Bout to thrown in the towel

[Sagboy]

Ogg, btw I didnt go after america or anylne else on the continent because they were all my friends, brothers in faith, plus i figured would be a good start for diplimatic victory, which I came within 9 votes of. Also chicago and a few others had turned and revolted to me so thats how I got them.

Also mecca had a huge food potential, so why wouldnt you farm the crap out of it instead of cottage spam on just a city with only plains?

 

[pigswill]

It's nice to have friends but it's better to have territory and power. If you go after your neighbour early enough chances are you won't be upsetting the other civs too much and you try to make friends later once you've staked your claim.

 

[Oggums]

Also mecca had a huge food potential, so why wouldnt you farm the crap out of it instead of cottage spam on just a city with only plains?

1. Main reason is because it's your capital, and Bureaucray gives a 50% bonus on commerce and hammers. If the only commerce there was comming from farmed river tiles, then your bureaucracy is a waste.

2. Since your capital is your first city, it's also the first one that can start working cottages, which will allow them to turn into towns sooner for the real $$.

3. Even if you did get an extra specialist or two by having all farms, they wouldn't benefit you as much as having all that commerce coming in with bureaucracy. With the commerce, you can lower you research slider and get a lot of gold if you need it, for unit upgrades, or if you switched to Universal Sufferage (from caste system), you can buy buildings (say you just researched factories and want them quickly in all your cities). Plus all those towns also give you a hammer while you're in universal sufferage.

 

[Steve3000]

It's only cheating if you're in some sort of competition, or make some claim like, "omfg I beat diety!!1!".

Unless you're planning to lie to yourself about winning, you can reload a thousand times and nobody is getting to be cheated out of a damned thing.

Show me someone who has finished Diety without reloading and i'll show you a liar.

 

[Sagboy]

So what if i wasnt running buracracy but representation, which seems to be a better civic for me now since my last game?

 

[Oggums]

You still need to generate commerce somewhere, otherwise you can't keep up in techs.

With Caste System/Representation, it is possible to just farm everything and fund your research entirely with scientist specialists in all your cities. You can probably even win regularly on the lower levels doing this. But if you do the math, you will always be better off with a city that's littered with towns.

You can check this by switching civics in both saves, then verifying which one has a higher beaker output in the city screen.

Farms do nothing, except provide more food. Generally, the only reason to build farms is if you need that extra food so that you can work another mine or an extra cottage, or in order to grow your city more quickly. The exception is if you want to set up a great person factory, in which case you need all that food for the specialists. In this game you don't really have enough cities for more than one GP farm.

 

[pnp_dredd]

Anywho I pulled away with score towards the end and decieded to end it with space race, but monty just wouldnt stop attacking me so it took awhile.

As a few other people have commented - you need to decide HOW you are going to win much earlier.

Try playing games using the specifications of the HOF Gauntlets - they're great learning tools. Have a couple of goes yourself, and then read through the threads to see how others tackled the problem. It's a great way to learn about tech slingshots, or early-game conquest ideas.

Or play the GOTM, but specify the victory condition BEFORE you start the game, and then tailor everything to that condition.

Say you are going for conquest/domination, then your early game is all about exploration to find targets, hooking up resources (copper/horses), researching to axemen, and having a couple of cities with barrack producing horse archers/axemen early on (pick one or the other). You might not research alphabet for ages. After capturing a couple of cities you will find that you need to focus on building commerce in some cities, so lots of workers are a must, to build cottages and improve worked tiles. After a period of consolidation, you want to work towards macemen/knights and another wave of conquests. If you have done things right, then by this time you should have twice as much land as you opponents and winning is a formality.

A cultural game would be completely different, with early moves focussing on getting religions, building temples, finding good commerce-producing city spots for your legendary cities. Apart from searching for nearby city spots, there's not a lot of point exploring. You would focus on the top tech path (heading for music) and after that beeline for liberalism. Keep opponents happy by gifting them techs, because your military will be weak.

It's all about early specialisation, heading towards a particular victory condition right at the beginning.

Another thing that I've found is that Epic speed feels more relaxed - you have time to think, whereas Normal speed seems to rush past, and it's 1000 AD bfore you know it. By that time you should be able to tell whether it's going to be an easy win.