So I've been playing on Warlord (EDIT: Not Monarch) for a while, and can usually beat it (although it's usually within 50 turns of time, or thereabouts), but I'm having trouble making the jump to Noble. I think the biggest question I'm facing is, at what rate do you expand early on. I usually try to keep my research at 100% for as long as I can, to get the jump on the AI, but at Noble this doesn't seem to work - if I expand as fast as them, my economy's in the toilet, and if I expand slower, I become a backwater. How soon do people usually build their 2nd and 3rd cities? What research rate is normal?
When do you expand?
- Thread starter Xarlak
- Start date
Found your second and third cities as soon as you can on standard sized maps. After 3 cities it's up to you whether you want to continue fast expansion or slow it down, but having 3 early isn't going to hurt much. Don't mind the science % so much as how many beakers you're getting. For example if you have one city only and it's producing 15 commerce, that's 15 beakers at 100% science. Let's say you add 2 more cities and each of those cities produces another 8 commerce. Further let's say the overall maintenance of your cities increases from 0 to 2. If you have no libraries then at 100% science you'll be generating 31 beakers and losing 2 gpt. So you lower that to 90% science so as not to lose 2gpt and now you're getting 28 beakers and +1gpt. So even though you lowered your science from 100% to 90% you're still making 13 more beakers per turn than if you had just stuck with the 1 city.
edit: Oh and I think you meant you're moving up from warlord to noble, as monarch is 2 levels higher than noble.
edit: Oh and I think you meant you're moving up from warlord to noble, as monarch is 2 levels higher than noble.
