My First Monarch Game

[Trickey]

So, after beating up on the regent A.I. for a little while, i finnaly decided it was time tom take the next step up to monarch. Standard map, 8 civs, all setting normal. I started off at a pretty nice stiuation. The english were just to my south, and even further south were the persians.

I quickly fell behinde 5-6 techs, even though i was bigger than the English. I decided if i wanted to stay competetive, it was war time time! So i stacked about 10 swordsmen outside the English boder, then took 3 of their cities in 2 turns. I sued for all the tech i was behind.

later on i saw i few Persian settlers headint through my land. Hell no, im not lettin them settle. So they declare war on me when i ask 'em to leave. Worst part is, they have iron, which equals Immortals.

I actually beat the crap out of the immortals.

then Persia demolished Emgland. Now i have brought you to my present situation, i'd really apprecieate it if some good players could give me some advice on what i should do.

 

[Barker]

Your very first priority is to research a new form of government. I prefer monarchy myself for my first change. This will really help your production and research efforts. I noticed some luxuries in your territotory that have not been connected. Connect them ASAP... you can never have too many hapy people, plus you can trade extras for tech etc.

Your most pressing concern is military. Build units and conquer! Your capital is building wealth..... build more swordsmen and horse to conquer some cities.

I would start an invasion and take out the old English cities of London and York. If you take out Hamadan, you will have a pretty decent choke point to fortify until you are ready to finish them off.

 

[Trickey]

Thank you for the help. I know i'll have to invade, but i want to wait until i have samurai, reson: i just finished seeing xerses move 20-30 immortals through my territory to finish off the english. Thanks.

 

[bobgote]

it's like the upgrade from warlord --> regent, only more so. From the start you need to put more emphasis on military (important), development by workers (more important) and trading techs timely. I'm not much further than you are trickey. I play monarch, and hold my own, but haven't quite won a game yet. Came close but some sneaky devil won on space race while i was at war. I second the idea of getting monarchy ASAP. and also, don't change to republic too early - can mean disaster.

In my last game i actually went to communism. I put all science to 0 and stole techs. I got one every 5 or so turns, at least 4 faster than normal research. Production was great too.

Anyway, good luck.

 

[Higher Game]

I think your cities are too far from each other. This is acceptable in communism, but you do not want that. You only have a few cities with decent production. Make horsemen and upgrade them to samurai; hopefully the GA will let you take a few of his cities.

 

[bobgote]

I don't know if you want to hear about MY latest game... but I'll tell you anyway. I am the persians, and I have outexpanded the zulu . Now I have iron and am crankin out the immortals. If i kill off the zulu, i have an island to myself and should be the top civ

 

[Sullla]

OK, there are a number of things wrong with this game, I will try to go through them one by one.

First of all, your cities are too far apart. The ones near your capital are very poorly placed, with lots of unused tiles between them. I recommend going into the Succession Games Forum and looking for a good "dot map", a planned layout of where cities will go to avoid wastage. You have an enormous empty space around Kyoto; NOT a good thing! To help you out, I'm going to post a picture of where cities SHOULD have gone, which would have helped you out from the beginning.

Comments on the dotmap: The red dot is your capital, which I based the rest of the plan around. Yellow dot is a strong second city site, on a river next to cattle. It also locks up the gems in your territory. Green dot is another great early site, on a river with floodplains nearby for quick growth. It overlaps a wheat with the capital, which allows for some micromanagement possibilities. Light blue dot has terrible land, but it locks down all of the incense luxuries. Dark blue dot has no remarkable territory, but is close enough to the capital to be a useful city. The two purple dots are essentially fishing towns, but they have enough land to be a bit productive too. Light purple secures another gems luxury while dark purple locks down an iron resource. Brown dot up at the top locks down 2 more incenses and black dot is a fishing town that claims tundra in the hopes of a resource appearing there later. The key thing is that almost all of the tiles near the starting position are used; I put 9 cities (without significant overlap) in an area where you had 5. You should be able to see the idea by now and continue it to the south, if desired.


You need some more work with the three sliders too. First of all, there's no need to put 30% into luxuries; I turned it down to 20% with no cities going into disorder. You can go lower still if you HOOK UP THE GEMS in your territory! How could you have left a luxury unused in your territory? Silly, silly, silly. It's also pointless to put 10% into science. Are you going to buy your techs from the Persians? Then go 0% science and concentrate on building money. Are you going to research it yourself? Better put more than 10% into the tech! Going 6/1/3 is very much a bad move.

You have only 7 workers for your cities! WAAAY too few. That's why your cities are sitting with unimproved tiles all over the place. Get some more out immediately! You should never have unimproved tiles in your core cities.

As for production... why is Kyoto on wealth? If there are no city improvements left to construct, build military units! Upgradeable ones, so they will be good in the future. But putting your cities on wealth is a waste of them. For that matter, with only 10% of your income going to science, why are all of your cities building libraries? If you are going to put most of your income into wealth, build marketplaces, for goodness sakes! THINK about what you are building; don't just pick something for no reason.

You need to get into a better government ASAP as well. With your current situation, I'd recommend Monarchy since you don't really have the infrastructure for Republic yet. But by all means get out of despotism!

I hope this gives you some things to think over. You need to do some more managing and better placement of your cities to succeed and thrive on Monarch difficulty. Best of luck to you in this endeavor!

 

[Sirp]

That tutorial we were discussing over on Realms Beyond really would be helpful I think Sullla. It's really fairly amazing how many things come intuitively to me now, that I forget even take skill to learn, and that other people don't know about - things like slider management, hooking up luxuries, basic city placement principles, use of workers etc etc.

-Sirp.

 

[Sullla]

Well it IS a good idea, and we should collaborate on it sometime soon (two opinions are always better than one). But how about giving me about a week to finish up my exceedingly fun Epic8 game and write a report for it, and then we'll start looking into it, OK?

 

[Sirp]

Sullla: yup, sure. Actually I do have some epics reports to write myself. I've finished epics 6 & 8, but I haven't written the report for either of them yet.

 

[Trickey]

Sulla, thank you very much for taking the time to help out a poor player like me. I really like how you made a map for me to look at, and to hopefully learn from. I dont know how i did this bad, i am far from a good player, but this is beyond my horribleness.


Thanks alot to everyone else who replied. I had some time to look over the map last night. Now i feel like i am already a better city placer, and overall civ player.

im sure youll see some more of my games here on this fourm, and i would be very grate full if you could critique them aswell.

Btw, its amasing how badly i beat regent when i always did place my cities so poorly.

 

[Higher Game]

I would like to see how well you do in this game. Updates, please!

Since you are religious, the first thing you need is a better government. Since you are currently at peace, you should be in a republic.

 

[Trickey]

i accdentally saved over it. I hat that. i had another japanese game going and i picked the wrong one to save over. I am gonna post another game and ask for some tips.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Originally posted by Trickey
i accdentally saved over it. I hat that. i had another japanese game going and i picked the wrong one to save over. I am gonna post another game and ask for some tips.

Try making a new folder for each game you have. It sure as heck makes it easier to figure out which .sav's are which, and easier to delete games you are no longer interested in.:yinyang:

 

[bobgote]

How can you play 2 games at the same time? I struggle with 1 . I don't usually record my games tho.