OP. I think all you are doing is proving is how easy warlord is. You are showing that Warloard is so easy you can play it without strategy. Nobel is Neutral and where you have to start thinking about what you are doing. You are basically playing Chess by random and wondering why you can win...
Choosing the next tech at random is going to guarantee your failure every time. I suppose you might win the Lottery once and win. But under normal circumstances I really don't even understand why you would play a strategy game sans strategy and expect to win.
You win on Warlord because a Blind Monkey with Down Syndrome can win on Warlord.
Also resources are important but not mandatory. If you work the land properly you should be fine with limited resources. The only thing that would make the game really difficult then normal would be if the map had no iron. But even then if nobody has it, it's doable.
I get that it can't be played on the harder difficulties this way. I've said as much now several times. What I didn't understand was it could go from way too easy to way to hard in just ONE difficulty jump.
I'm not expecting to be able to play it this way on the harder difficulties, and never suggested it should be played that way. I know this is not the way the game was "meant" to be played, and thus was never expecting me or anyone on the planet to win playing this way on the more difficult levels.
But it just seems a bit odd that the jump could be so huge in just one move (from Warlord to Noble). I thought perhaps there must be other things going on in the jumps besides what I was used to, and was questioning whether availability or access to resources was maybe one of those things. I now understand it's not, as I've been unlucky now in six straight games.
But I finally figured out how to test my theory easily, and sure enough, you guys were right, resource allocation and/or placement does not seem to be connected to difficulty. I made 20 starts, 10 on Warlord and 10 on Noble, with the exact same setups and went into the world builder thing that shows the whole map immediately, and simply counted up the resources within 12 hexes of the original settler placement and while there were more resources in total on the 10 Warlord games, it was NOT statistically significant and more importantly it was true that on 9 of the 11 games there was actually more resources (happy or strategic, I didn't count food resources) within that range on Noble difficulty, which is almost exactly 50/50. So no, it doesn't appear that resource placement or availability is affected by difficulty level. At least not from Warlord to Noble.
And I play this way because I think it is FUN. I get that others won't agree, and don't expect them too. I only commented because I found, and STILL find, it hard to understand how or why it would be such a big difference in results in just one single difficulty jump. I wouldn't have expected that, thus my questions.
And to the last poster above who asked about settings, I listed them above, and all of those other things you asked about (huts/barbs/trading/etc.) I leave ALL OF THEM at default. Maybe that's where I'll have to tinker in order to come up with a happy medium between Warlord and Noble in order to find my happy spot.
