dear all, I have been playing CIVs 4 quite sometime now... from vanilla to warlord to bts... I can do 100% win in all prince and below for vanilla and warlords... with my own style of playing... But whilst to do it in bts... to date i failed .... i believe in balance of playing... i enjoy playing industurous characters like Qin or Stalin or ramesh... i like to build crazily... always obtaining impossible in my 3 major cities in cultural,econ/science and also hammers. in bts i find it very hard... as a new major factor comes in... spy factor... I find it hard to maintain tech leader while building wonders and war mongering... but i just love it to it all... as for econs... er I always believe cottage and specialist on parallel ... some cities are just meant to be cottage while some are meant to do SE.... is there someone out there that plays the same way as i do? ( i know... even back in vanilla , a warmonger rarely builds wonder ... they prefer capturing ...) and no, i hate to win early... i like to take it late... but to date i still cant suceed on corps.... >.<
i dont know dave, i just cannot concentrate on one thing ... i dont think i will have any problem with monarch if i were to warmonger.. or just concentrate on culture ... but er wonders are fun ... hee hee
essential point is : having fun. if fun means 'building wonders' / 'make super cities' / 'make some war' / 'win the game', then stay at a level youre confortable with. on BTS you can disactivate espionnage if you prefer, or just go down one level
I think I play the game similarly to you (build early, win late) so I will chime in with some things that works for me. I largely ignore spying unless I got a gspy early in the game, then I will make some spys to steal from my neighbor. usually I just put the spy points against the leading AI, so I can sabotage him when needed. I treat the spy buildings like walls and castles - they are the last things I build, when I got nothing else to build. I just enjoy building wonders also, but it's almost impossible to build them all, especially higher the level, so I pick and choose, usually don't bother with ToA or GL or the ones that came with divine rights. industrious/stone/marbles help, but the most important things are trees. I usually just settle the gp in the capital because I am too stupid to figure out how the proper bulbing sequence. I do both build wonders and warmonger and still win pretty comfortably at Emperor level. but I don't start conquering unually until macemen because I simply don't have the production needed to both build wonder and mass axes. with maces, it's more advanced so you don't need as many, especially if you aim for it so your neighbor doesn't have longbows/xbows yet. For me this first war with the maces is crucial even if I planned to play a space game as it gets me enough land to compete. and even if I decided to not actually go thru with the attack (neighbor too strong, or are protective and have longbows), having these units ready is important to ward off any invations, so I almost always plan to have a strong stack of maces. To get units, If I do CE then I have a unit city to keep pumping units, because most cities are low on production. If I do SE/FE then I whip 2 times from every city when I can build macemen, that's usually enough to capture 1-2 cities and then sue for peace. also, Since I settle the GPs, my capital is high on prod, and build units in between wonders. I build airships instead of seige/spy, lots of them. I never really get corps either, I just hate switching out of state property.
crazybuilder: To be honest, my experience with increasing levels of difficulty on most games is that the fun is sucked out of it. There is less and less room for mistakes and leading by a large margin is nearly impossible without an intricate understanding of the systems involved (goodbye, mystery). While you do need to focus on a strategy to move up in difficulty level, more to the point is that you need to find it fun to move up in difficulty level. If you don't enjoy beating the higher difficulties specifically, but enjoy dominating on the way there and building wonders, etc, then you'll have a hard time accepting the very real competition that the computer can present. re: espionage. I don't have BTS or Warlords, but I did play Civ 2 yesterday and I forgot how terribly annoying diplomats are. =P
If you're going to mix it up with both Warmongering and Building and want to keep it that way my advice would be use the warmongering to go with the building. Say it's mid to late game, you've got a nice chunk of empire from some early conquering, keep your core cities focused on building and redevelope any conquered civ cities to production cities and crank out the military. As far as the corps go, my advice is to found the HQ in a major commerce city (preferably where you have or are going to put Wall Street, and just possibly city merchant specialist the heck out of it). I've had many games where expanding a corp within my border produces -7 (for example) in the city, but after founding my GPT goes up because of where the hq is. I would advise being careful with corps though, not every city needs a corp in it to benefit your civilization as a whole. Corps are great when you expan into other civs (especially when you can use espionage to force them back to free market).
thanx for the tips if i am playing qin, normally i will wave wars when i gotten UU.. er ... nowadays my war plan is .. spies to temporaily upset the city (0% cultural) and then go in with my UUs ... as chinese UU adds colleteral damage.. and they are also go for defending captured cities as well. hence i start of with worker- settler - warrior-warrior -worker.. research bronze - road by the time i got my second city, usually i settle on stone/marble/copper whichever nearby.. i will then start on stonehegde on second city while beelining to mono. normally at noble or prince i will be able to complete stonehedge and found mono in time... and by default .. normally the religion will be found in latest city... by this time.. my cultural level at second city is crazy.. but i will continue by building oracle.. tech will be priest-- animal--pottery.. the aim is to get metal casting for forge.. at the meantime first city is building settler... and then axeman if found brone if not warrior.. then 2 workers to chop down greatwall and pyramids in first city.. thats how i start..
If you are struggling on your current level, then you must learn to streamline some of your play. Perhaps skip Stonehenge, and focus on the Great Wall and Pyramids. Instead of Stonehenge, you can use Slavery and when a new city grows to 2 population, whip one of them to finish you Monument. Cities re-grow from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 pretty quickly, so its not so bad to use the whip. Another idea for advancing is to streamline your tech path. Go after the more important techs sooner. Instead of stopping off for Monotheism, go right for Code of Laws, that will usually also get you a religion if you do it early enough, with the bonus of a free Missionary as well. Also, one of the biggest mistakes players make moving up in the early levels is a lack of workers. Without workers, your land develops too slowly, and you end up working unimproved tiles. You want to have plenty of workers, especially in the early game, 1.5-2 per city isnt too many, at least for your first 7 or 8 cities. Use those workers wisely, no need to improve all 20 tiles for every city when you will only have 5 or 6 citizens for a while. And dont be afraid to use a worker to chop out other things than Wonders. Using chops to build Workers and Settlers helps you decrease the number of turns your city isnt growing, or chopping out a Workboat will help your city grow that much faster. You dont have to make drastic strategy changes to be able to beat Noble, but you do have to begin to grasp some of the more advanced concepts, like teching CoL even though its 17 turns and Monotheism is only 5.
