Trouble moving from Prince to Monarch

[Gudhjem]

I usually play prince level, epic speed, standard map, and use various civs. Winning isn't a challenge anymore, though I enjoy trying to win earlier or with a higher score. I typcially win around 1900, somtimes earlier, and best scores are in the high 30Ks.

I've tried moving up to monarch level in the hopes of having victory be in doubt, but I am finding the gap to be enormous. I get pummelled.

My usual strategy on prince (which i garnered mostly from tips on these boards and the Academy) is to settle capital plus 2 cities (sometimes only 1, sometimes 3) and quickly kill off the closest AI with axemen. I usually go for stoenhenge and get it, particularly if stone is settle-able. I build a library only in my highest rev city or 2, and concentrate on military to kill off the second AI about the time, or even before, I get catapults. I then consolidate to get research back to a reasonable level, and proceed to destroy the rest of the AI. I beeline for alphabet after a few worker basics, and trade aggressively throughout. I also head to CS after alphabet.

Employing a similar strategy on monarch has not worked in my half dozen tries. First, the barbs come at me with archers and even axes so fast I spend much of my early development trying to keep my improvements intact. Second, the AI sometimes hems me in with only capital + 1 city settled (which I always make sure is on copper if cap is not). My cities are also stuck at about size 5 for a long time, since I don't have more than one or 2 happy resources and the AI usually wont or can't trade with me. By the time I'm ready to go for the AI with about 8 or 10 axes, they have more, and sometimes even longbows (which is hopeless). Even worse, I can't seem to get the AI to not gang up on me, since I dont have tech leads to bribe them. They quicckly get annoyed and it goes downhill. I usualy don't have the option to adopt thier religion either.


So that is my long-winded background to this question: Do you experts find monarch to be MUCH tougher than prince? Is it suppossed to be this way, or do I need to search for a flaw in my strategy? My sense from reading these boards is that the difference is not so great, but that's not been my experience. Perhaps I have reached my gaming ceiling and should content myself with prince...

 

[Galileo44]

Yes, Monarch is a big step up from Prince. However, your strategy seems fine except for one thing. You are not expanding enough. If you are breaking even at 80-100% science, you need to expand more to get more cities and grab more resources as the happy cap becomes real at monarch. Do not be afraid of maintanance costs, they are bad but when cities grow and build infrastructure they pay off. Other than that it looks good. Keep trying!!

 

[podraza]

Check out Acidsartyr's thread on the immortal game. He shows that being hemmed in is no problem on immortal, hence, not a problem for you. You only need 2 cities before you can amass an army sufficient to capture every other city you'll ever need.

My strategy for winning on Monarch is close to yours, so I think you are just a tweak or two away from making this work. Are you whipping to get out an early army? Maybe you should forget about Stonehenge and focus on units instead.

 

[cleverhandle]

My usual strategy on prince (which i garnered mostly from tips on these boards and the Academy) is to settle capital plus 2 cities (sometimes only 1, sometimes 3) and quickly kill off the closest AI with axemen.

Violence is not always the answer. On the highest levels, the AI expands so quickly that you'll need to fight to expand at all. But on Monarch (even on Emperor) it depends on the map. Sometimes there's a good bit of space between you and your neighbors. Don't fight a war just for the sake of it - think about what you're going to get out of it. If you're not getting an immediately usable luxury or strategic resource, you may be better off waiting it out until you get your economy better established.

I usually go for stonehenge and get it, particularly if stone is settle-able.

Stonehenge is certainly not always the answer. You can have a settler and a worker for the cost of Stonehenge if you're without Stone and/or Industrious. Sometimes snagging a good city spot is a better play.

First, the barbs come at me with archers and even axes so fast I spend much of my early development trying to keep my improvements intact.

A few well-placed fog-busting warriors with Woodsman should handle this. You don't need much military in the early game if you place it correctly. It's rare that I pick up Archery within my first 10 techs, but barbs are never an issue for me.

Second, the AI sometimes hems me in with only capital + 1 city settled (which I always make sure is on copper if cap is not).

You should never be hemmed into two cities at Monarch. If you are, then you're not getting your worker techs early enough and/or you're making too many buildings/wonders. Try following the details of a good Monarch/Emp SG to see how much you need to invest in workers and improvements.

My cities are also stuck at about size 5 for a long time, since I don't have more than one or 2 happy resources and the AI usually wont or can't trade with me.

You need a plan to deal with happiness (unless you have a rare start with 2+ early luxes) and you need to make that plan early. Monarchy, Pyramids/Representation, Religion, and Drama are all possibilities. Leverage the advantages of your map and civ.

So that is my long-winded background to this question: Do you experts find monarch to be MUCH tougher than prince?

Personally, I found Monarch to be almost identical to Prince, and Emperor to be much tougher than Monarch. But others say exactly the opposite. It all depends on your style and how it's affected by the moves between levels.

 

[Sisiutil]

I also got whomped on my first few Monarch tries, but I seem to be managing the level reasonably well now.

You've received excellent advice above. I can only emphasize Galileo44's point that you are not expanding enough in the early game. I usually try for at least 4 cities, even 5 before starting my first war. There's a synergy between expansion and keeping barbs at bay, as more cities = more cultural borders = fewer barbarians.

I'm fond of Stonehenge most of the time as well. Try this: get at least three cities before you even think about something like Stonehenge. Then the other two can produce your next settler or two, workers, and military while one builds a wonder.

 

[InvisibleStalke]

I found Monarch a big step up too. Its the first level that you need to unlearn some bad habits from earlier levels and prune your strategy down to things you really need. Monarch punishes you for wasting turns. Emperor does even more so, but once you have unlearned your bad habits on Monarch, the step to Emperor isn't as hard.

- Early wonders are a risk - you need to get a big payoff to make them worthwhile. If you are industrious or start near stone or marble they might be worth a play. If you have a really good source of income then a CS slingshot might be worthwhile. But if not, I tend to leave them alone. For the price you can have more cities or soldiers which can be a much better return.

- Worker turns and early techs are critical - you need to plan what your workers do carefully so they build the things you need when you need them. Don't research a tech that your workers can't use right away.

- Unless you start with gold or some other good commerce source you will need to get to either pottery or writing quickly to either get some early cottages going or a library running scientists. Without these your early research won't go fast enough to get to alphabet early enough to score good trades.

- And you need to get a defense up and running - with bronze ideally since you really want slavery. If not with chariots. Fail on these and you need archery immediately. Some games you will be hammered with barbarians. Others you can almost ignore them because the AI does all the fogbusting. You need to recognise which you are going to face (generally the more crowded the map the less barbarian problems) and plan accordingly. Fog busters are your early weapons, but on some maps you will need a better defense quickly.

- The decision about the order in which to get the key early techs of animal husbandry, wheel, agriculture, pottery, writing, mining and bronze working depends on your starting techs, unique units and map - on monarch you need a good strategy for optimizing this and planning what your workers will do when.

- When your economy is ready and you have a couple of cities, you can either rush settlers or soldiers depending on how close your enemies are. Again this is planned out in advance, but you really want to be using both chopping and the slavery whip to expand fast.

- And since you are going to expand fast you probably need more workers. If necessary chop them. Don't wait too long before you build your second worker - and early on you are going to need at least one per city.

- And since you are going to want to expand fast, usually shortly after getting alphabet, you are going to need some way to pay for your empire. So code of laws and currency become key techs to target. If I was to describe a typical game on Monarch then I would probably see myself rushing to alphabet, expanding quickly and trying to time code of laws or currency with a rest period to rebuild my economy after expanding. Then begin another expansion cycle and probably recover again with Civil Service.

- You need to plan how to expand culture in your cities. You can do it with religion, stonehenge, libraries, creative or monuments. No need to build a library in a production city when you can quickly build a monument.

- Happiness becomes your main limiting factor early on. If you start with the opportunity to found a religion (ie you have mysticism), then founding hinduism is a good bet and worth +2 happy with temples. If not, then you want to plan on getting to monarchy fairly early. Unless you are lucky enough to see the pyramids as doable.

- Because happiness is so limited, you will need to be whipping unhappy citizens more often. And learning how and when to whip is probably the single thing that will make the biggest difference to your game.

 

[ownedbyakorat]

Here's an idea... play Prince level on normal speed for a while, then move to Monarch/epic. The dirty little secret with regards to game speed is that faster game speeds are much harder to win.

 

[podraza]

lol, the monarch players are all contradicting each other here, confusing our friend even more.

Let me tell you one way that always works for me on monarch. This is just one way.

First, at the start, I ignore wonders and I semi-ignore religion. I don't try to found one, but if it spreads, I will try to spread it internally for the organized religion bonus.

I like to build 3, preferably only 2 cities before the war starts. The war is fought with 6 to 8 CR1 Axmen rushed quickly using slavery from my 2 or 3 cities. This should occur well in the BC era. It helps when you're not building settlers/workers and building units instead.

Hopefully the nearest neighbor is close. This is one instance where higher difficulty is, in a strange way, a good thing. Because it means they will have expanded closer to you and your units don't need to go all that far. Start warring. You probably won't build another settler, you will capture your cities from now on.

One thing I like about this approach is that it tends to regulate expansion for you. The time spent recovering between periods of war tends to be just about enough to build up the infrastructure required to pay for the expanding empire.

Don't forget to extort! A great tactic is to extort a tech from a Civ that you are about to go to war with. Nothing to lose! In fact, if you intend to wipe them out, this is the only way you can get it from them anyway.

This effort requires closely monitored micromanagement of the tiles for the first half of the game. If things go well, you won't need to do this for the second half.

 

[illram]

Try using science specialists in the early game. If you get the pyramids, even better. A few scientists make a huge difference in the ancient era. (Plus if you are warring, you can lower the slider and almost completely depend upon specialist generated beakers.)

I found my biggest deficiency when I switched from prince to monarch was failing to properly utilize great people and specialists. If you lightbulb techs and utilize specialists in the early game you can get an early tech advantage. What you do with it is up to you.

 

[Gudhjem]

Wow, great responses. I don't think I've ever seen such a helpful board. Glad to see there is no "formulae" necessary, and still different ways to win even at Monarch and higher. I see several things mentioned that I don't think I am taking full advantage of (appears I am not handling my specialists at all well and I'm not whipping enough, among other things).

Looking forward to trying some of these ideas, and I think I need to look at some of these sample game threads. Is it the threads in this forum that are best for that?

Thanks for all the responses. Nice work.

 

[Thomas G.]

You could try emperor a few times, and then going "back" down to monarch will be much easier.

I say all leaps are great. Prince -> Monarch is a pretty big step
But so is Monarch -> Emperor.

Remember that to exhort techs (from your first war victim) you need alphabeth.

Also, if the enemy was ganing up on you, you need to improve your diplomacy. Religion is very very very important. Never convert religion which will make you isolated. Do convert if all your neighbours are of same religion. If half of neighbours are Buddhist, other half Hindu you can even consider staying neutral and watch them fight each other. Or better, side with the bigger side.

You said you had ahppiness issues, and this is a sure sign you don't WHIP enough. The whip is your friend, since you can't grow anyway. If you can, whip 2 pop at a time so your unhappiness doesn't ramp up.

Consider your war targets carefully. You know that going to war is often a good thing by your post, but you need a certain goal. Taking a good city is very often enough. Also tech for peace (remember Alphabeth). Or mabye to capture a critical (luxury) resource. Or all of the above. Watch out for high maintenance costs though.

One last thing - library can be good for one other thing than the +25% research (and culture..). They allow you to hire specialists. In cities you have nothing better to do (and you don't wanna build units yet because you need a tech first...) you can hire those science guys, and watch the techs roll in. In addition you can get super scientists to pop techs with. This is well illustrated in acidsatyr's immortal posts.

 

[cabert]

Yes the gap between pronce and monarch is large. So is the one between noble and prince and the one between monarch and emperor.

You already have great advice here, and surely leverage 2 of them (slavery and great people) hard makes the most difference.

If you have happiness difficulty, check my signature, I wrote an article about it.

My 2 cents is to really play your hand :
- traits
- starting techs
- map

If you're not industrious, don't build stonehenge!
But if you are, built it ! It's the earliest GP source available!
(sisiutil's advice is really a good one, you shouldn't start building wonders when you're short on cities able to give you workers and settlers and military)

If you're expansive, go for pottery soon, and whip those granaries. It's the best whipping tool.

If you're agressive a barrack is cheap and worth more than stonehenge (capture the stony thing, and you have both ).

If you're philosophical, some nice tricks about great people really shine. It's easier to lighbulb high priced techs and trade all around the place than to research all of those things.

If you're spiritual and start with mysticism, going for an early religion can be great. If you are only spiritual, go for some civics to switch to (caste system and slavery have both their good sides, only spiritual leaders can go from one to the other).

... I hope you see what I mean...

 

[Thyrwyn]

One way to lessen the gap between one level and then next is to turn on Raging Barbarians and Aggressive AI.

Play some games at Prince with those two options selected and then try moving up.

If you are being inundated by barbs at Monarch, play each start until you either recover or die - don't give up when they start pillaging improvements. The key to surviving the bars is to get some fogbusting troops fortified in defensive terrain and engage them before they get to your borders. You will need horses and/or bronze hooked up early.

Try ignoring religion and concentrate on military: you will need 1-2 defenders for every city, a few for your workers and 1-2 fogbusters per city

 

[johnny_rico]

With all this information Gudhjem, something is bound to work. I've now played two games on monarch and have won both of them. Granted, I played with Gandhi and Ragnar, both financial, which makes life real easy. I take that back. Gandhi is spi/phi, which is arguably better than the financial trait.

Do not neglect the power of scouts early in the game. Find you enemies and learn the lay of the land. Identify resources and early strategic hotspots and gain control of them.

What I've done is found hindu (buddhism is risky), perform a metal casting slingshot via the oracle, work alphabet and civil service, trade backwards for all the tech's I've missed.

I primarily work on granaries and forges for every city (you're bound to have gold, silver, or gems available, but almost always one of the three). Combined with spreading religion, it creates sufficient happiness. I usually only build one or two barracks preferring to found an early city that does nothing but make units (farms + mines).

As far as expansion goes, I have a goal of having four cities founded by 450 B.C. If the research slider is still at 50+%, I'll look to build a 5th city if there is prime real estate. Otherwise, I'm scheming as to who the first victim is (taking into account proximity and who's built shrines/wonders).

Organized religion + forges allows one to build necessary infrastructure quickly. I'll emphasize 'necessary'; you really need to know early on what long term goals you have for each city. Building unnecessary buildings that provide only a marginal benefit early in the game are wasted turns for that city.

I whip like crazy in every city except the one that is producing gold (research). However, if the science city runs into happiness troubles, the unhappy citizens get the whip.

Fog busters are key.

I beeline to machinery after civil service and usually don't war until i can build macemen (200-400 A.D.) and catapults. Engineering is usually my next beeline tech.

I think one of the keys is to research the techs the A.I. strays from. Since the A.I. doesn't head for alphabet too quickly, I have been able to trade metal casting, code of laws, civil service, and machinery to several A.I., which generally puts me in the tech lead.

Of course, these are all guidelines, a game rarely plays out to one's early expectations.

My own experiences thus far with respect to difficulty level are it just takes a little longer to get caught up and I focus more on military vs. infrastructure in the early game.

 

[cleverhandle]

My own experiences thus far with respect to difficulty level are it just takes a little longer to get caught up...

This is a really important point that's often lost on people new to Monarch+. In the early levels, you can almost always establish parity, if not dominance, by the late Middle Ages if you play your cards correctly. The rest of the game is just a routine - even if you still go to war again, the outcome is pretty well determined. At Emperor, I very rarely reach a comfortable level of GNP, production, or power before the mid Industrial Age. Monarch is somewhere in between, but in any event you need to be prepared to be playing catch-up for a greater portion of the game and sometimes that's hard to adjust to.

 

[Gudhjem]

A bump to let all of you that posted all this very helpful advice know that I incorporated many of these suggestions (including reading acidsatyr's immortal thread as directed) and quickly won my first monarch game. In fact I'm already well on my way to a likely second win much earlier. I've quickly gone from being hopelessly outmatched on monarch to the level feeling a lot like prince, based on the advice from this board.

FYI, in my case, although I was and no doubt am still doing many things wrong or at least inefficiently, the main failings appear to have been specialists and whipping. I also wasn't placing my warriors outside my territory to fog-but, instead waiting for barbs to come to me.

Thanks again all.

 

[cabert]

A bump to let all of you that posted all this very helpful advice know that I incorporated many of these suggestions (including reading acidsatyr's immortal thread as directed) and quickly won my first monarch game. In fact I'm already well on my way to a likely second win much earlier. I've quickly gone from being hopelessly outmatched on monarch to the level feeling a lot like prince, based on the advice from this board.

FYI, in my case, although I was and no doubt am still doing many things wrong or at least inefficiently, the main failings appear to have been specialists and whipping. I also wasn't placing my warriors outside my territory to fog-but, instead waiting for barbs to come to me.

Thanks again all.

which leader did you win with?

 

[Gudhjem]

which leader did you win with?

Cathy. And just won again, this time with Cesaer. The kicker is, I had no iron, and neither did my first victim. I never made a praetorian.

The biggest limitaiton I'm now trying to overcome is war weariness, and how to manage that on monarch. I'm ready to attack the next civ and roll on to my domination victory, but have to wait a while or the WW meter jumps right back to where it was at teh end of my last war (I had +40 WW(!) in my capital, and had to have culture slider near 100%, no police state, no MR).

 

[johnny_rico]

WW at +40! I've never experienced anything close to that. Anyone else?

 

[cabert]

Cathy. And just won again, this time with Cesaer. The kicker is, I had no iron, and neither did my first victim. I never made a praetorian.

The biggest limitaiton I'm now trying to overcome is war weariness, and how to manage that on monarch. I'm ready to attack the next civ and roll on to my domination victory, but have to wait a while or the WW meter jumps right back to where it was at teh end of my last war (I had +40 WW(!) in my capital, and had to have culture slider near 100%, no police state, no MR).

when you finish off one victim, WW drops to 0, same when you sue for peace. There is a 1 turn delay, that's all.
40 WW is something I had never seen. Whip away more pop