I'm Doing It Wrong

However I'm doing it, I appear to be doing it wrong. Sometimes, it's the luck of the draw: in one of our recent out-of-band games (the Hives are going unfed while one of our participants completes his studies for the semester), I started sandwiched between an aggressive AI and a player with twice my starting area and no AIs to worry about.

I didn't really have much of a chance.

That said, I generally seem to expand the slowest of all the players in our group, and my score ends up being the lowest. And I have not yet figured out why. No matter what kind of build order I use or how I prioritize my settlers, I seem to lose out.

The one difference that I am trying (and which others have repeated) is overlapping. I HATE overlapping my cities and their fat crosses. But in the end, it's only toward the end of the game that full utilization can be acheived anyway. Moreover, in Civ 4, cities rarely get to that size. Even more importantly, unlike Civ 3, a city doesn't even have to come close to full land utilization to be productive and powerful. It may be that this is the last vestige of my Civ 3 habits I have to abandon to be competitive.

Or maybe I just suck :P