Mastering Realism Invictus - Hints and Tips.

[Bobisback]

The more cities you have, the more research costs go up, so it's not uncommon to fall behind. If you want to stay competitive, you have to start micromanaging and building up cities to be commerce/research powerhouses, using great persons and the right improvements/buildings to emphasize them, with those cities the using their hammers to build research or gold as necessary.

Looking at your image, the cities I see are mostly about food and hammers, not commerce.

You also want keep to the civics that allow you to best deal with quantity of cities. I usually keep to Despotism, Merchant Princes, and Plutocracy for as long as possible.

And I keep from expanding constantly. I try to go through alternating waves of expansion and building up my cities. During expansion my research my drop to as low as 35%, but I try to get it back to ~70% before I return to expanding.

Oh, and learn to play tall, not wide. Avoid having many cities, especially with overlapping territories. Settle cities to maximize their purpose (research/gold/units) and don't be afraid to have gaps between cities of wasted tiles, or about trying to get every single resource. Focus on getting the resources that city specifically needs to achieve its goals.

I would love to pick your brain on some specific strategies you use in this game. Your other thread on opening strategies was very insightful.

 

[Hafenguy]

Which thread?

 

[Bobisback]

Any tutorials on opening strategies?

Is growth important at the start of the game and build a worker from 1pop or grow to size 2/3 first? What civics do I go for? lots of the ancient/classical civics have negative effects so I don't even know if I should use them How many workers do I need per city? I notice it takes a very long...

forums.civfanatics.com

Following Y's post in that thread basically made emperor much easier for me. Going to do a post soon with specific questions related to his strategy soon.

P.S In fact, Y should totally repost his tips from that thread in here! It was crazy useful to me.

This was a critical piece of advice as well

And I keep from expanding constantly. I try to go through alternating waves of expansion and building up my cities. During expansion my research my drop to as low as 35%, but I try to get it back to ~70% before I return to expanding.

But the main issue I ran into is this is really hard to balance since the ai settles cities so fast, so sometimes it is necessary to do this with war, but make sure in the war you do not take too much, spread out the city captures over many wars, with build up times in between. Also I noticed (but might be wrong, I have not thoroughly tested this) that cities built by the player even in foreign lands do not get the negative modifier for being ruled by a foreign power. So sometimes it might be better to raze the city and build a new one, unless it has good wonders, or some critical infrastructure in it.


My last game I was actually able to maintain 100% research until late medieval age, where I stay on 90% until industrial. Then after massive expansion I am sitting around 80-85% but it is working back up. And now even at that level I can still quickly outtech all AI's on my map. I did this with using merchant families combined with Towns, and honestly it was a bit crazy strong. If you have some good food sources, like wheat, rice, or cattle. You can get some crazy powerhouse cities that are pushing insane research (or gold if you need it) with a bunch of towns doing 8-9 gold each.

 

[AspiringScholar]

My last game I was actually able to maintain 100% research until late medieval age, where I stay on 90% until industrial. Then after massive expansion I am sitting around 80-85% but it is working back up. And now even at that level I can still quickly outtech all AI's on my map. I did this with using merchant families combined with Towns, and honestly it was a bit crazy strong. If you have some good food sources, like wheat, rice, or cattle. You can get some crazy powerhouse cities that are pushing insane research (or gold if you need it) with a bunch of towns doing 8-9 gold each.

Did you find that advantageous in spite of ahead of time tech cost penalties and subsidizing other civs' research by being in the lead (since, of course, your extra trade routes with merchant families were presumably foreign and thus required open borders)? I am only comfortable on Monarch but I'm finding that the rubber banding of research on both sides favors a middle of the pack research approach and that running the culture slider for a substantially higher growth cap is more optimal, but that was only a recent discovery in an unexpectedly successful game.

 

[RamblinWreck]

Did you find that advantageous in spite of ahead of time tech cost penalties and subsidizing other civs' research by being in the lead (since, of course, your extra trade routes with merchant families were presumably foreign and thus required open borders)? I am only comfortable on Monarch but I'm finding that the rubber banding of research on both sides favors a middle of the pack research approach and that running the culture slider for a substantially higher growth cap is more optimal, but that was only a recent discovery in an unexpectedly successful game.

What culture percentage do you usually run? I always tend to ignore it, even in vanilla. I just forget it can give easy happiness too (especially post-Ministry when everywhere has a free theater).

 

[AspiringScholar]

What culture percentage do you usually run? I always tend to ignore it, even in vanilla. I just forget it can give easy happiness too (especially post-Ministry when everywhere has a free theater).

5% minimally post Drama/Theaters almost always (since it rounds up to the 10% and provides a very cheap additional unit of happiness), but with Arenas situationally 15-20%, but that of course depends on other factors. With an Arena and Theater, 15% nets you +3 and 20% +4, and that can actually propel you much further than the equivalent amount of research from running the science slider maximally, especially if you're already a tech leader.