Somewhere b/w Noble & Prince

[Anthropoid]

Hey guys, gotta question for ya. I been playing Civ3 and 4 pretty steady for about 5 or 6 years now, however long it is. . . I got pretty good with C3C, won a few PBEMs against pretty skilled human opponents, and at my peak I could consistently win Monarch games on almost any type map, with any Civ. I won maybe 50 or 60% of Emperor games, but didn't play them too often cause they just seemed too white-knuckle and unfun.

With Civ4 I did manage to win a couple on Prince (equivalent of Monarch in C3C) quite a while back but then went on a Civ hiatus for a while, and then BTS came out, and . . . well I've been trying lots of different mods, and just not being very focused . . . and now I cannot seem to win a Prince game on BTS.

Generally I like to play Terra maps with about one less AI than the map size (usually Standard) and I like games where it is not either (a) a constant uphill battle against crazy odds or (b) a cakewalk in which the outcome is a foregone conclusion very early in the game and from there on it is just tedious going-through the motions.

Been playing Fall from Heaven a lot lately.

So my question: any suggestions on map types, climate-civ-map type combinations, or other settings that could help me to either: (a) make Prince sort of consistenly slightly easier or (b) make Noble pretty consistenly more challenging? I feel like I could get my grooove back on if I could figure out a good setting that was not too easy but not too hard, win a whole bunch of games with a bunch of different Civs, then move on to a higher difficulty level till I reach my peak ability/interest level.

 

[Joshua368]

Play Archipelago with a financial civ (ragnar, willem, hannibal all really good) and build the Great Lighthouse and Collosus. Like a whole difficulty lower.

 

[Anthropoid]

Ah you mean play at the next higher diff than my comfort zone with those settings. Great suggestion! Thanks

 

[Bonescorpion]

I actually find the tectonics mediteranean even on noble to be challenging. It always seems that either you have health resources or happiness and never both. Add in the amount of land that is available and you can rex and cripple your economy and the AI still has room to grow. So much land its near impossible to not get into a big war with somebody down the road.

 

[Joshua368]

Ah you mean play at the next higher diff than my comfort zone with those settings. Great suggestion! Thanks

Yeah it makes the game pretty easy. Just make sure you expand good enough, populate all those islands.

 

[Anthropoid]

Hah! I didn't even realize there were those different sub-types under the Tectonics script! Thanks, will have to try one of those some time.

Another land form/setting combo that can make for a more challenging Noble level game: Large Terra, with Raging Barbs on. The only problem here is, the Raging Barbs generally tend to wipe out at least one of the AI, so if you can handpick your AI to be more resilient to early Barbs that is good. I guess having one extra AI for the map size might also be a good idea.