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

[supernovasky]

I was also fairly hobbled for gold - Only one lux resource that other people didn't seem to have.

 

[Falconiano]

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.

^ This.

Up to immortal the GL is pretty much a guarantee, and it gives you a serious advantage especially if you pop NC right after that.
Oracle is the other wonder that is extremely easy to win and gives a major advantage, even on deity, because the AI for some reasons doesn't seem to start building this until it's too late.

 

[JothHago]

I still think it's good practice to play without gunning for great library. Only because the start being so important, unless you can get GL before say T40 or T50. On the Trad SP, having to go Aristocracy sacrificing the middle part of it will also slow down growth at the start which I believe is a good key foundation to a more well rounded game. Maybe in King difficulty you can easily get other few key prods (granny/monument/worker) before GL but in higher difficulties, you really need to be going straight GL the moment writing is available else other civilizations will have retrieved it.

Also if you have luxury requiring specific tech to improve, would you wait till T50 or so before improving it, and risk not getting the enough early trades to hard buy a settler or worker(unless you play OCC).

I know I've pretty much learn to skip GL altogether in my games these days, play without it and I can still win almost all my games in immortal

 

[Maxym]

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.

This is why you fall behind in science. Don't work mines and gold, just food. Assign citizens to highest food tiles and watch your pop and science explode. Once you hit unis you will have specialists and food to grow as you cities will be in 10 pop range, 14 or more for cap. Don't worry about production, besides initial scout, monument, granny, archers and NC you don't NEED to produce anything else throughout the game until Apollo and parts if you go for SV. You still will produce ton of stuff, just don't worry how long it takes. Science buildings should be rushed anyway and rest is optional.

 

[CornPlanter]

I beat immortal without building GL ever. Not that I don't want it, but it was always difficult for me to get it and I just gave up. That said, if it's King we are talking about, you can pursue every wonder there is and be aggressive and go for cultural victory at the same time for all I know... just always keep in mind your long and short term goals, micromanage accordingly, and while you are at it, always keep in mind side effects of said micromanagement. If you build/rushbuy lots of army to teach your neighboor a lesson, you may run out of money and happiness in a middle of your conquest. Have a plan to deal with it, do your math, check what sources of happiness and gold are available. If you go for a wonder, city won't be building anything else for a long time. Are you sure you will defend yourself if you get attacked in the meantime? Will you have money to buy emergency bowmen if needed? Or maybe the only potential treats are fighting amongst themselves and you have a good window for building wonders? It's mostly experience.

 

[smileyy90210]

This is why you fall behind in science. Don't work mines and gold, just food. Assign citizens to highest food tiles and watch your pop and science explode. Once you hit unis you will have specialists and food to grow as you cities will be in 10 pop range, 14 or more for cap. Don't worry about production, besides initial scout, monument, granny, archers and NC you don't NEED to produce anything else throughout the game until Apollo and parts if you go for SV. You still will produce ton of stuff, just don't worry how long it takes. Science buildings should be rushed anyway and rest is optional.

More pop means more hammers anyway, because you won't have to choose between the high hammer and low hammer tiles anymore -- you'll be able to work both.

 

[Deau]

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.

CS approach: Super early game, try to complete quests from CSs that provide
2 lux (mercantiles)
A single lux that you don't expect to ever have within your expanded borders
an outstanding defensive position (creating a choke point from aggressive nearby AIs)

Mid game as you overcome happiness requirement between trades, faith, buildings and SPs, shift your CS focus towards cultural CS. Every turn cut off the next Rationalism policy is a noticeable gain towards science VC.

The general game breaking thing with happiness is strong faith. The issue is unless you have desert folklore or stone circles pantheon to boost your faith generation, it is hard to get enough faith out to purchase those pagodas. It is also somewhat painful to go outside your usual build order for shrines and temples +1 and +2 happiness bonuses. The start location will dictate if you can spare the hammers for at least one of these 2 passive follower bonuses.

A neat trick although more useful on emperor/immortal where the AI sucks at religion but expands enough to get the most out of it is to use Pilgrimage as founder bonus and rush the hell out of faith very early in the game.

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.

For optimal micro management, you want to set your citizens on food tiles manually and set the focus to production such that each time you grow a pop in a city, due to the timeliness in resource calculation, you will get the hammers from the tile assessed for the turn you grew whereas you wouldn't get the food from a food tiles worked because food was already calculated for that city on that turn.

The drawback is that if you forget to manually set that hammer tile to a food tile the turn after you grew, then you slow your growth up. Thus, while being suboptimal, setting focus to food isn't all so bad. In particular, the nice thing about food focus is that barbarians covering a manually locked food tile will be reallocated to the next best food tile instead of the best hammer tile so even though many players brag and claim about production focus, they often don't micromanage it back to food focus on turns in-between growth to ensure barbs don't screw their growth over.

Anyway ultimately, micromanaging is especially important in the very early game when you have 1-4 cities. From T100 and on, I rarely do any micro management on growth turns for tiles on Deity. I just do all specialists manually.

 

[Maxym]

More pop means more hammers anyway, because you won't have to choose between the high hammer and low hammer tiles anymore -- you'll be able to work both.

< This

Thank you

 

[Zephram]

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.

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.

THIS. One of the hardest things to do in Civ I find is first picking a strategy, and then sticking to it. Specifically, there is a direct conflict between growing and building science / economy, and cranking out a legion of military units it seems. You can't really do them both extremely well at the same time, forcing you to have to choose and then stick to your choice. If you reverse course and flip flop, now you just suck at everything :/

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.

For a while maybe, but generally I have to disagree, since I just lost a game with NC start, GL, continuous RA's throughout the game, worked specialists in the GL city, 8 settled academies being worked, Science production focus. Played Romans, lost to Darius Science Victory.

 

[JothHago]

He means if he gets NC after GL , there is no AI @ King difficulty that is going to keep up in science.
Doesn't reflect on anything higher as we know firaxis rigged difficulty levels differently.