High difficulties force me to settle new cities before improving luxuries

On quick your movements are precious compared to standard. That's why it's 'harder' than standard because production and tech go so much faster. The early game is SO important every little movement decision is critical. On lower levels for example I used to always walk my units along the shoreline to find all potential sea resources for city locations but now that is too inefficient.

Stealing workers is just a roll of the dice. If one happens to be in my path AND I am close to home it's worth the moves to grab it and escort it back. I will not wait for one. I may swing back by a CS once I have scouted 'far enough' to make decisions on my expansion locations.

Hovering around my nearest neighbor is worth it as I need to spot the settler ASAP.

As far as city locations go, I refuse to compromise. I will not settle on a luxury/resource. I also rarely 'rush' a settler before my capitol has 'peaked' it's growth. I prefer to build archers/worker and grow the capitol while 'defending' my expansion location(s). Hopefully the barbs will help me with that. The barbs also cannot really hurt me early as I have no worker out yet or improvements to pillage.

Athenaeum said:

The exactly reason why this is sometimes a problem for me is because the luxury tile is not surrounded by good terrain, or there is a far more optimal expand a couple of tiles away from the luxury. In these instances what do you do? Rush to settle the luxury so you get the expand? Or wait for the optimal expand but risk not getting it at all?

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I would probably rush to the optimal location and go unhappy for a little bit. I don't really care if I'm unhappy when my cap is making settlers and can't grow anyways. Set the new city to work a hill and pump out a granary so it can grow rapidly once you are happy.

Athenaeum said:

Who all would agree with this comment?

I thought that slower game paces gave more advantage to military strategies, because unit movement stayed constant while city production slowed. I thought that slower game pace would actually make things harder in terms of competing against difficult AI's.

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No it's true that faster games makes things harder because basically your units are "slower". They travel the same area in a longer window of time, therefore are less efficient.
There is also what appears to be a bug for musician strength with the 67% discount being compounded twice.

But I think saying it's as hard as deity is a bit of an exageration.

Another thing I want to comment on is the concept of settler-blocking.

Unless you DOW'd the AI, so that their units are subject to your zone of control, your scout is not really going to be able to block the AI's settler unless there is rough terrain. If you stand in front of the settler it can still move right through you to the tile behind you, if everything is open.

No, only military units can go through military units. However blocking usually cannot be used for very long. Some rare times you can find a loophole and exploit that where the AI will try to reach a special tile and repeat the same two moves over and over but most of the time if I want to block an expansion I have to have an archer. Scouts that transform into archers are therefore very efficient at blocking a spot.

Another tip is to expand far first and close second.

Finally you have to just acknowledge the fact that you won't stop all expansions, that's immortal and deity for you, you'll lose some good spots that's the game.

Athenaeum said:

Another thing I want to comment on is the concept of settler-blocking.

Unless you DOW'd the AI, so that their units are subject to your zone of control, your scout is not really going to be able to block the AI's settler unless there is rough terrain. If you stand in front of the settler it can still move right through you to the tile behind you, if everything is open.

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Civilian units can't move thru military units of an opposing player.

Yeah don't play quick pace from experience it's harder and for me not as fun

I used to play exclusively on Quick pace. It was very different and took me a while to adjust to Standard, which does seem easier

Acken said:

No, only military units can go through military units. However blocking usually cannot be used for very long. Some rare times you can find a loophole and exploit that where the AI will try to reach a special tile and repeat the same two moves over and over but most of the time if I want to block an expansion I have to have an archer. Scouts that transform into archers are therefore very efficient at blocking a spot.

Another tip is to expand far first and close second.

Finally you have to just acknowledge the fact that you won't stop all expansions, that's immortal and deity for you, you'll lose some good spots that's the game.

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Why would turning your scout into an archer have any effect on your ability to block?

If you want to kill the thing.

Athenaeum said:

Why would turning your scout into an archer have any effect on your ability to block?

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Acken said:

If you want to kill the thing.

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This. and because they ignore terrain they can move though hills jungles to block a settler that gets stopped on them

They could capture it too so if you want to do that you have to press the button to make sure that the archer captures it because if you dont, the archer will shoot at the settler instead.

z284pwr said:

This. and because they ignore terrain they can move though hills jungles to block a settler that gets stopped on them

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In order to kill a settler, can't you just capture it with a scout then delete it next turn? If the AI captures it back it will be a worker instead of a settler. Don't really see why having an archer would help, unless you were trying to kill the warrior escort, but even then it would take 3 or 4 shots to kill it.

Or course it's because of the warrior... You park your archer ahead of where you want to settle and use scout movement while shooting arrows. You can even add your warrior or a second scout that is not too far.