What do you think is the weakest part of your game.

Actually, I meant prince to monarch, but it's still wrong....

 

1. WarfareI can't seem to bother microing the most out of my cities, especially during wars. When I'm fighting, I'm always focusing on my armies, so I guess I'm more of a soldiers' king. I take care of my stacks and even occasionally set up scout promoted HA's and stuff like that so I can better conserve my units and conquer. Where does this lead to?

I end up having all my reinforcements in the cities, I mean... can you set up waypoints or something, to bring em forward?




2. City Specialization I don't know how to do city specialization, I think the hardest part for me is to get good production cities up and producing units in mid game.

The balance between food and hammers, so hard to achieve is

I mean my best production city was once when I played as Incans, I had factory, Three Gorges Dam, Ironworks, and all the jazz, including either West Point or Heroic Epic, cant remember. In any case I was churning out space ship parts like crazy. Thats how I won that game as well, I ended up churning nukes out of that city once the SS was complete so I basically sent a grand FU! message to all the AIs, before venturing to Alpha Centauri.

I maybe tend to focus too much on lowering maintenance and trying to get libs up and going. I don't know really, I tend to have very few if any specifically production dedicated cities... Once draft becomes available, together with rifling, its no biggie of course but still. I always build courthouses so thats not a bad strategy I think.

3. Diplomacy I suck epicly at this. My diplomacy is mostly basically about trying to rex myself in to favorable positions while blocking AIs into small peninsulas while taking all the good land for myself, including critical resources. I tend to send the foreign diplomats home empty handed every time they come asking open borders. I mean isn't that the whole point of rexing, to block the enemy from settling anywhere?

This is maybe another problem. I rex as any possible civ when I'm playing, from the get-go. I tend to get dowed by monty or shaka, but thankfully axes/maces pwn monty's jaguars at least.

4.0 My latest game (as Romans/Julius, Big and Small, Epic, Noble)
However I ended up in a really weird situation in my last game. I had my own continent, a fairly big, the biggest. No other civs there (I prat-rushed Yanks). I dowed and razed cities everytime someone tried to set foot on my island. Ethiopia was the strongest rival, and Joao too, I was equal in score with Ethiopia but Joao was significantly weaker, I had a score at the 3000s.

4.1
There were lots of vassals around, In fact the free world consisted of me, Ragnar and Stalin (both stuck at middle ages). I saw the danger in this, Ragnar had warred against me but was by now a nuisance, just like Stalin whose armies were mainly swords. I had beelined Assembly Line and as such I was building elite infantry from Washington.

4.2
So I decided that since Joao had 4 fairly weak vassals, and Zara(whoever the Ethiopia guy is called) had 3 I think, I MUST have teh vassals as well. I embarked on an epic streak of conquest to put an end to the Viking nuisance. I captured Nidaros and vassalised them.
Then I did what all the great leaders always had done, invaded Russia. Of course my 20-ish infantry plus cannons would own them pretty good, I also had a real good casus belli this time, I was beelining to industrialism, and I was pretty close, finished the tech and I only needed combustion to get tanks. I had no oil on my continent though, so I decided to take all of Stalin's.
I took what I wanted, even got a free city with uranium as well (so I had the capacity for uranium and oil once the rebels were quelled) reducing Stalin and his cronies to 3-city vassal nations just like the vikings.

4.3
At this point the whole world declared war on me, I dragged on, even changed back to nationhood and drafted my way out of the danger and crushed all invasion forces that had landed. Oh btw I didn't have a navy at all, I didn't get Astronomy until very late, and Joao had destroyers already so I didnt bother with combat ships at all. My navy consisted of 2 galleons for obvious single turn transport duties between Ragnar's & Stalin's continent, and my continent.

The war dragged on, and they wouldn't just give up. I would have had to give them cities which they never could have taken by their fairly inferior land forces.
I went totally bankrupt and my units went on strike. I disbanded all my obsolete maces & L-bows & archers & axes and even rifles. Still I could only stay on the positive per turn income by stalling my research at 10% with 4gold/turn. *sad face*

4.4
I did have huge unhappiness problems from this WW-style engagement (I didn't have the awesome police state or pyramids). Ethiopia / Portugal ruled the seas and razed all my water improvements. I had for some reason HUGE food problems, all my cities were starving and unhappy. But I think Ethiopia was also facing huge restraints on its teching, they had a far flung colonial empire on some of the very remote islands on top of their smaller continent, which was horrible in terms of terrain, pretty much half of it was tundra. They had lots of small cities on horrible locations as well.


5.0 Navies should be obvious already but my navy always sux big-time. I tend to get the enemy invasion forces on my shores, and not the other way around. Naval invasions tend to save time as well, reducing the amount of walking to the city walls? In any case I only build a few galleys early game if I must, e.g. if I'm isolated on an island or something.

Mid game naval vessels pretty much suck, caravels are only good for exploring and I always get beaten to the circumnavigation bonus, so why bother at all?

Astronomy and fregates come so late and are easily obsoleted by ironclads, and ironclads are easily obsolete by destroyers... Upgrading is expensive and I have other uses for my money than upgrading triremes to something useful. So all in all my navies tend to consist of just galleons doing 1-turn dashes across continents to the safety of cities.

 

the weakest part of my game seems to be playing on mp and making opponents quit and cry home to mama a bit too quickly.

that and perhaps the beauty of what is built could look better graphically-more of a balance via composition.

the build isn't for yeild- rather display, which alleviates the rather silly notions of cottage or farms or economies. this is the superior

 

hey troy, i will be happy to lay a whooping down on you anytime

 

#1 Using the terrain I get: I almost always regenerate/restart until I get good terrain.

#2 Finishing a "losing game" (not a great victory) where I still have something to learn. Once I lose track of the game I restart over and over again...

 

1. Too little micromanagement.
2. Too much aggression.

 

That's also a problem of mine. I mean, is there like a manual that comes with the BTS expansion? Hmm can't remember atm. Like, its a new feature so it can't be explained in the normal Civ4 manual (I think I've lost that one by now anyway )

 

Handling espionage, theirs and mine, is a weakness too. It annoys me so.

 

Okay, im not exactly sure if this is either in Civilopedia or the paperback manual for BTS, but when does the instigate city revolt spy action become available? do you need a certain tech for it, becoz last time I tried playing as Catherine, I had spies and lots of swords ready to tackle the Celts. but my invasion dried up because my spies couldn't lower their defences. This was very early game though, Alphabet so I had just got the spies in the first place.

 

It takes a decent number of espionage points to incite a city revolt, but it's not just the fact that you need espionage points. You need espionage points explicitly assigned to that civilization. Click on the Spy button in the upper right corner of the screen and assign all of your espionage points to one civ. You'll soon have enough points to mess with them. If you have your points distributed through the entire world instead of concentrated on one civ, you won't have enough to do anything useful for a long time.

Don't forget to drop the assignment of spy points to that civ after you've crippled them. I play far too many games with all my spy points going toward a mostly defeated civ or even a vassal just because I forgot to go back to that screen.

 

you need a certain number of espionnage points (can't remember, I never use it).
If you don't spend commerce towardss EP, don't have courthouses, castles, ... and no spy specialists, and if you didn't put all your EPs towards your target, it can take a while...

 

1. National wondwers: Build them to late or some not all.
2. I expand to slowly in the beginning, because inefficient use of hammers and chopping.

 

ok thx. that's what I failed to do. I figured I'd be just ok with a great spy settled in my capital and the spy academy thingy there also, together with maximum possible espionage slider at 30%, but I gotta try that espionage weight against the target civ.


espionage in my eyes seems rather weak when you think about it, only stealing techs and the city revolt thing seem really worth the hassle.

 

Yeah you can! It's awesome. Hit the city bar (under the city name). When it's flashing, hold shift and right-click on a tile. A yellow circle should appear on the tile. Any unit produced in that city will advance to that tile (and await your orders).

 

Just a few words. 0% science = 0.
That's the bottom line.

 

that would be pretty simple.
too bad it's wrong

 

Indeed. Although it depends how pedantic he was trying to be. 0% of anything is 0.

However, a 0% science slider simply means none of your commerce is converted into beakers. Of course, there are many ways other than commerce to get beakers, PreLynMax.

 

I thought this was thorougly discussed already, PreLynMax. science can come from specialists or building/producing research regardless of the researchslider. I can run 100+ beakers/turn in the early AD's with a 0% slider on a foodrich and/or hammerheavy map. Im sure the better players can pull off a lot more. You should give it a try!