Tips for expansion and war on noble please!

[ChicagoCubs]

First off, as others mentioned, changing the research slider to something less than 100% is not a bad thing. I know when I started, I felt like I had to do everything in my power to keep it at 90-100%. After playing around a bit, I realized that dropping it to expand was the nature of the game. As many people note, when the slider hits 40-60% it is time to build up you expanded empire. As it creeps up to 70% or so, if you can expand/conquer more, then take a city or two and see the impact on the slider.

For war, you need to have you objective in mind and build up for that. You can always change mid-war based on how thing go. Objectives that I have used:

--Stifling Growth - I never attacked a single AI unit, but I tried to pillage every improved tile in his empire. I had great defenses in my territory, but just wanted to slow the AI down a bit. There wasn't an immediate impact on the AI, but in the long run it slowed him down and allowed me to catch up.

--Elimination - build up and attack based on the goal of wiping them off the map. I hate long wars so I will use a multi-prong attack and hopefully take/raze two-three cities at a time.

--Specific Target - you want that one city for the wonder, resource, location, etc.

--Experience - I have declared war just to get my units some experience.

--Improved Relations - If my friend is at war with the AI, I will send in some troops to get the "shared battle" relations bonus with a friendly AI.

 

[svv]

Also, is it best to group workers together and get them building improvements that way? Completely improve one city, then move on to the next?

You don't need to improve more squares on the city than you have population - maybe one or two more if it's about to grow. You also might want to improve squares that give you a good resource (health or happiness bonus, strategic resource you need) even if your pop in the city won't be working it for a while.

Generally though, if your capital has a pop of 4, and you have 4 or 5 squares there improved, it's best for the workers to build the highway to the next city and start improving there.