Recent content by jazwana

the diplomacy has to be a lot tighter too. Pick a few allies and stick with them, thick and thin. Lots and lots of tech trading, especially with your allies. Beelining is more important too, so you have techs to trade around. 've gotten stuck a few times behind _everyone_ ... and noone wants...

it sounds like you're playing on a map with starting positions in a lot of peininsulas. There it would be good to close borders (especially if you're creative) so you can block expansion, but on the majority of maps that won't fly.

one thing to note is, if you manually assign specialist (i.e. they have a yellow square around them) then no more will be added or taken away by the governer. So if the AI was constantly adding multiple specialists into your city you could try forcing just one.

I'm not a fan of having every city build their own worker. Obviously your capitol needs to be building it's own, but your 4th 5th 6th 7th cities should already have established workers to help them out. Plus, by this time your capitol and 2nd/3rd cities should be hitting it's happy/health cap...

going for a knockout blow to the largest empire early on might lead to trouble. If you end up keeping too many cities, your economy may tank due to both the protracted war & maintenence. I'd go for taking out the weaker, smaller civs first; especially your first conquest. The capitol is...

Micro-managing happiness (and sometimes health) i've found to be important. I spend a lot of time switching around the city governor when on noble and below you can just ignore it the entire game. I usually don't found religions and instead go for vasslage, that's worked ok for me on prince so...

a lot of it might be military strengths. Try building an extra unit or two in every one of your cities and seeing if he attacks.

i've played in a MP game as the russians where everyone turned on my war-mongering ways and globally united to destroy me ala civ 2. Through some devious tactics and early cossacks tech I was able to hold them off from longbowmen in the very beginning up until the point they got tanks. Those...

I agree on the creative as well. It's a very nice leader trait for seaborne maps. Depending on map size you'll be mixing it up before you get to Navy Seals, so the American UU might be timed too late. All of the early UU's will probably fade before you get around to meeting other civs...

I too haven't seen the AI use collateral damage effectively. When they do attack a stack next to their city, they never press their advantage either. They can have 6-7 longbowmen defending and instead of coming out and taking out my weakened stack they'll sit in there after throwing away two...

for mp too, depending how you play you'll probably see less tech-trading than sp games so having a stronger in-house economy will be better than trying to trade around for everything. Don't worry about cottages as much, you have the costal squares for trade, i'd use the land for grabbing as...

shoot for the great lighthouse and colossus wonders, especially colossus if you're financial. Both are great boosts for those sorts of maps. Grabbing resources may be an issue so going for resource-less units like longbowmen, musketmen etc will be better unless you have the resources in front...

if you're a neighbor of isabella you have two choices: share her religion or take her out as soon as you get axemen. She expands somewhat slowly but once she gets to the middle ages she really hits her stride.

early: expansion, worker grab or my warrior passes the mongol scout at turn 4 and i blunder into his undefended capitol. middle: Either i've been attacked and need to push back a few cities to secure my core ones or i've got a decent tech/resource advantage and need to leverage it. late: I...

I'd say it depends a lot on your economic position. Overexpansion too early on can kill you just as easily as underexpansion. Your civics have a lot to do with this- organized & financial (or spiritual if you can get that holy shrine) can support a larger empire than say...aggressive +...