Puppeteer
Emperor
I've played a few games on Noble difficulty and can now pretty consistently best the AI by a good margin by the time caravels come along. I'm going up a difficulty level for my next game. There is no one-strat-fits-all-situations strategy that I've seen, but here are some general tips:
Food is still power. Food is ridiculously powerful, especially in the early game where food can build workers and settlers as well as hammers do. An abundance of food lets you use grow faster, build settlers/workers faster, assign more specialists and work more low-food (and high commerce or hammer) tiles. An abundance of food also lets you ignore some unhealthiness while attending to more immediate matters.
(Continuing with food.) Sea resources, rice, corn and wheat are great bonuses. There is usually at least one around. Get it improved with a work boat (requires fishing) or farm (requires agriculture) as soon as you can. Rivers are wonderful as you can farm along them for extra food.
(Yet more food.) Your goal should be to expand to about 3 cities and max out your population ASAP. You may feel like you're falling behind, but once you're at max population you have to switch your population off food and onto hammers, commerce or specialists, and when you do that you surge forward because you have more population than anyone else. At that point you're ready to work on infrastructure, military or another 2-3 expansion cities (if you have decent commerce in the early cities).
Forests are fantastic...for cutting down! I don't understand the forest lovers. I don't want to hear about lumbermills as I've never built one. Forests limit your food on grass and river tiles and limit your hammers on hills. And they give you such a shield bonus when you cut them down for something more useful. When you are at max pop with improved tiles you'll never miss the things. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but I'm generally much more productive short-term and long-term with forests gone. If you have flat grasslands and hills around you don't need forests. Put farms or cottages on the flat grass if you have enough bonus food to work the hills for hammers.
Religion. I find in most games so far that beelining for an early religion isn't necessary. Mostly I come out better getting the worker techs to improve my lands and expand quickly. Then I can pick up a later religion if someone else's doesn't spread to my cities. A notable exception is my current archipelago game: I knew I'd be isolated and wanted religion for the happiness and culture so I beelined for Hinduism (with a Judaism backup plan) from the start. If you know you aren't isolated then it's not that big a deal to get someone else's religion and pick up the techs to build monestaries (for missionaries; alternately use Organized Religion to build missionaries anywhere) and temples to spread and benefit from religion in your lands.
Culture. I love the variety of ways to get culture to pop your cities to level 2 culture or push against an opponent's border. If all else fails, build an obelisk before calendar to pop your borders. Other ways include: religion (if it's your state religion or if you don't have a state religion), specialists (specifically an Artist: get these early with the Caste civic), buildings (library) great people & super specialists or wonders. In early game I'm usually just trying to pop the borders to the fat cross so I have more work tiles to choose from. When my population is up I often push culture to claim more land & resources or to push an opponent's border back. High fences make good neighbors; so does a lot of space between you.
Early Strategies. To repeat myself a bit, go for high food and 2-3 fast early cities. The barb animals won't enter your culture borders (human barbs will), so I take my scout or warrior and explore a bit but don't wander too far. When I'm ready to build the settler I bring the scout/warrior near where I want my 2nd city; I try to place him where I can see all the tiles between my 1st city and where the 2nd city will be founded; I'm not escorting the settler so much as making sure I can see any animals before they can threaten him. After the 2nd or 3rd city I make sure all cities and settlers have their own military guard.
(early strat cont'd) I've lately taken to popping out a worker ASAP followed by a settler. Again, not a hard rule, but if I can improve the food output early it really pushes me along later. Really you have to play based on your terrain, traits and starting techs. If there is a food bonus to be farmed or fishnetted then I'll get the worker or workboat started immediately and start researching the tech, if needed. If there is a special situation like an isolated island with other islands nearby then you need to adjust a bit. But the overall goal is to get those 2-3 cities placed favorably as early as possible and then max the population.
Don't waste time on builds, research, moves or actions that don't either benefit you immediately or grow your population. Once your population is maxed you suddenly have the power to churn out military, infrastructure or research to get back on your preferred game track.
Scouting. This is one thing I'm not 100% clear on yet. From Civ3 experience I love to scout early, thoroughly and far because I can watch my enemies expand long after I've left, and I don't trust my enemies with RoP. In Civ4 I can't see new cities plopped in explored areas (I can see new resources in explored areas, though), and there is no more RoP rape, so getting Open Borders seems a valid way for later scouting, and I get the added benefit of doing so on the opponent's roads. Oh, and unlike Civ3 in Civ4 you can walk through other civ's units and cities. Scouting early city sites is obviously vitally important. Leave no near tile fogged, and try to move in a wandering or circular pattern to avoid doubling back over areas already explored. Scouting beyond your next planned expansion phase should probably be done in moderation if at all I think, but again I'm not sure on this yet. Contacting other civs can be useful, and try to unfog all the coastal tiles as I think that greatly improves your chances of finding a trade route to other civs.
City Placement. I'm looking for food first and hammers second. Resources are also important, but there are resources everywhere. Sometimes iron, copper or maybe a horse is worth stretching for, but often if the game is still early I'll count on cultural expansion to add a resource if it's not immediately needed. Some people seem to love to settle on hills, but on Noble I've yet to allow anything to attack one of my cities. So usually I want the hill for hammers and plop the city on a flat tile. If there is a lake near an ocean and you find a good city site that puts your city on the ocean and can work the lake you can get 3 food (and 2 commerce) from the lake if you build a lighthouse; obviously I like this. (Actually I've only tested this when the city is both on the lake and ocean; I haven't tested if the lake is just accessible from the city, but then I usually want the city on the fresh water if possible.) If you have two possible city sites which are about even, look at your resources: is there a different food resource available? If you can add a new type of food to your trade network your cities get +1 or +2 health from it. Somewhat repeating, but being on a sea coast is very desirable as is being on a river or lake. I don't mind "wasting" tiles between cities, especially if they're bad tiles or a bad mix of food + hammers. And it's easy to pick up resources between towns with a small culture push. I've been avoiding overlap, but on my archipelago game I wound up with 3 coastal cities on a small isle that could share some high hammer tiles. That worked out nicely as I could alternate which city got lots of hammers while the others worked the sea, but usually I avoid overlap.
City Placement AI Suggestions. If the blue circles disagree with where you want your city, you might look and see if there's a good reason, but after my first or second city I find myself disagreeing with the suggestions a lot. I don't quite grok what the suggestions are going for many times.
City Automation. My first few games I happily let the city governor do its thing and thought it was doing a good job. As I learned more and played on I started getting angry with the governer even when using the "emphasize ..." butons. I now mostly micromanage my cities, although it's not as bad as in Civ3 because I don't worry about wasting factors of production. I micromanage based on whether I'm pushing research, production, growth or specialists. The "emphasize ..." buttons still affect how new citizens are placed. The governor is pretty good about maximizing resources for the current build, but it does not share my views of "max pop is best" and will assign specialists and for some reason rotate them so I have an odd mix of GP points. Micromanaging under Civ4 is much less troublesome than under Civ3 because of fewer cities and no overrun penalites. The most annoying part of MM is when I'm at max pop and trying to inch up to the next pop increase without going over it. (I hate unhappy citizens--they waste food.) BTW I do turn the governor on when building workers or settlers as it seems to perfectly max out their builds.
Worker Automation. I haven't tried it, but the game does give suggestions with blue circles and highlighted worker buttons. My first game I followed the suggestions, but as of late I almost always disagree with it. (I know you can turn them off, but I don't want to quite yet as I occasionally still miss something obvious.) The worker automation AI has a cottage fetish and later a windmill & workshop fetish. The AI knows what worker techs you have and seems to know which tiles you're working, but it doesn't think ahead at all as far as I can tell. It definitely doesn't know where you want your next city or what your long term plan for this city is. The AI frequently suggests replacing my current improvements, so I assume if I had the worker automated it would do just that.
Unit Automation. Never tried it. Never going to.
Random Thoughts:
Monestaries. 10% science? You have to be making 20 sci in a city before getting 2 bonus beakers. And you can train missionaries without a monestary with the Organized Religion civic. There are many other sources for culture. I'm not a big fan of these at the moment.
Libraries and Forges. Again, +25%. Can be worthwhile, but if you're not pulling in many beakers/hammers the time may be better spent on other projects. You want these things, but maybe not right away.
Work boats. They go the same places that galleys go and just as fast, and you're probably going to need (another) one sooner or later. And I haven't seen barb galleys until late. I've used them to explore when I didn't have something immediately useful to build.
Obelisks. I'm not a big fan, but sometimes I need these to pop borders early, especially when a fish is on an ocean tile.
Lighthouses & granaries. I love lighthoues; gotta have 'em. With my emphasis on early food I've been building granaries but often find myself completing them around the time I'm hitting max population. On heavy food locations I'm going to try building military or something and putting granaries off until I have a lull in things to build. I don't think they help if you're not growing, but I do love granaries and want them sooner or later.
Super specialists. You can make super specialists from a great person. I finally tried this: they "join the city" but don't add to the population or eat food (very good!). In other words they're free aside from using up the great person. I wound up with a second prophet and added him to the city because I already had my religion's shrine.
Civilopedia and manual. Neither seem very intuitive, but the information you want is probably in there somewhere. The civilopedia isn't cross-referenced very well, and the picture-list is awful and seems to be in a not-quite-alphabetical order. If you can't find the info you want, approach it in a different direction. Are you looking for something a great person makes? Look under Great People in Game Concepts (this is how I found out a trade mission is not a building and why I couldn't find it under buildings). Wondering why Bismarck's starting techs aren't listed? Look under Civilizations for Germany. Note that past "wonders" may be found in the civ4 civilopedia under buildings or projects and may be referred to as national wonder, world wonder or project. The manual has a set of tables in the back which seems incomplete at first glance. The stuff that's missing is in list format in the "Advanced Rules" section starting on page 107. Flip through that secion for a goldmine of information. I've bookmarked page 157 which starts leader traits and leads into civilizations.
Great Work aka culture bomb. This is a much-discussed topic. But city placement is so important I don't see this as a culture attack. I see it as a way to keep all 21 tiles of a city under my control, perhaps steal a resource (as a harassment, not necessarily to be counted upon) and to lean on an opponent's workable tiles. One time I semi-squeezed a town in to grab an unclaimed iron and used the culture bomb to secure the city. I haven't seen an opportunity to rush in and steal an enemy city with this; trying to probably takes your attention away from more important areas. On the other hand I've found artist specialists useful in the culture push so I tend to get a great artist or two each game.
Food is still power. Food is ridiculously powerful, especially in the early game where food can build workers and settlers as well as hammers do. An abundance of food lets you use grow faster, build settlers/workers faster, assign more specialists and work more low-food (and high commerce or hammer) tiles. An abundance of food also lets you ignore some unhealthiness while attending to more immediate matters.
(Continuing with food.) Sea resources, rice, corn and wheat are great bonuses. There is usually at least one around. Get it improved with a work boat (requires fishing) or farm (requires agriculture) as soon as you can. Rivers are wonderful as you can farm along them for extra food.
(Yet more food.) Your goal should be to expand to about 3 cities and max out your population ASAP. You may feel like you're falling behind, but once you're at max population you have to switch your population off food and onto hammers, commerce or specialists, and when you do that you surge forward because you have more population than anyone else. At that point you're ready to work on infrastructure, military or another 2-3 expansion cities (if you have decent commerce in the early cities).
Forests are fantastic...for cutting down! I don't understand the forest lovers. I don't want to hear about lumbermills as I've never built one. Forests limit your food on grass and river tiles and limit your hammers on hills. And they give you such a shield bonus when you cut them down for something more useful. When you are at max pop with improved tiles you'll never miss the things. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but I'm generally much more productive short-term and long-term with forests gone. If you have flat grasslands and hills around you don't need forests. Put farms or cottages on the flat grass if you have enough bonus food to work the hills for hammers.
Religion. I find in most games so far that beelining for an early religion isn't necessary. Mostly I come out better getting the worker techs to improve my lands and expand quickly. Then I can pick up a later religion if someone else's doesn't spread to my cities. A notable exception is my current archipelago game: I knew I'd be isolated and wanted religion for the happiness and culture so I beelined for Hinduism (with a Judaism backup plan) from the start. If you know you aren't isolated then it's not that big a deal to get someone else's religion and pick up the techs to build monestaries (for missionaries; alternately use Organized Religion to build missionaries anywhere) and temples to spread and benefit from religion in your lands.
Culture. I love the variety of ways to get culture to pop your cities to level 2 culture or push against an opponent's border. If all else fails, build an obelisk before calendar to pop your borders. Other ways include: religion (if it's your state religion or if you don't have a state religion), specialists (specifically an Artist: get these early with the Caste civic), buildings (library) great people & super specialists or wonders. In early game I'm usually just trying to pop the borders to the fat cross so I have more work tiles to choose from. When my population is up I often push culture to claim more land & resources or to push an opponent's border back. High fences make good neighbors; so does a lot of space between you.
Early Strategies. To repeat myself a bit, go for high food and 2-3 fast early cities. The barb animals won't enter your culture borders (human barbs will), so I take my scout or warrior and explore a bit but don't wander too far. When I'm ready to build the settler I bring the scout/warrior near where I want my 2nd city; I try to place him where I can see all the tiles between my 1st city and where the 2nd city will be founded; I'm not escorting the settler so much as making sure I can see any animals before they can threaten him. After the 2nd or 3rd city I make sure all cities and settlers have their own military guard.
(early strat cont'd) I've lately taken to popping out a worker ASAP followed by a settler. Again, not a hard rule, but if I can improve the food output early it really pushes me along later. Really you have to play based on your terrain, traits and starting techs. If there is a food bonus to be farmed or fishnetted then I'll get the worker or workboat started immediately and start researching the tech, if needed. If there is a special situation like an isolated island with other islands nearby then you need to adjust a bit. But the overall goal is to get those 2-3 cities placed favorably as early as possible and then max the population.
Don't waste time on builds, research, moves or actions that don't either benefit you immediately or grow your population. Once your population is maxed you suddenly have the power to churn out military, infrastructure or research to get back on your preferred game track.
Scouting. This is one thing I'm not 100% clear on yet. From Civ3 experience I love to scout early, thoroughly and far because I can watch my enemies expand long after I've left, and I don't trust my enemies with RoP. In Civ4 I can't see new cities plopped in explored areas (I can see new resources in explored areas, though), and there is no more RoP rape, so getting Open Borders seems a valid way for later scouting, and I get the added benefit of doing so on the opponent's roads. Oh, and unlike Civ3 in Civ4 you can walk through other civ's units and cities. Scouting early city sites is obviously vitally important. Leave no near tile fogged, and try to move in a wandering or circular pattern to avoid doubling back over areas already explored. Scouting beyond your next planned expansion phase should probably be done in moderation if at all I think, but again I'm not sure on this yet. Contacting other civs can be useful, and try to unfog all the coastal tiles as I think that greatly improves your chances of finding a trade route to other civs.
City Placement. I'm looking for food first and hammers second. Resources are also important, but there are resources everywhere. Sometimes iron, copper or maybe a horse is worth stretching for, but often if the game is still early I'll count on cultural expansion to add a resource if it's not immediately needed. Some people seem to love to settle on hills, but on Noble I've yet to allow anything to attack one of my cities. So usually I want the hill for hammers and plop the city on a flat tile. If there is a lake near an ocean and you find a good city site that puts your city on the ocean and can work the lake you can get 3 food (and 2 commerce) from the lake if you build a lighthouse; obviously I like this. (Actually I've only tested this when the city is both on the lake and ocean; I haven't tested if the lake is just accessible from the city, but then I usually want the city on the fresh water if possible.) If you have two possible city sites which are about even, look at your resources: is there a different food resource available? If you can add a new type of food to your trade network your cities get +1 or +2 health from it. Somewhat repeating, but being on a sea coast is very desirable as is being on a river or lake. I don't mind "wasting" tiles between cities, especially if they're bad tiles or a bad mix of food + hammers. And it's easy to pick up resources between towns with a small culture push. I've been avoiding overlap, but on my archipelago game I wound up with 3 coastal cities on a small isle that could share some high hammer tiles. That worked out nicely as I could alternate which city got lots of hammers while the others worked the sea, but usually I avoid overlap.
City Placement AI Suggestions. If the blue circles disagree with where you want your city, you might look and see if there's a good reason, but after my first or second city I find myself disagreeing with the suggestions a lot. I don't quite grok what the suggestions are going for many times.
City Automation. My first few games I happily let the city governor do its thing and thought it was doing a good job. As I learned more and played on I started getting angry with the governer even when using the "emphasize ..." butons. I now mostly micromanage my cities, although it's not as bad as in Civ3 because I don't worry about wasting factors of production. I micromanage based on whether I'm pushing research, production, growth or specialists. The "emphasize ..." buttons still affect how new citizens are placed. The governor is pretty good about maximizing resources for the current build, but it does not share my views of "max pop is best" and will assign specialists and for some reason rotate them so I have an odd mix of GP points. Micromanaging under Civ4 is much less troublesome than under Civ3 because of fewer cities and no overrun penalites. The most annoying part of MM is when I'm at max pop and trying to inch up to the next pop increase without going over it. (I hate unhappy citizens--they waste food.) BTW I do turn the governor on when building workers or settlers as it seems to perfectly max out their builds.
Worker Automation. I haven't tried it, but the game does give suggestions with blue circles and highlighted worker buttons. My first game I followed the suggestions, but as of late I almost always disagree with it. (I know you can turn them off, but I don't want to quite yet as I occasionally still miss something obvious.) The worker automation AI has a cottage fetish and later a windmill & workshop fetish. The AI knows what worker techs you have and seems to know which tiles you're working, but it doesn't think ahead at all as far as I can tell. It definitely doesn't know where you want your next city or what your long term plan for this city is. The AI frequently suggests replacing my current improvements, so I assume if I had the worker automated it would do just that.
Unit Automation. Never tried it. Never going to.
Random Thoughts:
Monestaries. 10% science? You have to be making 20 sci in a city before getting 2 bonus beakers. And you can train missionaries without a monestary with the Organized Religion civic. There are many other sources for culture. I'm not a big fan of these at the moment.
Libraries and Forges. Again, +25%. Can be worthwhile, but if you're not pulling in many beakers/hammers the time may be better spent on other projects. You want these things, but maybe not right away.
Work boats. They go the same places that galleys go and just as fast, and you're probably going to need (another) one sooner or later. And I haven't seen barb galleys until late. I've used them to explore when I didn't have something immediately useful to build.
Obelisks. I'm not a big fan, but sometimes I need these to pop borders early, especially when a fish is on an ocean tile.
Lighthouses & granaries. I love lighthoues; gotta have 'em. With my emphasis on early food I've been building granaries but often find myself completing them around the time I'm hitting max population. On heavy food locations I'm going to try building military or something and putting granaries off until I have a lull in things to build. I don't think they help if you're not growing, but I do love granaries and want them sooner or later.
Super specialists. You can make super specialists from a great person. I finally tried this: they "join the city" but don't add to the population or eat food (very good!). In other words they're free aside from using up the great person. I wound up with a second prophet and added him to the city because I already had my religion's shrine.
Civilopedia and manual. Neither seem very intuitive, but the information you want is probably in there somewhere. The civilopedia isn't cross-referenced very well, and the picture-list is awful and seems to be in a not-quite-alphabetical order. If you can't find the info you want, approach it in a different direction. Are you looking for something a great person makes? Look under Great People in Game Concepts (this is how I found out a trade mission is not a building and why I couldn't find it under buildings). Wondering why Bismarck's starting techs aren't listed? Look under Civilizations for Germany. Note that past "wonders" may be found in the civ4 civilopedia under buildings or projects and may be referred to as national wonder, world wonder or project. The manual has a set of tables in the back which seems incomplete at first glance. The stuff that's missing is in list format in the "Advanced Rules" section starting on page 107. Flip through that secion for a goldmine of information. I've bookmarked page 157 which starts leader traits and leads into civilizations.
Great Work aka culture bomb. This is a much-discussed topic. But city placement is so important I don't see this as a culture attack. I see it as a way to keep all 21 tiles of a city under my control, perhaps steal a resource (as a harassment, not necessarily to be counted upon) and to lean on an opponent's workable tiles. One time I semi-squeezed a town in to grab an unclaimed iron and used the culture bomb to secure the city. I haven't seen an opportunity to rush in and steal an enemy city with this; trying to probably takes your attention away from more important areas. On the other hand I've found artist specialists useful in the culture push so I tend to get a great artist or two each game.
that's what Slavery is for 
