Any tips for Monarch and above?

2 farms on grassland can equal many different things. They can equal the ability to use two mined copper hills or 4 sea squares or simple flexibility. Greater size is the key to any form of economy.

Food itself is greater than any amount of gold.
 
Yes. I do. I prefer large, productive cities to small ones that use only a handful of the cottage spam sitting around them.

well, as usual the answer lays in the middle... some cities, depending of its surrounding, have potential for production, others for commerce. I always try to keep cities as big as the happiness factor allows it. if i see a city is underpopulated i would change a village or town for a farm, more people means not only more commerce, but more of everything.

keep your cities as big and happy as possible :king:
 
I found the jump from prince to monarch to be one of the easiest in the game. I think the thing that improved my game most once i hit monarch was just trading techs more. Every time i research a tech i'm always sure to check to see if there's anything i could get for it. Even between techs I check to see if the AIs finally decide to start trading techs they were holding on to.

Also learning how to rex while keeping my economy from crashing (start working those cottages or running those specialists asap).
 
I am slowly but surely getting much better at this. I think the reason the jump was so difficult was cause on Prince I could still get by with the old strategies I used but on Monarch they became less doable. Like I'd always automate workers and do an extremely early rush which is much harder when they have archers. So I've had to transition into manual workers, which was tough cause I'd never even thought about their actions before. But now I'm getting much better at it, and it's showing in every game. In my current game I'm the Japanese and I'm the clear tech leader. I even fought off the Koreans who came at me with their fancy hwachas thinking they'd just storm my 3-wonder capital. But I fought em off and razed their annoying cities that were close my borders. Stopped cause I accidentally made peace with em, I was gonna take them out.

And I didn't even realize that food factored into the production of workers and settlers. See you don't have to pay attention these things until you start playing the tougher games.
 
EDIT: I suppose I should note the difference between a major and minor war, by major war I meant the fact that it will be my first war where I'm going for everything the AI has, all his good cities and capitulation are the goals. Minor wars happen all the time, whether it be because of diplomatic reasons, defense, or just to take a city that is poorly guarded that is close by. Once you have rifles and cannons you can cut through the AIs cities like butter.

Hmm perhaps we should define what a major or minor war is??

Oh i just invaded France. Just a minor war they only had three cities.

Invading the English? Major war as empire covering three quarters the world. :lol: (moi English??? shhhh) It is good you added the edit though for clarity.

I guess it keeps the other civs happier too till the end game if you have not attacked another AI. I think i read somewhere the Ai cant attack you if you have a + rating on the diplomatic ratings thing. I can see why people use religions less on Emperor or above as this is normally one of the top things that annoy AIs.

Moving on.

I think you need to get BTS patched before you start razing all the cities. Took out as French city and they had 5UU muskets pop up. I hope the romans cant do that with prets.
 
Only peacemongers can allow themselves to have huge cities that grow much over the tile cap of a city. Warmongers have to struggle with multiple :mad: modifiers as well as they rather resort to cheap ways of keeping the population happy, which means for most of the game getting it from duly upgraded :) resources and civics. This means a two already needed buildings: market and forge for majority of the game.

Temples and similar cost a lot of :hammers: per each :) they provide and you'd rather have your cities producing units instead. The :culture: slider costs you a lot of :commerce: and it's more and less a waste, since you are not running for the cultural victory anyway.

So in the end result warmongers should resort to medium sized productive cities, while leaving full grown towns and villages that you happen to conquer to provide additional gold. It's a kind of a self regulating system: the further you expand, the more :gold: you need and the later in the game there is and the more villages and towns and the less cottages and hamlets you find.

There is another quirk: before workshops begin to be effective a city that is surrounded by grasslands, flood plains, food resources and with few or no tiles that produce anything else than food, cottages might be a way to stop that city from constantly overgrowing. You may choose to turn the city into a small GP farm, but it depends weather you're philosophical or financial.

If you are financial cottages next to rivers and hamlets deliver 3 :commerce:. This is a nice kick-off advantage. It doesn't count much in the later game, but it can fill an early budgetary gap. If you are philosophical, a city running 4 specialists(forge+library+temple) will spit GP at an decent rate as for end classical-early medieval age, while cottages are less attractive. (BTW I don't remember weather there is a PHI/FIN leader or is it one of the "forbidden" combos)If you have Parthenon, that might influence the decision also.

The problem is that before caste system you actually have to construct buildings to allow any specialists to run in your cities, cottages don't require it. Its not easy to equip an unproductive city with all those buildings.
 
Liz is phil/fin.

Don't underestimate the warmonger power behind US rush buy, if the game's gotten far enough for your economy to support it.

Late late game you can workshop the hell out of a few cities and churn out units at alarming rates.

Another interesting approach I've seen is a hybrid economy. Most cities are cottage cities, but there's a wealth city running merchants and settling them back in (best if also has a shrine), where the player puts his $ multipliers (cottage cities get science multipliers and use the slider). A powerful wealth city = running the slider higher, or paying for war if you can keep just that one city happy (Lots of crap units in HR + wall street). That's a big deal. There are lots of ways to leverage new money, but my favorite is new cites, preferably enemy cities :evil:.
 
I love the US rush buy, especially with Kremlin.(Kremlin makes the whip rush also cheaper! - but I usually run caste system at that time)

There is a typology I see in the game styles. People mostly talk about Warmongering/Peacemongering. But I rather see a third option in between: Imperialism.

It differs from peacemongering that you do wage multiple wars in the game, but your aim is still a peaceful victory. You wage those wars only to reap the occasional benefits of expansion.

Warmongering is when you are trying to achieve a military victory or a quasi military victory, which is formally a peaceful one, but in fact it has been facilitated by the destruction of all relevant competition.

Imperialism = expansion for benefits only
Warmongering = expansion for victory

The reason is that you cannot switch effectively from peacemongering to warmongering and vice versa. What you can do is to switch from either of those to to imperialism.
 
Mik1984, that's a useful distinction (warmongering versus imperialism). I often play as an imperialist, warring not for domination/conquest, but to ensure that another victory condition (space race usually, but also diplomatic or even cultural) is easier--just because you have the necessary production/research centres, income, resources, population, and safety thanks to your large veteran army.
 
@ OP: never automate workers, at least not in the beginning when every turn is crucial. ideally, you want to finish improving that next tile right before your pop increases to take advantage of it. having worked a tile that you're not going to use until ten or twenty turns later is a big waste. also, if you have a large army and friendly relations, you can get a good amount of gold from smaller civs without hurting your diplomatic relations ("could you spare this for a friend...") also, remember to trade your techs whenever you can. i usually check what's available for trade every 5 turns or so (unless i know i'm so far ahead in tech that they'll never have anything i want). if a civ has a horde of macemen and you only have axemen, and they ask you for 200 gold, give it to them. i almost never target religion as a source of income, and at emperor or deity, i don't even try to build wonders (unless i want to convert some hammers to gold and don't have currency yet).
 
I disagree about not building wonders. Never build wonders unless you either have the resource or a great engineer to rush it. In my last immortal game I successfully constructed pyramids. Even though I'm a warmonger, they were really worth it. I could adopt representation to get a nice early :) boost and I didn't have to rush economics, since the mercantilism combo was good enough and thanks to stone I could build castles everywhere cheaply.
I did even let the free great merchant pass me by with economics after I discovered liberalism. I chose nationhood instead to stack the nationalism :espionage: bonus with the one from castles to create an early tech stealing spy empire. It was worth it also.

PS I constructed also Parthenon using an engineer(I didn't have marble). The +50% GP bonus in all cities made a nice synergy with Mercantilism.

When I was building Pyramids, I was not hoping to actually succeed, but to fill a budgetary gap. Building wonders when you have the resource is a much better way to produce :gold: than the "build wealth" order.
 
The higher the difficulty, the more you need to take AIs into account. If you can't match their large empires unhindered by maintenance and various bonuses, you can case them to squander them:

Keep everyone - friends and enemies alike - stuck in costly and unproductive wars. Don't avoid wars if they present little risk... if an AI throws troops at your fortress cities with 20:1 casualties it won't remain a threat for long. Bide your time until you can conquer someone, by backstabbing or scavenging.

At higher levels, you aren't the king of the jungle... you're the spider in the web. Optimising your economy for long-term potential might be a luxury you can no longer afford; you're trying to not lose outright while biding your time.
Exactly at which level you start playing from behind probably differs depending on skill... for me this is:

Deity: Can't compete under my usual settings (normal speed&size, as random as possible)
Immortal: Play from behind, lose more often than not
Emperor: Probably play from behind and still win, can sometimes play from the front.
Monarch: Playing from the front unless I have a truly bad start
 
On emperor a good player is capable of winning with every leader on every map, even with an unfavorable beginning.
On Immortal you need a little luck and you need to be flexible:
A neighbor has no iron or copper? - Go and use the advantage before it expires!
There are multiple useful resources around your starting location? - Time for REX'ing!
A much stronger opponent has grown next to you? - wage a pillage/attrition war while constructing reinforcements in your cities. With his workers hidden and strategic resources disconnected he will be able to construct harmless archers only!

PS
Not mentioning your civ's advantages. If you have Mysticism and stone go for polytheism. If you won't succeed in grabbing Hinduism, don't worry since you can go afterwards for masonry you need anyway and take a shot at monotheism. This will give you early access to Organized Religion, which is a very powerful bonus. You have a decent chance of success, since the civ that grabbed Hinduism won't chase Monotheism.
 
Once you start playing Monarch, you really have to start to play with more focus. After you have explored the map, met your neighbors and popped some huts, you need to come up with a long term goal. Everything you do should in some way bring you closer to that goal. Some examples of long term goals would be building the pyramids, conquering a neighbor, or REXing to "X" number of cities. Once that goal is accomplished, evaluate your situation and come up with another goal. If you just conquered a neighbor, your next long term goal (hopefully not too long) will probably be to fix your economy with a longer term goal of aquiring certain wonder or maybe a tech beeline (liberalism comes to mind).

If you can win at Prince I'm sure you know how important it is to improve your worked tiles and to get that second settler out quickly.

Good luck on Monarch!:king:
 
At higher levels, you aren't the king of the jungle... you're the spider in the web. Optimising your economy for long-term potential might be a luxury you can no longer afford; you're trying to not lose outright while biding your time.
Exactly at which level you start playing from behind probably differs depending on skill... for me this is:

Deity: Can't compete under my usual settings (normal speed&size, as random as possible)
Immortal: Play from behind, lose more often than not
Emperor: Probably play from behind and still win, can sometimes play from the front.
Monarch: Playing from the front unless I have a truly bad start

I agree with this completely.:goodjob:
 
Well, the other problem is... that I never actually played this game lower than monarch. I jumped quite fast to emperor. It was significantly harder, but I was somehow getting around. After multiple emperor games I found this level of no challenge, and I got temporarily bored with the game.

Until recently, when I rediscovered it on Immortal level. For the first few immortal games I recieved a beat down, I couldn't accomplish any goals I set. The reason was that I had developed a set of perfectly functioning routine strategies on emperor and I had to drop every single part of routine in the game. Out of the only two level jumps I expierienced, I found the one from emperor to immortal the tougher one.

You must do in the game what you SHOULD do, not what you WANT to do. The way of thinking provided by sirsnuggles is a big NO-NO.

Deity still seems to me as a level out of reach. I'm afraid that only extreme knowledge and exploitation of all AI bugs and deficiencies(as well as it's in depth routines) can turn the tide on your side, just as it did in C3C as far as I remember - with the difference that I also seem to remember that the C3 AI was much more bugged...

PS I just remembered something: I did play on Noble my first game and on quick speed standard map. I wanted to familiarize myself with game mechanisms and it took me only a couple hours.
 
You must do in the game what you SHOULD do, not what you WANT to do.


This right here could be the cardinal rule for civ. Basically no strategy is set in stone, and your ability to modify you strategy to any situation is the key to winning on the upper levels.
 
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