really worth it. I could adopt representation to get a nice early :) boost and I didn't have to rush economics, since the mercantilism combo was good enough and thanks to stone I could build castles everywhere cheaply.
I did even let the free great merchant pass me by with economics after I discovered liberalism. I chose nationhood instead to stack the nationalism :espionage: bonus with the one from castles to create an early tech stealing spy empire. It was worth it also.

PS I constructed also Parthenon using an engineer(I didn't have marble). The +50% GP bonus in all cities made a nice synergy with Mercantilism.

When I was building Pyramids, I was not hoping to actually succeed, but to fill a budgetary gap. Building wonders when you have the resource is a much better way to produce :gold: than the "build wealth" order.

The higher the difficulty, the more you need to take AIs into account. If you can't match their large empires unhindered by maintenance and various bonuses, you can case them to squander them:

Keep everyone - friends and enemies alike - stuck in costly and unproductive wars. Don't avoid wars if they present little risk... if an AI throws troops at your fortress cities with 20:1 casualties it won't remain a threat for long. Bide your time until you can conquer someone, by backstabbing or scavenging.

At higher levels, you aren't the king of the jungle... you're the spider in the web. Optimising your economy for long-term potential might be a luxury you can no longer afford; you're trying to not lose outright while biding your time.
Exactly at which level you start playing from behind probably differs depending on skill... for me this is:

Deity: Can't compete under my usual settings (normal speed&size, as random as possible)
Immortal: Play from behind, lose more often than not
Emperor: Probably play from behind and still win, can sometimes play from the front.
Monarch: Playing from the front unless I have a truly bad start

On emperor a good player is capable of winning with every leader on every map, even with an unfavorable beginning.
On Immortal you need a little luck and you need to be flexible:
A neighbor has no iron or copper? - Go and use the advantage before it expires!
There are multiple useful resources around your starting location? - Time for REX'ing!
A much stronger opponent has grown next to you? - wage a pillage/attrition war while constructing reinforcements in your cities. With his workers hidden and strategic resources disconnected he will be able to construct harmless archers only!

PS
Not mentioning your civ's advantages. If you have Mysticism and stone go for polytheism. If you won't succeed in grabbing Hinduism, don't worry since you can go afterwards for masonry you need anyway and take a shot at monotheism. This will give you early access to Organized Religion, which is a very powerful bonus. You have a decent chance of success, since the civ that grabbed Hinduism won't chase Monotheism.

I found the jump from prince to monarch to be one of the easiest in the game.

Interesting. I found it to be quite hard. I thought Noble to Prince was trivial and Prince to Monarch was big learning curve.

Once you start playing Monarch, you really have to start to play with more focus. After you have explored the map, met your neighbors and popped some huts, you need to come up with a long term goal. Everything you do should in some way bring you closer to that goal. Some examples of long term goals would be building the pyramids, conquering a neighbor, or REXing to "X" number of cities. Once that goal is accomplished, evaluate your situation and come up with another goal. If you just conquered a neighbor, your next long term goal (hopefully not too long) will probably be to fix your economy with a longer term goal of aquiring certain wonder or maybe a tech beeline (liberalism comes to mind).

If you can win at Prince I'm sure you know how important it is to improve your worked tiles and to get that second settler out quickly.

Good luck on Monarch!:king:

At higher levels, you aren't the king of the jungle... you're the spider in the web. Optimising your economy for long-term potential might be a luxury you can no longer afford; you're trying to not lose outright while biding your time.
Exactly at which level you start playing from behind probably differs depending on skill... for me this is:

Deity: Can't compete under my usual settings (normal speed&size, as random as possible)
Immortal: Play from behind, lose more often than not
Emperor: Probably play from behind and still win, can sometimes play from the front.
Monarch: Playing from the front unless I have a truly bad start

I agree with this completely.:goodjob:

Well, the other problem is... that I never actually played this game lower than monarch. I jumped quite fast to emperor. It was significantly harder, but I was somehow getting around. After multiple emperor games I found this level of no challenge, and I got temporarily bored with the game.

Until recently, when I rediscovered it on Immortal level. For the first few immortal games I recieved a beat down, I couldn't accomplish any goals I set. The reason was that I had developed a set of perfectly functioning routine strategies on emperor and I had to drop every single part of routine in the game. Out of the only two level jumps I expierienced, I found the one from emperor to immortal the tougher one.

You must do in the game what you SHOULD do, not what you WANT to do. The way of thinking provided by sirsnuggles is a big NO-NO.

Deity still seems to me as a level out of reach. I'm afraid that only extreme knowledge and exploitation of all AI bugs and deficiencies(as well as it's in depth routines) can turn the tide on your side, just as it did in C3C as far as I remember - with the difference that I also seem to remember that the C3 AI was much more bugged...

PS I just remembered something: I did play on Noble my first game and on quick speed standard map. I wanted to familiarize myself with game mechanisms and it took me only a couple hours.

You must do in the game what you SHOULD do, not what you WANT to do.




This right here could be the cardinal rule for civ. Basically no strategy is set in stone, and your ability to modify you strategy to any situation is the key to winning on the upper levels.

A few tips for Monarch winning:
- just wait until you get to Emperor, that's where it really gets tough ...

Seriously though, a few misc. tips:
- pay attention to details in how each city is working its tiles; especially in the early turns you need to change this a lot. The effects of doing things a bit better early on propagate all down the game timeline
- try changing to an easier civ. Easier depends on your strategy of course, but Napoleon is a particulary easy leader to use, especially at Emperor. He is Organized & Charismatic. Organized basically gives you $ for free, meaning you don't have to do anything to really take advantage of the trait. And you need more cities than the other civs anyway due to their bonuses so Organized plays into that. Charismatic, well, sure helps to have more happy people early one, especially at Emperor

The biggest problem that ive had playing on Monarch is underestimating my neighbors, don't figure that you can use monte/shaka as an attack dog unless you intend on taking some huge relations hits with most other AI's. at least in my experience if Monte/Shaka/Ragnar are around me ill go and try to take them out as early as possible, a few times ive actually snuck monte's city from him as inca because he only had 1 archer on it since the other was protecting his worker. i also find that more often than not im razing cities to keep my income from becoming awful. you should get currency as early as possible and start scoring huge amounts of gold off of useless techs (i got almost 1000 gold for optics on a pangaea map) so you can run your slider at 100% even with a -20-50/turn deficit. also you can get alot of gold for just asking friendly/pleased AI's for it.

If you have problems with winning on monarch, it means you are doing basic errors, there's no big mystery sitting here. You don't need a better leader. You need to optimize your early expansion and research strategies and pay attention to the details. Maybe you don't specialize the cities enough? Try reading the guides.

Regardless of your personality, you've got to become an untrusting micromanager. Don't trust your people or they'll be unhappy. Don't trust your Governors, or they'll be unhealthy. Don't trust your Scientists or Engineers, or you'll lose race after race. And primarily, don't trust your a$$hole neighbors. Big military and big micro- are the key.
Personally, I've won on Monarch, but it loses the fun for me. (Games are supposed to be fun, right?)
I wouldn't want to be President, I don't think lol

I am newish to monarch but am doing OK just won as Zara but had a very lucky start. So I am no expert but I have found in almost every game where its gone tits up that I got to 5-6 cities by macemen but everyone else, of any threat, had at least 8 or more.

If you can get to 8 cities quickly, by maces if possible, then you have a foundation you can work from, this means getting economy sorted quickly, one of the first things I usually have a worker do is cottage. Also that 8 means forbidden palace which is a big help. Personally I never build more than 4-6 cities, usually 4, all the rest are taken from neighbours.

and as everyone else has said for those mortals among us you need to micromanage workers cities etc, and of course the old chestnut city specialisation.

I am newish to monarch but am doing OK just won as Zara but had a very lucky start. So I am no expert but I have found in almost every game where its gone tits up that I got to 5-6 cities by macemen but everyone else, of any threat, had at least 8 or more.

If you can get to 8 cities quickly, by maces if possible, then you have a foundation you can work from, this means getting economy sorted quickly, one of the first things I usually have a worker do is cottage. Also that 8 means forbidden palace which is a big help. Personally I never build more than 4-6 cities, usually 4, all the rest are taken from neighbours.

and as everyone else has said for those mortals among us you need to micromanage workers cities etc, and of course the old chestnut city specialisation.

One thing I've found helping me in conquering is not building the great wall anymore. Yeah you get great spy points, great general emergence odds go up, and no barbarians but that ends up hurting you. Cause with the AI having all archers no warriors, axemen lose a lot of city raiding power and you want Swordsmen instead. And that city attack promotion, having two or three of those makes a huge difference as opposed to an unpromoted one.

And when I build the great wall I'll get lulled to sleep and not concentrate enough on military because I'm not worried about barbarians, which will alwyas screw me up when the civs become a threat.

And yeah I find I'm at my best when I have 4-5 cities early on. If I go beyond that my economy crashes. I can hang in there with techs too especially if I manage to get pyramids and great library, those are the two wonders I ever go for nowadays.

I'm on a bit of a 'cold streak' in this game right now, but I attribute that to me trying new styles and things to improve, so it's a bit rough. I've won two games on monarch now one with Zara Yaqob a domination win, and the other with Tokugawa a space race win. Almost won with Suleiman a culture victory, but I only had 5 cities the whole game and my military was awful, once they all were over 50k culture charlemagne attacked and I just quit the game cause I was dead. But it was a good try.

I hope one day I can win consistently on this difficulty and move up.

The easy levels encourage expansion because the penalities of not micro managing are slight.

Get past Monarch and expansion is an immediate drain $/£/€ and happiness wise, and you can quickly get into deficits and chaos.

Mind you, I lose pretty much every game at Monarch right now, so who am I to offer advice.......

When I bought Civ 4 Gold and BTS two months ago I started at Noble as that was the suggested level for old Civ players. I played a few games there and got used to the mechanics, but was still fairly uninformed and wouldn't always win. I play to feed my OCD tendancies as well as lift my sagging ego so I knew that Noble wouldn't cut it. I studied some of the strategy threads and jumped to Monarch. On my first try I followed the recipe in the following thread and got a moderately tough win.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=248435

At the same time I studied the following article on rushing

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=244075

I replayed my first Monarch game with an axe rush and got an easy victory. I then played about 10 partial Monarch games where all I did was rush so that I could learn that tactic and its strengths and weaknesses. This taught me a lot about how to effectively use pop rushing, chopping and how to more effectively wage war. It also gave me experience with how to modify my initial build order, tech development and improvements to take advantage of resources available in 1-3 cities. Micromanagement with only a few cities makes life easy and once you've got it down then managing more cities isn't so bad. I would then play through to when I made contact with other continent, concentrating on the 'Liberalism' path while also learning about the tech paths necessary to more effectively use my resources. This gave me some experience with early to mid game economy control. I found that in all of these games I was even or ahead in techs when the second continent was contacted and so I only played one game to completion.

I've just started to work on Emperor level. So far I can tell that my greatest deficits are in

- knowing when to expand and when to develop
- knowing how to judge when to start and stop a military campaign
- identifying how to develop my economy (I use a hybrid economy) when the terrain doesn't scream production! GPF! or commerce!

Good luck and keep having fun. Remember, Civ is a game.