Having a lot of trouble moving to king difficulty [G&K[

[supernovasky]

So I can win virtually every game on regular difficulty, but man, the step up from regular to king is insanely difficult to me. I failed miserably with ethiopia going for culture, as I watched my civilization screen just go "X wonder was built in a faraway land" "X wonder was built in a far away land" nonstop... So I decided that cultural was difficult. It was always my most difficult victory condition anyway.

So I then moved on to try Iroquois with a very aggressive strategy that I got from these forums. I B-lined for the great library and then slingshotted for Steel. I built quite an impressive army and just absolutely demolished China by taking out one of its workers quite early, and flipped both of China's cities. I was sitting pretty on my continents map building up other cities, but then I started meeting other civs. They all hated me, were all hostile, and began an insane war against me. I couldn't fund the city states because my army was too big, and I was defending on too many fronts. In the end, one of the city states took a satelite city and Arabia took all of it's cities back. They somehow managed to get to battleships and bombers before I could and I just started getting slaughtered. It seems focusing on war hampered my scientific progress not to mention the AI wouldn't even take fair deals, so I was dealing with constant unhappiness and gold that was either stagnant or negative.

So I just tried a third game with the Inca and went scout-scout-monument-settlerx3, built a bunch of cities... none of them even CLOSE to my neighbors borders... Elizabeth is friendly with me, her closest city is about 4 tiles away... BAM. 10 archers/spearmen/catapults storming my cities while I have no military. With this third game, it made me think sprawl and wall just doesn't even work - how do you do it? You either build military early and fall behind on science and research and wonders, or you build economics and science buildings early and get absolutely destroyed by Friendly AI declaring war out of nowhere.

I need help. How do I beat King, especially if I want to play peacefully/diplomatically while still expanding? Or is this pretty much impossible and I should instead focus on sprawl/maul? And if that's the case, how do I do that without fighting on all fronts and getting destroyed?

 

[nanomage]

looks like you're warring with melee units, that's all but obsolete in GnK. Try using mostly ranged + few horse and start a game with a civ that has a strong range unit. China, England, Babylon are all very strong. Also heed the usual advice about prioritizing science techs, selling your luxuries and strategics for gold and deprioritizing wonders.

 

[Browd]

And popping out 4 cities without any military (other than your initial warrior and a couple of wandering scouts) is invitation for anyone to DOW you.

 

[cajypart]

Don't build settlers: buy them.
You have to rush luxuries tech and sell them.
If you exterminate a civ, you'll have a warmonger malus in diplomatic status. Try to let one city to your opponent, make peace and declare war to another civ.
I prefer to go philosophy when i rush GL for National College.
And i prefer build units rather than wonders: why build a wonder when you can steal them?

 

[Civilmyzation]

then why build great library at all?

you leave behind a civ, make sure its a "nice" civ, or you will get denounced and face just as bad of a penalty as if you wipe them out.

the best is to let them attack you, counter the attack and remain at war. wipe them out and you aren't a warmonger.

 

[joncnunn]

Cultural victory: Is indeed much tougher on King than Prince, especially if your not doing a OCC (Tradition) or a 2CC (The one & only settler from Liberty)

Normal use of the Great Library on King / Emperor when gone after at all: Use for Philosophy which unlocks National College very early; which is built right away.

When not going for Great Library: Shoot to have the NC built around turn 70.

 

[Matthew.]

Build less wonders and more military.

Science is largely based off population and while science techs are indeed important, they are not going to amount to much if you don't have the raw population to back it up.

It also sounds like your overall balance is off. Instead of going all out on settling cities or building an overly large army, try to find some middle ground. You rarely need more than 6-8 military units for most of the game and you need to know when to expand and take cities and when it is better to hold off. The AI is actually very predictable once you understand what causes them to declare war.

Don't build settlers: buy them.

Yeah it is good practice to use the AI's gold to fund your own cities, but I'd say it is more a guideline than a hard-set rule. There are some situations where building settlers is just fine.

When not going for Great Library: Shoot to have the NC built around turn 70.

Lol... king difficulty doesn't need NC by T70

 

[Scorpionleader]

This is how I'm doing it.

1 - Get over the wonders addiction. Get library in capital and get NC with two cities up before turn 100. Before I went to give king a try, I realized this was something that was going to really hurt me more in the future on higher levels, so I try not going for most of them. Early wonders will inhibit your early growth. Be very selective. When I'm going for NC now, I only have two or three cities. Watch some deity let's plays (Light Cleric is my favorite) and see what wonders they are actually going for, and try to only build those, unless you get an engineer.

2 - For defense you need 5-7 archers. I found that at king level, you can't ever sell lux's for 240g, so I will sell for 7g/turn instead. I buy archers and build settlers for this reason. While building a settler make sure to take advantage of the city not being able to grow, and go heavy with production, you won't starve while building a settler.

3 - If you are going on attack, you need two melee as well. Rotate fresh units to the front. Be prepared to bring a worker. This has really helped me keep units alive. Even if I don't need to cut forest/jungle/marsh, I might use a worker to draw the enemy out in the open where I can pick them off, retake the worker with mounted unit, and do it again. This really helps when they are turtling behind the city. After espionage kicks in, you don't need to scout the city with a unit to blast away. Put a spy in the city you want to attack. Instant visibility. Well, relatively instant. It takes a couple of turns.

4 - When you have 3 cities 5-7 archers will defend in most cases. When they attack you, be prepared to finish them off. You don't actually have to take a city, but if you don't at least attack back, you will be in a perpetual war, and they will just amass enough to overtake you and come back. If you go on offensive and take out some of their army, you will get a peace deal quick. Don't let the AI dictate the terms of war.

5 - Learn to set city to food focus and manipulate tiles/specialists slots to get more science or production. Whatever is in need at the time. Science is really key, so you need population to get past the pesky AI in science. This really helped my game a bunch.

6 - Look for Tabarnak's "Traditions 4 City Opener." Lots of useful information there. It's not cookie cutter, but it's a great place to start.

7 - Post here with screenshots. Everyone here is very helpful. They can give lots of advice from posted screenshots. I found a lot of my problems by doing that. Lack of science generation was killing me. Look over some of my other posts, and see what people helped me with.

I thought I was doing great on prince level, but there are some things that need to be done differently on king difficulty. I didn't even realize I was terrible at combat until I got to king, and I didn't have access to an unlimited army in most cases to feed a meat-grinder. I needed to learn to keep them alive. I still have trouble later on with keeping the archers alive. I usually miss-click and 'poof' they are gone. I will do things like leave a general in an open field just because I forgot to move him along with my army. I don't catch that one until he gets killed in most cases.

 

[joncnunn]

Lol... king difficulty doesn't need NC by T70

My assumption is that he's going to want to continue moving up in difficulty. For that, the best thing to do is adopt Immortal/Deity tactics at levels earlier than strictly needed for his difficulty level.

 

[supernovasky]

You guys have helped me a WHOLE lot. Having a lot more success. I just lost a game but I made it much closer than last time. I've learned so much about the game just micromanaging the citizen/specialist slots. In this game, I managed to take Arabia's capital. Where do I go from here? Clean him up? Leave his remaining cities? Also, washington DOW'd me. Here are some screenshots of my new game:

http://i.imgur.com/seqZNTY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SsJW0nb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/5zXioBq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/jFA4LCC.jpg

 

[Unresolved]

I prefer thinking about NC benchmarks by how many cities you have at X turns. I like to do turn 60 2-city NC, 75 turns for 3-city, 90 turns for 4-city, and 100 turns for 4-cities + one captured capital.

 

[Wossop]

Up to and mostly including immortal the great library is pretty much always the best 'thing' to build as soon as possible in any game. Deity players would make it, if they wouldn't fail to be first 9/10 times

When playing on king I would - scout - monument - granary - great library. You can delay this a little bit in order to get luxury resources workable. If you are going tradition hard build a worker before doing GL, keep growing. You can cut down some trees with your builder to speed up building the GL.

As other people suggested buy your first settler(s), you can build them if your city has a little bit more production and is not growing fast anymore. Taking a worker from a city state works aswell and is always good if they are not under AI protection. This saves you ~10-15 turns of building or 310g for buying.(assuming normal speed)

If you get National College after GL there is no king ai that is going to keep up with you for a while in science.

It's also okay not to have every building/wonder you can build, if you're going to war just keep building units, even if you think you have enough, build more so you can keep going - and by this increasing everything. Going to -9 happiness is fine, only growth is slower, everything else will just work fine.

The AI will build all those random wonders for you, and you just get to take them for free with their cities!

Only wonders i would worry about while you're still not too confident; great library, national college, the oracle, leaning tower of pisa

Of course there are a lot of other very nice wonders, with situational uses where you can build them yourself. But these wonders are generally always good to build - and if you only build these wonders you'll do fine. You will be able to get all of them, especially if you build them/tech towards this order.

 

[JothHago]

This is how I'm doing it.
2 - For defense you need 5-7 archers. I found that at king level, you can't ever sell lux's for 240g, so I will sell for 7g/turn instead. I buy archers and build settlers for this reason. While building a settler make sure to take advantage of the city not being able to grow, and go heavy with production, you won't starve while building a settler.

You can always sell luxuries on standard speed at 240g if you are on good terms. Most of the start, your diplomatic position will be neutral and you almost will be able to sell it at 240g regardless of difficulty level. The next step down is usually 209 gold and then 171 but that's after diplomatic penalties kicking in (settling too close, warmonger, CS stealing etc)

3 - If you are going on attack, you need two melee as well. Rotate fresh units to the front. Be prepared to bring a worker. This has really helped me keep units alive. Even if I don't need to cut forest/jungle/marsh, I might use a worker to draw the enemy out in the open where I can pick them off, retake the worker with mounted unit, and do it again. This really helps when they are turtling behind the city. After espionage kicks in, you don't need to scout the city with a unit to blast away. Put a spy in the city you want to attack. Instant visibility. Well, relatively instant. It takes a couple of turns.

Until artillery kicks in, chances are you won't get more than 2 tiles away on standard range without promotion. I still think the spies at early stages is best used to counter-espionage (if you're leader in tech), rig election ,or to steal techs

5 - Learn to set city to food focus and manipulate tiles/specialists slots to get more science or production. Whatever is in need at the time. Science is really key, so you need population to get past the pesky AI in science. This really helped my game a bunch.

I think going forward, it's best to lock food tiles and always set focus to production. There's an explanation somewhere that describes the extra production when a new pop kicks in the turn itself. It's always a good practice on this anyway, allows for better management for your pop.

 

[Maxym]

He means at king AI won't have 240 cash on hand, so it's better to do a 177+2gpt or even lower than to sit with lux on hand. You can usually get at least a hundred up front from somebody, I never was forced to do 7gpt, but you can always sell those to whomever comes into some cash when needed.

 

[JothHago]

Right, suppose that's true on King. But I do know that while AI's usually rarely have 240, I'd take a combination of gold and GPT instead of just 7gpt straight up.

But on the topic of OP going for GL and then Steel, I'd probably not rush for it. The only melee units I go for pre-industrial will usually be horsemen for the move rate. I usually go for Xbows instead.

 

[Scorpionleader]

You guys have helped me a WHOLE lot. Having a lot more success. I just lost a game but I made it much closer than last time. I've learned so much about the game just micromanaging the citizen/specialist slots. In this game, I managed to take Arabia's capital. Where do I go from here? Clean him up? Leave his remaining cities? Also, washington DOW'd me. Here are some screenshots of my new game:

http://i.imgur.com/seqZNTY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SsJW0nb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/5zXioBq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/jFA4LCC.jpg

I don't see that you have a front line with America, so I would push until I had one. Regroup the best you can, and push to Washington, or with Navy just take it. Minutemen are a pain, so be careful. No terrain penalties.

 

[supernovasky]

So I ended up losing that game. I've started yet ANOTHER. Washington had a fleet of navy and a bunch of battleships + AA guns. I just can't seem to avoid falling behind in tech every time, even AFTER the great library + NC. And it's not like I'm not focusing hard on producing tech either.

 

[supernovasky]

Playing expansionist with a non-CS bonus civ, what should be my position regarding city states?

I am also reading get used to unhappiness. How am I supposed to fill up specialist slots if my cities aren't growing? Last game I had a problem - my cities borders were huge, had 24 pop, but even still my specialist slots were not as strong as my worked tiles.

 

[Scorpionleader]

Playing expansionist with a non-CS bonus civ, what should be my position regarding city states?

I am also reading get used to unhappiness. How am I supposed to fill up specialist slots if my cities aren't growing? Last game I had a problem - my cities borders were huge, had 24 pop, but even still my specialist slots were not as strong as my worked tiles.

I set up for food focus to get the population up. I set only the science buildings for specialists to keep research high. Usually works pretty good. All tiles near river are farms. I find that production tends to work it's way in most of the time.

Some cities I set to production focus when I see they have an overabundance of food or I want to build something faster in that city. As far as I can tell food is your friend.

 

[supernovasky]

Yeah... In that game with Washington, I was producing tons of food... but I was afraid to take away my production and gold tiles and set them for specialist because I kept growing my cities... it was at like, 24 pop but still not jumping into my specialist slots and still with unworked land resources. Then I saw washington had something insane like 36 pop. What the hell? Lol.