Thanks for the thread. I'd like to summarize the main points that I gathered from the thread.
1) City Specialization plays a much bigger role then I suspected. Watching how you worked Bombay to increase your tech lead was very useful to me.
City Specialization isn't a skill you need to master to beat Noble, or even Prince, but it helps. Mainly, it's about opportunity cost. Why waste hammers building a Barracks in a city that will never produce units? Why build a Library in a city that inly produces 3
? Those hammers are much better served in building something more appropriate to the city. In my game, Vijay didn't even build a Library until the Renaissance Age and that so I could build a University to unlock Oxford sooner.
2) The speed of your conquest was significantly faster then I had been doing in my games, even though I had similar stacks of units. I had been moving my stack into a city and waiting for the revolt to finish before moving to the next city. Can you flesh out how you choose to move from city to city when you account for healing/defense?
I moved from city to city as quickly as I could. As soon as the city was mine, I moved all of my healthy units to the next city. Any injured units spent a turn or 2 healing and then moved on. This is where the Medic III unit really shines. A unit healing in a city with a Medic III will take a maximum of 2 turns. As soon as a unit healed, I sent it on to catch up to the main stack.
Most of the time, I wasn't concerned with any defense. When I took out Ragnar and Toku, the terrain was such that I didn't really need anyone to guard the newly captured cities. I left them empty and filled them in with newly-built units later.
Even when I took out Stalin and Napolean I wasn't worried about defense. The AI was just turtling in their cities and never sent any units into the field. I wasn't about to waste units guarding cities that weren't going to come under fire. I'm highly aggressive in my war tactics because I want to fight to be over as quickly as possible so I can rebuild.
3) Diplomacy was clearly a weak spot in my game. I had been trading techs for even value techs and never considered trying to get a good deal from the AI. I was also refusing all Open Border agreements early in the game until I had decided who my friends were and who I was going to victimize.
Diplomacy is the hidden feature that separates the good players from the not-so-good. Making friends and keeping them is so incredibly valuable in this game. In the beginning, I was focus on making Ragnar my friend. I sent him a Hindu Missionary to convert him to my religion. I gifted him techs to give me a "Our trade relations are fair and forthright" bonus. I switched to Hereditary Rule which is his favorite civic. I did similar things with Joao. Once Joao was Friendly with me, I knew I didn't have to worry about him attacking and I could focus on destroying everyone else.
At the beginning of the game, Open Borders with everyone. You don't have to decide on friends or enemies until someone asks you to stop trading with someone else. Then you have to decide. You'll never make everyone happy. Trying to please everyone is a good way to end up pleasing no one.
Techs trades are difficult to teach because obviously every game is so different. One thing that escapes a lot of people is the ability to sell of cheap, older techs for cash. I made thousands of gold throughout my game by selling techs like Meditation, Priesthood, Monotheism, Monarchy, even Code of Laws to backwards civs. Not only do you get some nice cash, but it's an easy way to get a +4 "Our trade relations ar fair..." bonus from even your enemies. Just be careful to not trade with your ally's worst enemy.
4) Courthouses are apparently a good building. I been building markets in every city to try and overcome deficits when I'd conquered a lot of territory. Courthouses seem to be more effective.
Courthouses are much more effective than Markets for overcoming deficits. Markets rely on your city already producing a decent amount of gold. A Courthouse can save 6-8 gpt from even the smallest, weakest city.
I'm looking forward to your next time, and would like to suggest that you tackle Prince. Also, if you're aiming for more interaction I suggest taking on a partner who regularly plays at this level to make some of the decisions for you such as leader selection, city placement, and victory route. Alternately you could simply post some screenshots with the current state of the empire and solicit plans from other players before carrying out your plan, sort of a "guess my plan" game. This would likely mean the game takes longer for you to play out, but it might create the environment you're looking for in this thread.
Thanks again, really enjoyed the thread.
I don't really want this to move up to Prince. There's already another series at that level. This is for beginning players and basic knowlegde, and I want to show that everybody should be able to beat Noble.
As far as the interactive part, I don't necessarily mean help with planning my game, but more questions about why I made certain moves or why I built certain things. I know that people have these questions, but are afraid to ask for some reason. I try to explain as much as I can, but I know there's some details that I miss that could be important.
Don't be afraid to ask those questions!
!
. what you want to do is promot some units to specialize against others to defend your stack. example: give an xbow combat I and shock and he'll make a great anti-melee unit to defend your stack from other macemen. if you stack consists only of axemen, give one of them combat I and then promote him to either shock or medic I. shock will protect your stack from other axes and medic will help heal them in between cities. if you're attacking a city, generally the city attack is the best. however, if you're aggressive and are only getting xp from a barracks, it is better to promote your axes with cover. this gives them 35% against attackign archer instead of only 30% and if you meet an archer outside a city, you stil get the bonus. however, this is only give the city isn't defended by axes 
. now you can see why many people decide to wait until they have to to promote their troops. a lot of times people will actually not promote their troosp so that they can use the promotion to heal their troops if they are fighting significantly weaker opponents.
on a barracks in a city that'll never make units. the same applies to marketplaces. if a city is very 
poor, then it doesnt make sense to build a marketplace there when all it'll net you is maybe 1
So you'll have to wait until tomorrow. Go 'Canes!
(I'm suffering from the illusion that "nobody of mine should have to die!" 
)
