How the hell?

[Kawalimus]

Sometimes my plan for expansion is build 4-5 good cities or so, then conquer my neighbor as early as I can and get his good cities, which if it works out will see me in the 8-10 range and able to compete on Prince/Monarch. My domination wins have all begun with something like that.

It's REALLY annoying with the bonuses they get as you go higher though. Monarch just beats me down mentally with techs. I always get discouraged, I think I've gotten a good tech lead, then next turn I look in the window and this guy's got a bunch of later techs out of nowhere. Bonus points if it's Mansa Musa. How the hell does he do that?!

I'm no master, but I'm getting better every time I do it. I'm terrible at placing my cities.

 

[Gumbolt]

The key for me on monarch is making sure i give away no techs that lead to long bowmen. Monarchy etc. I trade away as few techs as possible. With the Oracle your almost guaranteed a decent tech to trade for alphabet which the AI now seem to beeline early on before me.

As for starts i find unless i go the worker/ chopping route the Ai will have a huge network of cities before me. The alternative is grow the capital then expand. large cities certainly produce settlers/ workers faster. Opportunity cost.

I would never build a wonder with fewer than 3-4 cities at start unless i had a lot of food resources and wanted to build something to allow my city to grow before i built a worker/settler.

One of the reasons i like the imperialist trait is I can build a settler straight off in 18 or so turns pending on terrain. My second city could be set up before 3200bc on monarchy. By 1500bc I could easily have 7 cities if I rexx like crazy. Although without financial or organized I would have little or no science.