Many have asked, so here are all the ones I've discovered so far, including one or two I read here: [IMPORTANT: first thing to do is set the "end of turn" option on, as many of the following will be difficult to do without it] 1: Settlers - settlers can build roads, irrigate, build railroads, or control pollution or mine all in one turn. After all your pieces have been moved (or in the case of roads/railroads where you wish to use said road/rr, before) click onto the settlers again, and hit r/i/p again. Repeat as many times as necessary for said operation on square (the computer will not let the settlers do anything else once one improvement has been completed) 2: Ships - ships have interesting effects on piece movements, and can be used very advantageously during the game. Build enough ships to space them their movement allocation apart between continents, including being docked in cities. (This is important!!!) When you want to move a piece from Spot A to spot B on another continent and you have this convoy setup, you can do the following: Move piece into first city with docked ship, and have piece go into sentry mode (do this for all pieces to be moved) and then activate ship (docked ship can be in sentry mode, it will not affect movement points) move ship out and then onto next ship in line, then activate that ship. (It will automatically take over all the pieces as passengers it can hold) move it onto the next and so on, until you dock into the destination city. Now, click into the destination city, and activate *all* the pieces you just delivered (they'll appear to be in sentry mode) and exit city. Voila, you now have *full* movement points restored to all the pieces you've just delivered, effectively getting two complete sets of movement points in one turn. (Note: I figured this last part out when I was already using transports, and have not yet gone back to discover whether trimerenes and sails do the same, although I expect they work similarly) This also works best with railroads, as then you can have a small military, yet deploy them world-wide in one turn. It keeps the populace much happier on the whole when you're running a democracy. I've just finished a game at emporer level (Yes, Suleyman the Wise is after Emporer Augustus at 140%:) wherein I had dominated the world by 2700 BC. (I'm going back to that point to see what my rating would have been had I finished conquering everyone at that point, and whether it would have been worth doing it instead of growing to 30+ million population and launching a space ship, and building all the wonders (or stealing them). Strategies: Start and obtain bronze working, the wheel, alphabet, and writing and literacy with science set as high as it takes to reduce the advance to a minimum number of turns. (See trade advisor to set the tax rates to obtain as much money as possible while gaining science at the highest possible rate.) You want Literacy so that you can build the Great Library Wonder, and gain any new advances made by others. Writing allows you diplomats so that you can steal anyything you don't find yourself first or gain through the Great Library, as well as force meetings between yourself and rivals when peace is desirable (such as you've just taken over a city, you have no defensivce units, and the enemy is coming upon you) Find your neighbors on the continent as quickly as possible (I build to or three militias and send them searching, not bothering to defend my city. If I loose, I prefer to do it in the first ten minutes, not after devoting several days to a game) Build a phalanx as soon as you obtain bronze working. Build a granary to allow your city to grow as fast as possible. Once you reach a size of 4, you'll need a temple, so build settlers to keep your city(ies) to a size of three until you obtain ceremony. You'll want to get out of despotism as soon as you hit about 5 in size, so you'll need code of laws and monarchy now. At this point, maintenance will become a problem so you need currency and trade (mathematics is in there also). By now, you should have taken over *all* your neighbors (it's easiest to do this early, when no one has built barracks and is fielding veteran phalanxes to guard them, and even if they are, until they have city walls, chariots romp right over them) Try to incorporate as many of these cities into your empire as possible. Now you'll need navigation quickly, but build trimerenes to investigate the surroundings quickly, and possibly make early contact. Contact: make sure that you leave some of the cities of other civs alive at this point, as you need them for trade. Generally, I leave the capitals, and take over all the other cities, then remove the weakest capitals and leave the largest three for trade purposes. (I'm of the thought that your highest score will come from sending the spaceship off). This should be enough to make even the Emporer level fairly easy, although it by no means is a full strategy. Other things are the following: Pollution, large cities produce pollution with the discovery of the automobile (cities size of ~20) with *no* production. Need mass transit to offset this. Recycling and mass transit combined allow for no pollution to be produced with up to 62 resources. Happiness - large cities will generally not have all happy people, so to increase your score, build settlers and found cities of size 3 or less with high luxuries at end of game (ie year before spaceship lands) Also disband all bombers and nukes in a democracy (perhaps all military?) before this occurs. Otherwise, a city of size 4 requires a temple, of size 5 or 6 a marketplace for all citizens to be content. Large cities (size 20 or more) are excellent sources of revenue for extra-continent trade after you've established your three trade routes for each city. Have high production cities (not necesarrily the largest population) produce caravans, and (with rr) send them to the large city, then across to the other continent to the *largest and most powerful* of the remaining capitals. (I made over 110 coins per caravan sent, built ~8 caravans a turn on this one continent) doing this, and my costs were only 650 coins per turn. (My tax revenue was about 3000 coins per turn) This allows you to buy all improvement for new cities befoore the population even reaches 2, and gives it full trade routes also. This is the quickest way to grow cities. (less than 70 years, 1840-1910 to go from size 1 to size 10-15) it also allows all production to center in on a few cities, with the corresponding costs associated with those improvements, while allowing the rest to concentrate on growing and trade only.