Civ 4

[Humodour]

For somebody with a very strong head for numbers, patterns and rules, I am surprisingly bad at this game.

 

Could somebody give me some tips?

 

I think starting with an explanation of how the Production and Science resources work and are acquired and spent would be a good idea.

 

And I also need to know how to use workers. I've been just hitting 'automate' on them but it looks like that's not very efficient.

 

My favourite leaders are the Dutch and Pericles (Greek). Culture/Finance for the Dutch which is good all-round. Culture/Philosophy for Pericles, plus the Odeons, which makes them a culture and special person powerhouse. Too bad I don't know how to make specialists or anything.

[Enoch]

OK. The "War Academy" at civfanatics.com has a lot of good Civ advice (although many of them aren't up-to-date with the expansions). In particular, this article covers a lot of the basics for beginners. It's pre-BTS, but most of the BTS changes are late-game stuff (corporations) that you can ignore for now while you get a handle of the earlier concepts.

 

When you say "production and science resources" do you mean the hammers and commerce produced in your cities, or the special map resources? The former is pretty easy: Commerce is produced by citizens working cottages, riverfront tiles, water tiles, and some special bonus tiles. It gets turned into one of Gold (for your treasury), Science (for research), Culture (requires a tech-- Music or Drama, I think), or Espionage based on the % sliders in the upper left of the GUI. (These Commerce products can also be produced directly by pulling citizens out of working the land and making them Specialists.) Hammers are produced by citizens working forests, plains, hills, mines, and some special tiles. They go towards whatever you have in the build queue in that city.

 

The Special Resources show up on the map. There are 3 general types: Food resources (wheat, corn, cows, fish, etc.), Luxury resources (Gold, Gems, Spices, Dyes, etc.), and Strategic Resources (Copper, Horses, Coal, Oil, etc.). Strategic resources are unique in that they all require the knowledge of a particular technology to see on the map. Resources generally have 2 effects. First, if one is in the workable area of a city and you have a citizen working that tile, they produce bonus food/hammers/commerce. Second, if they are in your territory and connected to your trade network, they have effects for all of your connected cities. To connect a resource to your trade network, it has to be 1) within your territory; 2) have that resource's improvement (farm for grains, mine for ores, plantations for some luxuries, etc.) built in the tile by a worker; and 3) be connected by road or river to your capital (sea-based resources don't need roads, obviously). Once connected, Food resources decrease unhealthiness in cities; Luxury resources decrease unhappiness in cities; and Strategic resources enable the building of things that you couldn't otherwise make (e.g., you need Iron to make Swordsmen and Oil to make Battleships). All of these resources can also be traded with other Civs, if you have a trade connection with them.

 

Specialists: To make one, open a city's viewscreen, and click on one of the tiles that your citizens are currently working. That citizen will then be accounted for in the specialist box to the right of the screen. Basic cities can only have "Citizen" specialist, which suck-- never use them. Buildings in the city enable other specialists (e.g., a Library lets you have 2 Scientists; a Courthouse lets you have 1 Spy; a Temple lets you have 1 Priest). (Some Wonders and Civics also enable Specialists.) Specialists produce what you would expect them to-- Science for Scientists, Hammers for Engineers, etc.-- and they also produce Great People Points, which speed the birth of more Great People in that city. In general, it is best to concentrate your GP production in one city-- pick one with a lot of food bonus resources (2+) and work only those tiles with everybody else Specialized.

 

Hopefully that helps a bit. I could go on-- and maybe I will later-- but that should help get you going.

 

 

Addendum: I can no longer conceive of playing Civ 4 without the BUG Mod. "BUG" stands for "BTS [the Beyond the Sword expansion] Unaltered Gameplay." It doesn't change the way the game works at all; it simply gives the player a lot more feedback in the basic UI that he would otherwise have to dig around in menus and do some math by hand to figure out. (E.g, it warns you when a city is about do grow, shrink, or become unhappy; it tells you when rivals have new techs to trade; it creates Great People and Great General progress bars similar to the tech progress bar; and much more)

Edited May 1, 2010 by Enoch

[Enoch]

A little more on Workers:

 

Your first priority with Workers is to improve any special bonus resources within the city's workable area (Get a farm on that Corn ASAP!). That'll be your biggest ROI. Secondarily, you want to improve enough tiles so that your Citizens aren't working an unimproved ones. A good rule of thumb for early on is to build Cottages on green grassland or flood plains, build Mines on hills, and avoid working flatland brown plains unless you have to. (If you have to, irrigate them.) But if a city is a pure Military producer, use more Farms-- you need the extra food to feed the citizens in your Mines. Early on, just worry about Farms, Cottages, and Mines. That's enough to get you going; the other stuff (Workshops, Lumbermills, Windmills, etc.) can be useful, but aren't particularly necessary except in certain specialized situations.

 

After you research Bronze Working, Workers can also chop forests down for bonus Hammers in the nearest city. This is great for speeding up Wonder production, and for building a huge stack of Axemen or Chariots to take out a neighbor in the Ancient age. If you don't have a good reason to chop a forest (e.g., you want to build a cottage or mine there), save it for when you need the Hammers.

 

You also want to make sure that all your cities are connected by roads to each other, and to any strategic resources you have.

 

Only automate Workers in the very late game when your Empire is huge and you're counting down the turns to victory.

Edited May 1, 2010 by Enoch

[Pidesco]

Stop mentioning mods that urge me to install Civ again, please.

[Enoch]

Stop mentioning mods that urge me to install Civ again, please.

Oddly enough, I just installed Civ 4 last night on my new near-netbook. (It's a notebook with an 11.6" screen, but with strong enough innards to run older games like Civ4.) Direct2Drive has the "Complete" package on-sale this week for $10, so I bought that to play on the new machine (which lacks the CD drive that my boxed copy requires).

[Humodour]

Oh wow, you bloody legend Enoch! Thanks heaps. <3

 

Hmm regarding automation, can I automate road building at least? That seems something reasonably safe to do and I believe there's an option for it.

 

Also, so when units and buildings in a city cost too much, I need to chop down more forests? Is there any other way to gain hammers? Is that what mines do?

 

Commerce isn't gold? So cottages are in fact the best way to get techs fast? The Finance trait would seem to be invaluable now.

 

What else impacts on production? When I first plonk down settlers upon starting a new game sometimes things take ages like 34 turns for a Settler, 20 for a worker, sometimes even worse! Whilst other times, rarely, I've seen Settlers only cost 17 production. I dunno if this is just a quirk for the first round or what but it's confusing.

 

When you say have one city be a GP city, does that mean have farms everywhere on that city, not cottages or mines?

[Enoch]

Hmm regarding automation, can I automate road building at least? That seems something reasonably safe to do and I believe there's an option for it.

I don't find it all that onerous to manage myself. I guess you could automate some designated 'road network' Workers, but it seems like that would be less efficient than having a simple pool of workers that you direct to do all your work.

 

Also, so when units and buildings in a city cost too much, I need to chop down more forests? Is there any other way to gain hammers? Is that what mines do?

OK, in your city screen, you see the tiny map of the 20 tiles (plus the city center) that that particular city's citizens can work. Each city gets a certain number of Citizens to distribute across these tiles (or to assign as specialists). This number of citizens is the same as the City population number (although the production of the city center is always free). Each tile, when worked, will produce some combination of Food, Hammers, and Commerce determined by its type, improvements, and any special resources there. You can move your Citizens around from one tile to another by clicking on that little map. Food gives you city growth, Hammers speed whatever is in your build queue, and Commerce gets split up as I described above. So, if you want to build things faster, allocate your citizens to tiles that produce more hammers. (There are also some little "emphasize X" buttons you can select to tell your city governor what you want produced by a city's Citizen placement.) And, yes, Mines are the tile improvements that your workers can put on Hills and some special resources that most efficiently increase Hammer output.

 

Commerce isn't gold? So cottages are in fact the best way to get techs fast? The Finance trait would seem to be invaluable now.

Yes, yes, and yes.

 

What else impacts on production? When I first plonk down settlers upon starting a new game sometimes things take ages like 34 turns for a Settler, 20 for a worker, sometimes even worse! Whilst other times, rarely, I've seen Settlers only cost 17 production. I dunno if this is just a quirk for the first round or what but it's confusing.

Settlers and Workers are a special case. They are built by both Hammers and Food. Normally, and food that isn't consumed by a city's citizens (each citizen consumes 2 food per turn, so a citizen working a 2-food tile is self-sufficient; any less requires other citizens to be bringing in more food to compensate) is put into the city's food stores, and once these get high enough, the city will grow another Citizen. But when you're building a Worker or Settler, any surplus food is converted into Hammers at a 1:1 ratio. City growth is impossible while building these units.

 

But, generally, there are some other things that impact production. Certain city improvements put multipliers on Hammers produced (Forge, Factory), and some Small Wonders do so, too (Ironworks, generally; Heroic Epic for Military production only).

 

Also, building a Settler right off is an inefficient starting strategy. The goal in the very early game is to get your Citizens working improved tiles ASAP. That means that you need a Worker or Work Boat (and the proper techs to build Worker improvements) before you need a Settler-- the right improvement (Farm on Corn; Pasture on Pigs; etc.) can more than double the amount of Food/Hammers that you're bringing each turn. Worker --> Settler can sometimes be faster than just starting with the Settler. I often end up doing something like Worker -> Worker -> Warrior (build while city grows to size 2) -> Settler, with the Settler build sped up by chopping a forest or two.

When you say have one city be a GP city, does that mean have farms everywhere on that city, not cottages or mines?

This is probably a little advanced for now, but, with some exceptions, it is generally most efficient to specialize your cities by building the terrain improvements and multiplier buildings to accentuate only one aspect of each city's production. So your Commerce cities get Libraries, Markets, and a lot of Cottages (as well as the Oxford and Wall Street small wonders), while your Hammer cities get Forges, Factories, lots of Mines and Farms, no Cottages at all, and Small Wonders like the Heroic Epic and the Ironworks. Great Person cities are the third variety-- they work Farmland, build little more than Specialist-enabling buildings, Granary, and whatever is necessary to keep the citizens happy, with lots of those citizens working as Specialists to pump out Great People. It's not really important just yet, but proper city specialization become crucial when the difficulty level gets up to Prince or higher. (A good ratio to aim for is 3 Commerce cities : 2 Production cities : 1 GP city.) Edited May 2, 2010 by Enoch

[Humodour]

Excellent info! This link makes sense now: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/earlygrowth.php

[Humodour]

It's hard to build cottages. Either it's the wrong tile or it won't grow (no person inside? but it says 'STARVATION' when I go to the city screen, but there's cows and corn around that have been improved...).

 

And how many mines should I build? Is it safe to build as many as possible? Because my location has craploads of hills.

 

And is it OK to build cottages on tiles without gold? Should I always aim for tiles with a gold piece or does it not matter for cottages?

 

How do I use water tiles? They have a lot of gold.

[Tigranes]

The city screen shows a lot more clearly which tiles are actually allocated to your city, and which of these are actually being worked. My memory is fuzzy, but the right hand tab should show which of your tiles are being worked on. Your population (big number next to city name) is divided into a whole range of tasks: you should be reorganising these workers within the city to work on your most productive food tiles, and as many as you can, until you get out of starvation, and hopefully even a surplus. Then you can distribute the rest in commerce, production (increases building speed), research, etc.

 

Can't remember cottage-specific info, sorry, but the water tiles are the same as above.

[Humodour]

This game is a testament to the fact that people like complex, hard-core games and that such games are financially successfully.

 

Quit trying to sell out, Obsidian!

 

Edit: And thanks Tig! I'll stop asking questions now. I have enough info to beat the comp at Noble, so time to try.

Edited May 2, 2010 by Krezack

[Calax]

Note: Your commercial city should be (assuming you have it) your religious holy city. That city will earn gold based on how far your religion has spread as the underlings donate to the church. Spread religion far and wide and earn buckets of money from that single city.

[Enoch]

Krez, if you want to upload a savegame, I can take a look at it and offer some specific feedback on what you've been doing. Or, if you rather, just some screenshots of your cities and territory.

 

 

@Calax, that can be fun to do. But getting 1 Gold per turn isn't actually all that great a return-on-investment on the Hammers put into making a Missionary. Also, at higher difficulty levels, a player-founded religion is almost always going to fall behind an AI-founded one, simply because the AI get big production advantages and tends to use said advantages to spam Missionaries. Also, adopting your own religion ties your hands, diplomatically. I like to see which way the wind is blowing and adopt the religion of the Civs I most want to kiss up to. If I go for a holy city, I do so by force of arms. I love starting next to Isabella-- she's guaranteed to found a religion and pour all her Civ's resources into spreading it to all her neighbors. Which means that: 1) I don't have to waste any hammers on Missionaries or beakers on the religious techs; and 2) I can pour all of my hammers and beakers into techs and units to conquer that incredibly lucrative Holy City after she gets it up and running.

 

 

Edit: Here's a Civ4 BTS game that we played here on the forum a few years ago: http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showtopic=48156

Edited May 2, 2010 by Enoch

[Humodour]

Cheers Enoch. I just played a game on Chieftain, learnt a lot.

 

Yes, my score was 7 times higher than the nearest AI by the end, and it was a tad boring, but I learnt a lot. And I got to send a rocket to space! Although I could have conquered everybody a lot earlier if I wanted. Tanks vs archers lol.

[Kissamies]

Edit: Here's a Civ4 BTS game that we played here on the forum a few years ago: http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showtopic=48156

We should have used a Spiritual leader so that everyone could have switched to their favorite civics on will.

[Humodour]

I understand how the city view works fully now.

 

Water tiles are pretty damn powerful when you're dutch.

[Walsingham]

Couple more points on military.

 

1. Frontier cities need at least five garrison units to deter the AI players from attacking opportunistically.

 

2. Frontier cities should ALWAYS be built on hills so you get the 20% bonus even after the walls fall.

 

3. Try to maintain a flying column of 4 cavalry units with 'flanking attack' upgrades whose job it si to travel to cities under threat and counter-attack enemy armies.

 

4. Being purely defensive wil make you lose. Try to maintain at least one strike group. Their job is to counterattack in the event of war and seize then burn enemy cities on the border. It seriously weakens the AI's focus on your cities, and helps reduce tensions in the long run by spacing out settlement.

 

4b. A strike groups should consist of four divisions of four units. The divisions are

- cavalry with flank attack; they weaken defenders, and the fourth man is kept in reserve to dash in, burn the pace and get back

- defensive, with mixed archers/muskets and spearmen/pikemen; in late game soldiers with appropriate upgrades

- storm troops; swordsmen, axemen, macemen, pikemen with city assault upgrade. Cultivate and keep these alive

- seige artillery; four of whatever you can scrape together

 

I like to pad my strike groups out with obsolete units to weaken defences, and to be left behind on the march to distract counter-attacks.

[Calax]

Been playing a bit of this and finally realized, The Van Orange is... scary powerful later in the game. Dikes in coastal cities net stupid production amounts... and yeah....

 

Anyway, Currently me and three friends hold THE continent in the north of the world map. I'm the second largest by virtue of being the furthest away from everyone and I'm Van Orange. We started exploring south across the ocean (set it up so everyone was on different continents to let one player keep learning) and found the other two teams. Imagine our surprise when Jiao II and Cesar both turned up to have started on their own islands... of a single tile. Anyway, right now the largest of us has an outpost on territory that hadn't been colonized on one continent (who we're at war with) and is fending them off easily, I packed a few units in there and then realized I could probably kick the crap out of the enemy city that we could see (which was garrisoned with a single swordsman... I have muskets)

 

Overall, I'm starting to think that two of us need to go up in difficulty (I can hold my own on noble, but they just steamroll anything in the area. I think the most advanced unit I've seen from the enemy is Trebuchets...) next time simply to provide some sort of challenge to them, and to make it feel less like I'm just plowing fields and more like I'm fighting.

[Kissamies]

Couple more points on military.

 

1. Frontier cities need at least five garrison units to deter the AI players from attacking opportunistically.

 

2. Frontier cities should ALWAYS be built on hills so you get the 20% bonus even after the walls fall.

 

3. Try to maintain a flying column of 4 cavalry units with 'flanking attack' upgrades whose job it si to travel to cities under threat and counter-attack enemy armies.

 

4. Being purely defensive wil make you lose. Try to maintain at least one strike group. Their job is to counterattack in the event of war and seize then burn enemy cities on the border. It seriously weakens the AI's focus on your cities, and helps reduce tensions in the long run by spacing out settlement.

 

4b. A strike groups should consist of four divisions of four units. The divisions are

- cavalry with flank attack; they weaken defenders, and the fourth man is kept in reserve to dash in, burn the pace and get back

- defensive, with mixed archers/muskets and spearmen/pikemen; in late game soldiers with appropriate upgrades

- storm troops; swordsmen, axemen, macemen, pikemen with city assault upgrade. Cultivate and keep these alive

- seige artillery; four of whatever you can scrape together

 

I like to pad my strike groups out with obsolete units to weaken defences, and to be left behind on the march to distract counter-attacks.

Heh, I'm always so busy maxing out my research that I don't have time to build these things. I do have increased presence at the borders, but never 5 units. It's mainly just the counter attack forces. Of course, this leads to the more oppoturnistic AI leaders thinking I'm ripe pickings and attacking me. I usually turn the tables with my superior tech quite easily, unless other leaders see my plight and join the fun. They tend to look the overall military strength for that, not what's actually going on the field.

 

I'm a builder that dreams of being a warmonger. There's always one more university or factory to build to gain more edge and the army is left unbuilt. I'm also somewhat obsessed about keeping my units upgraded. Too bad there isn't Leonardo's Workshop any more.

[Humodour]

Playing a game right now and it's going pretty much as Kissamies describes.

[Enoch]

The best ways to keep opportunistic AI attacks at bay is to: 1) make sure that you're not falling behind in the "Power" rating on the demographic screen, and 2) kiss ass diplomatically. Many AIs won't plan a war against you if they are "Pleased" with you, and almost none will start war preparations if you are at "Friendly." (I know that Catherine is one who you can never ever trust.)

 

I'm playing a game now as Ramses. It was an insanely beneficial start-- 2 Gold and 2 Corn (all riverfront) within Thebes' workable area, and a large peninsula off to the NE that I natuarally box my rivals off from. A start like that makes Monarch feel more like Noble. But I'm playing it anyway-- sometimes it's fun to not have to worry about getting all the micromanaging right to have a chance at winning. I also have a tendency to "turtle" too much; I have to force myself to be aggressive.

 

In that vein, I am in the process of wiping England off the map. Victoria was to my South, and even with my starting advantages, she was starting to pull ahead in technology. (She also had Gold, some seafood, and lots of mature cottages on Flood Plains. Plus, while I was expanding as quickly as I though was prudent, she kept her empire to 4 cities, which kept upkeep costs very low.) I had just gotten the Heroic Epic built in my production city (a beauty-- it works nothing but grassland pigs, 4 mined grassland hills, and 1 mined plains hill, and it builds almost nothing but military) when I decided to take her down before she gets Longbows. That city cranks out Swords and Catapults at about 1.5 turns each (on the "Epic" speed setting), so it wasn't long before I had my invasion force. When I had about a 70% advantage on the power graph, I knew that further delay would be silly. Never start a war that you haven't already won. (Unless you're just joining a war to kiss up to an ally.)

 

Now I have to decide whether to leave her Civ as one pitiful landlocked city in the middle of the jungle, or to finish her off entirely. I can certainly extort some technologies from her for a peace treaty, but eliminating her will make pacifying and ruling the conquered territory easier, and if I have to fight her again Asoka will give me another permanent "you declared war on our friend" diplomatic demerit. (The other AI on the continent is Alexander, who is usually a stupid-aggressive backstabber. I bribed him into joining the war against England, to get the 'wartime allies' diplomatic bonus and to make Asoka think twice about helping out Victoria. India is between Greece and England, so I wasn't worried that Alex would take any cities before I got there.) I'm leaning towards termination.

Edited May 18, 2010 by Enoch

[Humodour]

I just won a game. I noticed that 2 civs (one weak one strong) had Hinduism at the start so I jumped on that bandwagon. It was a good idea. Then I noticed they were wiping out Asoka so just as they were about to capture cities I beat them to it. Then I bribed them to declare war on eachother. Then about 5 enemy/ally cities flipped to me in the space of 5 turns (seriously). Then it was simply a matter of using my high research and production to build up lots of tanks and wait it out till I got a space victory. I was a little worried that the vassal state might get enough points to win a diplomatic victory, but he never did. I had an army ready to wipe him out, but didn't want to risk it since it'd trigger war with his master and then the other remaining civ would probably attack me opportunistically (which actually happened much later, just before I got the apollo programme, but by then I had Mechanised Infantry so I didn't care).

 

2 of my cities got legendary culture (90000 and 70000) while another was on 40000 by the end. I didn't expect that.

[Enoch]

An illustration. When I say "production city," this is exactly what I mean:

 

 

The whole purpose of this city is only to work those mines and bring in those Hammers. The Pigs and the farmed Grasslands are being worked only to feed the Citizens in the mines. (In 15 turns, when the city grows again, I'm going to make the new Citizen into an Engineer specialist.) Note that the only improvements built are ones to grow the city (Granary), keep order (Temple), reduce overall maintenance costs (Courthouse), and, most importantly, magnify unit production (Barracks, Forge, Heroic Epic). (I would have a Stable there, too, but I don't have Horses.) With all that production and the Heroic Epic, this city can provide most of the military needs of my entire empire. A Library, Market, or the like in a city like this would be a complete waste of hammers that could be used in making more military. As an added bonus, it also has a settled Great General, so all troops produced there (i.e., 90% of the troops my whole empire produces) will start with 5 XP (3 for the Barracks, 2 for the GG), which gets them 2 promotions right out of the gate.

 

That said, you don't need to specialize every city. Most of your cities will be primarily Commerce producers, bringing in just enough Hammers to build all the necessary infrastructure, and just enough food to keep the city growing while working as many cottages as possible. But it is very important to specialize the cities where you have your big multiplier Small Wonders-- Oxford U, the Heroic Epic, the Ironworks, Wall Street, and the National Epic. (And, later on, a city specialized with high food production and the Globe Theatre can abuse the Drafting mechanic if you have the right Civics running.)

Edited May 19, 2010 by Enoch

[Humodour]

That's pretty much what I did, Enoch. The problem is that by mid game I have control of so many cities it's hard to fully specialise them. So I might have 2 commerce-only cities, 1 or 2 production-only cities and the rest a mix. In my last game because I was Dutch and had the Colossus and dikes and lighthouses, the water tiles actually became the most used tiles meaning my main production only city inadvertently became my second largest commerce city whilst maintaining high production! That was a dream come true because it also meant I didn't need farms and could build workshops instead.

[Tigranes]

You generally want a few production cities evenly scattered out through the empire, so that they're able to pump out military units in a hurry if that sector is hit.