Finding My Civ Identity

[CometNEt]

I've played civ since civ 2 came out, but its only been fairly recently that I've started playing 'seriously', as in trying to focus on maximizing my efficiency and playing on higher difficulties, etc. In the older civs I'd play on Warlord or whatever the second easiest was and I could more or less do whatever I wanted and still win easily, since things were pretty simple. I guess I probably developed a lot of bad habits from playing for years like that and now that I'm pushing to play on tougher difficulties where you can't really do whatever you feel like at any time, I frequently run into some problems.

I started playing on Prince lately and while I've won a few games, I've also abandoned a ton where I felt I simply made too many poor decisions and the game was out of reach (these all happen somewhere before gunpowder).

While certainly there are lots of areas of my game I can improve on, I feel my biggest problem is in the macro picture of builder vs. warmonger or whatever you want to call it. From years of playing on easy difficulties, I am used to winning with a minimal army. In that regard, my instincts lean fairly heavily towards the 'builder'. When the message pops up about production finishing in a city and asks what I want to build next, my first reaction is always 'what building doesn't this city have yet?'. I tend to want to build virtually every building in every city, even if it doesn't really need it, which naturally causes me to frequently have an inadequate army.

Compounding the problem though, is the fact that I almost exclusively end up trying to win through military means. On pangea maps, I tend to virtually always go for domination/conquest victories. On a continent type map, I lean towards conquering my continent then leveraging my size advantage to obtain a space race victory.

Naturally these require a significant period of warmongering, and generally I will at some point start to prepare for a war and gear my production towards that and after a fair number of turns, I will find myself ready to go to war. Of course the problem with this is there is a long period of time where I'm really not remotely in a position to wage a war. The vast majority of my abandoned games are when one turn I'm at peace with my neighbor and the next s/he's got a 20 unit stack next to my city ready to take on my 1 defender (another bad habit I have... I'm used to 1 defender being all thats necessary). So yeah, if I get declared on when I'm unprepared, the game is over for me.

I've been working on trying to balance infrastructure production vs. military production but it's still definitely a work in progress. Anyway I was wondering if anyone else had similar experiences or could offer some advice on how to avoid slipping into the complacent mindset and neglecting military production.

Thanks and sorry for the wall of text.

[Theben]

Your 2nd or 3rd city should potentially have a lot of food and hammers, commerce isn't an issue. That will be your 1st military city. After building barracks and maybe a stable &/or granary, it should build nothing but military units. Make sure you have 1 military city for at least every 4 cities.

You will need to learn to specialize your cities in this game. Aside from military cities, there are commerce cities and GPP cities (great people pumps). Check out some strategy threads for further advice, at the moment Metalturtles Strat Thread is on the 1st page.

[Hauptman]

The best way to avoid the supprise invasion, is of course, plan on it happening every game. Prepare for it before it happens and before you know it, you'll find it's your 20 unit stacks supprising them.

Ive been playing emperor games exclusively with "aggressive AI" turned on and thus plan accordingly. It is in fact that low power rating that gets those attacks on you in the first place. I have had many games where because i was prepared from the outset, the AI's decided to pick on someone else leaving my grand armies to sit idle until I decide when to invade.

On marathon games (that I play) units are comparitivly cheap to build, so 5 turns for an axeman compared to 30 on a library, well it makes me build more units.

Just keep chugging along and you learn best by trial and error. However, set yourself tech paths ahead of time and stick to them, just choosing techs willy-nilly tend to let you fall behind. If you decide on gunning for civil service then machinery and avoid unneccesary techs it pays of in huge dividends. Trade for techs you missed later after you've abused your unit tech leads and youll be sitting pretty even on harder levels.

[Metaliturtle]

Remember, your army is the best wonder that can be built in any game. Just like having a science city, commerce city, GP pump, etc. You should have a 'Sparta' as well. And Sparta's motto should be "We make 'em big, we make 'em strong, we make 'em numerous and we make 'em WIN!"