CIV 3 Player wanting to get into CIV 4. Some questions!!

[jguzmartinez]

Hello folks, im a civ 3 player wanting to get into civ 4. There are somethings that i dont really understand and im hoping that you guys could help me.

1. I dont understand the maintenence concept in civ4. I assume that its like the corruption system in civ3. In my games i seem to be stopped by the maintenence of the cities once i build 5 of them. Please give me some tips of how could i overcome this.

2. How much should i expand on the early game. Its crystal clear that i should not do it crazily but, what is an ideal number of cities and why, taking a small map for example.

3. How does the fighting mechanic work in this game. In one game that ive played, when attacking a city, the unit that defended against mine was always the one that had the bigger bonuses against me. It seems like i have to bring 10000 units to take down a city. How am i supposed to do it??

4. Cottage or irrigation?? I generally irrigate all the land that i can since slavery seems OP in this game. In which tiles should i build a cottage and in which tiles should i irrigate. What has the most value, food, commerce or hammers?

5. I cannot find the ideal worker improvements for each tile in the internet. Is there an ideal improvement for each tile?? What is it?

Id appreciate if i could get the answer to all of these questions. The basic mechanics i think i got them. While i was playing i could recognize the similarities with civ3. Also, in the civfanatics page there isnt clear info about this game. Where can i find a good guide that helps me going further in this game difficulty. I am playing on noble at the moment and it seems a comfortable lvl for me to start. Id appreciate the answers!

[Simon Love]

Originally posted by jguzmartinez:

Hello folks, im a civ 3 player wanting to get into civ 4. There are somethings that i dont really understand and im hoping that you guys could help me.

1. I dont understand the maintenence concept in civ4. I assume that its like the corruption system in civ3. In my games i seem to be stopped by the maintenence of the cities once i build 5 of them. Please give me some tips of how could i overcome this.

2. How much should i expand on the early game. Its crystal clear that i should not do it crazily but, what is an ideal number of cities and why, taking a small map for example.

3. How does the fighting mechanic work in this game. In one game that ive played, when attacking a city, the unit that defended against mine was always the one that had the bigger bonuses against me. It seems like i have to bring 10000 units to take down a city. How am i supposed to do it??

4. Cottage or irrigation?? I generally irrigate all the land that i can since slavery seems OP in this game. In which tiles should i build a cottage and in which tiles should i irrigate. What has the most value, food, commerce or hammers?

5. I cannot find the ideal worker improvements for each tile in the internet. Is there an ideal improvement for each tile?? What is it?

Id appreciate if i could get the answer to all of these questions. The basic mechanics i think i got them. While i was playing i could recognize the similarities with civ3. Also, in the civfanatics page there isnt clear info about this game. Where can i find a good guide that helps me going further in this game difficulty. I am playing on noble at the moment and it seems a comfortable lvl for me to start. Id appreciate the answers!

(1) The maintenance system enables civs with a smaller number of cities to be more of a competition for huge empires of many cities.

I think the smaller the distance between cities, the lower the maintenance.

Courthouses cut maintenance costs in half (there might be another building which reduces it further - I don't remember. I think the State Property civic and Forbidden Palace national wonder reduce maintenance costs, too).

And basically, you just counter maintenance costs by getting more gold:

by having your cities work squares that give you gold - especially by building cottages and exploiting resources that give you gold;
by constructing certain buildings;
from trade routes between cities (which is helped by rivers, roads, coastal and ocean squares, as well as certain technologies and buildings);
from trade deals to get gold per turn from other civs.... There might be other things that I have forgotten....

(2) I don't play small maps. I try to play as large as possible, with as many civs as possible. I enjoy the challenge and the complexity of many civs, and I like how this more accurately represents real history.

I reckon I have anywhere between 3 and 6 cities until the Medieval Era, but sometimes more, if I am able to maintain other aspects of my game at the same time - e.g. tech research.

I don't think there is an ideal number of cities at any point. This is a sandbox game, and it allows you to play in many different ways. It depends on what you want to prioritise - though you will find that when you go to extremes in certain ways, then the game limits you in a sort of "elastic" way, where the more extreme you get, the more it affects your game in other ways.

E.g. if you focus solely on producing military units and military technology and conquering other civs, then your population and economy will stagnate, and this will limit how much money you have for supporting and upgrading units, and it will slow down your technological research rate.

Founding many cities is similar in the way it slows down the other aspects of your civilization.

The effect of founding more cities depends on many factors, e.g. how much you have done those things I mentioned above in response to the maintenance question. Basically, the more developed your cities, the easier it is to build new ones with minimal effect on other aspects of your game, such as your tech research and your ability to defend your cities and defend your land against enemy pillage. In this way, the game is similar to Civilization 3.

I reckon if you play enough, you'll find the balance you want between number of cities and other aspects of the game. I try to build as many cities I can, without getting behind technologically compared with the other civs who I've met, and preferably while maintaining a tech lead. That said, I don't always do so... it depends on various factors, such as:

resources - if I see some resources that look quite beneficial, and no-one has taken them, then I will prioritise founding a city to utilize them to maximum effect - and remember, if you found a city on certain land, it can pay for itself - e.g. with silver mines, gold mines and gem mines;

geography - e.g. being surrounded by rival civs, with my only city options far away, I become more careful about city placement - I'll try creating more distant cities generally only if I think the resources I'll get are worth it;

war - during wars, I generally focus a lot on producing military units, but with war comes the opportunity to conquer the enemies' cities, and gain more cities that way.

(I fight defensive wars often, but don't start wars of aggression unless I am trying to save a little civ from a big bully civ. This limits my conquest options, but I enjoy the game more playing in this honourable way. Then again, even during peacetime, I do often use culture to grab land and cities from civs that are serious rivals.)

(3) Ah, a simpler question - city conquest!

In Civ 4, cities get a % defence bonus. You can reduce this with artillery (starting with catapults, but later including ships and aircraft, too). Yeah, taking cities is MUCH easier when you reduce their defences before the attack proper!

Also, in the early era(s), please be aware that swordsmen with city raider promotions help very much to tip the odds in your favour for the attack proper! They are the earliest city-attack specialists.

(4) Well, I generally make sure that building cottages doesn't slow down each city's growth more than I want, but that's the only general rule I use with them....

The benefits of building cottages depend on a number of factors. E.g. if you specialise your cities (which gives benefits in this game), then cottages are useful for a science and/or money city, but not so useful for a city that focuses on military unit production, nor for a city that focuses on building wonders of the kinds that don't give you any help to money or science....

Also, e.g. a coastal city might get more food and money, but less production than an inland city (though the number of hill tiles and other resource tiles does make a difference here)... certain sea resources will give that city more food, and in such a case, you might want to focus land tiles on money and production, rather than farming, but maybe you want to focus such a city on producing workers and settlers? In general, I devote more land to cottages on inland cities than coastal cities.

I don't use slavery. But I do try to get bronze working early and capitalise on it, by chopping all forests in the 8 squares immediately next to all of my cities. This gives much more of a production boost in Civ 4 than it does in Civilization 3. And by doing it next to my cities, any enemy units that attack my cities are exposed without forest as defensive cover. I do tend to keep forests in the 12 outer squares of each city's "fat cross" - because they give a health bonus to the city, and I like having my cities work them to get production every turn.

(5) I don't think there is an ideal improvement for any tile - it all depends on how you want to play. That said, on each resource tile, I almost always put the improvement that allows my civ to use that resource. And I make my other improvement choices based on this choice, and my other priorities. How about you say how you want to play, and I can tailor my answers to this?

Did you play the tutorial in the base game of Civilization 4 (it's not in either of the expansions - to play it requires running the original game)? You seem to know much of what is in the tutorial, but if you want to be sure, then I recommend you try the tutorial.

Did you read the game manuals for the original game and the 2 expansions ("Warlords" and "Beyond the Sword")? There are links to PDF versions of each manual on the Steam store page for each of the 3 games.

[ghpstage]

1) Maintenance is like corruption only in that it exists to add pressure against expansion, in practice it performs far better as it prevents ICS/ICS-lite strategies from being dominant, while balancing rapid expansion and slow expansion strategies reasonably well.

The best way to think about managing growth in the light of maintenance is to think of each city as an investment. At first it will be a net drain on your economy, but it will pay off when developed.

Getting a pay off that is larger and quicker depends on,
*Where you place it. Where quite a bit to this but aiming to settle post-capital cities adjacent to a food resource when not playing a Creative leader will go a long way.
*Having enough workers to improve them in a timely manner and managing them efficiently,
*Making good tech choices to improve your economy (worker techs, writing, currency being high priorities)
*Specialising. Don't build everything everywhere, decide on a role for the city (production, commerce, great person farm etc) and focus on that. Granaries are great just about everywhere, and a Monument is useful in cities that need the first border pop early, but just about everything else is conditional.
*Trade routes. Set up some roads and use rivers and the coastline to get internal trade routes up and running early, get Open Borders agreements and connect your trade routes to those civs to get the more valuable foreign routes.

Other tips,
Specialists are very powerful due to the Great Person Points they generate. A city with an early Library running two scientist specialists is a great investment.
The Bureacracy civic with a cottaged capital, and with a Library and Academy can put out incredible amounts of beakers.
If you are playing Beyond the Sword, then building Wealth (available with Currency) can be an excellent use of your hammers during the midgame to speed you through the medieval period to the Renaissance where economic and military improvements can make military victory rapid and easy.

2) On standard sized maps a good target is to get at least 6 by 1AD (I don't play small)
A minmum of 6 will secure a decent base from which to do everything that comes later while also allowing you to build powerful national wonders like the Globe Theatre and Oxford University.

In the grand scheme of things the more cities you have, the stronger you will be.
This is provided you develop those cities and your economy is equipped to handle them of course.
I prefer to be ambitious and aim for 8-10 unless I am content to sit back and wonderspam.

3) In civ 3 units fortified in cities or defensive terrain also enjoyed large advantages, its just you couldn't see them directly

Most warfare comes in a few types.
*Early rushes are just about hitting a fledgling civ with numbers. Its purely brute force that relies on good intel, close neighbours and focused production.
*Seige warfare is the mainstay of one move SODs for the entire game. Stacks will be composed of up to 50% seige units with which to bombard away city culture/wall/castle defences and to suicidally charge into the enemy. Yep, you read that right.... seige has an effect called collateral damage so when they rush in they weaken the wider stack, and as a units strenght is directly proportional to hp even a relatively small amount of damage can make a large difference. Suicide seige brings the costs of warfare down to manageable levels.
*2 move warfare, mostly using mounted units involves making use of their mobility to attack enemies out of defensive terrain, pillage resources, hit cities on the first turn of war and to entice fortified units out of target cities by threatening others.

The later air units basically act as long range seige, while nukes are just absurdly OP.

4 and 5)
I've seen it mentioned that the AI gives values of a single unit of Food / Hammers / Commerce at 10 / 6 / 4, which is actually pretty reasonable, and highlights plains tiles (1F, 1H) as being clearly weaker than grassland (2F) which is a near abslute truth, but you will need sources of everything.

Choosing which improvements to use depends on things like the land you have, the cities role, your empires civics, your leader traits, your plan and your own preference. There isn't a best improvement for a certain tile type aside from the relevant resource improvements even if some do have biases i.e. having a lot of grassland, riverside grassland or floodplains will make a city an excellent candidate for a lot of cottages.

I have got 2 examples of 1AD capitals using different approaches

Both games were being played on Marathon speed, with normal map size.
The cottage cap was on Monarch IIRC using Willem (Financial/Creative), had 9 cities at the time of screenshotting. This game was played very poorly as at the time hadn't played in a year and was put out of pace by marathon scaling while greatly preferring farms to cottages.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=783805704
Due to financial and the cottage focused civics I had in place my entire empire at a very heavy cottage bias, with the game eventualy ending with me rusbuying my military for conquest.

And below was a later game played on Emperor with the Industrious Charismatic French leader (Louis?)
In this game I played without ever building a single cottage anywhere in my empire, having built only 6 cities at this point, instead using the hammers I would otherwise have spent on settlers and workers to wonderspam. Wonders and Representation boosted specialists are the primary driver of my economy in this game.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=783805776
The differences being the presence of a long river through much of Willems capital (pushes towards cottages), the extra food resource in Paris (pushes towards more specialist/mine use) and the difference in traits Financial vs Industrious.
This one went down the path of production, ending up moving from farms to increasingly high proportions of workshops as they improved (they become good improvements at Chemistry with Caste System, and truly amazing with State Property)

[jojobe]

The only thing I miss from civ 3 that is not in civ 4 is the change in era cut scenes. They should have never taken that out. the leader actually change their clothing to match the era. that is the only thing. civ 4 is the best CIV to date. I have civ 5 and as you can see civ 5 hours played is less than 20 hours.

[Ville Valste]

Originally posted by jojobe:

The only thing I miss from civ 3 that is not in civ 4 is the change in era cut scenes. They should have never taken that out. the leader actually change their clothing to match the era. that is the only thing. civ 4 is the best CIV to date. I have civ 5 and as you can see civ 5 hours played is less than 20 hours.

Civ5 is better, though. You should try it out sometime.

[Ville Valste]

Originally posted by jojobe:

The only thing I miss from civ 3 that is not in civ 4 is the change in era cut scenes. They should have never taken that out. the leader actually change their clothing to match the era. that is the only thing. civ 4 is the best CIV to date. I have civ 5 and as you can see civ 5 hours played is less than 20 hours.

And no, I can't see.

[jojobe]

Im trying to add mods invictus realism and Orbis fantasy mod on ...

[jguzmartinez]

Originally posted by CHE:

Originally posted by jguzmartinez:

Hello folks, im a civ 3 player wanting to get into civ 4. There are somethings that i dont really understand and im hoping that you guys could help me.

1. I dont understand the maintenence concept in civ4. I assume that its like the corruption system in civ3. In my games i seem to be stopped by the maintenence of the cities once i build 5 of them. Please give me some tips of how could i overcome this.

2. How much should i expand on the early game. Its crystal clear that i should not do it crazily but, what is an ideal number of cities and why, taking a small map for example.

3. How does the fighting mechanic work in this game. In one game that ive played, when attacking a city, the unit that defended against mine was always the one that had the bigger bonuses against me. It seems like i have to bring 10000 units to take down a city. How am i supposed to do it??

4. Cottage or irrigation?? I generally irrigate all the land that i can since slavery seems OP in this game. In which tiles should i build a cottage and in which tiles should i irrigate. What has the most value, food, commerce or hammers?

5. I cannot find the ideal worker improvements for each tile in the internet. Is there an ideal improvement for each tile?? What is it?

Id appreciate if i could get the answer to all of these questions. The basic mechanics i think i got them. While i was playing i could recognize the similarities with civ3. Also, in the civfanatics page there isnt clear info about this game. Where can i find a good guide that helps me going further in this game difficulty. I am playing on noble at the moment and it seems a comfortable lvl for me to start. Id appreciate the answers!

(1) The maintenance system enables civs with a smaller number of cities to be more of a competition for huge empires of many cities.

I think the smaller the distance between cities, the lower the maintenance.

Courthouses cut maintenance costs in half (there might be another building which reduces it further - I don't remember. I think the State Property civic and Forbidden Palace national wonder reduce maintenance costs, too).

And basically, you just counter maintenance costs by getting more gold:

by having your cities work squares that give you gold - especially by building cottages and exploiting resources that give you gold;
by constructing certain buildings;
from trade routes between cities (which is helped by rivers, roads, coastal and ocean squares, as well as certain technologies and buildings);
from trade deals to get gold per turn from other civs.... There might be other things that I have forgotten....

(2) I don't play small maps. I try to play as large as possible, with as many civs as possible. I enjoy the challenge and the complexity of many civs, and I like how this more accurately represents real history.

I reckon I have anywhere between 3 and 6 cities until the Medieval Era, but sometimes more, if I am able to maintain other aspects of my game at the same time - e.g. tech research.

I don't think there is an ideal number of cities at any point. This is a sandbox game, and it allows you to play in many different ways. It depends on what you want to prioritise - though you will find that when you go to extremes in certain ways, then the game limits you in a sort of "elastic" way, where the more extreme you get, the more it affects your game in other ways.

E.g. if you focus solely on producing military units and military technology and conquering other civs, then your population and economy will stagnate, and this will limit how much money you have for supporting and upgrading units, and it will slow down your technological research rate.

Founding many cities is similar in the way it slows down the other aspects of your civilization.

The effect of founding more cities depends on many factors, e.g. how much you have done those things I mentioned above in response to the maintenance question. Basically, the more developed your cities, the easier it is to build new ones with minimal effect on other aspects of your game, such as your tech research and your ability to defend your cities and defend your land against enemy pillage. In this way, the game is similar to Civilization 3.

I reckon if you play enough, you'll find the balance you want between number of cities and other aspects of the game. I try to build as many cities I can, without getting behind technologically compared with the other civs who I've met, and preferably while maintaining a tech lead. That said, I don't always do so... it depends on various factors, such as:

resources - if I see some resources that look quite beneficial, and no-one has taken them, then I will prioritise founding a city to utilize them to maximum effect - and remember, if you found a city on certain land, it can pay for itself - e.g. with silver mines, gold mines and gem mines;

geography - e.g. being surrounded by rival civs, with my only city options far away, I become more careful about city placement - I'll try creating more distant cities generally only if I think the resources I'll get are worth it;

war - during wars, I generally focus a lot on producing military units, but with war comes the opportunity to conquer the enemies' cities, and gain more cities that way.

(I fight defensive wars often, but don't start wars of aggression unless I am trying to save a little civ from a big bully civ. This limits my conquest options, but I enjoy the game more playing in this honourable way. Then again, even during peacetime, I do often use culture to grab land and cities from civs that are serious rivals.)

(3) Ah, a simpler question - city conquest!

In Civ 4, cities get a % defence bonus. You can reduce this with artillery (starting with catapults, but later including ships and aircraft, too). Yeah, taking cities is MUCH easier when you reduce their defences before the attack proper!

Also, in the early era(s), please be aware that swordsmen with city raider promotions help very much to tip the odds in your favour for the attack proper! They are the earliest city-attack specialists.

(4) Well, I generally make sure that building cottages doesn't slow down each city's growth more than I want, but that's the only general rule I use with them....

The benefits of building cottages depend on a number of factors. E.g. if you specialise your cities (which gives benefits in this game), then cottages are useful for a science and/or money city, but not so useful for a city that focuses on military unit production, nor for a city that focuses on building wonders of the kinds that don't give you any help to money or science....

Also, e.g. a coastal city might get more food and money, but less production than an inland city (though the number of hill tiles and other resource tiles does make a difference here)... certain sea resources will give that city more food, and in such a case, you might want to focus land tiles on money and production, rather than farming, but maybe you want to focus such a city on producing workers and settlers? In general, I devote more land to cottages on inland cities than coastal cities.

I don't use slavery. But I do try to get bronze working early and capitalise on it, by chopping all forests in the 8 squares immediately next to all of my cities. This gives much more of a production boost in Civ 4 than it does in Civilization 3. And by doing it next to my cities, any enemy units that attack my cities are exposed without forest as defensive cover. I do tend to keep forests in the 12 outer squares of each city's "fat cross" - because they give a health bonus to the city, and I like having my cities work them to get production every turn.

(5) I don't think there is an ideal improvement for any tile - it all depends on how you want to play. That said, on each resource tile, I almost always put the improvement that allows my civ to use that resource. And I make my other improvement choices based on this choice, and my other priorities. How about you say how you want to play, and I can tailor my answers to this?

Did you play the tutorial in the base game of Civilization 4 (it's not in either of the expansions - to play it requires running the original game)? You seem to know much of what is in the tutorial, but if you want to be sure, then I recommend you try the tutorial.

Did you read the game manuals for the original game and the 2 expansions ("Warlords" and "Beyond the Sword")? There are links to PDF versions of each manual on the Steam store page for each of the 3 games.

thanks a lot man for the info. I will play the tutorial, i am more comfortable with civ4 now that ive played more games.Thanks man!

[jguzmartinez]

Originally posted by ghpstage:

1) Maintenance is like corruption only in that it exists to add pressure against expansion, in practice it performs far better as it prevents ICS/ICS-lite strategies from being dominant, while balancing rapid expansion and slow expansion strategies reasonably well.

The best way to think about managing growth in the light of maintenance is to think of each city as an investment. At first it will be a net drain on your economy, but it will pay off when developed.

Getting a pay off that is larger and quicker depends on,
*Where you place it. Where quite a bit to this but aiming to settle post-capital cities adjacent to a food resource when not playing a Creative leader will go a long way.
*Having enough workers to improve them in a timely manner and managing them efficiently,
*Making good tech choices to improve your economy (worker techs, writing, currency being high priorities)
*Specialising. Don't build everything everywhere, decide on a role for the city (production, commerce, great person farm etc) and focus on that. Granaries are great just about everywhere, and a Monument is useful in cities that need the first border pop early, but just about everything else is conditional.
*Trade routes. Set up some roads and use rivers and the coastline to get internal trade routes up and running early, get Open Borders agreements and connect your trade routes to those civs to get the more valuable foreign routes.

Other tips,
Specialists are very powerful due to the Great Person Points they generate. A city with an early Library running two scientist specialists is a great investment.
The Bureacracy civic with a cottaged capital, and with a Library and Academy can put out incredible amounts of beakers.
If you are playing Beyond the Sword, then building Wealth (available with Currency) can be an excellent use of your hammers during the midgame to speed you through the medieval period to the Renaissance where economic and military improvements can make military victory rapid and easy.

2) On standard sized maps a good target is to get at least 6 by 1AD (I don't play small)
A minmum of 6 will secure a decent base from which to do everything that comes later while also allowing you to build powerful national wonders like the Globe Theatre and Oxford University.

In the grand scheme of things the more cities you have, the stronger you will be.
This is provided you develop those cities and your economy is equipped to handle them of course.
I prefer to be ambitious and aim for 8-10 unless I am content to sit back and wonderspam.

3) In civ 3 units fortified in cities or defensive terrain also enjoyed large advantages, its just you couldn't see them directly

Most warfare comes in a few types.
*Early rushes are just about hitting a fledgling civ with numbers. Its purely brute force that relies on good intel, close neighbours and focused production.
*Seige warfare is the mainstay of one move SODs for the entire game. Stacks will be composed of up to 50% seige units with which to bombard away city culture/wall/castle defences and to suicidally charge into the enemy. Yep, you read that right.... seige has an effect called collateral damage so when they rush in they weaken the wider stack, and as a units strenght is directly proportional to hp even a relatively small amount of damage can make a large difference. Suicide seige brings the costs of warfare down to manageable levels.
*2 move warfare, mostly using mounted units involves making use of their mobility to attack enemies out of defensive terrain, pillage resources, hit cities on the first turn of war and to entice fortified units out of target cities by threatening others.

The later air units basically act as long range seige, while nukes are just absurdly OP.

4 and 5)
I've seen it mentioned that the AI gives values of a single unit of Food / Hammers / Commerce at 10 / 6 / 4, which is actually pretty reasonable, and highlights plains tiles (1F, 1H) as being clearly weaker than grassland (2F) which is a near abslute truth, but you will need sources of everything.

Choosing which improvements to use depends on things like the land you have, the cities role, your empires civics, your leader traits, your plan and your own preference. There isn't a best improvement for a certain tile type aside from the relevant resource improvements even if some do have biases i.e. having a lot of grassland, riverside grassland or floodplains will make a city an excellent candidate for a lot of cottages.

I have got 2 examples of 1AD capitals using different approaches

Both games were being played on Marathon speed, with normal map size.
The cottage cap was on Monarch IIRC using Willem (Financial/Creative), had 9 cities at the time of screenshotting. This game was played very poorly as at the time hadn't played in a year and was put out of pace by marathon scaling while greatly preferring farms to cottages.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=783805704
Due to financial and the cottage focused civics I had in place my entire empire at a very heavy cottage bias, with the game eventualy ending with me rusbuying my military for conquest.

And below was a later game played on Emperor with the Industrious Charismatic French leader (Louis?)
In this game I played without ever building a single cottage anywhere in my empire, having built only 6 cities at this point, instead using the hammers I would otherwise have spent on settlers and workers to wonderspam. Wonders and Representation boosted specialists are the primary driver of my economy in this game.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=783805776
The differences being the presence of a long river through much of Willems capital (pushes towards cottages), the extra food resource in Paris (pushes towards more specialist/mine use) and the difference in traits Financial vs Industrious.
This one went down the path of production, ending up moving from farms to increasingly high proportions of workshops as they improved (they become good improvements at Chemistry with Caste System, and truly amazing with State Property)

Thanks man, civ community is great. Its a pleasure beeing aided by good people. If anything id PM you with more questions. Thanks a lot for the info.

[ghpstage]

Originally posted by jguzmartinez:

Thanks man, civ community is great. Its a pleasure beeing aided by good people. If anything id PM you with more questions. Thanks a lot for the info.

No problem, I don't mind answering PMs.

Also, in the civfanatics page there isnt clear info about this game. Where can i find a good guide that helps me going further in this game difficulty.

Missed this bit...

Having just looked, the recent site migration seems to have gutted the War Academy section where some decent basic guides were located, which is a big shame as a few good examples used to reside found there.

While there is an enormous amount of useful information on Civfanatics, iut can be very difficult to find it. The Strategy and Tips subforum is swamped by things that are quite badly out of date, weird opinion pieces, good but niche info, people asking questions, and stuff that is dubious at best or outright wrong at worst.
The good stuff is often very specific and technical, which isn't great for a newbie, and some of the very best stuff (i.e. AI behaviours, and AI DOW and barb mechanics) isn't even found among the Strategy Articles, its spread piecemeal through numerous threads in Strategy and Tips and the GoTM subforums, with the useful stuff usually being translated from code-speak and spread by word of post elsewhere!

Here's[forums.civfanatics.com] a popular one for beginners, though if your already comfortable at noble you may already be beyond it. The same author did write more guides you may find useful though.
The Civ Illustrated series, which is a collaborative effort between some of the top players on those forums are all excellent due to having worked cae studies to aid explanations in the city based guides, though you may want to delay #1 for the time being as its about leader specific AI behaviours, and hyperlinks a great many of the scattered sourcethreads I mentioned.

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

Didn't read all of the replies, so sorry if I give something redundant.

1) Develop your cities to get more commerce. That's how you overcome the maintenance cost and make them profitable. If you haven't, sign Open Borders with some AIs to get more/better trade routes. It's also hugely helpful to get to Code of Laws early so you can build Courthouses to decrease maintenance; Sumeria and Zululand both get a big help there in that their unique building comes earlier and reduces maintenance. But number one thing is to develop your cities.

2) Probably if you're running 60% science or more, you can afford to expand. If you're running 90-100%, you should definitely be expanding. The nation that expands a lot will have a weaker economy in the early game, but later on will be much more powerful.

3) Taking cities is not easy. Definitely the best way to do it is to bring a bunch of siege weapons (catapults, etc.) to bomb out the city defenses and then do collateral damage to the defenders. I won't say more on this because I'm not a good attacker myself!

4) I usually irrigate enough that I can work every tile in the city radius given ideal conditions, and then emphasize production or commerce in the rest. Grassland and floodplain tiles are often best to cottage, since a fully developed town gives you +4 gold - and that's without any civics or techs that give extra bonuses! It's usually best to optimize a city for a particular purpose - emphasize commerce in one, production in another, maybe food in one to run specialists to generate Great People.

5) There is no best improvement for each tile. It all depends on the situation. That said, I usually like to cottage grassland and flood plains, farm plains, mine hills, and lumbermill forests. But there are often situations where I change my priorities as well (especially when I decide that my hills need windmilled instead for food).

I'd be happy to answer any other questions you have. I also recommend that you take a look at the Civ 4 section of www.sullla.com. This guy is a very good Civ player who actually worked on the development of Civ 4, and I've found reading and watching his stuff to be quite helpful in improving my own play.

[jguzmartinez]

thanks a lot man, would you mind answering some more questions that i have via pm

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

Originally posted by jguzmartinez:

thanks a lot man, would you mind answering some more questions that i have via pm

Not at all. Go ahead.

[red255]

Originally posted by jguzmartinez:

Hello folks, im a civ 3 player wanting to get into civ 4. There are somethings that i dont really understand and im hoping that you guys could help me.

I know CIV 5 was terrible, but.... CIV 6 is out, is that also terrible? haven't checked?

1. Remotely. In Civ 3 once you hit a certain number of cities the additional ones were pretty much garbage. Still provided use like upkeep. I went and jammed them to have 1 specialist 1 tax so they produced all of 2 coin and territory, but they are garbage.

In Civ 4 they just cost more and more money to the point of ....being bad. but they'll always produce hammer so not as bad as Civ 3 and they can generally be made worth it.

also buildings like Forbidden palace and versailles reduce the penalty allowing more cities.

2. Gonna say 60% on the slider still should expand if you drop below 60% research should probably consolidate. Rule of thumb not ironclad.

3. Catapults. Sacrifice some catapults to the collateral damage god. Walk in with Macemen with City Raider 3. Trebuchet, siege weapons. Or just sacrifice tons of dudes I guess.

4. Oh, depends. But Hammers. Game guides would suggest you specialize your cities into commerce or hammers as you can build your research buildings in on and your hammer buildings in the other. which makes some sense. Hammer cities would make units after they are done with their hammer buildings whereas research cities just research. Food....see with food you generally run into some happy cap pretty hard early on. you generally want to start a city with ready acess to food so the farm stuff not really important.

5. More of a quota. you probably want 2 sources of food (corn, wheat, Rice, Fish etc) and dunno 10 hammers regardless of what town you want to build just so it can manage. if you have flood plains I like to turn those into commerce cities. they get big and I cottage those up. If you have hills near food, those are your production cities.

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

Originally posted by red255:

I know CIV 5 was terrible, but.... CIV 6 is out, is that also terrible? haven't checked?

The opinions that I have seen of longtime Civ fans who did not like 5 is that Civ 6 is all right and definitely better than 5, but still inferior to 4.

[red255]

Yeah well Wasn't looking for opinions of CIv 6 until its completly out. I expect some DLC.

CIV 5, God. issues with Civ 5.

1. Nickel and dime transactions for the races.... why?
2. Unbalanced Races.
3. Really bad AI
4. AI couldn't pathfind to save its life.
5. unit stacking -> one unit per tile....I guess if you are 3 and can't balance at all that makes some sense, except of course you can stack as many planes as you want because oops.
6. Tile improvements...you got markets and farms and mines. yay! who needs that other stuff.
7. The AI plays on Easy then taunts you about how unhappy your civ is compared to theirs periodically.
8. Multiplayer was unstable or bad? dunno was told it was bad. Single player was bad from the terrible AI and such.
9. about as much nuance as a punch to the face.
10. some later DLC added archer units for later eras because oh you might want those when you got rifles. Cuz we thought rifles were for melee units.
11. Sheer unbalance of the combat. was this beta'd? I'm holding off armies with a single city with a massive tech advantage against me. I mean I got an archer, and a trime and he's got swordsmen and whatnot and might as well have giant death robots he's not getting in.

think thats the last one I played. Oh and research agreements. the AI would always cancel those to declare war for no good reason and there'd be no penalty for it.

Oh and the constant denouncing. Stop that. thats just annoying. and its just hey that guy I'm denouncing him because he's going to kick our asses in some victory condition.

Cuz we can't do something like that in a nuanced fashion.

Oh and the turns took forever because of the individualized pathfindings and animations. took much less time if you set it to ugly mode which means it was animating the moves of things off screen. yay! because super clunky or super ugly. you have an ugly mode why arent you using it for things off screen?