Help on noble
- Thread starter webster
- Start date
webster,
You're right, there are some problems with this game. I think it is probably right of you to seek outside opinion too, as hopefully you'll get some pointers here that will significantly improve your playstyle.
Before we go further, please read; The Everyone's Guide to Getting Advice! compiled by VoiceOfUnreason.
There are a lot of suggestions I can make, however I'll confine comments to a few that if fixed would (imho) go a long way improving your chances.
No apparent Victory in sight
I'm not sure which victory target you have in mind for this game, but really nothing stands out. You're small, not good on the tech' front, unknown to half the world's leaders, and a Cultural win doesn't look likely. It's hard to win a game if you're not aiming for a target or at least giving yourself the critical mass to choose a target.
Insufficient Workers
Only 3 Workers is terrible. I'm aware some were killed off, but really this is one of the reasons this game has been a struggle from the get-go. There is tons of opportunity to chop forests for faster builds, and to lift food levels by chain irrigation. To make matters worse, one of them is building a Mine outside of any city radius, and another appears to have finished building a Mine again outside of any BFC. There's a dozen Mines in that area south-west of Moscow that are simply not able to be used by any city.
Explore and Trade
Limited trading partners and limited trade routes (Closed Borders with England is hurting you, as it's the gateway for many cities to get external trade routes). You have to meet the rest of the world to improve your technology and resource trading opportunities. Your lack of 2 movement units would support even building an Explorer!
Civics
You are not using The Caste System at all (no Merchants, Artists, or Scientists) when you could be whipping away under Slavery (St. Petersburg!), and barely leveraging Organised Religion (only 3 of your 11 cities are building city improvements). Try to get a better understanding of how Civics work and how you can make good use of them.
City Management
There are a lot of comments about city builds (e.g. Why Yekaterinburg and Newcastle don't have Barracks? Why Oxford isn't working a Gold Mine supported by Farms?) but I think that you'll get better with experience and think more critically about your choices as you play more games.
Hope these few points are of some help to get you on a better path. Best of luck!
You're right, there are some problems with this game. I think it is probably right of you to seek outside opinion too, as hopefully you'll get some pointers here that will significantly improve your playstyle.
Before we go further, please read; The Everyone's Guide to Getting Advice! compiled by VoiceOfUnreason.
There are a lot of suggestions I can make, however I'll confine comments to a few that if fixed would (imho) go a long way improving your chances.
No apparent Victory in sight
I'm not sure which victory target you have in mind for this game, but really nothing stands out. You're small, not good on the tech' front, unknown to half the world's leaders, and a Cultural win doesn't look likely. It's hard to win a game if you're not aiming for a target or at least giving yourself the critical mass to choose a target.
Insufficient Workers
Only 3 Workers is terrible. I'm aware some were killed off, but really this is one of the reasons this game has been a struggle from the get-go. There is tons of opportunity to chop forests for faster builds, and to lift food levels by chain irrigation. To make matters worse, one of them is building a Mine outside of any city radius, and another appears to have finished building a Mine again outside of any BFC. There's a dozen Mines in that area south-west of Moscow that are simply not able to be used by any city.
Explore and Trade
Limited trading partners and limited trade routes (Closed Borders with England is hurting you, as it's the gateway for many cities to get external trade routes). You have to meet the rest of the world to improve your technology and resource trading opportunities. Your lack of 2 movement units would support even building an Explorer!
Civics
You are not using The Caste System at all (no Merchants, Artists, or Scientists) when you could be whipping away under Slavery (St. Petersburg!), and barely leveraging Organised Religion (only 3 of your 11 cities are building city improvements). Try to get a better understanding of how Civics work and how you can make good use of them.
City Management
There are a lot of comments about city builds (e.g. Why Yekaterinburg and Newcastle don't have Barracks? Why Oxford isn't working a Gold Mine supported by Farms?) but I think that you'll get better with experience and think more critically about your choices as you play more games.
Hope these few points are of some help to get you on a better path. Best of luck!
logarithm64
Omnipotent Space Lizard
- Joined
- Dec 10, 2009
- Messages
- 162
I've played until about 1950AD and I think it would be best for you to aim for a space race victory.
First of all, you may want to consider trading a lot of techs with the AI to catch up with them (Divine Right in particular). Since your capital has a decent amount of food and working those grassland forests isn't a good idea, consider turning citizens into scientists (or maybe a few artists for creating great works in York). Since you are no longer at war, make either an explorer, spy, or caravel in one of your cities and use it to contact the remaining civs. Some of the AIs will refuse to open borders with you so you may wish to gift them a useless tech to make them like you. Switching religion to Buddhism and cranking out Buddhist missionaries in York can also help your diplomatic situation. You'll still get income from the Taoist shrine; don't worry.
I decided to built four extra cities in my game- one west of Moscow on a hill with the nearby floodplains and grassland farmed; one south-east of York as I had taken a considerable amount of land from the English; a commerce city west of York and a great person farm in the barren tundra in the north.
I personally went to Democracy as soon as possible for Emancipation's 100% cottage growth rate and Universal Suffrage's rush-buy capabilities, built a few more workers and cottaged over many of the grassland tiles. That way, your new cottages will yield seven commerce in about 75 turns, and you can use all of this new gold to buy buildings in hammer-poor cities (i.e. St. Petersburg). IMHO, specialists are not really the way to go here for research because on tech parity you'd be rather close to Emancipation unhappiness when you're researching Constitution for representation.
However, Emancipation did mean that the capital was now only able to turn two citizens into scientists instead of about seven with caste system. Therefore, I decided to go for Biology, make a city in the highly-forested north, build forest preserves everywhere and then buy a National Park in the city. Moscow would have probably been a better candidate had you not built the Moai statues there (St.Petersburg would have been better). This sort of answers your original question about forests- keep them in one city for National Park. If a city is poor in production and has a few forests, leave them for lumbermills. Otherwise, it is safe to chop them down to make room for extra improvements and the temporary production boost in nearby cities
As far as warfare goes, you may wish to wait until about 1900AD when you (hopefully) have Assembly Line and Artillery if you want to conduct any future wars. In my game, Elizabeth only had longbowmen when I had infantry, but she capitulated to Augustus Caesar. Otherwise, she would have been an ideal target. Montezuma wouldn't be a bad target either if you have State Property to deal with the maintenance costs. If you can start (or join) a world war against him, then you may wish to do so if you can crank out/upgrade enough military units in time. He'll have enough on his hands with his neighbours killing him to send out an army, and even if he does, someone will probably demolish his stack of doom anyway. Oh, and keep an eye on Ramesses- he seems to be going for a cultural victory. If he gets too close, be prepared to capture and raze his main culture city.
If you're still behind in tech, go for the Internet and only research techs that enable spaceship parts (directly or indirectly). Superconductors in particular is quite good to research first for the laboratories and, of course, the SS thrusters. Composites would not be a bad idea either as it takes a while to build all the SS casings. If you are the first to research Fusion you receive a great engineer that you may want to use to hurry production of the space elevator if your production is poor.
It's still possible to win this game. Good luck!
First of all, you may want to consider trading a lot of techs with the AI to catch up with them (Divine Right in particular). Since your capital has a decent amount of food and working those grassland forests isn't a good idea, consider turning citizens into scientists (or maybe a few artists for creating great works in York). Since you are no longer at war, make either an explorer, spy, or caravel in one of your cities and use it to contact the remaining civs. Some of the AIs will refuse to open borders with you so you may wish to gift them a useless tech to make them like you. Switching religion to Buddhism and cranking out Buddhist missionaries in York can also help your diplomatic situation. You'll still get income from the Taoist shrine; don't worry.
I decided to built four extra cities in my game- one west of Moscow on a hill with the nearby floodplains and grassland farmed; one south-east of York as I had taken a considerable amount of land from the English; a commerce city west of York and a great person farm in the barren tundra in the north.
I personally went to Democracy as soon as possible for Emancipation's 100% cottage growth rate and Universal Suffrage's rush-buy capabilities, built a few more workers and cottaged over many of the grassland tiles. That way, your new cottages will yield seven commerce in about 75 turns, and you can use all of this new gold to buy buildings in hammer-poor cities (i.e. St. Petersburg). IMHO, specialists are not really the way to go here for research because on tech parity you'd be rather close to Emancipation unhappiness when you're researching Constitution for representation.
However, Emancipation did mean that the capital was now only able to turn two citizens into scientists instead of about seven with caste system. Therefore, I decided to go for Biology, make a city in the highly-forested north, build forest preserves everywhere and then buy a National Park in the city. Moscow would have probably been a better candidate had you not built the Moai statues there (St.Petersburg would have been better). This sort of answers your original question about forests- keep them in one city for National Park. If a city is poor in production and has a few forests, leave them for lumbermills. Otherwise, it is safe to chop them down to make room for extra improvements and the temporary production boost in nearby cities
As far as warfare goes, you may wish to wait until about 1900AD when you (hopefully) have Assembly Line and Artillery if you want to conduct any future wars. In my game, Elizabeth only had longbowmen when I had infantry, but she capitulated to Augustus Caesar. Otherwise, she would have been an ideal target. Montezuma wouldn't be a bad target either if you have State Property to deal with the maintenance costs. If you can start (or join) a world war against him, then you may wish to do so if you can crank out/upgrade enough military units in time. He'll have enough on his hands with his neighbours killing him to send out an army, and even if he does, someone will probably demolish his stack of doom anyway. Oh, and keep an eye on Ramesses- he seems to be going for a cultural victory. If he gets too close, be prepared to capture and raze his main culture city.
If you're still behind in tech, go for the Internet and only research techs that enable spaceship parts (directly or indirectly). Superconductors in particular is quite good to research first for the laboratories and, of course, the SS thrusters. Composites would not be a bad idea either as it takes a while to build all the SS casings. If you are the first to research Fusion you receive a great engineer that you may want to use to hurry production of the space elevator if your production is poor.
It's still possible to win this game. Good luck!
VoiceOfUnreason
Deity
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2005
- Messages
- 3,663
Winable - sure. However, if this were going to be an easy win, you probably wouldn't be in this position in the first place.
Some observations
1) Food is life: you've got a very nice city just east of Moscow that you never settled.
2) Mines don't work that way.
3) Your tech path... meanders. Especially in the opening, having a plan is really important, and from what I can see you really didn't have one. A bad plan stomps no plan at all.
4) Your first great person came very late - GP are not an easy piece of the game, so just note "I have to get better at this" and move on for now.
5) Starts with lots of forests are usually telling you to spend lots of hammers early. Either you are going to chop the trees to construct an early wonder, or (better) turn the trees into settlers and workers. Later those workers come back and put cottages where the trees used to be, and convert your capital to a commerce/research center.
First, Thanks voiceofunreason.
1)So is Growing cities to their highest pop. in fastest manner best for most cities?
2)The useless mines were stupid but I had the wrong idea of keeping nonhill forest and trying to luck into a resource.
3)Tech goal was first worker techs, Bronze working, monarchy for HR, machinery and civil service for mace men then replaceable part for lumber mills and rifling for riflemen this is my goals usually.
4) Ya Never have figured out how to focus on getting GG people.
5)Need to get over keeping non hilled forest!
1)So is Growing cities to their highest pop. in fastest manner best for most cities?
2)The useless mines were stupid but I had the wrong idea of keeping nonhill forest and trying to luck into a resource.
3)Tech goal was first worker techs, Bronze working, monarchy for HR, machinery and civil service for mace men then replaceable part for lumber mills and rifling for riflemen this is my goals usually.
4) Ya Never have figured out how to focus on getting GG people.
5)Need to get over keeping non hilled forest!
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