Help a noob.

[predesad]

Okay, so the move up has been made, and I can confirm first hand that if the culturally connected start box is clicked that all the american civs will appear(Not sure the exact nature of the bug, but I remember hearing about it, and sure enough the incan's and mayan's are on my continent, and the aztecs and americans and some other people are on another continent.) My capitol has become a great settler factory(first one, works like a charm) but now it has suffered because of disease and so I have to build a couple of settlers in other cities. I have one question, I am at the position where one of my neighbors is weak and isolated and yet I still have lots of room to build cities... should I eliminate the competition(if they built galley's they could get to this area but I have them cut off from it with my own territory) or just pump out settlers, grab the territory and worry about them later?

prolly just keep pumping out settlers if you have the factory going, but if you can get units from some other cities which are not building settlers you could think about warring while expanding, just don't let it stop your expansion

 

[Sargon of Agade]

Okay, I have one qestion about the commercial trait, is it better to use that extra income to become or try to become the tech leader, or to rake in the cash and buy your techs?

 

[Beorn-eL-Feared]

ICS does cause huge corruption really quick though - since you get a lot of them. giving them just a bit more than their natural 9 (12-15 tiles, try and build in circles: equally distant apart your capital when it's possible) is something I've done first in Regent, and it pretty much got me through monarch onto emperor bloody fast. 1st city placement rule I set to myself is to adapt to terrain (build on hills, beside rivers, preferrably) and 2nd is to make them 2-3 tiles away from my capitol until I filled my natural area. After that, don't sparse up too much, but make cities first where there are luxuries, ressources, rivers and hills. In new cities, consider going spearman-worker opening, as those are the 2 units you need the most to progress safely through the difficulty levels.

This and the no-wonder rule should make you a monarch player soon enough, after you've learned to deal with the 2 content citizens.