How does one improve at this game?

"Play a lot."

That's the answer often given pertaining to improvement at Civ 5.

I want to improve my game, especially in multiplayer, but in general this has to do with just learning Civ 5. Should I just slog at the tried-and-true method of beating Emperor consistently, moving up to Immortal, beating Immortal consistently, moving up to Deity?

I do read up A LOT on the game, but my long-term strategy sensors are apparently malfunctioning. I have to learn how to think in turns, think in hammers, think in growth, think in beakers, etc. I tend to play most civs the same, 3-4 cities Tradition/?/Rationalism, I change the VC depending on the civ.

I have almost no experience going wide or going warmonger. Part of me thinks I should just play Liberty a lot so I get a much better overall feel for the game and how cities/happiness works. Often my games settle into a steady (but thoughtful) series of clicking next turn and choosing the next building at each of my 3 cities, building almost no military. I almost always go Scout-->Pottery-->Shrine-->Worker-->Settler-->Granary, fill out Tradition, get NC at turn 80-90 on 2 cities, beeline Education, get 2 more cities before Renaissance, settle down and just improve the crap out of my land/cities and hope I stay competitive. I've been trying more proactive approaches lately.

Any ideas on how to improve my game, especially with regards to multiplayer? My science tends to be low, whenever I try and warmonger because my start was bad I end up falling even more behind. How can I implement ways to shift the balance of power?

playing the same way over and over will not improve your game...

do you manage the growth of your cities? do you control what tiles are being worked? Population gives you hammers, science, food, gold... happiness is the limiting factor... Sell everything you can to the AI... Grow your cities as fast as you can... get trades routes up asap... internal food will grow a city quickly from 1 to 6...

Science is important, and leads to more good things, but population gives you science.

I like playing on Duel to get better. The turnaround is really quick. You can try different things, different civs, different maps, and it's over quick. I just did an Immortal duel map, won a domination victory in Classical era. But if your purpose is to try and get better, it's not enough to just win: you have to win and also feel good that you could keep playing if 9 other civs were still in the game. i.e. you can't just come up with an optimum build order for that Duel map. Then when you move up to a "real" game, you just have to realize that certain dynamics are going to be different (such as, there's actually going to be diplomacy).

I have been asking the same question and it seems kind of ironic to me that I wasn't able to rank up or be able to beat the ai at the highest difficulty. I have watched videos on civilization before but it seems that I am still in the same game without any changes. The best in have done is beat the game on Immortal in single player once and beat the game again on diety with multiplayer once. I have no idea why that happens..

reddishrecue said:

I have been asking the same question and it seems kind of ironic to me that I wasn't able to rank up or be able to beat the ai at the highest difficulty. I have watched videos on civilization before but it seems that I am still in the same game without any changes. The best in have done is beat the game on Immortal in single player once and beat the game again on diety with multiplayer once. I have no idea why that happens..

Click to expand...

With so much random-ness during gen, you can get a very easy map on Immortal that's much easier than a hard map on Emperor. I can win on diety, maybe 50% of the time on pure random settings. But I've played god-like diety starts that were much easier than Emperor starts.

read through some of the higher-quality guides in the S&T section. I recommend Deau's CV guide, Tabarnak's tradition guide, Tich's shoshone guide, and Tommy's poland guide. I'm sure there are some other good ones i'm forgetting. If you understand what you have to do, and understand how to play optimally, than you will be able to improve significantly with practice. But only with understanding of what you are doing wrong

TLHeart said:

playing the same way over and over will not improve your game...

do you manage the growth of your cities? do you control what tiles are being worked? Population gives you hammers, science, food, gold... happiness is the limiting factor... Sell everything you can to the AI... Grow your cities as fast as you can... get trades routes up asap... internal food will grow a city quickly from 1 to 6...

Science is important, and leads to more good things, but population gives you science.

Click to expand...

Yes, of course I do all of this. I bought Civ 5 the day it came out and am approaching 1000 hours played.

The thing that most confuses me about Civ however, is that you have all these things to manage, but all of them are important. Obviously in a game you have to focus on one thing to the exclusion of something else, but this rea is so murky to me that I'm just confused.

How exactly do you manage to stay ahead in tech, have a gold surplus, get through your social policies at a reasonable pace, build a military to defend your empire, grow your cities, manage your happiness, save up faith, spread a religion, settle new cities, build wonders, AT THE SAME TIME? Where does it all come from?

My brain understands workers, for example. They can just go do their thing after you make them. But unlike other games, where you "frontload" one of your strengths while protecting the ensuing vulnerabilities, it's like you have to do it all in Civ 5.

I don't have the calculated internal scale to know when investing a ton of production, time and resources in war is going to be profitable in the long run or whether I'm just going to break even or even slow myself down.

See what vivalamexico wrote, those guides are good and I especially liked Tich's guide.