The Noble's starting game...

[Fiz]

I've been trying to figure out the best starting strategy as a BTS Noble.

The trick seems to be to keep a decent balance between research and production, by tweaking cities to favor commerce vs. hammers.

With four cities under my belt, I've normally got to start kicking down the research slider. By that point in the game I usually can capture a barbarian city or two, but am reluctant to do more than two, for fear of going bankrupt.

I'm OK with this gold/production balancing act, but am in awe of the AI who is obliviously carpet-bombing the terrain around me.

It appears that the real strategy is to try and isolate the AI from expanding, even if it means picking some undesireable swampland myself and, of course, keeping my border closed. That's not trivial in the early game when one doesn't know the lay of the land.

I did go through Sulla's walkthrough, which seemed much more of a walk-in-the-park than I'm used to.

Any words of wisdom on how others approach the early game would be appreciated.

 

[Bleys]

One of the BIGGEST differences I see between Vanilla and BTS is how the AI settles "on" you. In Vanilla, it was common for an AI to squeeze a settler by my cities and drop a city of their own in the middle of my territory. It made it VERY hard to use "blocking" strategies, since they would find a way to fill a city in areas you wanted to back-fill later when it was economically sound to do so. Heck, I had some AIs I didnt open borders with sail AROUND my cultural border, and drop cities in my back-fill, LOL. So annoying until I learned those cities would eventually flip to me before long.

In BTS, they dont do that. What they do instead, I notice, is settle the "gaps" in your front line of cities. The AI will actually put a city ON that line as well, even if it will be under tremendous cultural pressure. For example, if your like me, and kind of build in a zig-zag type of pattern to minimize tile sharing, there is a tiny area along the outer "zag" with a few unused tiles and sure enough, someone will try it. Monty is one of the worst for then, that idiot will settle in the middle of a desert if its close enough to your cultural border and has maybe Iron or something on a desert hill.