Warlord too easy, noble.. way too hard?

[btha]

Just finished my first game of BTS, on Warlord.
I was way ahead of everyone in techs and my 100 strong modern armor/mech inf armada was unstoppable, i razed out entire civilizations in a few turns, and topped it off by launching 40 ICMB's in one turn so that i could have the majority of the votes in the UN to vote myself winner, and even before that i had three times the score of the AI in 2nd place.

So obviously, i wanted a bigger challenge, and started a game on Noble.

I started with my usual routine of building a granary and barracks in every city, 1 warrior per city... and before i knew i was completely bankrupt and far behind in techs because i couldn't pump money into research.

What am i doing wrong?
Usually when i play i'm used to building every improvement in every city pretty much. Is that not possible on Noble++?

 

[Bast]

Noble is where it starts to get very hard. I used to win on Noble but not anymore.

 

[Phil Ken Sebben]

I usually play either Noble, or if I'm feeling lucky, Prince. Beyond that it just gets incredibly frustrating!

 

[dojoboy]

I started with my usual routine of building a granary and barracks in every city, 1 warrior per city... and before i knew i was completely bankrupt and far behind in techs because i couldn't pump money into research.

What am i doing wrong?
Usually when i play i'm used to building every improvement in every city pretty much. Is that not possible on Noble++?

I suppose it's possible you're expanding too quickly. By chance we any of your settlements overseas? Because BtS has increased maintenance costs for overseas cities. Was it an archipelago map?

What civ & leader were you using?

 

[IronCrown]

You must be lacking the knowledge about some core game concepts. Really, anyone can easily win on Prince after reading some strategy articles or just a few threads in this forum.

Of course there's nothing wrong with you playing on Noble or below, but if you do want to become better and find it difficult to improve your play by finding things out yourself, there are some fool-proof strategies that will at least enable you to win on Noble every time.

 

[KotatsuNeko]

I've run into this exact same thing. Before BtS came out, I played a few games on Warlord in, well, Warlords, and because I'm a big pacifist noob they were generally fairly close late-game wins.

In BtS-Warlord, though, the AI doesn't seem as interested in research or expansion as they should be, and I often pull a few techs ahead early on. My score for most of the game is around double my nearest competitor. So, too easy, and I tried moving up a notch. Using the same strategy I was used to, I was working on Pottery or something when someone else had already discovered Metal Casting (I knew because a random event burned down their Forge).

The gap, it is huge.

 

[Kranden]

I've been playing on monarch and now just starting on emperor. Most likely your expanding too fast and not opening up trade routes with your rivals. You need to start planning out how to make your cities. Which city will be your military and your financial city. Then Later pick a border city next to a rival you don't want to goto war with in the long run and turn it into your cultural city. At this point it gets alot harder to get a religion in the start so you may need to plan and conquer an enemy who has his own religion but be careful not to wait too long doing it or you may find that he has spread his religion far and you may anger many other civs. Dont be afraid to make Demand from weaker civs for money, I usually demand money from neighbors i plan to conquer within 30 turns.

 

[btha]

I am expanding very fast, i didn't know that was bad. In fact, i'm playing with my custom made Nazi Germany mod and i couldn't resist not giving me 3 settlers at start when i was making the mod, so i am indeed expanding very fast.

 

[LegionSteve]

I just finished my first BtS game, as Augustus Caesar. Noble, standard map, normal speed. I won a space race victory but it was very close. The Ethiopian bloke was well ahead of me on score and very close to a diplomatic victory. It is much more difficult than it was in vanilla Civ4. I used to win fairly easily on Prince level, Monarch was where it started to get difficult.

The point someone said above about over-expanding too early is a good one, thats an easy way to go bankrupt. I nearly did that in my game but luckily I got the mausoleum, got the taj mahal, and had saved up enough great people for 2 more golden ages. 36 consecutive turns of golden age put me straight to the front of the tech race

 

[IronCrown]

I am expanding very fast, i didn't know that was bad. In fact, i'm playing with my custom made Nazi Germany mod and i couldn't resist not giving me 3 settlers at start when i was making the mod, so i am indeed expanding very fast.

There we have the explanation for your failure. If you mod three settlers in, you should also mod maintenance costs to zero. Of course the difficulty wouldn't be Noble anymore, then. Rather Settler-3

 

[skallben]

I started with my usual routine of building a granary and barracks in every city, 1 warrior per city... and before i knew i was completely bankrupt and far behind in techs because i couldn't pump money into research.

What am i doing wrong?
Usually when i play i'm used to building every improvement in every city pretty much. Is that not possible on Noble++?

This is a habit you need to get rid of, one of the important things when moving to higher difficulty is that you need to specialize your cities. Ill elaborate;
Why build a barracks in a city that will not build a military unit for 50 turns?
Why build a marketplace in a city with almost no commerce?

Simply put, ask yourself this: Is this building worth the time/hammers in this particular town currently?
If that is not the case you are better off getting workers/army or a building that city will actually have use for.

 

[Cromat]

The gap between Warlord and Noble is the big divide in civ. Once you manage to win consistently on Noble though, the road to Prince and Monarch is shorter. I'm comfortable on Monarch now.
Here are some things that helped me (some of these I learned from this forum):

1) Don't automate Workers and check your city governor to see if it's working the best tiles. Yes, it's tedious but it's worth it. If you have nothing to with your workers have them automatically connecting trade routes (that will also make them connect late resources like Oil and Uranium).

2) Don't build everything in every city. Look in your Domestic Advisor and see which cities have the best research and prioritize Libaries there, etc.

3) Place your cities carefully. Think of what resources they would get in their fat cross (the 21 workable tiles) and think about what role that city is supposed to play (cottage town, GP farm, production city etc).

4) Don't get too caught up in wonders. If you do decide to build one, check the diplomacy screens to see if someone already has the needed tech and maybe a speeding resource (stone for Pyramids etc). If there is someone like that then maybe it's not worth bothering. Whatever you do, don't trade the necessary technology to someone else while you're building the wonder, even if it's 2 turns from finishing. They may have a Great Engineer waiting.

5) Whip. Slavery is probably the most consistently useful civic, make good use of it. Only whip after you invest one turn into building something, that should lower the population price considerably. Unless of course you have to have something in one turn like an emergency defender or something.

6) Trade technologies. This is a big thing. I can't win on isolated starts in Noble or above. Go for a big tech you can have a monopoly on and then trade it to backfill on technologies. Check the research prices of each tech so you don't get screwed. When you trade a monopoly technology, trade it to everyone on the same turn so they can't trade it among themselves.

7) Watch the power graph in the info screen. If you're falling behind too much, build more units because you might be attacked.

8) If you start near Montezuma/Alexander/Genghis... seriously, eliminate them when they're small.

 

[btha]

Thanks.. that helps a lot.

 

[OctopusOverload]

Cromat, you should consider writing a guide! Those were short but to-the-point tips, easily understood and contained almost no CIV-abbreviations. Thats how I like em!

 

[Bast]

Just won my first game on BTS Noble. Darius I of Persia - large map - 10 civs - normal speed. SPACE RACE win in permanent alliance with Elizabeth of England!

 

[LlamaCat]

You must be lacking the knowledge about some core game concepts. Really, anyone can easily win on Prince after reading some strategy articles or just a few threads in this forum.

Of course there's nothing wrong with you playing on Noble or below, but if you do want to become better and find it difficult to improve your play by finding things out yourself, there are some fool-proof strategies that will at least enable you to win on Noble every time.

you do realize we're talking about BTS here, right? if there are some fool-proof strategies already documented for the new expansion, I've love to see them.

for the record, I still can't "easily" win on Prince in Vanilla/Warlords.. although for me the level of difficulty in winning almost comes down to victory condition more than the game settings. for example, Space Race is by far still the easiest victory, even in BTS. I'm finding domination victory on Noble in BTS very impossible at the moment but I hope to get better soon. Conquest... eek, I could pull that off on a normal sized map in Warlords on Noble level, but who knows under harder conditions..

 

[LlamaCat]

The gap between Warlord and Noble is the big divide in civ.

5) Whip. Slavery is probably the most consistently useful civic, make good use of it. Only whip after you invest one turn into building something, that should lower the population price considerably. Unless of course you have to have something in one turn like an emergency defender or something.

6) Trade technologies. This is a big thing. I can't win on isolated starts in Noble or above. Go for a big tech you can have a monopoly on and then trade it to backfill on technologies. Check the research prices of each tech so you don't get screwed. When you trade a monopoly technology, trade it to everyone on the same turn so they can't trade it among themselves.

7) Watch the power graph in the info screen. If you're falling behind too much, build more units because you might be attacked.

There are some good tips here, but some I find curious:

whipping with only 1 turn incurs some penalty for hammers. there are other strategies to whip with 1 or 2 turns remaining on an item to get maxium hammers for population, and this is what I find. unless you have several food resources in a city (not every city is like this, kind of rare) you should not whip away 3-4 population for 40 hammers' worth of production. you need to be able to grow back quickly but not too quickly for unhappiness. it just depends - I would not characterize whipping in such general terms as you have.

isolated start on noble is probably one of the easiest ways to win, at least before BTS it was. you are protected, no one is going to attack you. you can go crazy on domestic improvements and you will eventually catch up to and outpace the AIs because they are stupid. once you have optics you can start trading techs anyway (which is still early-mid game). isolated start on Prince, in fact, can be quite easy, especially for a space race or time victory. it party depend on victory conditions and these are easy ways if you just want to win the game but don't care how.

the power graph is almost pointless in many respects. I have read about how it works and altered my strategy. you should not become a worshipper of the power graph because it's so misleading in many ways that it can make you change your otherwise good strategy.

 

[Niteshade]

I just want to echo that those are well-phrased, excellent tips Cromat. You should make a guide!

 

[Cromat]

Isolated starts really depend on how big an island/continent you get and what resources it holds. I did win a Noble isolated start with a cultural victory, but I was relatively tech backwards and was actually invaded a few turns before my third city went legendary.
The problem is that without tech trading you are forced to research every line of technology yourself. It's also generally easier to win a game if you have someone to conquer and take cities from.
I haven't rolled an isolated start in a long time. Perhaps my problem is that I don't beeline to Optics fast enough. Anyway, I think isolated starts are especially good for cultural victories, since without danger except barbs you can go wonder crazy. I should try to play one on Monarch.

The power graph is a good source of info not because YOU should base your decisions on it, but because the AI bases it's decisions on it. If your power graph falls too low and someone doesn't like you, they might invade. Trying to keep up prevents that from happening.

And you're right about the whipping, but I wanted to make it a quick general tip. As I said I learned through reading guides on this forum.

 

[Spearthrower]

I think Cromat's points are good, with the addendum from LlamaCat on whipping strategums.... whip, but do so selectively.

One other big help to consider is to use a Civ and Leader you are familiar with and feel comfortable with them..... really leverage their strengths and play a few games at Noble with them until you get it.... then try other civs and leverage their traits.

Some strategies work for all, some are more focused..... you'll find the playstyle that suits you and will let you play harder difficulties if that's your aim.