How can you compete on Monarch and above?

[obsolete]

I always found it odd that people who make representation a priority, then burn off their great people instead of absorbing them to take more advantage of the representation.

 

[cabert]

I always found it odd that people who make representation a priority, then burn off their great people instead of absorbing them to take more advantage of the representation.

is it better to have liberalism in 300/500 AD or to have a few settled GS?
it's arguable.
At monarch level, you can be first at liberalism after 1000AD, so it's not mandatory to lightbulb. But if you warred a bit you certainly lost some time in the tech departement, and lightbulbing is the easiest way to catch up fast.

 

[obsolete]

I hate lightbulbing. You don't get to chose what to lightbulb so you are very very restricted. I'll absorb them in and take advantage of representation. I like the perm hammers + beaker + gold output I get. During wartimes, I drop my science slider to 0 and use all the money to keep upgrading to more & more advanced units while still moving up the tech tree.

 

[JujuLautre]

I hate lightbulbing. You don't get to chose what to lightbulb so you are very very restricted.

In some way you can chose. Not among all the possible techs, but the lightbulbed techs always follow a certain order in which they are available for lightbulb.

 

[futurehermit]

Anyone who's half-decent at lightbulbing plans their lightbulbing route--you do get to choose, there are options. The best imho is lightbulbing your way to liberalism (philosophy-paper-education-liberalism) and then printing press and chemistry (all done with GSs). Nothing wrong with that route at all imho.

Leader traits: Philosophical and Industrious are both great choices, highly touted by some very strong immortal/deity players on these very forums. If you have industrious + stone, pyramids are very very nice. Otherwise, just nabbing a few timely wonders (Pete2006 likes stonehenge, oracle, and colossus for example) is quite handy. Philosophical is huge and you read any acidsatyr game and you're left in awe at how powerful it can be--much more powerful than financial imho. The acid crew was landing liberalism prior to 500AD with Gandhi for example...

On monarch, which is my preferred level as well (nice mix of challenge without an insane amount of tedious concentration and microing with some forgiveness mixed in for minor mistakes), you can get by with any leader but as mentioned Rome and I would add Hatshepsut make things easier.

Just make sure you conquer a bit of terrain early and have a plan in mind. Expand slow but steady and once you've taken out at least two rivals you can usually dictate your victory condition.

 

[frob2900]

-Industrious is anything but dubious on monarch. Perhaps on higher levels but on Monarch it can get you pretty much any early wonder you set your mind to. Perhaps even two.Try Oracle+Pyramids for early forges (also cheaper with Ind.) and police state.

-Philosophical is not particularly hard to manage in the sense that you can get one early great person much faster and if you set up a GP farm, it will be much better. Doesn't really have anything to do with the MM of a full scale SE.

-With early workers you can chop really fast in the beginning. It's sort of a quasi-industrious if you don't mind levelling all your forests or you can chop up a sizeable army in no time.


For my money, Mehmed is one of the best Monarch leaders. Expansive for health/fast chopping, Hammam for large cities and janissaries for more cities.
The cheap factories later on let you industrialize in an instant.

I have to disagree with your leader choices Dnomal. Not because those leaders suck or anything, but I would say that industrious is a dubious choice at monarch or above, the cheap workers of expansive are nice but hardly a game changer, and being philo, while supercool, can be tough to manage properly without alot of MM.

The traits that I think help out someone trying to bump up a level are financial, aggresssive, and if you have warlords charismatic.

The main reason being all of these traits help you without you really having to try to exploit them. Everybody needs to tech and war, and the extra early happiness of a charismatic is huge when you are used to prince and noble.

Just nitpicking.

 

[mudphud]

I'd just like to put out that there are a lot of good traits and what is much more important than choosing the leader with the correct traits is using the leader's traits correctly. Some of the traits are more useful and more easily used than others but I think it is good to be able to use them all. After all this makes for more varied and interesting play. Also, to win on monarch you don't have to have a specific leader just fine tune your strategy. Don't feel like you always have to do the same thing. If you find stone consider building a stone wonder (even more so if you are industrious). If copper pops in your initial fat cross and there is a nearby enemy capital consider ax rush (even more so if you are aggressive). The other thing is realize that you won't always be the tech leader but make trades and beeline techs the AI doesn't have to trade with to help keep up. Early on you will hopefully have an advantage in one area but the ai will probably be ahead in other areas.

Finally, read some of the ALC or aelf's games. These helped me understand a lot of the basic ideas for how to play and allowed me to be a (relatively) successful monarch player. If you are having trouble with a specific issue I'm sure people here will be glad to help. Your current question is so broad that is hard to really answer.

 

[Dan Quale]

is it better to have liberalism in 300/500 AD or to have a few settled GS?
it's arguable.
At monarch level, you can be first at liberalism after 1000AD, so it's not mandatory to lightbulb. But if you warred a bit you certainly lost some time in the tech departement, and lightbulbing is the easiest way to catch up fast.

You really dont have to lightbulb to get it that fast. I've pulled off liberalism on immortal/marathon at 440 AD without a single lightbulb, although I agree it could be faster with the lightbulbs.

Those "few" (more like 12-15 with a philosophical leader, and a couple of food heavy enemy capitals) gps really add up settled in your own capital running beauracracy and representation, really add up fast. 1 Gs with representation =1 hammer/9 beakers per turn. With beauracracy its bumped up to
1.5 hammers 13.5 beakers/turn, which I find pretty impressive.
At only 10 gs you are getting 135 base beakers per turn, from a single city.
Not to mention the additional 15 base hammers.

If you are maintaining a strong lead, lightbulbing is not so necessary. And as highly used as it is, early lightbulbing, is among the greatest wastes of a gp, short of testing Issac Newton's combat prowness in a gladiatorial match vs a panther. Those first gps, come so early and cheaply, yet if you do the math their overall contribution would have been enormous, compared to the tech they instantly, gave you, as well as everything you traded it for.

 

[InvisibleStalke]

Beakers from settled specialists aren't bumped up by Beauracracy although they certainly are improved by academies and libraries. The B. bonus is only to commerce.

 

[ds61514]

There's also the thing about time value of beakers. 1 beaker now is worth more than 1 beaker one hundred years from now. Getting Taoism/Education quickly lets you trade more techs, lets you brew more AI-AI conflict, lets you build Oxford/Pacifism faster, etc etc. It gives you options that 9 beakers at 1800 AD doesn't.

 

[Phrederick]

If you are maintaining a strong lead, lightbulbing is not so necessary. And as highly used as it is, early lightbulbing, is among the greatest wastes of a gp, short of testing Issac Newton's combat prowness in a gladiatorial match vs a panther. Those first gps, come so early and cheaply, yet if you do the math their overall contribution would have been enormous, compared to the tech they instantly, gave you, as well as everything you traded it for.

It's not the overall contribution over the entire game that matters, though. If an early lightbulb lets you conquer an extra civ or build a wonder you otherwise wouldn't get, that's a benefit you can't get by settling them. Examples: Lightbulbing philosophy lets you get pacifism 10-20 turns earlier WHILE researching something else as well, which could end up netting you an extra great person. Lightbulbing theology could let you build your army with theology, significantly raising your kills:losses ratio. Lightbulbing Divine Right could let you get a head start on Versailles and Spiral Minaret, letting you get them even if you build them in cities with less than stellar production. There's situations where I'd prefer a single free tech now to the beakers equivalent to 3-4 free techs over the course of the game, because the earlier the benefit, the earlier you can use that advantage to get ahead and stay ahead.

 

[futurehermit]

There's also the thing about time value of beakers. 1 beaker now is worth more than 1 beaker one hundred years from now. Getting Taoism/Education quickly lets you trade more techs, lets you brew more AI-AI conflict, lets you build Oxford/Pacifism faster, etc etc. It gives you options that 9 beakers at 1800 AD doesn't.

Very well said.

 

[pigswill]

On the subject of early lightbulbs getting 1000 beakers from a lightbulb (and maybe an extra 1000-1500 beakers from tech trading) can save you 50 turns of research with a small empire producing eg 40-50 beakers/turn. As well as using this to maintain tech parity you could alternatively focus on hammers and build a respectable stack while your GS catches up on tech for you.

Later in the game when your empire is producing 1000+ beakers/turn light-bulbing is less important (but then +15 beakers/turn is less important as well).

 

[futurehermit]

Yes, late in the game it's all about golden-ages. That's for space race though. For domination, you want to close out the game in the late renaissance/early industrial where lightbulbing is still ok.

 

[pigswill]

Other point I wanted to make is that competing on monarch is likely to call for different strategies than competing on more difficult levels (hearsay evidence, I'm still on monarch).

 

[futurehermit]

Yeah, on monarch the AI doesn't tech as fast as on higher levels so lightbulbing and trading is less (though still) effective. Plus the AI doesn't expand as fast, so early rushes are not always as possible/effective and instead building a pile of your own cities first can be the better option than stringing yourself out over fair distances with significant maintenance costs.

 

[bluedevil99]

Dark--

I'm in the same boat as you, just made the jump to monarch and am finding it really, really challenging. I've won a couple of domination victories along with a diplo and space race, but I'm still restarting half the time.

I can offer a couple of hints. Play Incas at first as they're way overpowered, and try a war friendly map like Pangea. Yeah it amounts to easy mode (along with industrious/financial, quechas are money, and free-culture terraces will be in most cities you capture) but it helped me at least to get a feel for how fast the AI techs and where I need to be by when in order to keep up.

In general I like to play a leader with early advantages to offset the AI's early edge. Hatty and Cyrus are great for war chariots and immortals. Hatty is a good for a second game after HC, both because you don't have to bother with stonehenge and because no anarchy encourages you to experiment with civics (and unlike prince, using civics well is essential). Cyrus has two of the best early start traits and I think immortals are by far the best early game unit (over praets). Hannibal is great as with financial/charismatic you can easily expand instead of early war if the map dictates it.

Only other things is: Scout, scout, scout. I learned this from Sisutil's threads. At first I'm reading his ALC games thinking man, why is he building multiple scouts early? Them I realized at monarch and above the single most important thing is having a long term plan. You need to know before you build your 3rd city (and preferably before the 2nd) whether you're going to continue expansion or who your first target will be. Similarly you need to know BEFORE finishing off your first opponent where the war engine is going next (and how long you're going to spend in recovery). You can't do this unless you know where your opponents' assets lie. This also means I typically prioritize AH, BW, and IW, both to know where to build cities and because the single most important thing to know early is who has iron/copper and who's in danger of getting it.

Good luck! I've sure needed it