After rah´s City States centred Strategy this is another attempt at exploring general strategy in the brand new Civilization V. The strategies and ideas I´ll present in the first couple of articles have proven themselves in Single Player on Deity difficulty - that though defnitely does not mean they represent some fundamental truth. This is the very beginning of this game and I definitely hope it has enough depth that we´ll see lots and lots of development in strategies and understanding of the game´s mechanics.
The following is a look at a quick expansion strategy with France focusing on taking advantage of this civ´s trait and the Liberty Cultural Policy tree.
Like almost anything you can call "strategy" in civ, this approach does not refer to the whole game, but instead is about the initial expansion phase from Ancient up to early Medieval era.
The nice thing about this buildup is that it puts you into a position of many options. You expand your empire quickly - what you do in between is your choice. This strategy is the strongest if left unchallenged till early Medieval. It´s still easily possible to get units to defend the growing empire - though defending against a rush by a human in a MP game should be very hard without cutting down on the expansion parts in favor of units.The Plan
Expand very quickly and make use of the new cities, supporting their buildup with Cultural Policies from the Liberty branch which you adopt faster than any other civ could relying mainly on France´s trait.
Against the AI the "full buildup mode" will be much easier to pull off than against humans in Multiplayer.
The numbers in the build order relate to quick game speed.
France - Fast Expansion
- turn 1: worker
- turn 5: Adopt Liberty (at 15 culture)
Adopted LibertyIt´s worth growing the city here past pop2 if there are tiles worth hooking and working fast before starting contruction of a settler. I recommend hooking and growing to enough size to work the tiles that provide more than 2 food or 1 food and at least 2 production. Hooking Gold tiles isn´t important during this very early stage.
- when worker done: monument/worker to grow if tiles worth to grow to present
Optimally you plant your second city the turn you adopt your second Social Policy, Collective Rule, definitely not before since otherwise it won´t receive the half full granary on foundation.
- after potential growing: settler
- turn 15: Adopt Collective Rule (at 30 culture)
Once you found your second city, continue expanding with another worker and settler. At this point it´s likely you have to compromise. You might need additional units though if you do it right your warrior and the cities should be able to defend against barbarians relatively easy at this point in the game if those are your concern. In a MP game the danger of units coming your way is even bigger, especially if it´s not a 1v1v1vX, but a team game or duel.
- second city + capital: worker + settler
- once third city founded:
- Stonehenge in one of the three cities can be a possibility now, especially if you have one with decent production. Researching Calender early should fit the strategy anyway, since hooking happiness quickly will be important with fast expansion expansion and growth.
Attempting Henge- Third worker, possible a rudimentary army/more army.
- At least one Monument
- Third settler for fourth city
- Adopt next Cultural Policy: Republic vs. Citizenship
Republic
Citizenship
Adopt your third policy before building your third city, sometimes even before building your second, depending on when you could get the settler for it and plant it.
Remember that costs for Cultural Policies scale with the overall number of cities you control (puppet cities don´t count).
Costs for adoting third Cultural Policy: at 2 Cities: 80culture, at 3 Cities 95 culture
Costs for adoting fourth Cultural Policy: at 3 cities 170 culture, at 4 cities 200 culture
At this point - still exploring the abilities of the Liberty branch - you can chose between Republic and Citizenship.
Republic is a straight forward hammer bonus. If it is good anywhere, it should be best in a strategy that aims for many cities quickly like this one. At this point you cities should be accumulating around 3-10 production per city, which makes the additional hammer of Republic a bonus of somewhere between 10% - 30% - not too shabby. Also multipliers apply to this 1 hammer, which thanks to decimal places becomes 1.5 for example when producing a settler with Liberty having been adopted.
Production in Cities when adopting Republic
Citizenship increases the speed with which worker build tile improvements. It says 25%, though that depends on the game speed.
On quick speed it shaves off a turn of farms, mines, plantations, trading posts, not roads though for instance.
You have to take an educated guess here whether Republic or Citizenship first will bring you better results. If you have lots of resources to hook, maybe go with the last, if you have enough workers and all relevant things hooked and are now connecting your cities with roads, go Republic.
4 Cities
- Adopt next Cultural Policy: Represenation vs. Meritocracy
Where you strategically go from this initial buildup is your choice. You can get a military and attack someone, you can keep on expanding, you can rush for a specific wonder etc. See this article for different tech paths after initial buildup.
In any case you´ll be able to adopt more Cultural Policies.
Still exloring the strengths of the Liberty brancn, Representation
and Meritocracy are the options. If it´s only between those two, then gor for Representation first if you have enough happiness, other Meritocracy - that mostly depends on how much you expanded at this point in the game.
Adopting Meritocracy
Representation pays for itself over the course of the game - if it´s a long enough game and makes your new citiy acquire tiles even faster giving them +3 cultural from the start together with France´s trait.
The choice is not too hard, Representation is a bonus, Meritocracy an answer to a problem, not so much a gain. If you´ve got that problem, go that route first.
5 Cities
Empire running, ready to produce an army for instance
Demographics
For all intents and purposes, this is exactly what I did in my first game. Worked great, set me up with a small little empire that spanned a relatively narrow, long continent, and by the time I was able to start adopting Patronage civics I had plenty of gold to reap the rewards of CS, essentially following rah's article before ever reading it.
Those two strategies synergize extrordinarily well for the French.
"My nation is the world, and my religion is to do good." --Thomas Paine
"The subject of onanism is inexhaustable." --Sigmund Freud
What happened to waiting to get the game, Guy? Decided you couldn't wait for the patches? ;P
If there is no sound in space, how come you can hear the lasers?
:(){ :|:& };:
"My nation is the world, and my religion is to do good." --Thomas Paine
"The subject of onanism is inexhaustable." --Sigmund Freud
Although it seemed to be clear for months now that this strategy would work you really shed some light on the fine little details. I would have hoped for some more suggestions on tile improvement and city placement though. But maybe this would be best reserved for another general strategy article.
This is like a walk in the park against AI. Based on one duel size Deity game which I finished and one Deity standard size game that is still running here my assumptions to the questions I asked above (They are for SP so including CS):
Social Policies
I found it viable to not finish the complete Liberty tree. Instead I went:
Liberty - Collective Rule - Republic - Patronage - Philantropy - Scholasticism
After that you can go Honor for warfare or freedom/commerce/rationalism for additional city development. In CS heavy SP games you can of course also finish the Patronage tree.
City Placement
The second city was placed in food rich territory.
This is a huge exception to the later cities. Reason for that is you want it to take over the role of producing settlers from your capital as soon as possible. So food is not exactly what you want but it is that 3 yield tiles that you want. Gold is not important for second city but for third and beyond.
I specifically settle near hills and in woods as second priority. First priority was of course to accumulate luxury resources. Basically you settle everywhere where there is no open desert and snow in the long term but the order does matter. Don't walk to far though, you want to have a dense network of cities for deploying defenses. One exception: I found it practical to built a city next to my nearest enemy and also next to a City State near him which I would ally with after allying with the maritime ones. This combination usually builds a pretty strong defensive line which you are able to defend with only 2-3 units against an advancing army as the enemy is declaring you very early anyway. The CS serves the role of distracting and providing another firing city. I found the CS to be way better in Deity than other difficulties when fighting for you regarding units produced although there seems to be a random factor in how much they actually build.
City Improvement
I want to say two words to you - just two words: Trading Posts. This is of course pretty obvious, but especially true for SP games with maritime city states. You want to get that gold and you need less or no food rich tiles. As you are spamming settlers like crazy you will reach the happy limit very early and that additional food will best be replaced by production or gold. Let the citizens work as scientists once you got library and switch every grassland tile for a woods or hill and even unemployed citizens once you reach that happy limit. A few river farms might be good if you want one city to grow substantially larger for example for producing wonders fast. Ideally your capital will take that role and has enough food bonus from maritime CS.
In MP of course most of this strategy will be different (building farms more important early on, especially on rivers). My tips are only focussed on my SP experience as I could only speculate what might be best in MP in the long run.
Regarding Social Policies:
It´s absolutely viable, likely even the better plan to not max out Liberty just like Cyberian said.
jobe,
First of all, thank you for making the first good cut at policy planning, you make that very clear.
I want to see if I understand your development procedure, circumstances permitting; do I have this right?
In the capital: worker, monument or worker, settler, settler or military.
City #2: settle just after Collective Rule, worker, monument or military.
City #3, worker, military,
About this time, the best production city may start Stonehenge, another city builds a monument, another builds a settler, military units as needed.
[One comment: I can hardly imagine *not* using my first build for a scout. Ruins are too valuable, recon is important, and contact with city-states nets gold.]
You don't discuss the tech path other than mentioning that Calendar will be in there, partly to enable Stonehenge; what sequence do you like?
"...your Caravel has killed a Spanish Man-o-War."
That´s right. Obviously Civ is not chess, so naming exact opening sequences up to the third city is a tricky thing since the setup is not the same every time. But with the limited yields of Civ5 and no mechanics like Slavery etc. Civ5 allows for less variation.Originally Posted by Hermann the Lombard
The idea is to go max worker/settler takign advantage of FRance´s trait, sneaking in a monument here or maybe even a granary+library (for GP making) there and setting up an empire that gives you various options from early Medieval on. If you need units earlier - you need units earlier.
I won´t lie - I´m a MP player and there are no ruins in MP.
If you play, do the math: What is the average bonus I´ll get from a ruin and what is the average number of ruins I´ll get (with that additional scout/without)? Obviously the setup you play is the decisive factor here. If you play a duel on a large map, you will get a thousand ruins, if you play small Inland_Sea with 5 other people it won´t be that many, scout or not. In Civ4 difficulty level decided what bonuses the huts could provide - I don´t know if it´s the same in civ5, but it might not be worth delaying a worker by 5 turns to get 20 gold or some map info - it is worth delaying a worker though for an additional pop in a city, or obviously the super imbalanced free settler and technology. I don´t think the latter ones appear on higher difficulty levels though.
Take a look here
In one game my exploring scout promoted twice, first to an archer who had the scout's bonus of ignoring terrain. (Meanwhile in my first game my starting warrior ended up as a Pikeman while still in the Ancient Era, very cool even if it makes no sense!)
"...your Caravel has killed a Spanish Man-o-War."
That's where i stopped reading.with France
when worker done: monument
Thanks for wasting 2 minutes of my time.
Knowledge is Power
God, you must be a slow reader if it took you so long to get to that point. If it takes you that long, you probably wasted even longer posted your snarky reply.
Try making an actual contribution instead of complaining about people that are trying to. Geeze.
The OT at APOLYTON is like watching the Special Olympics. Certain people try so hard to debate despite their handicaps.
Baron O RIP.
Well said.
"...your Caravel has killed a Spanish Man-o-War."
another great late game tactics when using this and not having won on a Continents Map Type:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388793
Yeah, not a bad article, but my only issue is that if you've got a decent tech lead, you really don't need that big of a civ or a ton of troops to knock off the AI, so this is probably a touch of overkill.
But I could see how it would be entertaining.
The OT at APOLYTON is like watching the Special Olympics. Certain people try so hard to debate despite their handicaps.
Baron O RIP.
I finally got around to trying this strategy, and let's just say there were a few flaws in my attempt. This will be a mini-DAR of the first 60-odd turns.
At start:
Paris is in a river valley with a nice mix of terrain and two adjacent luxury resources: cotton and spices. That’s a spot of jungle in the upper left. The starting Warrior is about to go exploring, and I’ve started work on producing a Scout. Then 34 turns later:
We have a Worker, a cotton plantation, a Warrior safely home from exploring, contact with two city states (cultured Brussels to the north and militant Budapest to the southeast), and contact with Russia to the south, probably too close on the south since that’s my only direction of expansion. This appears to be a peninsula unless there’s more land past Brussels , that makes it both easy to defend and not so easy to expand (“Hello Catherine? I know you’re great and all, but we’re comin’ through!”) Our first Settler is ready to go, with a nice city site almost straight south, only there’s one minor problem. Not much of a problem, given bombardment from Paris and followup from an experienced Warrior. Oh, and one other problem: the Scout got killed after discovering very little. This time it was a waste of resources. Now jump 27 turns after this:
France just founded its third city and first port, one which will have nice aquatic resources: whales and fish (the former is a luxury resource, the latter gives food and gold). Lots of tasty cattle, lots of frisky horsies to ride down our foes, some Ivory on the hoof, more spices to sell...now if I can just find some maritime city states to help feed my people… The units you see are from Brussels and Budapest , so they aren’t a threat. Russia is not bellicose…yet. OTOH, I got skunked on trying to build Stonehenge (and the Great Library is long gone), but I’m reluctantly going to make a stab at the Oracle. At least when you get beaten to a Wonder, your production comes back as gold and isn’t entirely wasted. That’s part of why I have so much gold (791). Another fly in the ointment: my people are a tiny bit unhappy. I need to tap more of the resources, for which I have two workers under construction, one on the verge here.
At that point I was feeling uneasy, mostly that things were going so slowly relative to AI wonder projects. However, I did manage to bag the Oracle. But then I went far astray, and you may suspect my worst sin from my remark above about Catherine...I got involved in a land war in Asia, er, in Russia. I thought I could leverage my four cities into a delayed horse rush to take out Moscow. Memo: if you delay it, it's not a rush, and gives the AI too much time to arm. By the time I got there, Russia had multiple archers and some spearmen. My army bogged down. (Napoleon into Russia? What was I thinking?)
I did build a fifth city over on the water to the east, but I've lost all my momentum, and in any case I seem to be quite hammer-poor. Oh, and one minor thing: I aggressively sold resources to build up a fund for bribing city states, but not one of the city states on this continent was maritime, just one cultured and three militant, so I had to produce my own food.
So anything (else) obvious that I did wrong? Did I have the basic idea?
p.s. Is there a way to suppress the interface for screenshots, or at least to make it smaller than for a console game?
"...your Caravel has killed a Spanish Man-o-War."
What game difficulty and which game speed did you use?
Sorry. A little while after I posted it occurred to me that I omitted the conditions: King, Continents, Normal speed.
BTW, to conserve posts, which way do you like to go after the initial expansion to 4 or 5 cities? I realize that MP is a different kettle of fish, and perhaps the answer is YMMV. My inclination is to pause to consolidate at that size to keep policy production cooking for a bit, and also because 4 to 6 cities at normal spacing (as opposed to ICS spacing) is about all that will fit before needing more lebensraum.
Last edited by Hermann the Lombard; October 14, 2010 at 12:27.
"...your Caravel has killed a Spanish Man-o-War."
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