Question about having a bad economy in the early game

[Phoenix Master]

I have been trying to beat warlords on noble on a Pangea Map. I started a new game as Alexander of Greece. It is a standard map and I am up against six civilizations. I spread out most of my cities too far from the capital so the maintenance costs were very high for those cities. My economy is okay now, but it is still pretty bad and the other civs are ahead of me in techs. The main advantage I have is that I have iron and horses and some of the other civs do not. My question is how can I quickly improve my economy so I can go to war successfully and how can I prevent this from happening in the future?

 

[nate46]

I'll give you some basic tips:

This game is all about exponential growth so the most important room for improvement is almost always the first 50 turns or so. Learn the early game well and you will find that mid game you win no matter what until you get to the very high difficulty levels.

1: Worker is almost always the first thing you should build in your very first city.

2: The first thing you should tech is whatever tech allows your worker to improve your best potential food resource near your first city, (I.E.: Hunting if you have a deer, agriculture if you have a corn, animal husbandry if you have pigs). As your first city grows in population, try to have the worker improve all tiles it is working. Working unimproved tiles isn't good--if you're still working too many unimproved tiles, consider building a second, third, or fourth worker early game (you'll usually want about 4 workers by the time you get four cities).

3. Don't be afraid to chop extra forests for extra production to rush the construction of important things like extra workers, or settlers. This requires bronze working, a valuable early game technology.

4: Usually you want to get pottery relatively quickly and lay cottages down on riversides. This will give you enough commerce to expand your empire. If you don't have any riverside, you can run a specialist economy where you tech towards writing, and then build libraries in 2 or 3 cities, then run scientist specialists.

 

[Pangaea]

Hopefully not too many grand deviations between Warlords and BtS, but have you checked out this guide?
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/beginner-help-the-basics.648469/

If you have BtS I would suggest to play that instead, and then post a shadow game here on the forum (for example in this thread), where you post the 4000BC savegame and image of the starting location, and play along with the forum in fairly short turn-sets of 10-15 turns at a time (at least in the beginning). Most likely you will learn a lot and improve your game so that these economic problems don't happen.

 

[Fippy]

Nice reminder, i have to start working on my guide again now that sgotm finished.
That evil feeling when you started something and then delay and delay and delay..

 

[Noble Zarkon]

how can I quickly improve my economy

Expanding fast is good, you should be trying to claim as much land as you can early on before it fills up. There usually then comes a stage where your economy is stuck, cottages help as has been mentioned but there are two key techs you need to aim for - Currency and Code of Laws. Currency is regarded by many as one of the best techs in the game - it gives you an extra trade route per city and allows you to build wealth. Code of Laws allows you to build Courthouses which reduce maintenance. Another key tech is sailing because that allows trade routes over rivers and trade routes increase your income. Finally the Great Lighthouse is an awesome wonder which gives an extra two trade routes to every coastal city, early Wonders are usually a bad idea but this is one exception. Ideally you will have a costal city with a lot of trees to chop it out.

Hope this helps!