Learn as you play monarchy!

[Icewise]

Alright i have to say i am not the best player and find Monarchy difficulty level still pretty challenging so i decided to play a game and see where my pitfalls lie with you guys hopefully pointing out my mistakes.

• Normal speed
• Random leaders including me
• Continents
• Standart size
• All victories enabled other than Time victory
• All conditions on default so Tech trading is on and barbs are on too

Here is the starting position.

So then i got Catherine (the sexy minx) who i sometimes enjoy playing as.
Financial bonus is of course excellent and Creative isn't too shabby either.

So the starting spot seems to be pretty good. Gold, silk, rice all within the fat square, i would love to have that fish but then it would mean losing Rice and not getting the river bonus so thats off then.

I will settle right on the spot then i think.

Tomorrow i will start playing this game and write everything here, for now anything you wanna add then do so please.

 

[Sisiutil]

Cool.

A couple of general, non-game suggestions::

If you press PrintScreen from within the game, you should just get the game window and not your desktop (though I did love seeing that you have a folder titled "Crap I don't use" ). Failing that, try Alt + PrintScreen to only capture the active window. Also, turn on the gridlines. And if you could post a saved game file too, that would be great.

Nice start. Getting gold right off, especially for a Financial civ, is sweet. That will help with the tech advantage the AI has on Monarch. You have Mining, you'll want Agriculture very soon--work the rice so you can work the gold.

Too bad about the fish. I'm concerned that if you settle in place, there won't be enough room to build a city to your north that can work the fish. I also don't like to make a city coastal unless it can obtain at least one seafood resource. I would move the Scout 2 tiles west onto the desert hill to see what you'd get if you moved the Settler 2 tiles west as well, which would still keep all the resources if you settled in place. There might be desert, but it looks like there may be floodplains.

 

[Icewise]

Alright points noted, but you have any idea how to get rid of that horrible white bit at the bottom i just can't seem to be able to i'm using paint BTW.

So as you can see moving the settler 2 tiles west is out of the question as there is nothing but desert and Mountains there, but 1 west is possible but you lose the Trading bonuses plus all the water Improvements and i am sure there are some other bonuses which i have no idea about!

Here is the save for all the wild girls and boys here!

View attachment 132297

 

[homeyg]

Damn you got a ton of torrent files on your desktop!

Nice start btw.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

One of those "deserts" is actually a flood plains. If you moved 2 west, there would be 2 unworkable tiles (desert and mountain), but you'd pick up a second flood plains and probably make some room to utilize the fish more effectively. I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but I think it's worthy of debate.

 

[Gnarfflinger]

I think it is possible to get the fishing town 3 north 1 east (but maybe a better site may be revealed as the scout ignored.

I'm going with the move 2 squares west side.

 

[Vynd]

I would just settle in place. It's clearly an excellent location for a city, and that's all you can really base your decision on at this point. Sure, moving might make for a better distribution of cities later. But it might not make any difference, too. It might even mess things up that would have been fine if you settle in place. There's really no way to tell based on the information you have now.

 

[Petrucci]

Alright points noted, but you have any idea how to get rid of that horrible white bit at the bottom i just can't seem to be able to i'm using paint BTW.

If you are using paint you will actually have to reconfigure the dimensions

Once you have the picture loaded into paint, you will have to go to Image then from the pull down select attributes, you will have to fiddle with the height some. Surely there is a better way to do this! I don't have a suggestion due to my inexperience taking screen shots in Civ IV.

Great start and good luck, I like reading these threads, but don't have a whole lot of experience with monarch, I'm a mere prince player so I shall only troll

 

[cabert]

if the fish is such an issue, you only have 2 option :
- get it with Moscow= settling 2 N, (i'm wildly guessing that it's an otherwise crappy site, but you'll have enough food!)
- get it with a second/third/fourth city = leaving enough room for it. Without any intelligence on the coast line, you can only guess. My guess is it's going to be hard even if you go 2 W (loads of overlapping + 2 useless tiles is bad!), so you would need to go south, with even more coast AFAIK = bad.

My opinion is to forget the fish for now. you'll have the health bonus when you expand enough, but that's it. And you're financial = a coastal city isn't that bad (early game, later you'll need more land for more cottages).
So my advice is to settle in place (losing a forest ).

 

[cabert]

by the way, don't chop the forest on the calendar ressource (silk if i see well) until you get the calendar tech! It's a good tile to work early (production and commerce), though not as good as farmed rice or mined gold or cottaged FP.
As for techs, go for agri asap, then BW. You'll need fishing very soon, but not before BW, the wheel. You can research fishing before pottery because it gives a research bonus for pottery (so not a total loss).
As soon as you spot some bronze, settle next to it.

 

[JoeM]

Why not settle on the gold and get the defensive hill bonus?

 

[Andrei_V]

I'd settle on place and go straight for CS slingshot.

 

[voek]

Why not settle on the gold and get the defensive hill bonus?

You don't mean that, do you? The gold with financial and having mining from the start is invaluable...

 

[cabert]

Why not settle on the gold and get the defensive hill bonus?

i thought of it too,
but Voek is right, it's a too big loss.

 

[Jeff1787]

I would settle in place. With the rice and the gold, you can worry about the fish later. If I moved at all, it would be one square west.

 

[Jeff1787]

Actually 1 square west looks pretty good.....

 

[Murky]

I would settle in place so that you can get the +2 food (with lighthouse) and +1c from the sea tiles. It will also let you build the harbor and the coastal wonders. It looks like there is a good possiblity of more floodplains to the west and more coastal places to the north.

 

[Sisiutil]

Actually 1 square west looks pretty good.....

Yeah, if you're the AI. That leaves you with three coastal tiles that can't be improved with a lighthouse.

Settle on gold and you lose its commerce. Not good. You want it for that early boost to your research. And I'm starting to think that if you expect a city to need a hill for defense, you're doing something wrong. The AI has not had a chance to attack any of my cities since...well, I can't remember.

It looks like you may have a little room north of you for a fishing village. So it's a bit of a coin toss. The current location makes for the better city site, so that should probably be the deciding factor.

 

[pigswill]

I'd go with settling in place. This looks like a worker first start while researching agric and bronze working. A worker will find enough to do with farming the rice and mining the gold.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

And I'm starting to think that if you expect a city to need a hill for defense, you're doing something wrong.

This is especially true of the capital. If you want to settle on a plains hill to get the extra hammer, that's hard to argue with (in general; settling on gold to get the extra hammer is nuts), but the extra defense should really only matter in a border city. If your capital needs +25% defense to survive, start over -- you already lost.