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Civilization IV. Civilize me.
Esh
Tending bar. FFXIV. Motorcycles.Portland, ORRegistered User regular
Tending bar. FFXIV. Motorcycles.Portland, ORRegistered User regular
So, I just grabbed this off of Steam for my trusty new MacBook Pro. I've never in my life played any of the Civ games (and very little turned based strategy). I held off on the expansions for now. If possible, some tips and tricks and things to definitely not do would be appreciated.
And if I enjoy it, are the expansions definitely worth grabbing?
And if I enjoy it, are the expansions definitely worth grabbing?
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I think the expansions are worth getting, you need Beyond the Sword to play some mods that are out there. There are some fantastic mods out there, I like Fall from Heaven 2 and Neoteric World.
Likewise barbarians will generally attack the first unit they see, so if you position a unit on a hill(or better, a forested hill) the defense bonuses will let your warriors take out the barbarians/animals in the early game.
When building cities be picky where you place them, in the early game an unproductive city can bankrupt you. The most common strategies for cities is either lots river tiles to build cottages on(for gold production), lots of food-producing tiles to exploit specialists, or lots of hills/hammers for your unit-producing cities.
Also, specialize your cities. You don't need(or want) every improvement in every city.
Mostly though you learn by playing and screwing up alot.
"Cottage economy" is the easiest way to make money on the lower difficulty settings.
You simply build a few cities near a few sources of food (Pigs, cows, floodplains etc.) and spam cottages which will then generate money.
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
2) COTTAGES!
3) Slaves. Learn Bronze Working quickly, switch to slavery. Whenever you see an unhappy face underneath a city switch to something useful (I recommend soldiers) and whip it complete.
Those are the fundamentals. Ideally you'll use axemen or swordsmen to kill your closest neighbor ASAP.
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
No, install Beyond the Sword at least.
Definitely get and install Beyond the Sword, if you don't have it; it improves a lot of things about the base game. Also, once you've learned the basic user interface, download the BUG Mod (BtS Unaltered Gameplay) from civfanatics.com; this mod adds a whole pile of useful tweaks and improvements to the game UI, and (as the name says) doesn't actually change the game at all.
Pay attention to the fact that building a Settler or a Worker redirects the city's food, as well as hammers, into the build. So the city's growth is stalled until the unit is built.
Bronze Working lets your Workers chop down forests, which adds 20 hammers per tile chopped to the nearest city's current build (30 in vanilla Civ4, but chopping was nerfed in BtS). Chopping and whipping (from the Slavery civic, also enabled by Bronze Working) are two very important ways to speed up your production in the early game. "Sustainable development" is not the way to go in 3000 BC; if you're getting outgrown early on, you're not abusing your citizens or the environment enough.
Don't build too many cities too fast! City maintenance costs will crush you.
If there's something that particularly frustrates you, choose a leader with a trait that mitigates it. I often choose Creative leaders as a crutch so that I don't have to deal with building a Monument or other culture structure just to get my cities their second ring of tiles.
The AI leaders have distinctive personalities and some of them should be obliterated on sight, such as Montezuma and Genghis Khan (the backstabbing bastards) and Isabella (that sanctimonious religious nut).
That goes for Great People too. You don't want a city that has an 11% chance of a Great Artist, 33% chance of a Great Engineer and so on. Don't build Wonders that produce a different kind of Great Person than the kind you want to appear in that city. Great Artists are my favorite because you can "culture bomb" a captured city. This means if the Great Artist produces a Great Work in a newly captured city, it will immediately end the civil unrest and push the borders out, making the city instantly productive after capture.
Also, the 70% rule is God. If you can't capture another city or settle one without dropping your Research slider below 70%, then don't fucking do it. Raze it to the ground or don't build settlers. Research is the single most important thing in the game of Civilization because advancing farther than your enemies means you get to stomp them into the ground with ease. If you fall behind you may as well just start a new game in most cases.
One key thing to bear in mind is that large cities are good, more so than a sprawl of smaller cities. Once you've built an improvement in a city that improvement will provide a permanent benefit while costing you nothing, so large, highly developed cities will provide you with significant boosts to income, research, and production, while underdeveloped cities provide you with almost nothing, while increasing the upkeep you will have to pay. Choose your city locations carefully, since you'll want to squeeze as much benefit out of the area as possible, and building a city solely to grab a resource is far less practical. If you capture a city that is in a useless location, go ahead and raze it, since it won't provide you with any benefit even when it stops being in open revolt.
"Sid Meier's Civilization 4."
1. Can I stack units?
2. Roads. Do they need to attach to everything I have the workers make? Cottages, pastures, mines, etc?
3. How many workers are ideal? One per city?
4. How do I deal with overcrowding in cities?
5. The Hammer, Bread, and Gold. I understand the bread is food, but what and how does the hammer (Production) work? Do things build faster? And gold, is that just for maintaining the cities?
2. No, but your workers will get there faster.. and that means they'll build it up faster.
3. It depends on a lot of things, namely how close the next civ is, how pone to early agrassion you are, are you going to be all militaristic or expansionist or just culture up with a few cities, etc..
4. Early game overcrowding can't really exist because you'll be making units, settlers, or workers... late game I don't experience this problem as I go heavy tech and my hospitals, recycling plants, and mass transit comes in before most of my important cities goes into overcrowding. Spacing of cities helps too because they don't overlap resources with other cities and therefore can support more population. I generally raze cities I capture at that point unless they got enough wonders to justify their existance.
5. Hammer build things faster. Gold is your income... part of it is to maintain the buildings and infrastructure in your cities, part of it is to support your military...
2. roads just need to connect cities with each other and resources. your workers will probably build tons of them if you automate them, but you don't need to build them. Later on, railroads should go to all your mines and lumbermills, but that's the future.
3. 1-2. say, 1.5.
4. break out the whip!
5. bread = food = pop growth. hammer is for building. each building/unit/wonder has a hammer cost, so if your city as 12 hammers, you'll build a barracks (40 hammer cost) in 4 turns. The surplus is applied to the next building, i believe.
Gold is mainly for maintaining cities, yes. But also for maintaining units. units outside your cultural borders cost extra $$ in maintenance. Also gold is used to upgrade units, so having a stockpile when you get better techs can get your invincible armies on the warpath much sooner.
Stacking works how? I tried moving them onto each other and just displaced each other. I didn't seem to see a button for it either.
Automated workers? Do tell.
Roads to resources? Like mines and pastures and farms?
Likewise, a mountain with a mine does not have a resource. But a mountain with iron with a mine provides the 'iron' resource.
I hope that clears it up a little. Or at least, doesn't confuse the issue further. :P
2. When you have a resource on a tile (like cows or gold), it adds extra bread/hammers/coins to the tile production when you have a population point working it. When you build the appropriate improvement on the resource (pasture for cows, mine for gold), the extra bread/hammers/coins increases. BUT, if you want to supply the resource to your civ so that you can get the civ-wide benefit, you have to build the improvement AND connect the tile to your trade network. Usually this means building a road from the improved resource tile to a city, and connecting all your cities with roads. (If you have Sailing, your trade network also runs along all rivers and coasts, automatically.)
When a city is connected to your capital in a trade network, you'll see a little yellow three-arrows-in-a-circle symbol on the city's icon line. That means it's getting the civ-wide benefits of the resources your trade network has: +1 health per distinct food resource, +1 happy per distinct luxury resource, and it can build units that require strategic resources. (That copper mine isn't going to help you build Axemen unless the city where you want to build the Axemen is connected to the copper!)
It doesn't matter whether you build roads through improvements that aren't on resources.
5. Your city's total of bread from its worked tiles is its food points per turn. The population eats 2 bread per population point each turn; the excess goes into the orange bar on the city screen. (If you have unhealthiness points, each green barfy-face wastes 1 bread on top of the base food cost of your population.) When the orange bar is full, it empties (if the city has a Granary, it empties only halfway) and the city grows by a population point. If you have negative excess, the orange bar shrinks instead of growing (you are warned by STARVATION! in the city screen), and when it empties, the city shrinks by a population point. As the city grows, the number of food points required to fill the orange bar grows too.
Your city's total of hammers from its worked tiles is its production per turn. This is the simplest one; production turns hammers directly into units, and excess hammers are saved to go to the next thing you build.
Your city's total of coins from its worked tiles is its commerce (NOT gold, not directly) per turn. Commerce goes through a bunch of calculations which you can see in the upper left of the city screen; costs are taken off the top based on your civics, distance of the city from your capital, and some other factors, and many city improvements act to increase or multiply your commerce output. After all that happens, the final commerce is multiplied by your research rate (upper left of main game screen) to produce beakers of research. The remainder is taken as taxes and goes into your treasury as gold. That lucky early gold mine? Don't think of it as a shiny rock factory; it's a genius factory. (Not that the +1 happy for the luxury resource isn't nice.)
Ah, so like a rice patty or what not? Or pigs?
You can also tell a worker to just auto-road (I think it's called "automatic build trade network") rather than full auto-worker. This one isn't so bad.
Also, if you build a city directly on a resource, you get its civ-wide benefit as soon as you develop the technology that would otherwise let you improve the resource, but you don't get the full extra bread/hammers/coins for the resource tile.
When you go to war, bring lots and lots of siege. Like, almost one siege per attacking unit. When taking a city, you can lower their defenses quickly. Don't be afraid at all to sacrifice siege in order to do tons of collateral damage. Sending three cats to die will usually give your swordsmen upwards of 80-90% victory conditions. The idea is that you replace the siege, while your fighting units gain all sorts of sweet promotions. Remember to take a spearman or so in early wars, (i like to make him my medic) to defend against horse archer counter attacks.
You don't have to take every city, so watch your maintenance. Keep the cities with wonders/holy cities, but the other stuff should depend on whether you can afford it, or if it is in a fantastic location (good resource, geographic chokepoint).
Don't DOW on everyone, but if you have twice the land everyone else does, with well developed cities, you can pretty much pick your victory condition. Also, certain civs are jerks and will DOW on you every game. Montezuma and Tokugawa are famous for this. I personally kill Joao every time i see him because he is a needy goose and will demand everything or hate you.
As far as civ selection: Financial is a very strong trait, and the easiest to leverage, but it might spoil you. The Japanese civ is terrible.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Rome, Rome, Rome, Rome, the Inca, and the Dutch (with BtS).
Conversely, if Rome has iron, don't go to war with Rome... not until you have rifles.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Minor exception if you're aggressive and give all your axemen smite, but it's still not recommended.
ALWAYS kill Isabella and Montezuma ASAP.
Steam: badger2d
Yes. Stacking them together is more for defending against counterattacks. The game will automatically have the ideal defender chosen so that your weaker or wounded units live and have a chance to heal up.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Starting a new game now.
Ditto.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Yep. Stack Attack just speeds things up, but the computer still picks the best defender each time. It's actually a negative choice because it doesn't let you stop an attack if things go horribly wrong. At least if I remember correctly.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
Spiritual (=No anarchy) and I think their War Chariots are also decent.
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.