Can you Handle a challenge?

It seems I appear to be the worst Civ player ever. I cannot get past noble. I try and try and try and try. It appears i am missing something. I have attempted the Cottage Economy as well as a specialist economy. I even know a cottage economy is easier to use but pays off later than a specialist economy.

I seem to alwayts have the most cultured society available but never a strong enough military. I have made efforts to stop this because I am always attacked for being weak. If you want a challenge tell me what I am doing wrong. Here is a pic of my last start. I seam to do well and then the computer passes me by. this game is hemispheres with 5 continents. I can provide more info if needed.

Ok I started by building a worker and researching mining so I can then move onto bronze working. My warrior is doing recon of the area for villages and my next city.

Welcome to CFC
If you want detailed advice, you should really post a save and that picture is a little too small to see very much.
First off, let me introduce you to the ALC series, which you can find here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5320091 Reading those threads have vastly improved my game.
I'm no expert, but I can win on noble consistantly now, something I was haveing trouble doing for the longest time. I'll just give you a few tips that I found really helpful:
-Don't build every buidling in every city. Not every single city needs a library, especially early on in the game.
-Keep your power rating up. Even if you don't want to fight, be sure to keep checking on your power rating. AIs love to try and pick off weak targets. The higher your rating, the less likely they will attack.
-Expand! I was always really bad about expanding, putting off my first settler for far too long. You don't have to worry much about improving your capital until you have 2-3 cities. I usually try to make a settler my 3rd-4th build. You'll want to make a warrior to escort your settler, though.
-Pay attention to BFC of a city. On Warlord, I could easily get away with just plunking down cities wherever, not really paying attention to what they would be able to do/work. You need at least a basic understanding of the BFC mechanics at Noble, or so I found.
-Specialise your cities. That usually means a Science City, A Money City, a Prodcution City, a GP Farm, Military city, etc. If you have a city with a ton of food, make it your Great Person farm! Hills? Production! Specialising a city helps out a lot.

I know most of that was probably basic for you, but those things really helped me out.

danfire said:

I seem to alwayts have the most cultured society available but never a strong enough military. I have made efforts to stop this because I am always attacked for being weak.

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Try to found your second city as a good production city (food and mines, possibly a river for better long-term production), and dedicate it to producing military units all the game. With the exception of a monument if you need to pop your borders, a barrack, a forge, some health/happy building if you need them to grow the city to increase its production (ONLY to increase its production), and heroic epic when you can. Improvements? Improve the food special(s) and build mines. Then later, build watermills, workshops and irrigate.

-Pay attention to BFC of a city. On Warlord, I could easily get away with just plunking down cities wherever, not really paying attention to what they would be able to do/work. You need at least a basic understanding of the BFC mechanics at Noble, or so I found.

What is the BFC of a city I did a search but no clue as to what it is?

danfire said:

-Pay attention to BFC of a city. On Warlord, I could easily get away with just plunking down cities wherever, not really paying attention to what they would be able to do/work. You need at least a basic understanding of the BFC mechanics at Noble, or so I found.

What is the BFC of a city I did a search but no clue as to what it is?

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BFC is the cities Big Fat Cross. Basically, it's what land it can work. The BFC are any tiles within 2 squars of a city that arn't diagonal. Hmm, that was a terrible explanation, but you'll see what I mean when you open a city menu after a first border pop.

For me, I think of BFC as 3-5-5-5-3. Starting two rows above the city square with 3 tiles, then five tiles one row above, etc. I always have the grid turned on, which makes this MUCH easier to see.

I've gotten pretty good at counting the available food ... MUCH easier to see if you toggle ON the yield button. Then figure out how many farms you need to maximize growth, and go to town.

The next level of city building, which I'm now striving for, is to pay attention to what tiles are being worked and what type of city I want to have, and factor that into my building choices. For example, it doesn't matter much what you build on the 20th tile you work, if you don't set the city up to grow to at least that size population!

A couple of quick things I can think of off the top of my head besides the good points so far....

1) Try to limit the number of wonders built. - I started this in Civ3 (thanks to some advice on this forum) but it's a good habit to avoid building wonders. A couple wonders might be usefull but they almost always stunt your growth and they become much harder to get the higher the difficulty you go.

2) Build a military city - it's good to have at least one city constantly pushing out military units. It doesn't even have to be that large of a city, but it should help keep your military updated and help prevent your score from dropping and therefore prevent being attacked.

littlej said:

A couple of quick things I can think of off the top of my head besides the good points so far....

1) Try to limit the number of wonders built. - I started this in Civ3 (thanks to some advice on this forum) but it's a good habit to avoid building wonders. A couple wonders might be usefull but they almost always stunt your growth and they become much harder to get the higher the difficulty you go.

2) Build a military city - it's good to have at least one city constantly pushing out military units. It doesn't even have to be that large of a city, but it should help keep your military updated and help prevent your score from dropping and therefore prevent being attacked.

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This is great advice. You may want to try avoiding Wonders all-together for a game or two. I LOVE building Wonders but recently played a game as Carthage with the specific intent of (1) ignoring Wonders and (2) ]focusing on city specialization. I'm a fair to middling Noble-level player and I managed not only to win that game, but to get my earliest spaceship victory ever on Noble - sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Not building Wonders was tough, but it forced me to focus on aspects of empire-building that were more beneficial overall.

You may want to look into the BUG mod. It gives you a desktop glance at the respective power-levels if you have enough espionage points and serves as a quick, "better build some more military units" reminder.

Yeah, not building wonders was probably the best thing I ever did to help improve my game. Often people rely on them too much and the tougher the opponent is the tougher it is to get wonders.

Usually I try and find myself a couple of financial cities (almost all cottages) and a production/military city early. If I get those rolling well, then I'm off to the races. As I add new cities I usually make them into additional financial cities but if I find my military is lacking then I'll add an additional production/military city. However this all depends on the terrain and your resources.



I also found the harder the difficulty the more important I find military campaigns, even if you are going to for a peaceful conquest. It's important to have a high population and when you run out of room to expand you're still going to have to grow your empire someway. If I'm going for a peaceful victory I'll expand early, then when I get around to Knights and/or Calvary I try and wipe out a weak neighbour. Once I'm a decent size (the largest civ or close too it), then I can sit back and aim at whatever objective I decided to win by.


Edit - Oh yeah, one last thing. Don't go after a religion early, that will also stunt your growth.