HELP! Trying to improve my play (based on Sisiutil's ALC Game #3)!

[Some1]

Hello and merry Christmas to everyone!

Since I (already) got bored to Civ5, I decided to go back to good old Civ4...
I decided to improve my play based on Sisiutil's early ALC games, mainly because of good documentation, veteran player's tips/guidance and the fact I own only Civ4 Vanilla (Build Version: 1.7.4.0). For my first game I chose Sisiutil's ALC: Game 3: China/Qin Shi Huang (Prince Level; Space Victory; Score: 21247) I've played mostly at Noble/Quick setting, so Prince/Normal was going to be a new challenge for me, I've won only few Prince-level games before.
I started off with the savegame he provided from that game and played along guidelines provided in his Game 3: China/Qin Shi Huang (Prince Level; Space Victory; Score: 21247) thread. Things went unusually smoothly for me as you can see from 1060AD savegame.

I've already learned new stuff like:

• You can't capture population 1 city
• When cities' fat crosses overlap you can actually select which city controls that tile!
  Didn't know that was even possible in Civ4, mostly because it isn't that obvious as in Civ5 (the refresh button in city screen)!
• Slingshot (I need to learn more about this tactic)
• Spamming your UU asap when you get techs for it
• You don't have to tech everyting in tech-tree, which I usually do!

Now, at 1540AD I feel things are finally getting out of my hands (too much stuff is going on for me to keep up... after the big war that is)! I realize I've done some big mistakes by not changing my civics, when I first got them (~500 years with same civics ) and by letting Caesar have two cities after I captured Rome in 1060AD! Leaving Neapolis along with his newly settled city was big mistake, as I found out later. Now, looking back, I realize I've been focusing too much on the war effort. Back at 1060AD things looked superb, I had unlocked new civics which I would not use, until 1540AD!

From this point on I've no clear plan what I should do next. Although I have accumulated biggest point lead over AI than ever before compared to my own games!
Hopefully some of you can/have time to provide advise on these issues:

• I.e. what should I build/research next to close the AI's tech-lead?
  I'm probably trying to grab Steel and whore that around, much like Sisiutil did.
  Buildings are very hard for me to decide, e.g. wonders are built in random cities. Where should I put ironworks and so on..?
• What civics/religion to use? I've founded Christianity but since most of my cities are already Buddhist (state religion) so I guess I keep it that way...
  Converting to all new civics would give me 3 turns of anarchy so which ones you recommend?
• Should I settle few new cities to open places I have left?
• What victory should I be aiming at? I'm between Cultural/Space Race/Diplomacy and ofc Time

If you can't bother writing, just download the 1540AD savegame and play then repost here, I won't mind. All help appreciated!! I might replay from 1060AD after I finish this.

 

[Ghpstage]

Looking at your 1060AD save.

• Your economy is in a shambles, you can start repairing it by trading for Currency and Calender and trebling your worker count.
• Workers are most important, your citizens are currently working a large number of unimproved tiles (mostly forests), this is very bad! Try to have around 1.5 workers for each city while you are still growing.
• Why are you building so many buildings? Temples and Colisseums are expensive and you don't need them, Hereditary Rule, those Calender resources and the trades they should make available will be more than enough for now.
• No city should be without a food resource (Xian is horrible!) and no food resource should be left unsettled if possible, fix as much of this problem as you can!
• Where is your Great Person farm? Oh wait there isn't one!? Gaul could do a fine job, farm around it some more and get the National Epic here and run plenty of specialists.

 

[whats a navy]

Adding on from Ghpstage
1) Have your cities over lap somewhat. Overlap can be good in some cases and especially in jungle which you have a lot of. Their are food resources like rice and banana that you aren't settling because fear of overlap.
2)Tech trade some more. You have techs that Mansa and HC would trade for other techs. This can be very beneficial for increasing your tech rate. You really need calendar which could easily help your economy and food

 

[Some1]

Looking at your 1060AD save.

• Your economy is in a shambles, you can start repairing it by trading for Currency and Calender and trebling your worker count.
• Workers are most important, your citizens are currently working a large number of unimproved tiles (mostly forests), this is very bad! Try to have around 1.5 workers for each city while you are still growing.
• Why are you building so many buildings? Temples and Colisseums are expensive and you don't need them, Hereditary Rule, those Calender resources and the trades they should make available will be more than enough for now.
• No city should be without a food resource (Xian is horrible!) and no food resource should be left unsettled if possible, fix as much of this problem as you can!
• Where is your Great Person farm? Oh wait there isn't one!? Gaul could do a fine job, farm around it some more and get the National Epic here and run plenty of specialists.

Hmmm, you're more than right!

• I built so many buildings because of the war weariness unhappiness, but since that can be resolved more easily I'll go hereditary rule.
• Second reason why I build so many buildings is that usually I end up building everything in every city. Should specialize them instead!
• And what comes to GP farm what you think about Huayana Capac's cities, especially coastal Ollantaytambo has 3 fish and 1pork resource.
  I've never had GP farm before so... I don't know.
• Reason why I didn't trade calendar was as stupid as it sounds: I didn't want to obsolete my Stonehenge/Obelisks.

Adding on from Ghpstage
1) Have your cities over lap somewhat. Overlap can be good in some cases and especially in jungle which you have a lot of. Their are food resources like rice and banana that you aren't settling because fear of overlap.
2)Tech trade some more. You have techs that Mansa and HC would trade for other techs. This can be very beneficial for increasing your tech rate. You really need calendar which could easily help your economy and food

1) Now that I know I can reassign tiles between cities that isn't going to be a big problem.
2) I'll get the calendar then

Based on your advices I think I replay from 1060AD or maybe even from 950AD or so, then I have time to fix some big problems.
Edit: I guess I even use my Great Prophet to help research Divine Right this time so Mansa Musa doesn't get it. After eliminating HC and Caesar I think I convert to Christianity to get better relations with Mansa. In addition to that I can trade that tech around too!

 

[Some1]

I ended up replaying from ~900AD to 1515AD.
As a result I'm leading my former 1540AD save by ~120points!

• Now that I've erased Huyana from my island I feel I've built too many military units! What should I do with them? Go after Mansa Musa?
• Also, what city should be made as GP-farm? The previously mentioned Gaul or now perhaps Cumae, Tianjin or Ollantaytambo?
• What techs to research from now on?
• I'm sure I should change civics to Bureaucracy/Pacifism, but what about Caste System/Mercantilism?
• Am I building too many buildings again?
  

And what do you think of this city placement map? (Red crosses are being the ones I'm going to settle next asap I get settlers)

 

[Ghpstage]

More workers, much more workers! The unimproved tiles being worked, the underdeveloped cottages, the lack of a farm chain to feed Xian can all be traced back to a low worker count. You can't really support more cities till you have more workers to improve both new cities, and the ones you have.

What your doing with the workers you have could be improved too,

• A waterwheel before Replaceable Parts is only a tiny amount better than unimproved forest (just an extra 1!) and Workshops before Guilds + Chemistry are iffy.
• No point building so many roads, there are more important things to be building.
• After you have Civil Service you can chain irrigate tiles, which would allow you to get some extra food to Xian by farming its Grassland.
• As a Financial leader theres an obvious advantage to cottaging just about everything thats riverside that can be fed.

Cottage heavy empires will benefit a lot from the Prinitng Press and Liiberalism techs. Printing Press will give a small boost to cottage output, and the Liberalism civics will further boost Towns (Free Speech) and help solve your diplo problems (Free Religion). Astro is also high priority as there are lots of foreign routes avaialble on the other continent.
Astro -> PP -> Lib is where I would go.

The GP farm is something that should be set up as early as you possibly can, 500AD would be considered late. The floodplain cities you mentioned would be better as cottage cities while Ollantaytambo is going to take quite some time to set up, I still think Gaul is the best choice.

Civic wise, theres no need to be in those war civics any longer, and theres never a need to be in that awful Serfdom civic!
Caste is only going to be helpful if you run lots of specialists, if your confident in setting up a GP farm soon then go ahead, otherwise Slavery might be a better choice. Similarly Pacifism is only going to offer much if your getting Great Person Points, I would rather Organised Religion to get some more economic buildings up.

Overall, get some more workers and cottage lots while focusing on cottage techs and you should win this easily.

 

[Some1]

Thanks for your advice, Ghpstage!

What about my massive army? It's going into waste now. Only if I could trade them for workers! Should I delete some of my units? The ones with less XP, to reduce upkeep?

In a hindsight, yes it seems that I've ignored my leader's traits and built wrong improvements, but since I'm novice civilization player... Anyhow this thread has taught me quite a lot!
Never had a GP farm before so I'll give it a try while I still can!
I'll make some more workers then, since I have more cities now.

 

[Ghpstage]

Once you get the hang of having enough, and using workers well, you will find it a lot easier to play at Prince, in fact you may wonder why you ever struggled at all
Some of your excess units can garrison cities that are currently empty, you get some free unit support anyway so you shouldn't have to disband too many of them. Check out the costs on the financial advisor screen (think its F2?)

I played from your latest save till 1770AD, built lots more workers went Astro -> PP -> Lib -> Democracy, built more workers and redid a lot of improvements. Tech rate is exploding and while I don't have all the techs the AIs do a gap is opening up behind me. Plan now is to get to tanks and build the Kremlin, rushbuy huge numbers of tanks and flatten the world

EDIT - Domination 1928, Mansa fell quickly to my Tanks. Invaded the second continent attacking Germany, didn't realise they had a defensive pact with England.... incidently I also found an apparent bug that bounced me inside German borders on DoW .
Took a city with a smallish Tank and Infantry force and held it till the city came out of revolt so I could rushbuy an Airport, then brought in another 100 Tanks and 23 Bombers to smash both the Germans and English easily. Just have to wait a turn as of this save till the borders of captured cities expand for domination.

 

[Some1]

Once you get the hang of having enough, and using workers well, you will find it a lot easier to play at Prince, in fact you may wonder why you ever struggled at all
Some of your excess units can garrison cities that are currently empty, you get some free unit support anyway so you shouldn't have to disband too many of them. Check out the costs on the financial advisor screen (think its F2?)

I played from your latest save till 1770AD, built lots more workers went Astro -> PP -> Lib -> Democracy, built more workers and redid a lot of improvements. Tech rate is exploding and while I don't have all the techs the AIs do a gap is opening up behind me. Plan now is to get to tanks and build the Kremlin, rushbuy huge numbers of tanks and flatten the world

EDIT - Domination 1928, Mansa fell quickly to my Tanks. Invaded the second continent attacking Germany, didn't realise they had a defensive pact with England.... incidently I also found an apparent bug that bounced me inside German borders on DoW .
Took a city with a smallish Tank and Infantry force and held it till the city came out of revolt so I could rushbuy an Airport, then brought in another 100 Tanks and 23 Bombers to smash both the Germans and English easily. Just have to wait a turn as of this save till the borders of captured cities expand for domination.

Seems that having enough workers makes a major difference. Also having them build right improvements is important too!

Workshops and Watermills become important much later than I've realized! Now that I have right techs and civics they're awesome! It's a complete waste to build them so early as I did...
Now that I saw what improvements are vital to build I think I got hang of it. Same for buildings, you clearly don't need them all in every city!

Now that I've got to 1770AD as well, here is my story:
I used different research path, I decided to go PP -> traded for Education and Economics.
Then realized that AI probably hasn't got Liberalism -> used all my treasury to research it as fast as I could. -> Took Astronomy as free tech.
Then I went after Replaceable Parts.
Traded Lib for Nationalism + money. And few turns later for Constitution + money with different AI.
Next I took on Democracy -> traded for Scientific Method
Then Physics -> traded for Corporation & Chemistry. (Mansa Musa probably traded it off to Asoka in the same round because Asoka didn't have it yet, or researched it turn later than me... Could've got Rifling from Asoka... Now that's what happened with Democracy tech few turns later aswell )*
At the same time I researched Communism (State Property - yummy!) -> decided to stop tech trading with AI for a while. Continued on Biology and then Electricity.
*I guess that's the downside trading with AIs, overall I think I gained more than lost in these trades.

It helped me a lot to see your suggestions in action. Farms and Cottages are way to go for a quite a long time.
To my surprise I'm even ahead of you in score, and I have no idea how that happened...

 

[Ghpstage]

Impressive, much better than the earlier saves

To my surprise I'm even ahead of you in score, and I have no idea how that happened...

You have more population, thats the main factor in score, a couple of things that will have contributed to the score difference are that you went Liberalism first and got the free tech, I also focused on preparing for the coming invasion so sunk hammers into things like Galleons, Jails and the like. Oh yeah and i'm building Wealth which is a bad habit I picked up from the Beyond the Sword expansion, where its a good idea .
With Biology in hand your populationm, and score is going to skyrocket now.

Now you've just got to decide how to focus your empire onto a victory condition!

 

[Some1]

Impressive, much better than the earlier saves

Thanks to you!

You have more population, thats the main factor in score, a couple of things that will have contributed to the score difference are that you went Liberalism first and got the free tech, I also focused on preparing for the coming invasion so sunk hammers into things like Galleons, Jails and the like. Oh yeah and i'm building Wealth which is a bad habit I picked up from the Beyond the Sword expansion, where its a good idea .
With Biology in hand your populationm, and score is going to skyrocket now.

Yup, population and score did skyrocket. I looked up some archived posts and I found out that population is 50% of the score. Now I understand why my score plummeted after I whipped simultaneously in multiple cities.

Now you've just got to decide how to focus your empire onto a victory condition!

Decided to go for Diplomatic Victory at first.
I couldn't believe that I was 3 votes short of diplo-victory at 1864! Wonder how much higher the score would've been...
Plan B was going to be Science Victory, which I finally achieved in 1916!!! Final score being: 6503 (35,768 Normalized) - Prince

Quite an improvement over former high score in 1870: 2768 (13,432) - Cultural Victory on Noble
I think I keep playing on Prince from now on