Getting better on Noble

asmith

Chieftain
Joined
Mar 21, 2009
Messages
22
Long time lurker, rarely post. I just want to thank everyone who wrote all those articles about becoming a better player. Lots of them helped loads, to get me from a so so Noble level player on Civ 4 Vanilla, to becoming a high scoring player i.e. over 20k. This is after 115 hours invested in the game and quite a few strategy guides and lets play videos watched. The tips I think that helped me the most:

1) Cottage spam may be important, but don't forget to put farms down so your cities can grow.
2) When you build a library, try to set some colonists as scientists to help pop the great people who can then be used to research technologies.
3) Don't build your cities far away from each other. I used to build cities at least 10 tiles away from each other. My thinking being that I would cover more area - the problem with that is actually you want as many cities as possible in a relatively small area so that way you have more money to research etc.
4) Try to conquer at least one civilization before the beginning of 1AD.
5) Keep at least one city building military units - although I did not follow this exactly, it did remind to keep checking the power graph and make sure I was never low on it.
6) Don't be scared to build cities on top of the resource you want. I never realised you could do this and assuming you have the right technology get the resource you wanted, with a penalty applied. In the early game this can be quite important.


I am guessing the leap to Prince/Monarch/Immortal etc will throw all those rules under the bus and I will have the fun of learning new aspects of game play. Not to mention playing warlords and beyond the sword!

Once again thanks for all the great strategies and tips posted around here :)
 
:thumbsup:

Recommend Beyond the Sword and with BUG or BAT mod. Those mods enhance your gaming experience a lot (save time, info alerts, powerratio on screen etc etc.).
 
Wow, people still play without the expansions? Get them asap for an even better game!

Building farms is very important. No point in building cottages if there's no citizens to work them! Also, it's very wise indeed to have a military city. Build the heroic epic in it and continuously spit out units.

Rising the difficulties doesn't throw these rules out at all, in fact it makes them even more important.
 
This is where someone puts the obligatory comment about building enough workers. :D

Have fun with learning whip cycles at Monarch!
 
6) Don't be scared to build cities on top of the resource you want. I never realised you could do this and assuming you have the right technology get the resource you wanted, with a penalty applied. In the early game this can be quite important.

I am guessing the leap to Prince/Monarch/Immortal etc will throw all those rules under the bus and I will have the fun of learning new aspects of game play. Not to mention playing warlords and beyond the sword!
Number 6 is very important when going for early-ish wonders: Oracle/Mids mostly, or if you want to actually take a real shot at stonehenge/great wall for some reason (I like Great Wall on 18 civ/Huge/Marathon/Pangaea, SH can be a gambit for De Gaulle or any CHA civ, though he does it best) you'll have more success winning the wonder by saving turns anywhere you can, and improving a Quarry for Stone/Marble requires 8 worker turns including the road, while it's possible to save all those worker turns and even teching the wheel in some cases by settling right on it. The AIs WILL gun for these same wonders, so any little bit you can save can mean the difference between slingshotting Metal Casting/going into early Rep or getting failgold :)

It also has some more general utility in increasing the yield of your city center depending on the resource, but this typically only matters very early on, similar to settling on a plains hill for the free extra hammer.

I play mostly Monarch and playing like one would on Noble (that is, doing pretty much whatever you want) seems to work fine up until about this level. Playing like I have in the past on lower difficulties didn't seem to falter much until I started moving up to Emperor recently, at least when I'm not using my best leader (I can still smoke Emperor with Rosie, as he plays very strongly into the builder's approach that I have trouble shaking)
 
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