Now you make me doubt... I do not have the game at hand, but I am fairly sure that you can automate everything in a city, even what it builds. And on a sidenote, once you have that many cities that you stop caring what city numbers 12 to 25 do, you can always have them build wealth in order to keep research up. That way no city will ever bother you again, and when you reach this stage of the game it is always uncertain if any improvement will still be worth it as the number of turns until victory might make it so that any improvement - even the granary - might be redundant.
Getting alphabet early would really be beneficial to your game then, trust me. Also you can build workers and settlers rather than a unit that you will only disband. If you can build a unit like a HA and have no room left for expansion even early in the game when you do not even have alpha yet, I would assume that expansion by the sword is in order...
Wow, so you just throw hammers out of the window like that?
Well probably, but i'm always annoyed to have to research it. I never do it, so when i encounter a situation when i would have need it, i'm always short.
No, in some cases i raelly can't afford more units, or i wouldn't disband the HA...
Well anyway Civ4 sucks, i don't play it anymore or just on Noble difficulty when i have too much time.
You need to trade techs to keep up, that is for sure. But there is waaaay more to it. You need to be able to read a diplomatic situation well, you need to know how you should handle your diplomacy and when you can safevly accept or decline demands, when you need to go to war and how to prepare them efficiently, how to manage your workers, etc.
