Struggling

[Eradicator_Z]

I have struggled with Civ since 4. Not sure if it is old age or what. I was able to beat civ 1-3 on the highest difficulty but now, I cannot get past King in civ 5 and never got far in civ 4 either. My problem with 4 was war. I was great at peace but could not seem to get the battle down. Now in 5 war is good but peace is hard. Note: I do not move on until I beat that difficulty with all the victory options. Now with BNW it has changed. Now even before G&K and BNW I could not get past king. In vanilla my crutch was happiness, G&K it was gold, now it is both. I cannot seem keep up at all. If I try to focus war I lose cause I have no $. I mean 3 or 4 units before classical puts me in the red. This includes workers. Is it just me? If not I really need some tips. Now I have not tried it in BNW but with G&K I could always win domination with Alexander. He just dominates early on for me. I could do science with Ethiopia. Ya, I know they are more religious but it worked for me. I could not quite get diplomatic, cause of $.

I tend to pump out 3 cities pretty fast. Depending on starting area I usually build a settler within 5 turns of getting the free settler from liberty. then from there it seems to be all about luck. My 2 main problems imo, are city placement and setting specialized cities. I have tried but making 5 or 6 general cities just seems to be my playstyle. Also I think I am a little OCD with getting all the national wonders. So even if I set a city to be science I build anything that goes towards a national wonder. Is this what you do? Or, do you only build maybe certain national wonders based on the victory you are giong for?

Here is a save from the game I am playing right now. Now this is one where I am diong better, most of the time it is basically over before this point. I appreciate any advice.

 

[Browd]

First problem I see is that each of your cities is set to production focus, with no food tiles locked down. Your cities are at 16, 9, 10, 10, 8 and 8, and only your capital has an aqueduct. You have plenty of excess happiness (Notre Dame helped, of course), and need to grow your cities much more quickly and much earlier (benefits of early growth snowball). This is particularly the case with Liberty, which offers no growth boosts (unlike Tradition). The city where you built HG is only at 8 pop, not working any specialists and generating only 2 excess food -- that city should be massive by now.

Second problem is science. You've built universities in 5 of your 6 cities (last university comes on line in 8 turns) and you are not working a single science specialist. 150 beakers per turn at turn 245 is not a recipe to catch up to the AI (since it's King, you're still 3rd in Literacy, 3% behind England). Get working the science specialists, particularly since the Scholars in Residence proposal in the World Congress is likely to pass (9 turns away). Also, getting your beakers up ASAP will make your RAs that much more useful. As an aside, you should generally avoid doing Research Agreements with the tech leader(s); England will benefit more than you do (and Brazil probably will as well).

Curious about your tech path. You've only had one war (white peace with Theodora) and (except for Dido) the world seems to be at peace (and you seem to be friends with everyone), so why are you beelining Dynamite? I would think you would want to work the top half of the tech tree (Economics, Industrialization, Scientific Theory, Archaeology, etc.). Also, since you are friends with nearly everyone, you should be able to do 240 gold lump sum trades, which are much more useful than 6 gpt (180 gold over 30 turns) - Pablo will pay a full 240 for a lux, Dido will give you 240 gold for an extra Ivory (or you can do an RA with her) and Liz will give you 225 gold for 5 iron. use that extra gold to rush-buy useful buildings or as a gold hoard for emergencies. EDIT: I took a closer look at your city build order. You are already #1 in military and are building galleasses and musketmen to beat the band. Why? Are you planning on taking out Brazil?

Wonders: BNW will be changing things, but most in G&K games the only National Wonders I built were NC, Oxford and National Epic. Next most common were Ironworks and Hermitage (mandatory in culture game). Almost never built National Treasury, Circus Maximus or Heroic Epic (even though I go domination in about half my games). Here, you've built NC, Circus Maximus and East India Company and are working on Ironworks, so I can't quibble much on that front.

As King permits you to do, you have gone a bit overboard on World Wonders, with Stonehenge, CI, Mausoleum (in a city with only one quarry tile?), HG, Notre Dame and Colossus. each is useful in its own way, but often a distraction from other things.

 

[PreLynMax]

Personally, the way I see your saved game, I don't see anything wrong with how you are playing it. You seem to have obsessive happiness (18 /turn), a nice income (55 /turn), and seems to be historically, ahead in tech (cannons and muskets at 1675 A.D.).

 

[Eradicator_Z]

It was going well, then the world turned on Dido. I made the mistake of re friending her and they all turned on me. I was going for dynamite cause I am used to the AI being more aggressive. Now I know that is not true. as for the money and happiness, once the world turned on me I lost my trade paths and went into the red. Then England attacked but were slaughtered, I got one city and once they were weakened Brazil finished them off. It is now an uneasy cold warrish thing with me and brazil. Everyone but Dido also now hates me. I lost a lot of trade due to that fact, and now have most cities on wealth but 2.

 

[Browd]

Never make friends with Dido. She has IIRC one of the highest deceptive flavors in the game, so she's likely to backstab you and/or one of her many other "friends", making enemies by the dozen and dragging down your reputation by association.

 

[sanchopanda]

Never make friends with Dido. She has IIRC one of the highest deceptive flavors in the game, so she's likely to backstab you

So true! When I was struggling with four barbarian camps yesterday she backstabbed me with a huge army although we had an DoF and no negative diplomatic modifiers. That was the first DoW I got since BNW came out. So be careful with such "friends". The moment you are busy in another war or move your troops away from your cities, she will attack.

 

[blazingsprocket]

I don't know about Dido, but the new Singapore... oh man. We were neighbors and they were city spamming, finally our borders touch and suddenly they couldn't help themselves from attacking me. All green relationship modifiers and they DoW me, fail to do any damage, feed me money to negotiate peace after I kill their invades, and then magically we're friends again!

The second time this happened, I was surprised. The third time I was just annoyed.