New Player: Early-Mid Game Decline

[K2mia]

Hey Folks, I have only been playing the game for a week or so and I am loving it. So far I have played one game at easiest mode and one at the next easiest and won them but apparently many of the finer points of what you need to manage at harder levels slipped through and I am so far unable to beat Warlord level.

The game I just finished I started with the Montezuma's Revenge scenario, it went smoothly for awhile and I managed to kill off Alexander's Greeks, get my Great General (El Cid) and at that point I was ranked the #1 civilization.

Things went downhill quickly from there and I am unsure of how I lost ground so quickly, I was out-teched within a few turns,many of my cities were unhappy (and I still don't know how to make them happy when they reach that level of unhappiness), the expense of upgrading my Jaguars quickly ate my gold away, build times started to increase and before I knew if there was no catching back up.

Sorry for the long winded-ness, I am wondering what tips you can provide to help me understand better how to unwind out of that early rush mentality and get into the tech race, get production moving along, etc - basically it seems I lost ground in the transition from warmonger to peacelover.

Sorry if the above is confusing and hard to read, I hope it makes enough sense and maybe some of you that have been playing for awhile can help offer some tips for the midgame coming from an early war scenario.

Thanks,
K2

 

[Polobo]

1) Read the stuff in the war academy on this site.

2) Learn how to avoid unhappy people and then proceed to do so.

3) Don't upgrade your older units, just station them in a city and build new ones. Once you get better control of your economy and also learn alternate ways to acquire gold then being learning how and when to upgrade units.

4) If you come out of war without currency and/or code of laws already researched, and you can't turn a profit at all, try again and raze more cities (instead of capturing them) during your war. If you have one or both the above, build courthouses and/or gold while growing your cities population and constructing cottages. Ramp up your slider until you get around 60% science then begin converting the cities producing gold into building something more useful, making sure you are still turning a profit.

 

[Sisiutil]

Welcome to CFC!

An addendum to Polobo's post, focusing on upgrades. He's correct, it's generally cheaper to build new units than to upgrade. However, there are a couple of exceptions.

• Hyper-promoted units: It's hard to produce units at Level 4 (3 promotions) or higher, so these units are generally worth upgrading. (Exception: one of their promotions is obsolete, such as Cover or Shock once everyone has Gunpowder.)
• City Raider units: Once you can produce both Riflemen and Grenadiers, you won't be able to produce units with City Raider promotions for a long time--not until Industrialism and Tanks. So it can be worthwhile to keep melee units with CR promotions until they've earned CR III, then upgrade them to gunpowder units.
• City Garrison Machine Guns: MGs can't get CG promotions, which are very useful for them--unless you upgrade Grenadiers with CG promotions. You can only do this until Assembly Line for Infantry comes along.

For any upgrade to be worthwhile, however, you need to be planning/anticipating fighting a war. Promotions to NOT figure into your power rating vis-a-vis the other civs, so they're useless unless you use the unit in battle.

 

[K2mia]

Thanks for the tips, will keep this stuff in mind as I keep trying.

Thanks,
K2