? Prince 2 Monarch ?

[RandomLeader]

The weird part is that you say that one of your cities is building only military yet you are the one that gets attacked. If you connect horses and copper early enough there usually is a window of opportunity in which the AI defends mostly with archers. Use that to attack, not to defend. You can attack with two early cities if the enemy is close enough. Three or four if not. Unless there's a crazy warmonger you should really be the first one attacking.

That was case related. I only research iron working if I don't get bronze anywhere near. Sometimes just horses will do and I'll make lots of chariots. On some occations I research it if I get goodies that are covered with jungle.

Montezuma isn't too bright every time if he is your neighbour but this time he managed to pull horsearchers after a stack of jaguars(which I destroyed quite easily). Horsearchers eventually started to get the best out of me and he refused to have peace. I couldn't get friend to war and last drop was that he bribed Mansa to declare. I had 3 cities at the time and every city made spears and axes with whipping. That fun ended (in that game I had iron) after 2 rebuild of that resource and I always tried to defend it. I still had chariots thoe. I must say that I had quite good army and I was doing just fine for a "long" time with that war. But somehow I think that monty stopped research after getting horseback riding. On the other hand my research went down. Maybe I should have attacked myself little earlier? Oh.. forgot.. in that paticular game I raized Montys closest city with 4 axes. I had construction but I had to waste most of my cats for collateral damage to few big stacks. Not enourmous but respectable stacks anyway. Mansa came with longbows.

Thats small story and it doesn't have all the details. I'll try to learn how to make a presentation so then it's more easier to point finger Truth is that my timing with war maybe little of and I respect AI way too much.

Mysticism is usually a top priority to expand your borders. Chop that Monument to do this as early as possible. Pottery can be good if you have lots of food or are expansive (whip grannaries) or lots of grassland (cottages). If not, head for writing. A library in your capital will really help your research, plus you can most probably run a couple of scientists in it.

I rearly ran into culture problems and usually I get my research going quite well. I don't think that I have too big problem there. I usually build eventually every building to every city. My priorities are granary, courthouse and library. That depends also where I'm going and which city I'm improving but if that is my militarycity I always try to commit some other city to make military if I need to sidetrack with that.

I'd say it's better not to build early wonders if you don't have any bonuses (Industrious or Stone or Marble). You're tying up a city that could build either war units or help you expand (settler) or improve (worker).

You might be onto something here. This might be my biggest flaw. Maybe I'm too narrow minded when I think I need something like pyramids. Biggest problem for me is that I don't like early religion and I sometimes overlook monarchy which basicly means that I need to get happiness from somewhere else (representation is too often my goal). Hmm.. How do I check where AI has builded wonders if I really want to have that? Meaning I would gladly try to conquer that city. Sometimes I do it but it's always accidental.

Why don't you post a game here? We could follow you along and give advice. Before each round tell us what you plan to do first, and we'll tell you if we think there's a better plan.

That will be my first goal. My spouse is little pissed off about that game so and I'm starting my own business. And I got my dayjob still so I got my hands little bit full at the moment. Anyway.. Some people sleeps at night, I think it's overrated. I'll be trying to start a thread within this week so help is really needed. I must confess that even when I first time played prince level it didn't feel so hard. Monarch is still wayyy ahead of me. On the other hand I usually build spaceship with prince but sometimes its more like playing for fun in the end (stopping the rocket and looking how far future techs I can go or making tons of money and having fun by bribing other civs to WWIII).

Edit: to the beginning. All my cities are not making military before I'm at war. I always have only one city that builds only military. Little language barrier from me I think.

EDIT EDIT: btw, it's hard to say what my biggest flaw is when people point out them from left and right. And that is a good thing cause sometimes one can be so close to a problem that he turns blind

EDIT EDIT EDIT: and the game is still warlords.

 

[Ruler]

3 cities is definitely too little in BTS especially if you're going to war against one of the warmongers like Monty. No way you can stop current AI unitspam with 3 cities. Solution, get more cities even it's cost you in economy. Hope you can catch up later. Worst case scenario you get boxed after 3 cities and you're foced to fight with the warmongers how you're supposed to win that's what I want to know too.

 

[carl corey]

Just a couple of answers to your last post: first of all, try to pillage even if you can't take cities. Take out every unit resource (copper/horses/iron). That way even if the AI outproduces you their units won't be good enough to use on the attack.

Also, monuments are not for cultural "wars", just so that you can build your second/third cities in better locations and then pop the borders to grab more resources.

By the way, people are pointing out real or imaginary flaws because we don't actually know how you play your games, so we're trying to cover all bases.

 

[Ruler]

Yeah it was on Warlords, sorry.

It's seems quite odd if you start to make units as your second city is out and once you are at war you're making units in every city and you still can't conquer and you even had cats. How do you promote your units. City raider swordmens are the kings with a few axemens and spearmens with Combat promotions for protection and half of your unit or third should be cats. If you have only Copper. Promote half your axemens to City Raiders and put rest on Combat.

Best time to attack while AI is expanding and building settlers.

 

[RandomLeader]

It's seems quite odd if you start to make units as your second city is out and once you are at war you're making units in every city and you still can't conquer and you even had cats. How do you promote your units. City raider swordmens are the kings with a few axemens and spearmens with Combat promotions for protection and half of your unit or third should be cats. If you have only Copper. Promote half your axemens to City Raiders and put rest on Combat.

I usually try to promote as a mix. And I love catapults so much that in times of vanilla my friends use to call me mr. collateral damage when we had LAN games.

But.. Now I need to focus little to my work also. I just start to wish that I wouldn't have nothing to do after this and I could start a campaing for you to comment. I can't so instead of teasing myself I'll do something else. Do you think I'm addicted? Well.. I am.

 

[Sisiutil]

Maybe these are my fundamental errors.. or at least they effect on my learning. I allways choose random leader which can be sometimes frustrating knowing you don't have advantages you want. Like yesterday I got one awesome starting location with chinese guy (well.. he had mining as a starting tech which was nice). But other than that he is quite useless in my games.

Also I have little problem as beeing full-speed or nothing. I sometimes save game but I am not able to allow myself to draw back if I make a mistake. I'll defenetly have to give this one a go. Maybe I learn something instead of watching everything crumble..

It's worth a shot. When you move up a level you have to pare your game down to its essentials. In fact, becoming very successful on the previous level and lingering on it may do you a disservice--you may pick up some "bad habits", or at least, tactics and habits that will not serve you well on the next level.

For example, when I was playing on Prince level as the Romans I found I could do a number of other things in the early game like building Stonehenge and the Oracle, and commonly did. Then I moved up to Monarch and was struggling.

So I had to pare down my strategy. I asked myself, "What do I absolutely need to win as Rome?" The nice thing about Rome in Civ IV is that the answer is completely obvious: Praetorians. So, how do I get them? Rome starts with Mining, so I need Bronze Working, the Wheel (because the chances that you founded Rome on top of iron are kind of low), and Iron Working. So now those are the techs I research, in that order. I abandoned the Mysticism-Polytheism-Priesthood tech path, realizing it was an unnecessary diversion for the Romans. Heck, even Worker techs are a diversion, at first. Once I have my source of Iron I build, chop, and whip barracks and Praets like there's no tomorrow.

Now if your favourite leader is Gandhi, the core strategy will be very different. The best thing to do on a new difficulty level is to determine exactly what that core strategy is and lower the priority of everything that isn't absolutely essential to it.

The Random Leaders setting is fun, but when you move up a difficulty level I'd leave it and similar settings alone until you reach a certain comfort level and feel you need a further challenge, but not one so hard as moving up to the next difficulty level.

 

[SickCycle]

I think I'm just not use to being behind in techs all the time..

I took some of Sisiutils advice and started a game with Shaka, who I'm most comfortable with and I hooked up bronze asap pumped out some impi and then went all out axes rushed brennus and took his holy city and took him out.

Now I'm in first place on the score with Zara and his colony behind me but he already has longbows.. It's just frustrating.

I can research it so I'm not that behind it's just weird when he's already got longbows and philosophy, among a dozen little techs that I dont have.. Unless hes trading with other civs which could be it since I don't know anyone but him and he wont trade with me.

 

[SickCycle]

I'm gonna go read some more of Sisiutils games..

 

[JujuLautre]

The Random Leaders setting is fun, but when you move up a difficulty level I'd leave it and similar settings alone until you reach a certain comfort level and feel you need a further challenge, but not one so hard as moving up to the next difficulty level.

If I'm correct, you usually don't use random leaders because it would mess with the ALC?

In this case, perhaps you just can't understand the real challenge of random leaders

Oh well, I think I just posted this because I finished my first warlords/monarch game with random leaders and a crappy land.

On topic, I don't know that allowed me to jump from prince to monarch. Playing mansa Musa, I did no axe rush and lost the liberalism race. Still, I whiped Gandhi out from this earth (thus allowing me the second biggest land) when having a tech advantage (macemen mainly, which he got not long after), paid attention to techs, paid a LOT of attention to diplomacy (was second to last in power a large part of the game; fortunately they all hated one other more than me), even if I got "-4: you traded with our worst ennemies" with every leader ;

I also teched 2 or 3 techs only for the sake of exchanging them; was not afraid to exchange techs even with the tech leader (being confidant I could pass him one day), beelined democracy to get my economy and production capacity back on their feet (hardcore CE); and finally beelined the internet to get the earliest space ship possible (had 5 or 6 techs, perhaps more, on the second tech leader at the end of the game ). I think I could have won without, but it would have meant more tech trading and more stress, considering that the other super powers constructed their spaceships at the sane time as mine.

At the end, I really enjoyed the combination state property + hard terraforming (workshoping) + golden age (golden age + universal suffrage = w00t) which allowed me to launch my spaceship in 1868 instead of my expected 1880 but this is not on topic.

Other than that, It was a good game; perhaps I should try BTS next, and/or emperor

 

[Photi]

I'm on the fence on this one, i've only recently switched to monarch from prince myself, and so in some respects i am in the same boat as the OP, but then again, i don't have a wife, so i probably play more than sickcycle or ruler. On prince warlords, i was still having fun, then bought BtS and fell asleep so I upped the level to monarch.

To echo sistuili, playing the same start twice or more can really be helpful. Not only can you try different tech or warring strategies as he pointed out, but also slightly different city placements have a dramatic effect on overall performance. I remember two games with the same map/start in particular. The first one I got overambitious in my early expansion causing me to stifle my economy giving me the most backward civ by the late classical period. On the other start I held myself back, I allowed slightly more overlap in my BFC's, i put a little more thought into my tech line, build orders and worker strategies and by the late classical in that game I was wonder spamming like crazy because I could and was tops by all measures except power (which I almost always lag in) even though I had 2-3 fewer cities than in the first game. What a rush the early game can be when you are in the process of pulling it all together.

Another thing worth mentioning that might be going on, as the OP or someone said his civ starts going south in the mid to late game and as I learned myself from the current ALC, is mercantilism vs. free market. I always avoided switching into mercantilism because free market was right around the corner, but, duh, it does no good to have a free market if everyone else is running mercantilism! Anyway, see the current ALC for more on that one.

I am personally not a warmonger, so I rely quite a bit on my early expansion to give me enough cities to stay competitive. So strategic placement of cities and leaving myself a hollow core to backfill later is important to me. If I don't get enough cities in the REX or will not have enough by the time I backfill, I realize I have to go to war and while war in the game can be fun (albeit stressful), it messes with my anti-imperial values (its just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game!), so I always try to make sure to get enough in the REX. "Enough" cities is of course relative to who your opponents are, but as a general rule I know I can be competitive with 15 give or take cities by the late-mid to early-late game on monarch BtS. Tech trading can be dicey, so if I fall behind, I start thinking about upping the espionage slider or engineering a GSpy. It is so much more fun (and advantageous) to steal a tech than it is to trade. A golden age can be quite powerful especially if you have a little catching up to do, a double golden age with the MoM in the Renaissance foreshadows the Space age, as it launches your civ to increasingly higher strata.

 

[Cer]

I just had my first win on Monarch... a domination win. I believe it was a fractal map but it turned out to look like continents.

Pay attention to where you found your first cities. A fair number of hammers, plus special resources that give hammer or food bonuses. Ancient era production cities can do well with a bunch of grass hills to mine... but plains hills work great if you have two food-bonus resources. In the ancient era, flatland forests left in place can help production a bunch too.

Or, if you want, large swaths of land to fit cottages or similar high trade improvements (fur camps etc). That will be a city where you build every building that gives a science- or gold-bonus.

I have usually avoided teching to archery and favored construction for stacks of mostly catapults for quick destruction of major cities, using bombard and then collateral damage. Most are city-raider promoted because the first couple defenders are the toughest-- the sacrificial catapults can hit those ones hard with city raider and the rest of the catapults survive due to earlier collateral damage, and their own city raider promotion.

If need be, all my cities will produce military at once (with no barracks in the cities that rarely produce military) to give me a quick edge in military numbers. Go into a war with more military than the opponent and get your diplomatic ducks in a row......avoid having any religious enemies and try to tie up potential backstabbers [monty/catherine/tokugawa] in wars you bribed them into, possibly against your target. If you do that and you arent surrounded by fog where barbs can show up, then your defenses can be really weak (cheaper upkeep) and you can throw all your good units into offense. Stonehenge or creative helps keep the barbs away, since large-border cities mean less fog.

My big strategy for happiness is happy resources (i like to pick up health resources too, of course) and I often stay a fair bit under my happy-cap in order to allow war weariness. More cities in more places=more resources. If you have stonehenge and are planning on spamming a settler or two soon, you can possibly delay calendar and still get happiness from fur/whale/wine/gold and a several others. Pay attention to which ones get a market/forge boost. (later on, use theater for a happy face, if you have dye).

 

[Sisiutil]

If I'm correct, you usually don't use random leaders because it would mess with the ALC?

In this case, perhaps you just can't understand the real challenge of random leaders

Quite true--I don't play with random leaders because I've promised myself to not play as a leader until I've played an ALC with them. (Though there are a handful of exceptions: the Caesars, Elizabeth, and Cathy.)

Maybe one day I'll play my last ALC and be able to find out what all the RL fuss is about.

Now I'm in first place on the score with Zara and his colony behind me but he already has longbows.. It's just frustrating.

I can research it so I'm not that behind it's just weird when he's already got longbows and philosophy, among a dozen little techs that I dont have.. Unless hes trading with other civs which could be it since I don't know anyone but him and he wont trade with me.

Well, two things on Feudalism and Longbows.

First off, I almost never research Feudalism (though I did in a recent offline game and surprised the heck out of myself). It's a low priority tech for me. Longbowmen are great units, but largely defensive in nature. To win in Civ, you've got to be aggressive and proactive. You take the fight to the AI, to its cities and its pillagers; you don't sit back and expect to absorb damage. The AI will pillage you back to the stone age if you do that.

Second, more generally, don't try to research what the AI is researching, especially once they've already researched it! A tech the AI owns is a tech you can trade for. You're better off sticking to techs the AI veers away from, which means they're valuable for trading. For example, the AI in particular is usually slow to research Alphabet, Metal Casting, Philosophy (once Taoism has been founded), Civil Service, Paper, Education, Liberalism (once the race to it has been won), Steel, Physics (once the free GS has been won), Assembly Line, and Fascism (once the free GG is obtained). Yes, you read that right, the AI generally de-prioritizes the entire tech path to Liberalism! Go figure. Instead, I've noticed the AI prioritizes religion-granting techs (Monotheism, Theology, Divine Right) as well as defensive military techs (Archery, Feudalism, Rifling).

In short, don't duplicate the AI's effort. Pursue techs it doesn't have and isn't likely to and then use them to backfill what you missed.

Another thing worth mentioning that might be going on, as the OP or someone said his civ starts going south in the mid to late game and as I learned myself from the current ALC, is mercantilism vs. free market. I always avoided switching into mercantilism because free market was right around the corner, but, duh, it does no good to have a free market if everyone else is running mercantilism! Anyway, see the current ALC for more on that one.

This was something I always knew about previously, but it's easier to demonstrate it in the ALCs now because of the new "Info" screen in the BtS Foreign Advisor. The new screen lists every AI civ's civics and the amount of money you're getting from foreign trade routes. For example:

It's very easy now to see when it's now worthwhile running Free Market--or not, as above. The AI will often run Mercantilism for a very, very long time. You may need to use a combination of very generous tech trades and spies to drag them, kicking and screaming, into FM.

 

[RandomLeader]

But at one point I decided I won't go back to Prince no matter what and kept on refining my play on Monarch. It's easier to revert to a level you're always comfortable on, but I find the challenges of a new level more intriguing and more rewarding in the long run. So go ahead, try Monarch, get your behind kicked, learn and advance. That's what happened to me on Emperor Warlords.

With all the great advices and excelent tips, this was the best of them. I have been playing, getting whooped but alas.. for some reason I am starting to beat AI. In some reason I am starting to feel like this is easy. Monarch level I mean. I just play..

Don't get me wrong. I am still without win. Just a moment ago I lost a spacerace by 2 turns. I could go and start save, do something different (like starting to build apollo when I could ) and win that game.. but I won't.

3 things are making my game easier. I am building cottages now little more than I did before. Actually I build as many as I can. Of course there will be 3-4 cities completely without them (I like military now). Also I go to war more. AI was bossing me around but tables have turned. Soon I will rule the world! Third thing is, that I am trying to play without wonderbuilding. Ok, I am still making few but I no longer yern to get everything. Great Wall is enough than I go and capture more. Late game happiness wonders I will build and national wonders. Also I like pentagon, if I get a chance.

I'll keep playing. Maybe next game is the game that I win. I still can't get myself to reload when something bad happends.. well I think it's more fun this way.

 

[futurehermit]

sounds to me like you need many more specialized commerce cities