How to Make the Most of Terrain?

[Flambo]

I've just recently moved from Prince to Monarch, and had one really fun win with Elizabeth on Normal/Standard Pangaea, 7 Civs. I was able to do well despite having too few cities, because my terrain was almost perfect - tons of river tiles, nearby production site, accessible bronze/iron. With the rivers I was able to research enough to keep up by trading with the AI, and the production site gave me just enough military to keep the AIs from declaring war.

Since then, I've found myself with starts that seem pretty nice, except for one problem: low hammers. What can I do to deal with this? Without access to a good production city and tons of river tiles for research, I find myself struggling. Even with abundant food resources, which should make whipping a dream, I just don't know what I'm about.

Mostly I'm interested to know what other people do when their production and/or commerce options are limited.

Also more generally, advice with balancing my priorities would be great. With the AI having a fair advantage at Monarch, I find myself afraid to put off important wonders like Pyramids for too long, and consistently miss Great Library. Even just a basic time frame to judge my progress would be great (ie: XX tech by YY year, AA wonder by BB year, etc.)

And of course... any other advice that doesn't fit any of those categories!

 

[Maronae3]

I notice the same problem in the early game, sometimes too little commerce or production. I compensate by simply limiting builds. In the early game (until Renaissance) you should really only building workers, settlers, and military, with an occasional exception of a library, (strictly for specialists until about the end of REX in my opinion) with the occasional building of wealth/beakers for a push.

Therefore, in this early stage, mainly your production will come from a cooperative in all of your cities. Once critical buildings like monuments or granaries are complete in your new cities, don't be afraid to whip empire wide or slow growth in any one city to pump settlers and workers. At some point, each city will hit the happy cap and at that point its just smart to stall growth with settlers/workers or to reduce the population to put out units. This is what usually maintains your production.

A good thing to look for if lacking any of these things are areas that are at least decent for production/commerce (maybe lots of plains but you need commerce) that are supplemented by excess food. Cities with multiple (really just 2) food resources can be used to act as either production or commerce cities, where the situation warrants.

As for years and wonders... My best advice would be to watch your opponents. It's impossible for us to ballpark years because that's just too situational. Either way, its relatively easy to predict these things in the game yourself. If you see that any AI has Literature, tech it or trade fast and be ready to chop in a quick race. Same with a tech like liberalism. Just watch as the AIs tech the prereqs and drag it out as long as you can based on that.