Winning on emperor.

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

Hey folks I'm looking for pointers on how to actually do this. No matter what I do, or which Victory condition I persue, I am getting beaten time after time.

I already read most guides on civ fanatics, watched about 3 playthrougs on youtube, and I still can't do it.

The AI seems to completely disregard any trading that is not heavily in their favor, and somehow they seem to build units non-stop and still be able to have a tech lead on me. Even the unit spammers seem to be able to just go right past me.

I'm not sure if I should be adjusting things on the custom game screen or using the play now function.

I simply don't understand how the AI can so effortlessly outech me. Specially if they never expanded and their land is small / lots of water tiles.

I can usually hang on until early industrial. Then they completely outech and outman me. They'll have infantry when I barely have rifles and cavalry. I'll devote 3 or 4 cities to cottages, have 1 city as production as maybe one city as the great person farm. Then I might also expand a bit and conquer more cottaged land yet it doesn't really seem to matter if they expanded or not. The result is the same. If they grow too big they also might start vassalizing people and then that's just adding more nails to the coffin.

I'm looking for steuctured advice, or maybe even a recorded playthroug. (I've watched 3 from grimith but I can't seem to copy his sucess) otherwise more or less the things I should specifically do or not do. I've read most general guides on economy, warfare, etc, but I'm not being able to sucessfully execute everything to get a win.

[Mr. X]

I might give you some generall tipps. I try at the moment to beat the game on deity, but failed so far. But in one game i was the first one to get liberalism, kinda funny xD

Some general tipps that might help.
Use Chopping as much as you can in the early game too speed up settlers and worktroups.
(bronceworking as soon as possible)
If you have a city with high food field, try building a second city which radius crosses that field, so it can grow super fast, when the other city is already big enough.
First thing to build is nearly (some rare cases not) allways a worktroup (at the start of the game)
Get cottages as soon as possible and try working one per city atleast. (but grow the city first). Ofc theyre best near rivers, but rivers are kinda op anyway. I get 2-3 minimum in my capital.
You can skip a lot of research, the whole monarchy - tree is obsolete. and just research what you really ::::!:::: need. in most cases i think its bronze working, the wheel, agriculture, pottery (very important early ) and writing. Animal husbandry if you might need it for the ressources, or you lookout for horses to fight early barbs.
Then i rush asthetics, to trade it with the fast ai (deity) against alphabet or mathematics. The key is to get to currency and code of laws and then to civil service fast. In most cases its abd to get your own religion early, you might end up in a war way too early... But buddhism is allways a good option to boost research, if you have the time to build monasterys.

Metal casting, Monarchy, Machinery, feudalism, totally obsolete, you should look for your tech lead as mentioned above, and try trading those obsolete techs with the AI for your research advantage elsewhere.

Hope that helps a bit. And ofc, try growing as fast as possible... But only as you can afford it. And if you beat it, i would appreciate feedback :)

[Thomas Turbando, o jurista]

One has to face the fact that no amount of guide-reading will make anyone good, ultimately one has to be able to respond to the changing circumstances of the game's universe in a way that takes out the best from such universe's possibilities and predispositions. It's not simply about following known advice and then expecting to come out on top, one has to elaborate their own strategy to win, particularly on higher difficulty levels.

[IdealPoint]

Originally posted by Disciple.:

completely disregard any trading that is not heavily in their favor, and somehow they seem to build units non-stop and still be able to have a tech lead on me. Even the unit spammers seem to be able to just go right past me.

I'm not sure if I should be adjusting things on the custom game screen or using the play now function.

I simply don't understand how the AI can so effortlessly outech me. Specially if they never expanded and their land is small / lots of water tiles.

Ok, so...
Trading will almost always favor the AI unless you have very good relations with that AI (friendly). But the thing is you can trade a tech to MULTIPLE AIs during the same turn. So yeah, you don't get the best trade with an individual AI. But you get to trade with multiple AIs. You can actually keep up with the AI in tech, even on diety, with a good enough start and the right leader. But that approach doesn't make sense, because you CAN'T keep up with the massive expansion, free units, and upgrades the AI gets on higher difficulty.

So what you need to do is.....focus on techs the AIs will research late, and trade them around to fill in your gaps. This is why so many people tell you to never research feudalism-because basically every AI prioritizes feudalism, and why bulbing techs is so important on higher levels. You get a specialist to give you a monopoly tech to trade to the AIs to stay on par with them techwise.

And to keep up with production you use the AI against itself again. Bribe the AI into pointless wars, even if you don't want to participate, to ruin any alliances they may be building and make the AI build more units instead of settlers/buildings. And plan your wars well in advance, around key tech advantages you can get (usually by getting liberalism first). You can actually go to war in the medieval era with the AI if you are good at army composition, positioning, and strategy. But it is almost always less efficient than using cuirassers or the 15 strength units because you can sweep through a developing civilization so much faster with two move units, and mounted units are generally hard to counter anyways. Plus you can pincer attack multiple cities more easily.

To break it down for you...prince is basically an even playing field (except the AI is too easy to rush on prince). You can win by out teching, out expanding, out religioning, even out spying the AI on prince, because the AI is an incompetent builder, directionless techer, and generally bad. On monarch you can still win by playing well and making your civilization the best it can be. On emperor, and especially on immortal/diety the AI has huge advantages such that you should try to focus on exploiting it's weaknesses instead of just competing on a level playing field.

One other tip-most people build way more buildings than is recommended. Sure, you need granaries and a culture building almost everywhere (or be on top of spreading religion through missionaries). But if you plan correctly you don't need barracks everywhere, because you usually only build units from 2-3 cities. Same for universities, etc. Instead of building a building over 20-30 turns consider how long that building will take to actually improve your empire versus building wealth or wonder fail gold to pay for a bigger empire and better tech rate faster. How about building gold and using that gold to rush buy a building in a high population city where the building multipliers will have more of an impact? How about whipping out a few longbow city defenders to free up your heroic epic city/barracks/stable city to make offensive units. Small underdeveloped cities aren't necessarily bad, if you are sacrificing their long term growth to get more cities now, or get to a monopoly tech to trade or go to war with faster.

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

I lowered the difficulty level down to monarch and kept trying some stuff. One thing that worked For me was having horses and immediately destroying the closest neighbor. However this approach doesn't repeat itself very often, specially on emperor.

Great people are another thing that I don't manage too well. On one game I went out of my way to obtain great people, using pacifism and starving cities down. But most often i usually will get maybe 5 in a game. I find it difficult to create a powerful great people farm because of all the food required.

Which brings me to.. using slavery vs caste system. Often times I do not have enough hammers as I'd like, and therefore building infrastructure and armies takes too long. Usually slavery could be useful for preparing the invasion stack, but I find it usually cripples the economy and there is not enough reinforcements coming in. I do notice that caste system has a +1 hammers for workshops, and im wondering if it's possible to match the production of slavery with a lot of workshop and caste.

Another area I'm finding difficult is balancing production and commerce. I think I either do too much of one or the other. Generally my armies will not be strong enough to break through the enemy force, and if they do, it's usually at a very slow pace which cripples the development. Having, say, montezuma as a neighbor, will mean incredibly lengthy wars which usually let all the other AI just develop peacefully. At that point I'm finding the runaway AI just goes uncontested by even the warmongers, and I cannot get the same warmongers to wage war because I can't afford the price due to warring myself and falling behind.

Sharing resources and oversettling: should I ensure every city has 1 food resource for itself, or could this 1 food be used to feed 2 cities by sharing? I stick very strickly to having 1 resource per city, but I'm wondering if this could be viable. The happy caps usually end up cutting short the benefits of the resource at some point

Thanks for all your replies. I'm probably going to practice a bit more on monarch before having a go at emperor again. I still haven't been able to win and I think it's because I need a better knowledge of great people, warfare ans such.

[Thomas Turbando, o jurista]

So-called great people farms are something you don't need to do unless you really feel they're necessary or beneficial. They're not essential to an efficient playthrough.

[Scathe]

Originally posted by Disciple.:

Sharing resources and oversettling: should I ensure every city has 1 food resource for itself, or could this 1 food be used to feed 2 cities by sharing? I stick very strickly to having 1 resource per city, but I'm wondering if this could be viable. The happy caps usually end up cutting short the benefits of the resource at some point

it sounds to me like your cities might not be benefiting from monarchy enough based on this quote, rushing for hereditary rule and building cheap units fixxes happy caps pretty good. the oracle can help here sometimes, although getting code of laws with it for a religion can also be good. even after a city has grown near max tile usage, food resources are still great for allowing you to use tiles without food, or use specialists.

also, I don't know how strict you are about trying every map, but usually I'll find a map where my first 3 cities have 2 food resources each, probably 2 of them also have a production resource or at least a hybrid resource like cow, my capital has a commerce resource like gold or gems, and all 3 cities have plenty of prime cottage land, wether flood plain or grassland, and all 3 have 2-3 hills for mines for production. sometimes my empire involves overlap, especially when it involves conquered cities, but my first 3 I very rarely build with sharing resources in mind, they usually are built to be late game and use their entire allotment of tiles. finding maps that slant in my favor helps.

warning - I can easily win on monarch, but, I too struggle on emperor, so I wasn't going to try giving advice till your latest post.

edit - also, if vassal states seem to produce "more nails in the coffin" try playing with vassal states disabled. I feel this is a fairer diplomacy playing field. I play custom games with vassal states disabled.

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

Originally posted by Scathe:

Originally posted by Disciple.:

Sharing resources and oversettling: should I ensure every city has 1 food resource for itself, or could this 1 food be used to feed 2 cities by sharing? I stick very strickly to having 1 resource per city, but I'm wondering if this could be viable. The happy caps usually end up cutting short the benefits of the resource at some point

it sounds to me like your cities might not be benefiting from monarchy enough based on this quote, rushing for hereditary rule and building cheap units fixxes happy caps pretty good. the oracle can help here sometimes, although getting code of laws with it for a religion can also be good. even after a city has grown near max tile usage, food resources are still great for allowing you to use tiles without food, or use specialists.

also, I don't know how strict you are about trying every map, but usually I'll find a map where my first 3 cities have 2 food resources each, probably 2 of them also have a production resource or at least a hybrid resource like cow, my capital has a commerce resource like gold or gems, and all 3 cities have plenty of prime cottage land, wether flood plain or grassland, and all 3 have 2-3 hills for mines for production. sometimes my empire involves overlap, especially when it involves conquered cities, but my first 3 I very rarely build with sharing resources in mind, they usually are built to be late game and use their entire allotment of tiles. finding maps that slant in my favor helps.

warning - I can easily win on monarch, but, I too struggle on emperor, so I wasn't going to try giving advice till your latest post.

edit - also, if vassal states seem to produce "more nails in the coffin" try playing with vassal states disabled. I feel this is a fairer diplomacy playing field. I play custom games with vassal states disabled.

I do switch to hereditary rule as soon as possible although shortly after that time I seem to start falling behind on techs. My usual researching goes essential techs > writing > alphabet and aesthetics, or aesthetics then alphabet. Usually I'll try to avoid researching alphabet myself but sometimes it takes too long for the AI to research. After that I'll get construction, currency and might go for code of laws and civil service Although this can change if I need a military tech on the machinery branch.

By the time feudalism starts rolling around, the scenario is similar but I don't have any techs that I could give away, or the ones I have are things like civil service which the AI will use to out tech me.

I can never really catch up after that point. Sometimes the biggest AI will have 7 techs on me, and at that point fighting them or convincing others to fight them doesn't seem to work.

As far as the cities, I'll usually have 1 food for each but finding more doesn't happen that often. I like to use a city for production purposes and that one gets hills, but for the others, sometimes I find it somewhat hard to find particularly good spots, or might struggle placing a 6th city without going on conquest, mostly because the land doesn't seem good at all.

Usually I'll secure the food first, and then depending on the terrain I'll adjust the city to be commerce oriented or maybe fit a medium role.

I have a slight suspicion I might be using too many cottages and not enough production, because usually the wars will stall unless I planned for it and it was a war with knights or cuirassiers on mind. Having war declared on me by a pesky neighbor like montezuma usually doesn't end too well.

I have a few wins on monarch and then went to emperor right away, but I think the difficulty change between the two might be greater than I expected.
-

I started a new practice game with the americans on monarch and managed to settle an uncharacteristically big amount of cities (at the cost of completely crashing my economy). It seemed like a weird game because I never before had that much time to expand. I had to check with the worldbuilder because I thought something might be going wrong with the AI's, but that didn't seem to be the case.

I'll try to grab a few screens of that game next time I play and post them here. Maybe that could shine some light on what I should and shouldn't be doing.

[Scathe]

Originally posted by Disciple.:

I started a new practice game with the americans on monarch and managed to settle an uncharacteristically big amount of cities (at the cost of completely crashing my economy). It seemed like a weird game because I never before had that much time to expand. I had to check with the worldbuilder because I thought something might be going wrong with the AI's, but that didn't seem to be the case.

I'll try to grab a few screens of that game next time I play and post them here. Maybe that could shine some light on what I should and shouldn't be doing.

playing as the americans makes this game harder in my opinion. edit - if lincoln, you need a good great person city for his philosophical trait, think lots of farmed grassland and 2-4 food resources. not easy to find. national epic and great library would help this city as well. if roosevelt, taking advantage of his wonder production, both by completing wonders and by failing wonders for gold, is something I understand helps, but I'm not good at this. also knowing what wonders to build and actually getting them helps. washington's trait combo I don't know what to say about, I wouldn't want to play with it.

this game is about snowballing, civilizations with early game units that you can leverage to get ahead make the game easier, and the financial trait on a leader is in my opinion the easiest one to benefit from, and maybe the strongest. it is good that you're playing as the americans to help you master the monarch difficulty level, but for the step up to emperor, consider inca (arguably the strongest civ, strong financial leader in huaya capac, strong unique unit that can actually rush through archers, and culture on a granary is a great advantage too), or for something less overpowered but still a strong start, there are several good choices, maybe darius of persia, elizabeth or victoria of england, hannibal of carthage, or pacal of maya.

if you are willing to play with un-restricted leaders in custom game options, it opens up some other strong or maybe overpowered combos, I play with this setting, and my favorite combo is willem van orange of rome. I also like playing as willem van orange of babylon (this is not as overpowered, but I like building gardens at reduced cost thanks to willem). I like the creative leader to make city placement decisions easier. however I would hand the strongest leader title to hannibal, pacal, or elizabeth probably. rome or china may challenge inca for strongest civ in an un-restricted leaders environment. sumeria is also a good un-restricted leaders civ option.

[grognardgary]

Step one Hemispheres map 6 continents. You'll one or no other civs to deal with at the start eliminate the other civ if present asap preferably before he has anything tougher than warriors. Grab all the goodie huts you can save before kicking them, Goal is to get 6 700 gold and some tech dont bother with scouts, Try to kill the other civs scouts whenever you see them. Occupy your continent quickly

[grognardgary]

Stonehenge which saves you the trouble of building a monument in each city is the most important early wonder. In general anything that provides bonuses in all cities is a must have. By the way in my opinion one should limit overlap among ones cities in civ IV Bigger cities equals more of everything including the number of specialists it can support.

[Scathe]

Originally posted by grognardgary:

Stonehenge which saves you the trouble of building a monument in each city is the most important early wonder. In general anything that provides bonuses in all cities is a must have. By the way in my opinion one should limit overlap among ones cities in civ IV Bigger cities equals more of everything including the number of specialists it can support.

I would dispute the claim that stonehenge is most important. I like the oracle and I know my brother likes the great wall. a lot of wonders have good utility. I like playing as a creative leader and that makes stonehenge completely useless to me in all my games. to make a blanket statement that one wonder is always the best in this game is wrong. each game presents different scenarios to evaluate. I am sure stonehenge does a lot of work for you in your games, but spending those early hammers on settlers or military units also has snowballing potential.

[Vuyek]

here I am, Mr Prince, and people are playing deity

[grognardgary]

Originally posted by Scathe:

Originally posted by grognardgary:

Stonehenge which saves you the trouble of building a monument in each city is the most important early wonder. In general anything that provides bonuses in all cities is a must have. By the way in my opinion one should limit overlap among ones cities in civ IV Bigger cities equals more of everything including the number of specialists it can support.

I would dispute the claim that stonehenge is most important. I like the oracle and I know my brother likes the great wall. a lot of wonders have good utility. I like playing as a creative leader and that makes stonehenge completely useless to me in all my games. to make a blanket statement that one wonder is always the best in this game is wrong. each game presents different scenarios to evaluate. I am sure stonehenge does a lot of work for you in your games, but spending those early hammers on settlers or military units also has snowballing potential.

Anything that saves you around 200+ turns of building a game is never going to be completely useless... Generally if you cant get at least Stonehenge pyramids and Great wall and oracle on levels below emperor you're doing something wrong. of course thats if you're playing someone that gets that wonder bonus. By the way like oracle too but I'vealways got stonehenge built before its even available.

[Vuyek]

greg, who playes with goody huts on?

[grognardgary]

Originally posted by Vuyek:

greg, who playes with goody huts on?

Why wouldn't you especially on Higher tech levels you need to be out exploring and leveling your warriors early on any way, might as well get rewarded for it beyond the obvious. Besides on higher levels it helps to redress the built in tech imbalance on higher levels