Finaly busted monarch..

[obsolete]

After numerous failed attempts on Monarch with this new patching, I finaly pulled off a win by space victory. I came just a few turns close to doing it before but seems something always would happen.

I went for democracy quite early this game, and then decided to go communism and rushbuilt the kremlin, then I ended up rushbuilding every other wonder that was left. Finaly pulled off the space race win just before Montezuma (bastard who backstabbed me) could finish his last part.

Maybe it was a fluke, god knows I had to capture four holy cities to pull it off this time. But I think I'm definitely going to take a break now. I probably spent a few thousand hours in this game just trying to crack that level.

 

[Sadan01]

Congrats mate . I took a break sometime after patch 1.61 arrived on the scene (around 6/7 months ago - computer died, then was sent overseas for work) and only picked up Civ4 again about 2 weeks ago with Warlords (& v2.08). I haven't cracked Monarch yet with Warlords so my go's off to you.

After reading quite a few SG games on here, it is good to be a n00b again Ah Civ! A game where I am always learning something.

 

[TM Moot]

Yeah, well done fella.

I'm still to break my Monarch duck, last time I was winning the Space Race but kept getting invaded by Augustus and Alexander.

Nevermind, back to 4000BC.....

 

[futurehermit]

Good job. Key to winning on monarch (imo): War early and often (although don't cripple your economy over-expanding) and put a lot of thought into each move. If you can limit your mistakes it goes a long way. I get into the mindset by reading through the EMC and ALC threads.

 

[Mr. Civtastic]

Congrats.

 

[obsolete]

Well I could have made things easier by increasing turn length to get more use out of my UU and increasing my edges by out-maneuvering the AI, but I wanted to keep things as default as possible. That meant no map tweakings, and no silly Perm Alliance exploits.

What I found out to work best early is making (or stealing) 4 workers early. 4 seems to be the magic number, and then I just warmonger my ass off (non stop). As soon as I get peace from one, I hit on the other again. I beeline for alphabet so that when I get them to sue, I can grab a few techs sometimes. And when they refuse to give up techs, I can then trade with those on the other continent.

 

[frob2900]

Key to breaking Monarch is aggressive early expansion.. Don't give the AI a chance to have more land than you, because their production bonuses will bury you...

Do whatever you can to keep up in tech but keep expanding early and be aggressive.. A good leader to try out a first Monarch win is Mehmed, since he is Expansive (faster worker builds, more health) and Organized (fast courthouses and later factorier) and has the Hammam special building, which is very powerful..

With Mehmed I can generally beat Monarch without much difficulty (the difficult part being the early wars, but there is plenty of room for mistakes as long as you are consistently producing units). The whip is probably the most important part of the early game.

Beating Monarch without heavy early aggression and thus a smaller empire is very hard, since you have to keep the massive AI stacks from attacking your empire through diplomacy...