Learning curve

[JUSTOSKAAR]

I have tried this game on and off but its honestly such a learning curve and lots of things to keep track on, any one got tips and tricks?

[Hamish]

Some simple tips I would say is, take your time! Try to get boosts both civic and science, and it is worth learning what does them. Be ready to defend yourself from barbarians and angry neighbours - in other words, build walls and armies! Use builders to improve bonus/ luxury and strategic resources. Expand as much as you can, more land, more resources,

[JUSTOSKAAR]

Thank you very much, I really appreciate it! :D

[plaguepenguin]

The game does have a learning curve because of all its systems and subsystems. The saving grace there is that you really don't have to pay any attention at all to a lot of the systems, much less master all of them, and you can still win on lower difficulty. The higher the difficulty the more you will need to be able to bring in all sorts of different systems to win, but you only need a few core systems early on, starting to play on low difficulty. You pick up the finer points of all the systems that aren't core as you go along.

The core systems tend to be more intuitive, in that when faced with a choice you do what seems to be sensible and it turns out well. It makes perfect sense that advancing up the tech tree is going to be important, so you prioritize campuses and their buildings, and that works within the game. Science is a core system. Religion is non-core. It can give you all sorts of nice things,and you will sometimes need some of the nice bonuses it can provide to defeat Deity, but at Settler you can do without it. That's good because it's not nearly as straightforward and intuitive as science.

The core systems are science and culture (because you have to move up the tech and civics trees), with gold and production needed in support. You prioritize districts and buildings accordingly. At Settler you can ignore districts and buildings that are parts of non-core systems,and never build a single encampment, entertainment district, holy site, or world wonder. Once you are pretty good at the core you can also ignore walls and spies, because you will defeat enemy armies in the open field before they get near your cities) and you will end the game before they can work up a good espionage game.

Before you get to deciding what districts and buildings to go for, of course you have to expand. That need and how to meet it is pretty intuitive. You win in the end by having more districts than your competitors, and for that you need more cities. You get more cities by getting settlers, or by getting military units to conquer a neighbor civ or two.

The earlier you expand, peacefully or by conquest, the better, because your cites take time to grow, and the number of districts a city can have is limited by their population size. Your ability to have them build the districts and their buildings is also limited by how much production they have. Food and production are therefore the two tile yields you have to pay attention to for your cities. Improving your tiles with builder charges can increase both food and production. Having tiles in your cities that have good yields, both before improvements and even more after them, is a function of choosing good sites for the cites you found by sending out settlers. There is a learning curve to that, but the basic idea is that you want sites with tiles that will yield both the food and production that are the foundation of doing whatever you need to do with that city after it has grown enough to be able to serve your overall strategy by producing the districts you need and their buildings.

Housing and happiness can limit growth and productivity, and aren't amazingly intuitive, but those subsystems can be picked up pretty easily as you go. The starting advice for housing is to settle preferentially on fresh water, and for happiness it is to work luxuries whenever you can.

Exploration gives you all sorts of other advantages, but its key role is to scout out good sites for peaceful expansion, and potential threats or conquest opportunities from neighbor civs. The starting advice is to explore out in all directions at least until you are blocked by city-states, neighbor civs, or impassable terrain, because that's the initial boundaries of where you can site your new cities.

Combat in the open field is pretty intuitive. Building more and better units to throw into combat is also the obvious way to do well in war. The starting advice for defense in particular, and open field warfare in general, is that ranged units tend to be the most useful, though they are best if you have some melee or anti-cav to ward off enemy melee and anti-cav. Conquering cities is not so intuitive, at least after the AI starts building walls, encampments, and its own ranged units, but at Settler you can most often avoid the need for conquest at all, or at least put it off until after your sound development game has gotten you ahead of the AI in unit quality and quantity. At that point you can pick up how to do conquest, with its finer points, because your tech and production yield has made the learning curve less subject to painful reverses. Most of us learn better from paying attention to inefficiencies in gaining success that we can improve upon, rather than by failure, but everyone's different.

[KingKickAss]

Its not as bad as you might think. Every game you play, you should be doing a lot better than the last. At least that's how it was with me.

[Level12Boss]

The joy of games like Civ is that you learn by playing over and over again. That's why these games have hundreds of hours of gameplay. So the learning curve has a really long tail. What you need to focus on as a new player is just getting comfortable with the basics.

A low pressure game means you can figure things out as you go without failure.

Try a custom game with the following settings:

• Chief difficulty level. The AI basically sits around poking dirt with a stick so you won't have any pressure
  
• Pangaea map. Its a single continuous land mass so no need to worry about boats
  
• Standard size map, but delete one AI civ at the bottom of the list. This will delete one of your nearest neighbours giving you more room to expand in the early game.
  
• All victory conditions enabled:so you can watch the various win conditions progress and get a feel for it.

I'd then focus on the easiest and most obvious win condition: domination victory (capture each opponents capital city). Choose Gilgamesh as your civ and just start cranking out War Carts at the beginning of the game. Flood your nearest neighbour with units until he's dead. Repeat for the win!

Play that scenario 2-3 times and you'll have a good feel for building stuff and controlling your military. At that point you can start playing for other win conditions and trying other civs.