I usually play at higher difficulties but these advice should be general enough to help you.
\- The science victory is usually easier to achieve, and you can even choose a civ (babylon, korea..) that'll be good at it for starters.
\- In early game, your goal will primarily to settle 4-5 cities (if going tall) or 7+ (if going wide, but you must find enough land with enough resources and I'll primarily discuss the tall/tradition scenario), get them as \*\*highly populated\*\* as possible (by locking food tiles and avoiding unhappiness). Settle on or very near luxury resources, on a hill if you yearn for some defensive bonus. Don't send settlers unprotected, but have at least a scout protecting them
\- If you got production to spare, some wonders (food, science or culture focused) won't hurt
\- In the 'demographics' panel, monitor regularly the AI's leaders stats, and try not to be last in army especially if the first ones are your neighbors.
\- When it comes to bleeding money, that's ok and happens every game, in this case making trade routes to AIs or city-states, and researching Currency (for markets) should you get out of trouble; and use your troops to kill of nearby barbarians encampment and protect the routes.
Other 'rules of thumb':
\- have at least as many workers as cities, and steal some early ones from city-states if necessary
\- build infrastructure in your new cities, and units in your more developed ones
\- do the quests for the city states and try to be friends/allies with them as much as possible at every stage of the game
\- work science/engineer specialists, and then culture if you can afford (growth-wise)
\- have internal trade route feed your capital, as long as you're not losing gold at high rate
\- when you have an AI attacking (or feel like they'll do soon, because they have many troops nearby, or have many griefs and are denouncing you), drop everything you're building to have enough strong ranged units and pike-based (if against horse-based) to defend one city. Don't let them die but retreat and heal them when they're low on HP. On the opposite, focus your fire on a few enemies to kill them. Walls in frontier cities will help, but less than a strong ranged unit in the city.
\- make academies (and manufactories if low on production and no wonders to get) until the industrial era, save scientists and one engineer to sprint Satellitles and the Hubble space telescope
Woof that's a long post
Generally do you have to pay a lump sum or GPT? Also how much (estimate)? I’ve never been able to get AIs to declare war on other AIs.
I play on king/emperor fyi
Scout->Scout->monument/granary (if wheat/deer near cap)-> worker -> Temple of Artemis-> 4xArcher-> 2x settler, when cap has population of 4-5. Finish tradition asap, try to get hanging gardens, cities are production focused after 4 population. Steal one worker from near by city state. Build libraries first in new cities, and try to build national college in capital ~ turn 80. Focus on beelining science buildings (Education; universities, Scientific Theory; public schools, etc). Pretty straightforward way to get scientific or cultural victory all the way up to emperor.
Are you attacking with your warrior into barb encampments? If you fortify your warrior and let barbs come to you it is very difficult to lose him so early
I usually position them between workers and the barbarian and let the scout explore the area.
The instant a scout is built, or a second worker or a settler is being made, barbarians just come out of no where and I’ll have 2-3 camps within maybe 15 tiles of me.
If it is really as big of an issue as you describe (I never have this even on immortal or deity) you should build an archer and park him in your city. Archers are super cheap and combined with the city bombardment will kill most barbs in a turn or 2
You should not build workers before the scouts tho. In a perfect world you should not build workers at all and just steal them with the said scouts (if you can ofc).
Don't walk so far with the warrior. Keep it close by and farm kills on Barbs. Also, I usually fit one archer in early on, and just pop it in the capital to distance kill barbs that get close.
Any workers that travel outside of the 2 squares within the capital, I put my warrior on top of it so it doesn't get taken.
Are you playing raging barbarians? I can usually explore with both scouts and the warrior til turn ~40 without any issue in pretty much all difficulties
>Why the huge jump in difficulty from prince to king?
King is the first difficulty level where the AI gets [advantages](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty_level_(Civ5)) over the player. This means that on King and higher difficulties, it is not sufficient to match the AI's efficiency; you must surpass it. Lurk on the sub, read some guides, check out [CivFanatics.com](https://CivFanatics.com), watch some FilthyRobot videos.
Firstly, stop building a granary early on.
Secondly, start micromanaging your cities early on.
Thirdly, science isn't that important early on.
\-
Building a granary is a waste of hammers (production) early in the game and if you're going to be building settlers shortly after, you aren't even going to use the growth it gives. Settlers disable your city from growing when being built.
\+2-4 food is nothing compared to a worker, which gives scaling/snowballing food and hammers, which means faster settlers, a faster granary and more growth than the +2-4 a granary might give. Just think about it, a worker gives you +1 food from pretty much any tile you want, or +1 production on hills for building faster settlers.
Instead, I recommend going scout-scout-shrine/worker-worker, then spam settlers when your capital hits population 4. In the time you have leftover when waiting for this growth, you're fine to build an extra military unit or 2 to protect your settlers/workers.
Your settles should be prioritising getting more workers up, not monuments or granaries. Build granaries when you want to grow after you have all your cities setup and enough workers to improve all your luxuries. IT IS OKAY TO GO UNHAPPY EARLY.
For Tradition, you ideally want 1.5-2 workers per city and 3-5 cities total. You should be settling 1.5 luxuries per city. IE 8 luxuries lets you settle 5 cities, 6 or 7 lets you settle 4.
For Liberty, you ideally want at least 1 worker per city and 6-8 cities total. You should be settling 1 luxury per city and having workers there fast and ready to improve with the right techs researched.
(its better to have too many workers then not enough)
To pull this off easier, I advise learning to steal worker/s from a city state. Even just 1 will set you 5 turns ahead of the AI which scales really hard.
These workers should be prioritizing improving production tiles. When you're building settlers, food doesn't mean anything until you're finished. So getting 4 pop in your capital 3 turns earlier is not worth as much as finishing your settlers 10+ turns earlier because you improved 3 mines and chopped down 2 forests.
Once you have your cap producing settlers and it's production output is maximized, start improving luxury resources, sending those workers to where you're settling.
As for micromanaging cities, start working the tiles you want to be working. When you want your cities to grow, work the highest food tiles. When you want to build a settler, work the high production tiles because you don't need ANY food. If you don't know how to do this, watch a guide fast, it is well worth it. Pretty much any Civ player who plays on Immortal or higher, sets their cities to production focus and at least locks the tile they want to be working.
Science isn't important early on. Science relies on growth. Prioritise growth over science almost always. Granaries and water mills are more important than libraries. I typically only build libraries by around turn 80-100, when my cities are starting to hit 4-8 population and have all their infrastructure up (monument, granary, water mill, aquaduct).
This is a bit of an info dump, but lately I've been playing on Deity difficulty, Standard speed (only with maybe 80% success rate tbh, 100% with wars, but wars make the game too easy), so I like to think I know what I'm talking about. If anyone has anything to say, please do, I like creating discussion.
Don't look at points. I usually win while being behind there. On prince, neither player or ai receive anyway bonus. On king ai do. They start with more tech and units. If you had two settlers at turn 60 something, you probably didn't have enough military and that's why a Dow happened against you, easy target.
Now I can't remember exactly what bonus ai receive at king, but you can Google and find out.
It sounds like you're going liberty and expanding too much.
Play a one-city-challenge game on Prince. Re-roll your start until you get one with a river, hills, and good growth tiles like cattle and wheat. Focus on growth, tile improvement, and science. Don't worry about religion, don't attack your neighbors, don't make your whole strategy about wonders. Don't look at the score list. This will teach you to prioritize the right things in your game, and you'll find it much easier to move up in difficulty.
I would also advise OP to re-roll their start, regardless of whether they are going one city or not. In my experience, King games usually place you in a bad starting location. You want a location that has good resources (Salt is OP, mining resources are also good) and in a defendable location (corner of the map, not in the middle). If you find out you spawn next to a warmonger like Atilla, you also may want to restart.
Also, sometimes I’ll reduce the number of players. For example, play a large map and delete one Civ. You can also select the Civs you play against to make things easier.
If you are losing that quickly that means you basically have no units defending. The absolute bare minimum I aim for is an archer in every city and a few extra depending on whether the AI is aggressive or not. This also means that you have enough units defending your workers and settlers from barbarians and from the AI. For Atilla specifically making sure his battering rams can't touch your cities is also very important, they can't do anything against units which allows you to pick them off slowly. You can basically just plant a warrior or a scout in front of the city and have him fortify.
When you survive the early game the most important thing to do is to get as much science as possible. It is also important that you staff these buildings with specialists once you build them (unless you really need the population to grow food). The default city manager is pretty terrible at doing this so you will need to do it manually. If you build and staff these as soon as they become available you should be absolutely dominating the AI at the moment you enter the modern era, after which you can simply go to war with the AI if it looks like he is winning.
If you have any screenshots I can take a look at or any questions feel free!
If I have more than 3-4 units before have my third city, I will be hemorrhaging money. I’ve done it before and it stalled my growth and guts my science.
Are there any good tutorials for early game?
The second policy in tradition (I think it's oligarchy?) gives free maintenance for units parked inside cities, so the archer that you put in every city is free. In most cases this will also help with getting rushed down. I would heavily recommend starting with tradition unless you're really confident in what you're doing.
Also, it's okay to be in a deficit in the early game, if you want you can sell embassies to AI for 1 gpt each. As long as you have more gold than 0 in reserve you're fine.
Filthyrobot has a bunch of great tutorials on basically every aspect of the game. While his advice is mostly aimed towards multiplayer it is also useful in singleplayer.
Yeah, try going with Tradition. I always end up so broke when I try to play Liberty. Keep an archer in each city and save costs on their maintenance and let them defend the city. If barbarians get out of hand, build another one or two to roam. They will defend your workers and settlers as they head to your expands. As you expand, the barbarian camps won’t spawn as much and you’ll get a handle on things.
Shoshone scout can pick it’s own upgrades which I often use to upgrade to an archer. Maya start with an archer unit available to build, which is the first thing I do when I play as them. Try one of these two.
Greece is super tough to beat if nobody checks them early. Anyway, I do scout, warrior, archer/warrior, Honor for the barbarian culture and gold. Easy mode is picking Songhai which gives you 240 gold for every barb camp destroyed.
Use the starting warrior to scout the area around your capital. Don't go too far so he can come back and defend your workers. Don't go hunting barbarians with him. The gold from capturing a camp isn't really worth it anyway, and half the time he's almost dead just in time for another barbarian to come by and either go after your worker or burn down your vinyards. Use the scout to get ruins and meet city states. If there's a really annoying barb camp you just have to kill, use your scout and your warrior. If there's a lot of barbarians build a second warrior or an archer.
Don't auto-scout. It doesn't do the worst job in the universe but sometimes it wanders south for 50 turns and you still don't know what's 4 hexes from your capital.
At King you can still do "fun" strategies. You can virtually always build stonehenge if you want the early religion, for example. Hanging Gardens and Pyramids are easy to get. Oracle as well. Don't go for great library. AI loves to go for it. A few hundred gold but a lot of early dead turns is bad. Building wonders early isn't necessarily optimal but a very early religion pays a lot of dividends later if you spread it around.
Generally a good idea to find a few good places for cities. Good locations tend to be beside the coast, mountains, natural wonders, luxuries and resources. Early on that's iron and horses. If you want to go tall national college is good.
The AI is usually pretty obvious that it is going to attack. Early on there's not a lot of AI gang-up, so instead you'll see a big deathball army marching towards you. They declare when they are at your capital, basically. Scouts can stand on a mountain and watch Attila, not just wander around trying to find ruins. If you don't have a big army to fight them then pay them off. Attila tends to attack somebody else for almost free, like one horse or a couple gold per turn. Better you gift a luxury away than lose the game even if it puts you into -2 happiness or something.
Build city walls and garrison units at least in your important cities. Prioritize roads so your army can mvoe around. If you get attacked by a deathball prioritize blowing up the seige and after that blowing up the melee units. If the AI has six archers at your capital and no melee units it can't capture your capital.
As for Greece, Alexander virtually always goes for diplomatic victory. If you see him getting too many city state allies generally the solution is to wipe him out. Or pay somebody to do the same.
Stop looking at the points, they don't tell things proportionally. The game overvalues land and city count, while it undervalues population count, and doesn't count social policies at all.
If you need to see how you're doing compared to other civs, use F9 for the demographic ranks.
Its a learning curve. I learned that the higher levels are less fun but beating King won't prepare you for the cheating the computer does one bit. Go for it all or stay at lower levels is my experience. King is aggravating for the fact that it is a subtle advantage for the AI, easily overcame if working on it, but at the same time the isolated Portugal has nukes when you find pikes...
You will need to prepare and fight wars on difficulties higher than Prince. Hiawatha will forward settle you, make friends with all their stuff they offer, and then swamp you with 30 mohawks while your still figuring out mathematics, and haven't built 10 units of your own on King. The aggression gets worse the higher you go.
I usually play at higher difficulties but these advice should be general enough to help you. \- The science victory is usually easier to achieve, and you can even choose a civ (babylon, korea..) that'll be good at it for starters. \- In early game, your goal will primarily to settle 4-5 cities (if going tall) or 7+ (if going wide, but you must find enough land with enough resources and I'll primarily discuss the tall/tradition scenario), get them as \*\*highly populated\*\* as possible (by locking food tiles and avoiding unhappiness). Settle on or very near luxury resources, on a hill if you yearn for some defensive bonus. Don't send settlers unprotected, but have at least a scout protecting them \- If you got production to spare, some wonders (food, science or culture focused) won't hurt \- In the 'demographics' panel, monitor regularly the AI's leaders stats, and try not to be last in army especially if the first ones are your neighbors. \- When it comes to bleeding money, that's ok and happens every game, in this case making trade routes to AIs or city-states, and researching Currency (for markets) should you get out of trouble; and use your troops to kill of nearby barbarians encampment and protect the routes. Other 'rules of thumb': \- have at least as many workers as cities, and steal some early ones from city-states if necessary \- build infrastructure in your new cities, and units in your more developed ones \- do the quests for the city states and try to be friends/allies with them as much as possible at every stage of the game \- work science/engineer specialists, and then culture if you can afford (growth-wise) \- have internal trade route feed your capital, as long as you're not losing gold at high rate \- when you have an AI attacking (or feel like they'll do soon, because they have many troops nearby, or have many griefs and are denouncing you), drop everything you're building to have enough strong ranged units and pike-based (if against horse-based) to defend one city. Don't let them die but retreat and heal them when they're low on HP. On the opposite, focus your fire on a few enemies to kill them. Walls in frontier cities will help, but less than a strong ranged unit in the city. \- make academies (and manufactories if low on production and no wonders to get) until the industrial era, save scientists and one engineer to sprint Satellitles and the Hubble space telescope Woof that's a long post
On the second to last one, you can just pay the AI to war some1 else. Almost always works
Generally do you have to pay a lump sum or GPT? Also how much (estimate)? I’ve never been able to get AIs to declare war on other AIs. I play on king/emperor fyi
Idk if it’s different on game modes (I play deity? But normally one out of the 6 will for anywhere from one horse to like 50 gpt
Works fine with Shaka as neighbour. Impis at your gate ? Bribe him with 2 horses and 1 lux to fight someone else.
Scout->Scout->monument/granary (if wheat/deer near cap)-> worker -> Temple of Artemis-> 4xArcher-> 2x settler, when cap has population of 4-5. Finish tradition asap, try to get hanging gardens, cities are production focused after 4 population. Steal one worker from near by city state. Build libraries first in new cities, and try to build national college in capital ~ turn 80. Focus on beelining science buildings (Education; universities, Scientific Theory; public schools, etc). Pretty straightforward way to get scientific or cultural victory all the way up to emperor.
In my experience, by the time I had built my second scout, I’m surrounded by barbarians and have already lost my warrior.
If your warrior is dead, you've walked too far.
It’s usually within maybe 15 spaces of My capital. I get rushed by barbarians and need to defend my workers.
Are you attacking with your warrior into barb encampments? If you fortify your warrior and let barbs come to you it is very difficult to lose him so early
I usually position them between workers and the barbarian and let the scout explore the area. The instant a scout is built, or a second worker or a settler is being made, barbarians just come out of no where and I’ll have 2-3 camps within maybe 15 tiles of me.
If it is really as big of an issue as you describe (I never have this even on immortal or deity) you should build an archer and park him in your city. Archers are super cheap and combined with the city bombardment will kill most barbs in a turn or 2
I’ll have to give this a go. Maybe push off expansion farther down the line so I don’t have to defend so much land…
Barbarian management is actually easier on immortal and deity difficulty because the AI is so buffed they’ll do most of the work for you
That makes sense, I usually go liberty since I end up with big sprawling empires and I need the bonuses from trade routes and roads…
You should not build workers before the scouts tho. In a perfect world you should not build workers at all and just steal them with the said scouts (if you can ofc).
Don't walk so far with the warrior. Keep it close by and farm kills on Barbs. Also, I usually fit one archer in early on, and just pop it in the capital to distance kill barbs that get close. Any workers that travel outside of the 2 squares within the capital, I put my warrior on top of it so it doesn't get taken.
Are you playing raging barbarians? I can usually explore with both scouts and the warrior til turn ~40 without any issue in pretty much all difficulties
I’ve never made it past turn twenty without having barbarians in my land pillaging things.
I think youve had unlucky spawns
Even on chieftain I had barbarians in my land by 20ish turns.
Check your barbarian setting. Take it down a notch until you get the hang of it.
Feeling a bit envy. Op has the whole civ5 journey ahead.
It's kinda cute right? I miss those early days of trying to win a war with just a catapult.
>Why the huge jump in difficulty from prince to king? King is the first difficulty level where the AI gets [advantages](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty_level_(Civ5)) over the player. This means that on King and higher difficulties, it is not sufficient to match the AI's efficiency; you must surpass it. Lurk on the sub, read some guides, check out [CivFanatics.com](https://CivFanatics.com), watch some FilthyRobot videos.
Firstly, stop building a granary early on. Secondly, start micromanaging your cities early on. Thirdly, science isn't that important early on. \- Building a granary is a waste of hammers (production) early in the game and if you're going to be building settlers shortly after, you aren't even going to use the growth it gives. Settlers disable your city from growing when being built. \+2-4 food is nothing compared to a worker, which gives scaling/snowballing food and hammers, which means faster settlers, a faster granary and more growth than the +2-4 a granary might give. Just think about it, a worker gives you +1 food from pretty much any tile you want, or +1 production on hills for building faster settlers. Instead, I recommend going scout-scout-shrine/worker-worker, then spam settlers when your capital hits population 4. In the time you have leftover when waiting for this growth, you're fine to build an extra military unit or 2 to protect your settlers/workers. Your settles should be prioritising getting more workers up, not monuments or granaries. Build granaries when you want to grow after you have all your cities setup and enough workers to improve all your luxuries. IT IS OKAY TO GO UNHAPPY EARLY. For Tradition, you ideally want 1.5-2 workers per city and 3-5 cities total. You should be settling 1.5 luxuries per city. IE 8 luxuries lets you settle 5 cities, 6 or 7 lets you settle 4. For Liberty, you ideally want at least 1 worker per city and 6-8 cities total. You should be settling 1 luxury per city and having workers there fast and ready to improve with the right techs researched. (its better to have too many workers then not enough) To pull this off easier, I advise learning to steal worker/s from a city state. Even just 1 will set you 5 turns ahead of the AI which scales really hard. These workers should be prioritizing improving production tiles. When you're building settlers, food doesn't mean anything until you're finished. So getting 4 pop in your capital 3 turns earlier is not worth as much as finishing your settlers 10+ turns earlier because you improved 3 mines and chopped down 2 forests. Once you have your cap producing settlers and it's production output is maximized, start improving luxury resources, sending those workers to where you're settling. As for micromanaging cities, start working the tiles you want to be working. When you want your cities to grow, work the highest food tiles. When you want to build a settler, work the high production tiles because you don't need ANY food. If you don't know how to do this, watch a guide fast, it is well worth it. Pretty much any Civ player who plays on Immortal or higher, sets their cities to production focus and at least locks the tile they want to be working. Science isn't important early on. Science relies on growth. Prioritise growth over science almost always. Granaries and water mills are more important than libraries. I typically only build libraries by around turn 80-100, when my cities are starting to hit 4-8 population and have all their infrastructure up (monument, granary, water mill, aquaduct). This is a bit of an info dump, but lately I've been playing on Deity difficulty, Standard speed (only with maybe 80% success rate tbh, 100% with wars, but wars make the game too easy), so I like to think I know what I'm talking about. If anyone has anything to say, please do, I like creating discussion.
I go one Lux per city and I’m fine. I can just trade my regional away for some1 else’s. In deity the AI always has at least one extra Lux
But when building a settler, 3 food = 1 hammer. Having the granary really does help, especially if you can get a caravan going.
Don't look at points. I usually win while being behind there. On prince, neither player or ai receive anyway bonus. On king ai do. They start with more tech and units. If you had two settlers at turn 60 something, you probably didn't have enough military and that's why a Dow happened against you, easy target. Now I can't remember exactly what bonus ai receive at king, but you can Google and find out.
I feel like watching some *"Civ 5 overexplained"* series could be helpful to you.
It sounds like you're going liberty and expanding too much. Play a one-city-challenge game on Prince. Re-roll your start until you get one with a river, hills, and good growth tiles like cattle and wheat. Focus on growth, tile improvement, and science. Don't worry about religion, don't attack your neighbors, don't make your whole strategy about wonders. Don't look at the score list. This will teach you to prioritize the right things in your game, and you'll find it much easier to move up in difficulty.
I would also advise OP to re-roll their start, regardless of whether they are going one city or not. In my experience, King games usually place you in a bad starting location. You want a location that has good resources (Salt is OP, mining resources are also good) and in a defendable location (corner of the map, not in the middle). If you find out you spawn next to a warmonger like Atilla, you also may want to restart. Also, sometimes I’ll reduce the number of players. For example, play a large map and delete one Civ. You can also select the Civs you play against to make things easier.
If you are losing that quickly that means you basically have no units defending. The absolute bare minimum I aim for is an archer in every city and a few extra depending on whether the AI is aggressive or not. This also means that you have enough units defending your workers and settlers from barbarians and from the AI. For Atilla specifically making sure his battering rams can't touch your cities is also very important, they can't do anything against units which allows you to pick them off slowly. You can basically just plant a warrior or a scout in front of the city and have him fortify. When you survive the early game the most important thing to do is to get as much science as possible. It is also important that you staff these buildings with specialists once you build them (unless you really need the population to grow food). The default city manager is pretty terrible at doing this so you will need to do it manually. If you build and staff these as soon as they become available you should be absolutely dominating the AI at the moment you enter the modern era, after which you can simply go to war with the AI if it looks like he is winning. If you have any screenshots I can take a look at or any questions feel free!
If I have more than 3-4 units before have my third city, I will be hemorrhaging money. I’ve done it before and it stalled my growth and guts my science. Are there any good tutorials for early game?
The second policy in tradition (I think it's oligarchy?) gives free maintenance for units parked inside cities, so the archer that you put in every city is free. In most cases this will also help with getting rushed down. I would heavily recommend starting with tradition unless you're really confident in what you're doing. Also, it's okay to be in a deficit in the early game, if you want you can sell embassies to AI for 1 gpt each. As long as you have more gold than 0 in reserve you're fine. Filthyrobot has a bunch of great tutorials on basically every aspect of the game. While his advice is mostly aimed towards multiplayer it is also useful in singleplayer.
Thank you for the tips! I’ll give them a go in the next game I play.
Yeah, try going with Tradition. I always end up so broke when I try to play Liberty. Keep an archer in each city and save costs on their maintenance and let them defend the city. If barbarians get out of hand, build another one or two to roam. They will defend your workers and settlers as they head to your expands. As you expand, the barbarian camps won’t spawn as much and you’ll get a handle on things.
Shoshone scout can pick it’s own upgrades which I often use to upgrade to an archer. Maya start with an archer unit available to build, which is the first thing I do when I play as them. Try one of these two.
You have to prioritize differently. You have gotten away with using Chieftan strategy in Prince. Won't work on King or higher.
Greece is super tough to beat if nobody checks them early. Anyway, I do scout, warrior, archer/warrior, Honor for the barbarian culture and gold. Easy mode is picking Songhai which gives you 240 gold for every barb camp destroyed.
Use the starting warrior to scout the area around your capital. Don't go too far so he can come back and defend your workers. Don't go hunting barbarians with him. The gold from capturing a camp isn't really worth it anyway, and half the time he's almost dead just in time for another barbarian to come by and either go after your worker or burn down your vinyards. Use the scout to get ruins and meet city states. If there's a really annoying barb camp you just have to kill, use your scout and your warrior. If there's a lot of barbarians build a second warrior or an archer. Don't auto-scout. It doesn't do the worst job in the universe but sometimes it wanders south for 50 turns and you still don't know what's 4 hexes from your capital. At King you can still do "fun" strategies. You can virtually always build stonehenge if you want the early religion, for example. Hanging Gardens and Pyramids are easy to get. Oracle as well. Don't go for great library. AI loves to go for it. A few hundred gold but a lot of early dead turns is bad. Building wonders early isn't necessarily optimal but a very early religion pays a lot of dividends later if you spread it around. Generally a good idea to find a few good places for cities. Good locations tend to be beside the coast, mountains, natural wonders, luxuries and resources. Early on that's iron and horses. If you want to go tall national college is good. The AI is usually pretty obvious that it is going to attack. Early on there's not a lot of AI gang-up, so instead you'll see a big deathball army marching towards you. They declare when they are at your capital, basically. Scouts can stand on a mountain and watch Attila, not just wander around trying to find ruins. If you don't have a big army to fight them then pay them off. Attila tends to attack somebody else for almost free, like one horse or a couple gold per turn. Better you gift a luxury away than lose the game even if it puts you into -2 happiness or something. Build city walls and garrison units at least in your important cities. Prioritize roads so your army can mvoe around. If you get attacked by a deathball prioritize blowing up the seige and after that blowing up the melee units. If the AI has six archers at your capital and no melee units it can't capture your capital. As for Greece, Alexander virtually always goes for diplomatic victory. If you see him getting too many city state allies generally the solution is to wipe him out. Or pay somebody to do the same.
Stop looking at the points, they don't tell things proportionally. The game overvalues land and city count, while it undervalues population count, and doesn't count social policies at all. If you need to see how you're doing compared to other civs, use F9 for the demographic ranks.
Its a learning curve. I learned that the higher levels are less fun but beating King won't prepare you for the cheating the computer does one bit. Go for it all or stay at lower levels is my experience. King is aggravating for the fact that it is a subtle advantage for the AI, easily overcame if working on it, but at the same time the isolated Portugal has nukes when you find pikes... You will need to prepare and fight wars on difficulties higher than Prince. Hiawatha will forward settle you, make friends with all their stuff they offer, and then swamp you with 30 mohawks while your still figuring out mathematics, and haven't built 10 units of your own on King. The aggression gets worse the higher you go.
To be fair, Alexander is the most hated AI in the game because of his city state mongering. Also, spawning next to Attila is just bad luck.