Vel's Strategy Thread

[Arrian]

Or, alternatively, you can cottage-spam yourself (and play a financial civ). You will sacrifice production to do so.

The problem I have with that is military... the AI gets freebie units, IIRC. They always seem to have a horde of city defenders when I've got a warrior & a chariot. The human has to actually build their units. That takes hammers. The AI can cottage-spam and still have something resembling a viable military.

-Arrian

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Arrian
The problem I have with that is military... the AI gets freebie units, IIRC. They always seem to have a horde of city defenders when I've got a warrior & a chariot. The human has to actually build their units. That takes hammers. The AI can cottage-spam and still have something resembling a viable military.
-Arrian

Yeah, this is what I'm finding, and why I quite like isolationist starts. Pedal to the metal on tech, and a minor military. Then when Astronomy comes its "shi*t, better build some units!" I considered switching to Vasselage for this in my current game, but balked at the Civics cost and the turns lost switching back and forth.

I guess the game would really suck for warmongers without all those free AI units to rub up against, but I might just mod it for my buildery play and take out some of those free units. I don't mind being out-built by the AI, in fact I applaud it, but I don't like being bullied by it's free standing army.

[Velociryx]

See...I don't really see it as being a question of one or the other. The greater bulk of my cities rarely get above the 12-15 range, so I can have a number of what I'm taking to calling "Multi Role Cities", which I have several "work-tile-configurations" mapped out for.

In times of peace, or while I'm pursuing techs that don't give me anything new to build, I drop into the commerce configuration, and in times of war or heavy construction, then it's "Hammer-Time," so to speak.

By virtue of the fact that most of my cities are never big enough to use all available tiles, I can create a number of flexible packages and configurations, allowing me to adapt each city to what makes the most sense at the time....veering toward specialists if it's warranted, bulking up military if the need arises, building peacefully at certain key techs, and pouring money into research otherwise.

This, coupled with a few "purestrain" commerce cities (which rush buy/pop-rush/chop what they need), allows me to have the best of all worlds. At least that's what I'm finding so far...

-=Vel=-

[Arrian]

I typically *never* find myself in a "ok, nothing to build now" time. I may not have buildings to build, but that's when I catch up a bit with my military - which is typically very weak early on.

One possible reason is that I don't use Organized Religion, and thus lost the +25% production (for buildings). I run pacifism for the great people. Later I use free religion.

Thus, the only ways for me to arrange a commerce-heavy city is either:

a) get a coastal city w/loads of food to grow quite big & work lots of coastal tiles; or
b) cottage spam a city radius, FORCING myself not to prioritize hammers.

Or, of course, a combo of a & b. I have this in my current game. It's pulling in quite a bit of commerce (and research, thanks to an academy, library and observatory). It can't build squat, though.

-Arrian

[Velociryx]

Ahhh....the main difference there, I think, is that I've gravitated to Epic games.

While I have pockets of "downtime" in a standard game, I have deliciously long stretches of it in Epic, and can use it to really polish the Empire. Far and away my most enjoyable games are Epic...

Standard just feels....too rushed. Too compressed. You never get to enjoy....

-=Vel=-

[Drachasor]

Generally I have either my first or second city focus on production at least to start out. The other city is usually more commercially focused (this is often my starting city). I find this works very well in terms of research. Sure, my production might be a little behind, but that's more than made up for when I attack the AI with units a tech level or two ahead of their defenders. Also it allow me to maintain or exceed tech parity with the best of the AIs even if I am constantly at war. This is very good since it means I can be expanding my research and production base without sacrificing much.

I am just starting monarch difficulty games (previously this has worked well on prince), but I think this will continue to be effective. Of course, my current monarch game is 18 players on a standard-sized pangea map, so it isn't a typical game I started with neighbors about 8 squares away in all directions). This has caused me to focus more on production than I typically do, since I am at war a lot more. I've been at war since the early game, when I started attacking the mongols (it was Kahn, who is hard to get along with). I stole one of their workers and found this to be very handy in getting me a leg up. So far the worker stealing early warfare strategy seems to be pretty effective. Of course it is a bit easier when the AI is only 8 squares away, but you can usually do it when they are farther, so long as you get there before their first cultural expansion -- most of the time a worker will work a square you can see from the edge of the city radius, then you can declare war and grab the worker at the same time.

I've mostly decided to try to stick with pangea maps until I started playing against humans or the AI is fixed to manage ocean warfare better. Otherwise the AI is getting a major handicap since it can't handle an ocean campaign competently. On land the AI is more effective, so the pangea map should be more challenging.

Anyhow, one of the first 3 or so cities should definitely have a lot of cottages, and I'd say one of the first two. Otherwise I don't see how you couldn't fall behind in tech (unless you lucked out and got a bunch of gold and silver in your hills or something similar).

-Drachasor

[Drachasor]

Or, of course, a combo of a & b. I have this in my current game. It's pulling in quite a bit of commerce (and research, thanks to an academy, library and observatory). It can't build squat, though

That's why you put all your extra prophets and merchants into one city (a high commerce one ideally) and dump wallstreet there. Even without wallstreet it should be raking in a ton of cash. Just use Universal Suffrage to buy the buildings in the low production town. I usually find that early production aided by chopping and then a switch to U.S. usually leaves only a small window when I have to really deal with the slow production of such cities. On the other hand I get so much money and science out of them that it is easily worth it.

Of course if you get the pyramids this is much easier to do. I usually don't have too much trouble raking in 50-100+ in gold each turn while maintaining a 90% science rate. It is definitely better to go this route than a -10 to +10 gold each turn and 100% science, as the science buildings you buy easily make up the 10% reduction.

Again though, I have mostly played on Prince, but the financials shouldn't change all that much.

-Drachasor

[Velociryx]

This has been my experience as well, though I will say that I'm quite fond of "blunting" the effect of the cities that I arrange to be centers of commerce by leaving some forests intact, and so much the better if there are hills scattered about the region. Still, even on an utterly flat expanse of plains/grasslands leading to the sea, the occassional workshop can do wonders as far as hammer production goes, and this, coupled with the "production multiplier" buildings (rush/chop/slave-enhanced to build them quickly) can turn even a modest hammer producing commerce city into a viable production center.....at least where building infrastructure is concerned.

What I like about using MRC's is that they preserve the notion of specialization, but allow you to specialize in different directions with the same city, depending on the pressing needs of the moment. Flexible specialization, then....

-=Vel=-

[khumak]

I've found that the answer to my money issues is to build or conquer as many coastal cities as possible. Shrines are nice too but not as nice as coastal cities. The trade from them is huge. Even early in the game you can crank out an amazing amount of money if you focus on maximizing trade. Great Lighthouse + Colossus + harbors = $$. Later on ocean trade routes are even better.

[DrSpike]

It's silly to argue the relative merits of shields, food and commerce in Civ as a whole. You want high food so that you can grow and produce more and have more commerce, and produce more infrastructure that leverages your base outputs.

It's fine though to say food and shields are key early on, as long as the end goal is clear. Basically before you have infrastructure to leverage it a few extra commerce isn't worth much in Civ4, given the 'free' cap commerce. This early game focus on food/shields is more pronounced in Civ4 precisely because of that feature - in previous games the free part was small and roads gave commerce, so there was an easy way to generate it whilst retaining food and shields. Now you have to use cottages/coastal squares for the most part, usually just getting enough food to maintain that pop point. Thus aside from lucky squares the time for commerce is later, when the enabling infrastructure has been built.

[Velociryx]

Exactly!

And for the record, I don't think anybody here was "arguing" in preference for one or the other, but as our discussions were centered in the early game still (and thus, before the greater bulk of the most attractive commerce and research enhancers are even a twinkle in any civ's eyes), I think we all (rightly) reached the same conclusion.

As cool as cottages are, their impact is felt much more strongly at some point *beyond* the ancient era.

-=Vel=-

[Arrian]

But as you pointed out, in order for them to have an impact in the mid-game, you need to start working them early so they develop into towns.

-Arrian

[Velociryx]

Ahhh, but they have an impact beginning on the first turn you work them. It's just that the impact grows larger the longer you work them.

Nothing wrong (at all!) with applying the same logic to cottages that we do to city builds (that is to say....we find it perfectly acceptable to spend 8-11 turns working on a barracks to let a city grow--and then switch to some other build...so why not spend 8-11 turns working a cottage while in pursuit of a key tech...the couple extra coins gives you JUST the edge to win, and then drop back to hammers for a while....I find myself manually switching resources like that *rampantly* in my games.

It's micromanagement, yes...but micromanagement of an entirely new sort, for civ.

Good stuff, too!

-=Vel=-

[Velociryx]

But, I think the original point still stands...I do not have an outright commerce city (a city that's terraformed to maximize coin production) until well after the ancient age...

-=Vel=-

[khearn]

Here's an idea I haven't tried, but that sounds like it might work.

You've got a city site that you know will be a commerce city (say an expanse of grasssland with a river, and maybe on a coast) but not much for production, few hills or forest. Lots of these sort of sites start out covered by jungle, BTW.

Start out with farms and workshops, making it a production city, and build your commerce infrastructure such as your library & univeristy, harbor, and maybe financials as well. Whatever you think an commerce city should have, but takes sooo long to build in a typical commerce city. Then, once the infrastructure (or most of it) is in place, send the workers back in and convert the workshops & farms to cottages.

The big disadvantage is that your cottages start gowing later. But when they are growing, you have the infrastructure in place to use whatever they are producing. Since early cottage growth is fastest, you may come up to speed pretty quickly, as opposed to having villages & towns while you're still waiting for that slooow university build to finish.

You could build a few cottages early on to let them start growing during the infrastructure building stage. There is also a civic that speeds their growth (I think it's Emancipation). It's a late civic, so it might not be around when you really want it, though.

At about the point when you'd want to start converting from farms/workshops to cottages, I typically have a bunch of workers sitting around doing nothing, so retooling the city for commerce would give them something to do.

It would be interesting to do a comparison between the same site with early cottages vs. early production for infrastructure converted to cottages.

Does this sound like it might be viable?