Noob question on early city expansion

I'm starting to get a handle on many of the problems that have screwed up my perma-noble playstyle.

One that has remained, however, is pacing my expansion.

I habitually go either-or with REX or conquest, depending on whether I'm Rome or Holy Rome, my two favourite civs. (I play with free leaders, generally Hannibal or Liz)

I either conquer my way to a 6-8 good city civ by wiping out another civ when we're both at 4-5 each and razing any bad cities

or

Rex my way to precisely 6 well positioned cities, striving to avoid ever going below 60-70 science slider, cottage economy.

The trick is I don't have a good instinct for when more would be better; I don't know when it's time (on a standard map, 5-6 opponents) to start expanding again. Often I feel pretty good about my position but notice one or two civs starting to get higher scores, and then all of a sudden we do map exchanges and I see some relatively balanced civilization of 12 big cities or something.

I know with persistence and a the confidence that comes from being stuck on noble that I can probably bushwack the big advanced empire with an aggressive military strategy, but it sort of spooks me that I'm failing to keep pace with them in a non-psychoctically-violent way. I strongly suspect it's my own mania to avoid over-rexing that leaves me with a (usually bordered-in) 6 city empire for too long.

I know this is a too-many-variables question - map size, identity of neighbors, the playstyle I want - but for a standard map with 5-6 opponents and a non-pacifist, non-warmonger middling playstyle, when is it time to get beyond the initial six city REX limit? As soon as you can start running >80-90 science again? When ought that be?

Well, I personally try to expand until my science slider is down to 0% or 10% and then rebounding.

The key is to get 1) pottery or 2) writing or 3) any other source of research (Great Lighthouse, Pyramids, Settled Great Scientist) at or before your expansion. Without any of these, you don't have a way of doing the actual "economy rebounding."

Dont set hard numbers, you sort of want to develop a "feel" for how fast your economy is crashing or recovering. Sometimes carving out a chunk of land means a high-maint. blocker city, which means there is land closer to the cap to settle, with less costly cities. As you find your cottages maturing, or those commerce tiles are improved, and you are pushing the slider up, its time to start thinking about cranking out a few more settlers.

Do not worry about the science slider at all, but rather the actual tech rate. once you have writing, running a few scientists in any city with surplus food can easily get your tech plenty high. When that stops being enough, get every happy resource you can online and build vertically, therefor working more cottages. Depending on the success of this phase, you might never get your slider very high again, but you should still be at tech parity, if not above. in my most recent game, my slider never got above 30% but i stil invaded longbowmen with infantry.

This is one of the main good points about SE: You can use the whip to get out an early expansion/rush, and switch to specialists to get the economy back on track. Gandhi works great for this.

But if you play a more hybrid economy like me (cottages mixed w/ GP farms) then just try to stay at/above 40-50% before further expansion. I guess on higher levels, complete crashes are OK and likely expected (see Sisiutil's ALC as Cyrus), but you shouldn't need to go any lower on Noble/Prince if running a hybrid economy. And if you have rushed a dude and taken the capital, then try to link the capital to your empire. I know distance costs aren't too bad, but the issue is shuttling workers around and getting up cottages and farms and chopping libraries and linking resources. Even if you have to alter your dotmapped plans a bit, you can always settle those other cities later. Build a core of your empire first.

Disclaimer: I play on prince. If I am totally wrong, feel free to correct me.

All the above is fine advice. As long as you have just enough tech power to scrape to CoL (courthouses) or currency (trade route plus markets), you should be ok to rebound.

i usually play such that i expand till i'm sitting at 0% science, but with a lot of Cottages and Libaries with Sciencists working, crawling my way back into the field with Currency and/or CoL

once had a game where i managed to get the Pyramids (there was stone in my capital so ) ... i had a Bpt on ~100 with 0% science

6 cities are too few. You have no reason to stop there. You should have at least 8 cities in early AD or planning war soon. Someone said you shouldn't REX so much on lower levels, but I think it's the other way around. On lower levels it's ok to be on 0% science for a long time while on higher levels too fast expanding may actually cause some problems.

Ignore that misleading science slider percentage and watch your beaker/turn rate instead. As Sian pointed out, it perfectly possible to make an obscene number of beakers/turn while having the slider at 0. If you run a beaker's worth of scientists for every maintenance coin you spend, you break even science wise. And it's very rare for an empire to be unable to pay it's maintenance with gold at 100, so that's not a worry.

Making close to 0 beakers/turn during the BCs is not that bad, as long as you know that each (most) of your cities can pay themselfves off in the slightly longer run, either by working riverside cottages or running scientists. This means you can safely plop down a city whereever there is a river + grassland or a food resource nearby. That being said, going all out expansion is a strategical choice, and not always the optimal one...

Very useful advice, folks, appreciated. Incidentally I tried a game last night wherin I made certain not to fall down on city specialization - I always mean to do it and then overbuild. Well, I still -sort- of did in that I probably made too many commerce (aka worker, gran, library) cities, one up being a GP farm, a production city and 4 commerce.

But, considering that I was desperately starved for happiness resources I acutally wound up doing much better in terms of 'starting with and keeping a lead vs. the AIs' which has been a sort of goal I've been failing at.

Another issue is that my 'warmongering' games are mostly Hannibal+Rome, which is to say, a very enhanced war machine built around Praetorians. I've very rarely actually gone aggressive with Axemen; I suspect given the way I'm dilatory about it it'll have to be axemen+cats. But then there's the Swordsman question, and what to do with all these Captain Cavemen when tech moves along and I don't have 2000gp to upgrade them all.

About obsolete units: If you're going to war, then build lots of units, if not, build the minimum amount needed for exploration and garisson duty. If you go to war, most of the units should die by the end or if not, you should seek another target. Bottomline, don't do more than you need to.
If you build lots of units then find out that your enemy is more advanced when you're ready to attack then the error was miscalculating your mobilization speed (or insufficient scouting) and thus missing the window of opportunity for an attack so work on that then.

The specific context in that game was that I had a clear production city built, and once I had the barracks up (no metal casting yet) I basically felt the appropriate build for it was military units. I made a few chariots as I belatedly got copper wired up, then axemen, and worked in a Rathouse after CoL since it was high maintenance.

But the problem was I inadvertantly screwed up both getting copper and iron soon enough and then getting military techs, and as if that weren't enough, my neighbor was Native American and I could see a stack of about 6-7 Dog Soldiers quite close to my similarly sized stack of Axemen and oddsorts, so I know perfectly well there's no point in planning a great offensive with these guys unless I have an absurd number of catapults.

When you say "minimum garrison," do you mean one unit, or more? Or yet another "it depends?" I hate having my units strung out in 2s and 3s around my empire even if it's great for Hereditary Rule; in the event of unexpected war it's exceedingly inconvenient to concentrate a real army. My preference is for basically an appropriate garrison unit in each city and then an army stack.

Is it definately preferable to 'expend' an army to avoid upgrades as you mentioned? I primarily ask because I've almost always been very cautious with my 'City Raider' Praetorians/Macemen, so that I could eventually upgrade them to Rifleman and Infantry with CR3. I know tanks and artillery can take CR eventually, but sometimes one is stuck using infantry on a tough city.

CR promoted units can be great. Basically I never war in the middle ages though, it's very rare nowadays at least. I feel you can get a jump on the enemy either early with axes or in the renaissance or later.
Minimum amount is what you use for garisson and scouting, it can be a large number with HR of course. Free units are always free units and so you can always exceed the number needed as long as it doesn't cost you money.
Try to work on anticipating all wars. You can do this by such methods as learning about personalities of AI leaders and checking for WHEOOHRN when you ask them to go to war. You can also bribe backwards warmongers like Monty and Shaka to fight someone else as a preemptive defense. If you anticipate an attack you should of course be building up your army.
In regards to the old concept of power rating however, that is more dependant on difficulty level I think. Dan pretty much shoved how it's basically irrelevant on higher levels as you'll never match the AIs power to the degree necessary to have an effect on their war decisions. What is much more important is the extent of your shared borders/ are you on the same landmass and such.

Welcome to the Forums mtr12.