I finally managed to win a game at prince difficulty - a domination win playing as Catherine, finishing around 1950 (normal speed, standard continents map). I thought I'd share the highlights of my game for others who might have gone through the same frustrations trying to win at this level, and I have a couple questions to throw in as well.
I started off on the west cost of my continent and soon found that 5 of the 7 civs (including me) were there. On top of that two of those civs started close by, so I only had 3 cities before I was getting pinched. Fortunately, Gandhi neglected to pay attention to his defences, so I took his cities in order to expand.
After that, first Napoleon and then Victoria declared war on me (not overlapping though). With the strength of the Indian cities added to mine, I was able to hold them off, although barely. I then stole a couple of their cities, and the game turned into a gradual runaway win from there. My empire reached a critical size where it could just grow faster and larger than anyone else could keep up with.
The two keys to the win IMO were:
1. Continued aggression - by seizing cities early in wars, my maintenance costs were rising quickly. I destroyed the really poor ones, but otherwise kept a lot of them. But by continually gaining new cities through war, after a while the sheer number of cities in my control offset the fact I had to move the tech slider down to 60%.
2. Other civs didn't like each other. If they had banded together, I would have been toast. However, they had mostly different religions and that prevented any cooperation. Later in the game the #2 and #3 civs were the ones on other continents, and were too busy with each other to worry about me. I never chose a religion in this game because so many different ones were out there.
Now for questions - how do you best handle this scenario if you don't have that weak neighbour early on? That was the main key to the game, it allowed (not alone, but with other factors) a snowball effect to take hold where I just kept expanding and expanding. In my past attempts at prince, I was unable to accomplish that early expansion, and I always lost. Usually I couldn't keep up in techs, and even if I could, my lack of cities would leave me without enough units to defend myself. In this game, I was behind on tech once again for a while, but as I mentioned, the sheer number of cities I was gaining, combined with some ultimatums, allowed me to catch up. Gandhi was somewhat superior technologically, but he hardly had any units. And Washington was far superior for some time, but fortunately not on my continent and so not a threat until later (and we stayed friendly anyway).
I'll leave it there - I realize this is still fairly general, but I'm only looking for general advice. After all, this is only the first time I've been successful at Prince!
I started off on the west cost of my continent and soon found that 5 of the 7 civs (including me) were there. On top of that two of those civs started close by, so I only had 3 cities before I was getting pinched. Fortunately, Gandhi neglected to pay attention to his defences, so I took his cities in order to expand.
After that, first Napoleon and then Victoria declared war on me (not overlapping though). With the strength of the Indian cities added to mine, I was able to hold them off, although barely. I then stole a couple of their cities, and the game turned into a gradual runaway win from there. My empire reached a critical size where it could just grow faster and larger than anyone else could keep up with.
The two keys to the win IMO were:
1. Continued aggression - by seizing cities early in wars, my maintenance costs were rising quickly. I destroyed the really poor ones, but otherwise kept a lot of them. But by continually gaining new cities through war, after a while the sheer number of cities in my control offset the fact I had to move the tech slider down to 60%.
2. Other civs didn't like each other. If they had banded together, I would have been toast. However, they had mostly different religions and that prevented any cooperation. Later in the game the #2 and #3 civs were the ones on other continents, and were too busy with each other to worry about me. I never chose a religion in this game because so many different ones were out there.
Now for questions - how do you best handle this scenario if you don't have that weak neighbour early on? That was the main key to the game, it allowed (not alone, but with other factors) a snowball effect to take hold where I just kept expanding and expanding. In my past attempts at prince, I was unable to accomplish that early expansion, and I always lost. Usually I couldn't keep up in techs, and even if I could, my lack of cities would leave me without enough units to defend myself. In this game, I was behind on tech once again for a while, but as I mentioned, the sheer number of cities I was gaining, combined with some ultimatums, allowed me to catch up. Gandhi was somewhat superior technologically, but he hardly had any units. And Washington was far superior for some time, but fortunately not on my continent and so not a threat until later (and we stayed friendly anyway).
I'll leave it there - I realize this is still fairly general, but I'm only looking for general advice. After all, this is only the first time I've been successful at Prince!