First Monarch Game

[ikotomi]

If you go AH, Pottery before Writing/Alpha is a better choice. It gives your worker more things to do, greatly increases your commerce rate, and gives you a discount on writing. It's kind of a pain to test out on Epic speed, but my guess is that the date you hit alphabet isn't going to be much different if you grab pottery first.

Going AH first gives you an early production advantage. If you compare the two saves, it's about 1 city and 3 workers difference (assuming 2 libraries is roughly 3 workers). Skipping AH and going Alphabet gets you a significant tech advantage including Maths, Masonry (for pyramids play) and Iron Working to start clearing the jungle. It could be more pronounced of a difference in other games, but the only AH resource that it really opens up is the single cow in your capital.

At this point in time, a production focused start will be waiting to catch up on tech, as lack of horses means no reasonable early rush, where as the tech focused start will be focusing on getting production in better shape while pushing the tech snowball.

The tech start for me is more comfortable to work with, as we already have math chops to compensate for the lack of early production, and have the flexibility to either go for Construction/HBR for catapults for an army that can probably flat out win this game, or Currency for a second major economic boost into possibly the CS slingshot.

I would say at this point, choose either approach and roll with it, as both approaches will emphasize different skills. Go ahead and more screenshots of your progress though, as how you manage your workers and builds in the early part of the game is more important at this point than your tech choice.

 

[Lexicus]

After the first worker, I'm building a Warrior to help with exploration. Then I put one turn into a Barracks so the capital could grow to size 3 and start work on a Settler to put a city by the Wheat and Stone to the southwest.

 

[Lexicus]

Situation at 2225 BC. Farming the floodplains, but I think I'll go Masonry so I can improve the Stone next to York before teching to Alpha. Would going for the Pyramids be a good idea?

Lost one of my exploring Warriors turns ago, was planning to use York's warrior for defense but probably will just use it to explore instead.

 

[ikotomi]

Skimping out on warriors is usually a good way to die to archers early on. Since you're working the cow, it's pretty fast to pump out one or two more warriors. Having more warriors to spawn bust lets you delay the need to find metal or horses to deal with barbarians.

A general tip is around the time animals come out, try to only move your warriors on forests and hills. You want your warriors to be back to start spawn busting around when your first settler finishes.

Pyramids is good, but you don't need to prioritize it now. The main benefit is from being able to get representation, but you need libraries and food to take advantage of it. Try to settle the cities that give you the most immediate benefit first, and settle the cities that need a lot of investment like stone later.

Edit: A barracks at this point isn't as useful as more warriors. If you have nothing else you need, it's all right, but these early turns you want to avoid wasting hammers.

 

[Lexicus]

A general tip is around the time animals come out, try to only move your warriors on forests and hills. You want your warriors to be back to start spawn busting around when your first settler finishes.

He was; he had Woodsman II and was on a jungle hill but got attacked by two Panthers and got a bad roll on the first battle with like 0.3 hp left. At least the other warrior has Woodsman II as well.

Edit: A barracks at this point isn't as useful as more warriors. If you have nothing else you need, it's all right, but these early turns you want to avoid wasting hammers.

Word.

 

[Htadus]

I'll take another crack at it, I guess.

There seems to be a general consensus that the initial tech path should be AG-->AH. Correct me if I'm wrong. After that, what? Writing--> Alpha or should I grab Pottery?

It really depends on what you want to do. I played this game to 10 AD. And have about 10 cities. I decided to go select Alpha as my tech and it gave me a path through Pot as usual and then once Alpha is in (major cottage economy), I traded my way to discover CS with the Oracle. Once I learned Alpha I was tracking who had PH and was able to know that it was possible to wait longer to get CS. So that is what I wanted to do and I played accordingly. Also, I knew Cupac is a wonder builder, so I put all my esp on his so I can track what he is learning and also did not trade with him much.

BTW, I have a quite unusual city layout than yours. I will admit that your second city is what is considered a smarter city placement than mine. But I intend to make my second city, which also had wheat in the BFC, become my HE city.

If you are going AG and AH, you should get Pot asap too since this capital is food poor, a Granary is much more valuable. That was another reason why I chose Pot path. Early granary can negate lack of food way more than bunch of FP farms.

 

[Lexicus]

Situation in 950 BC. We discovered Alphabet 2 turns ago, and traded Writing for BW to Catherine, then traded Writing to Alexander for Hunting and Mysticism, then Alphabet to Wang Kon for IW. We are researching Sailing to get trade routes more quickly than my workers could build roads out to all the cities.

Plan is to whip some Swordsmen to go after these barb cities. I think I'll keep Vandal, but I want to raze Nubian and settle 1 tile east of it.

Tell me what you think of the city locations north of London.

EDIT: Oh, and the reason my cities are so unhappy is because I got the "new herbs" event that gives you health in exchange for happiness. I'm going to have to wait out the unhappiness initially since I chose the third option.
Actually, what is the best option to use with that event? I can imagine the happy face from the first option would be useful if, like, you were under attack and desperately needed more whips but otherwise isn't it better to take the health?

 

[ikotomi]

If you have a luxury resource connected, the health options aren't bad, but the unhappiness (especially the double) can cripple your production early that early on.

Taking the happiness option is the stronger early play, and if you have BW already to whip, that's icing on the cake.

You shouldn't have to self tech sailing. Tech something farther up the tree that AI doesn't have, and trade for it. If they aren't willing to trade it yet, you may have to gift fishing to AIs that don't have it (or trade it away) so that more get sailing.

Your current situation looks like a combination of slow settling and poor fog busting. Swords is a detour that isn't very desirable just to take out barbs, but at this level you can win the game with swords as well. It might make sense to slow down a bit and play the earlier turns again to see if you can do better, and ask for more help along the way.

City position wise, I'd move the north city east to have copper and green hill in the first ring, so you don't need to build a monument right away. The banana will take a long time to get good because you need calendar first. I would ditch that for later, and move the fish city one west instead, picking up after the border pop. You'll need to chop a monument first, but it can work some cottage tiles for your capital early on.

 

[Htadus]

Just for comparison, here are two images from similar time frame.

BTW, if you are running slavery, then there is no reason to not let cities grow.

 

[Lexicus]

All right, I'm restarting from the initial save. Is it generally better to focus on early Settler production in the capital than to go for a Library?

 

[Lexicus]

We're having good luck with Goody Huts, we popped a scout, then a map that led us to a hut that gave gold, then London's expansion popped Hunting.

Have to ask, is there any way to disable the default citizen automation? It's very annoying...

And...well...the screenshot speaks for itself...

EDIT: Is it a good idea for the first build in a new city to be a worker?

 

[Htadus]

When the capital is food poor, ideal second city should be your settler and worker building city. So it is better to found that city. On my first play of this map, I went BW first and chopped a settler and claimed the copper city where you planned, on the desert tile. That was a killer start but I changed my mind and went the Pot route. They are both powerful and will aid different end VC's differently. But the reality is that faster growing empire that can run the slider at about 50% usually is better.

As for your question, get the second city built as fast as possible and then decide how you want to play the game. If that is science, then library for sure. But expanding is preferred. First build is almost always is a worker.
Citizen automation can be turned off in the city screen near the bottom right. If you hover over, it will say it.

 

[Lexicus]

I played up to 95 BC (sorry I'm very poor about taking screenshots) last night.

We were about 4 turns from CS at that point, which is much better than the state in some of the other saves I posted, but I think we're still expanding too slow (and I think I can get CS earlier). I am also managing the whip unhappiness very poorly, in this game we didn't get the new herbs event but still our cities were being crippled by unhappiness from whipping too often (this is also probably because there are almost no luxuries to give us a bit of a happiness cushion).

I think that I will have to draw up a document in which I record the turn number when I crack the whip in each city, because the game doesn't show you this up front. The whip unhappiness lasts 15 turns on Epic speed if I remember rightly. This way I will be able to count the turns and manage growth and limit whips accordingly.

Despite not quite being where we want to be, we have certainly improved from our initial play. I never liked to devote too many early hammers to fast expansion because I felt that it destroyed my research, but I think I am doing better by adding more Settlers, Warriors, and Workers to my early builds. It almost reminds me of Civ III days when the procedure was to crank out settlers, workers, and warriors as fast as possible in the early turns. I think that this has to do with poor worker habits in the early game, spending too much time improving tiles that the capital would not be large enough to use for a long time, and leaving new cities unimproved for too long. I tried to fix that from the very beginning and I think I have done better.

Htadus, I've been putting the second city consistently near the wet wheat and stone south of London (you can see in the screenshots this is where York always is). That location just seems too good to pass up.

I don't really play Civ to win, and I don't play from the beginning with a specific VC in mind and certainly don't play to win on the earliest turn possible (the most fun game for me is one that stays competitive right up to the end of the tech tree). I prefer to roleplay to some degree and I find peaceful games boring. But Prince is getting too easy and Monarch is too hard for my current skill level.

I will consider the game to have been successful if I have a few good challenging, victorious wars, if I can keep reasonably close to the AI in tech, and if they don't simply curbstomp me with unmanageable stacks.

EDIT: Oh, and I'd like to thank everyone posting in this thread for the advice, I think it is really helping me out. Barring extremely lucky goody huts or random events I don't think I've ever made it to CS as early as I did in this playthrough, and I certainly have never expanded this fast.

 

[ikotomi]

I'm kind of wondering what you're whipping to be in trouble. I found between waiting for cities to grow to whip again, and building more workers/settlers preventing more growth, happiness wasn't an issue. Your cities also might be in better shape than you think.

Even if your citizen is angry, it can still be whipped away, so you can think of growing an angry citizen ad growing 30 more hammers (45 on epic speed). Most of your early cities won't have enough tiles that are worth that many hammers, so it doesn't hurt for you to be stuck with only 1 or 2 happy citizens with the rest of them angry.

My first choice city in my game was the wheat+grasslands hill+copper to the north. Stone is good, but it takes longer to get really good because the only good tile is the wheat until you get masonry and build a quarry. If you have slavery though, the stone is still a strong city even without masonry. Another thing to note early on is that the quarry takes twice as long to build as a mine, so a city with hills has another advantage in that sense. If it was your second city, I would probably build a mine on the stone anyways, to get some more hammers before masonry.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm looking at this again, and I think it was a complete overstatement that my cities are "Crippled" from unhappiness. I'm going to keep playing this, though I'm not as technologically advanced as you guys I am beating the AI by a lot.

 

[Lexicus]

780 AD, we're 8 turns from Liberalism. I'm pretty pleased with my progress in this game, much faster tech than usual, the AI nabbed some of the city spots I wanted but that's all right. Ragnar declared an ineffectual war hundreds of years ago and has sent 2 horse archers, but I have good relations with the Jewish leaders.

I was able to spread Judaism in my cities and then used three chops to build GL. First GS put an Academy in London and the second bulbed Philosophy the same turn I discovered Education (an unplanned but happy circumstance).

Cultural pressure from the AI on my western border is becoming problematic, but I won't declare war on Mehmed. Long-term plan, I think I'll tech to Rifling and attack Huayna and try to bribe a Jewish leader into attacking him too.

 

[Lexicus]

And 1340 AD. Doing pretty well.

 

[ikotomi]

You're definitely in a position to win this game, even if you don't take any more land.

As far as what can be done better, there's a few things that stand out.

You have a large tech lead, but there are still AI's with large sums of gold to trade. You shouldn't worry about giving AI's techs for "cheap," as you can use the gold better than they can use your tech. Also, even if they do tech faster, it can actually help you as they potentially unlock techs that you haven't researched yourself to trade with.

You're also building a lot of buildings in every city. Not every city is going to really make use of a library, and theatres take a while to pay off. Globe Theatre is nice, but it I would consider it a luxury that isn't really mandatory. A stronger play would have been building wealth and more military units, as grabbing more land right now is easy with your tech lead. You can probably win the game straight up just whipping war elephants and trebuchets at this point.

 

[Anysense]

I saw 3 settled great scientists. This is usually the worst option. Using great persons for lightbulbing or golden ages is typically much stronger.

 

[Lexicus]

And I think I built the Forbidden Palace too close to the capital.

Ah well, it seems clear that improving my early game has made weaker play in the later game irrelevant, at least in this game.