Vel's Strategy Thread

[Mountain Sage]

Good to see my ol' friends back

As usual, learned a lot thanks to you 'guinea pigs' guys

Now if only I could get finally my Civ4 game !

[Dactyl]

siom99,

I'm currently playing on Monarch level and I don't believe that your approach would work that well there if you ended up on a continent alone. More generally, I wanted to make the point that, at the higher levels, Civ4 forces you to be flexible. You can't say that you are going to pursue any given approach to be successful. You have to adapt to the circumstances. For example, if you are on a continent alone, you are most probably going to be way behind the other civs in technology. Not only that but it's going to be a much longer time before you'll have the ability to assemble a force with which you can effectively attack anyone and UU's like Rome's Praetorians will be way obsolete. In fact, from what I've experienced so far, the civs that you favor will definitely be scuffling.

By the way, you should include the level at which you are playing when discussing strategy. Not that it really matters but it does affect the strategic choices available to you. For example, in the strategy as you originally put it forward, you are extremely unlikely to snag an early religion at Prince level and above. You'll have to settle for Christianity, Islam or Taoism, and that means beelining for one of them at some point, which means falling behind in other areas of tech, and all this while you are already suffering tech-wise because of your isolation.

[Drachasor]

Has anyone else tried out building 2-4 warriors (depending on how fast you make them) first?

I find this can work pretty well. First you can scout all of the area around you. Secondly, they will get into fights with animals and you can give them the guerrila upgrade so they have a higher defense in forests--this means you can place them on forest/hills or hills near a forest and have the barbarians attack them instead of going straight for your cities (also the barbarians will spawn father away. Lastly, I can often steal a worker or two from neighboring civs. This saves me 10 turns or so of non-growth and production and hurst the other civ effectively.

Does this still work on higher levels? So far I've only gotten to Prince (which I seem to be beating easily so I am about to move to monarch).

-Drachasor

[Smac_addict]

Faster early settlers

Racing for settlers right out of the gate? Build on a hill. Most hills provide extra hammers, reducing Settler build time to 20 turns.

[sabrewolf]

Re: Faster early settlers

Originally posted by Smac_addict
Racing for settlers right out of the gate? Build on a hill. Most hills provide extra hammers, reducing Settler build time to 20 turns.

only hills with base terrain "plains". grassland hills do not provide any additional production.

[DrSpike]

Yeah. I always say to myself, "goodie, a plains hill", then realise that the surrounding terrain sucks.

[khumak]

The thing I don't like about settler first is that you have to send your initial warrior back to escort the settler unless you want a bear or wolf to eat him. For that reason I never do settler first anymore. Every single game I've tried that I lose the settler.

[Dactyl]

Depending on my starting location, I build settler/worker or worker/settler. Most time I don't have any problem with the animals. As someone else mentioned, if you are moving across plains or grasslands, just move one square per turn. That way, if you see an animal, you can back away. That said, I have recently been playing with civs that start with a warrior, and taken to exploring what is approximately a 14x14 square around my first city. (That's four squares from my capital in each direction, plus second city location, plus all the room that would be covered by its "fat cross".) After doing that exploration, I've taken to bringing my warrior unit back toward the capital to escort the first settler unit. I don't figure I lose anything by doing that. Unlike Civ3, there's no premium for early contact with the other civs, and by then there are rarely any goodie huts that the AI hasn't already got to, unless I'm on a continent alone, and then there's no big hurry in getting to the huts.

[Velociryx]

Okay, so we've talked about the extreme early game starts, and some viable maps up the tech tree to push whatever strategy you're doing, and we've brushed on terraforming, but only in a generalized sense, so the next thing I want to bring up is more detailed information about terraforming.

In looking at the early game choices, we find:

Farms
Pastures
Camps
Mines
Cottages
Seafood

That's a healthy lot of choices, and a greatly expanded list from what earlier iterations of Civ have given us, and in studying the terraforming options, and the terrain itself, some interesting trends develop.

What cities need - The Backbone of Ancient Age Terraforming
All cities, no matter how specialized you choose to make them, need food and hammers. Coins are optional. True, coins drive research, but they're not as vital as the other two, in the sense that a city can thrive just fine without coins (tho your research, and thus your empire as a whole, might suffer). Besides, it's nigh on impossible NOT to have at least some commerce from a city, even if you do not specialize toward that end.

Specials
Cows, Corn, Pigs, etc....any special that can be worked with ancient era, seminal techs, and lie inside the production radius of your city *should be* worked ASAP. A few turns spent terraforming these specials can dramatically increase the outputs of your city, and thus, get you off to a significantly faster start (note that this is true regardless of what early game expansion paradigm you opt for). Unless you're chopping, this should probably be your first terraforming goal, and WHEN you do it, build the camp/pasture/farm first. Your city is small, and the health and happiness benefits of roading out to it are scant compared to several turns more of the enhanced production.

Farms
Next up, have a look at your food situation. The goal of the early game is to grow your city FAST, and to do that, you need food. How big you grow it is largely dependent on difficulty level (as this will determine when you start feeling the pinch of unhealthiness and unhappiness due to city size. Recommend you check your cities at each growth stage and review the information, based on your difficulty level and how many health/happiness specials you have connected to the city, and use this information as a guide to better manage city growth). Let the health/happiness "reserves" you have be your benchmark for each city with regards to how big you grow them. Bigger than these reserves, and your continued growth begins to work against itself.

IMO, growth for growth's sake is a bad thing. Only growth that DOES SOMETHING for you and your strategy is good. To that end, BEFORE your city reaches its maximum growth potential, it might be a good idea to put the brakes on additional growth and start eyeing up other possibilities, shifting away from a purely food focus.

Mines
Forests are good sources of balanced resources for tiles, but Mines are pivotal to ramping up good ancient age production.

To work mines, you need a surplus of food, since mines themselves don't generate any, and you still have to feed the worker who's bringing in the hammers. And it's not like some cities can get by without hammers. They can't. All you'll have is a collection of unhappy guys in a city that takes 75 turns or so to build a temple, who really aren't generating anything useful for your empire.

Seafood
A separate category of "Specials," these guys are GREAT if you start on the coast, and have one inside your workable radius. The *reason* they rock, is because you build a work boat to harvest them, and said work boat does not stall your city's growth. IF you find yourself in such a situation, then a quick jaunt to "fishing" (assuming you didn't already start with the tech) will reap big benefits for you in the ancient age.

And that's it. Specials, Mines, Farms, (and Seafood). Those three comprise the backbone of your early game terraforming.

My recommendation: Study your game at the difficulty level you have chosen, and based on the health/happiness specials you've got coming in, and determine what number you can comfortably grow into, city-size-wise.

Once you have that number in your mind, pursue a policy of rampant growth TO that threshold (ignore hammers and coins for the time being...get big first!).

When you reach your threshold (and this may vary from city to city), then I recommend creating what I call a "Multi-Specialized City."

What I mean by that is this: Let's say that you jump up to size 10-12 before you reach threshold. You've got (up to) 20 workable tiles inside the "fat cross" that you can work.

All of these tiles need terraforming attention (or, in the case of a preserved forest, an intentional lack of attention), so that when you reach threshold, you can slam that city in some other direction, as needed.

Perhaps, at this point, you'll want to do a period of rampant, rapid building. In that case, you want to set the city in question to stagnant growth, and put all available workers to raking in just as many hammers as they possibly can. This is also a good thing to do with your military city(ies). Very fast ancient age troops.

Or, if you've got a solid military, and are facing no immediate threats, perhaps you'll want to ratchet up the number of specialists in play, in which case, you stagnate growth by assigning workers AS specialists and reaping the benefits they bring in (including those GP points!).

Or, if you need a shot in the arm, research-wise, that's where your cottages come into play....

The point is, that if you've got a size 10-12 city, you have enough tiles that ARE NOT being worked that you can set the city in question up to doing ANY of those things, as needed. Every city needs buildings of some kind, so every city will probably need to run a period of heavy-hammer focus. Likewise, when you've got the basics in place, your empire as a whole can surely uses a shot in the arm, technology or money wise....so you see where I'm going with this.

Cottages
IMO, The Cottage is the most interesting of the ancient age terraforming options, because it's so unique. Unique in the fact that, unlike other terraforming you can do, the cottage self-improves over time (based on the number of turns that the cottage has been worked). While it starts out modestly enough, in the end, it can rake in a handsome profit indeed for you!

Uses of Cottages
Very versatile bit of terraforming, in that it can bring you in raw money if needed (adjust research slider), faster trips down tech-tree lane (again, adjust research slider), or offset city maintenance costs, allowing you to further expand your holdings (invaluable).

Later on in the game, as these "multi-specializing" cities begin to mature, they'll probably grow larger, and use up an increasing number of the workable tiles toward a more "rigid" set of specialization, but in the ancient age, it's much too early for that type of thing, and this setup allows you to reap the benefits of specialization, while preserving the benefits of "switching gears" to meet changing game situations.

More later, time for work!

-=Vel=-

[Cort Haus]

I can't help thinking that commerce is under-valued in that analysis, Vel. I'm not sure that it's less important than food & hammers, with wonders, religions, and other tech-related bonuses at stake. By all means jump on the hammers when a wonder is under construction, but the earlier a cottage is worked, the sooner it becomes a town.

[Arrian]

I still think that the basic truth that food & production trumps commerce (this has, imo, always been the case in civ) holds, just not as much as in past iterations of the game.

It's great to have the ability to build infantry. But you need to be able to actually build 'em! It's nice to be able to build SS parts... but you need to build them to win.

Production and growth are still tops. Those things lead to other things (buildings, troops) that can win the game for you. Cottages are good, mind you, but at first I want farms to grow my city. I will work cottage tiles more once my city is getting close to the health/happy cap. Even then, however, I hate it when I have a city maximized for commerce and an observatory (a relatively cheap build) takes 15+ turns to build!

-Arrian

[Velociryx]

I agree with that assessment. Early on, all I want are hammers and food. Usually I've got more to build than I can say grace over anyway, so all the new tech I *could* be getting via commerce is going to be wasted until I can turn it into a tangible good.

Once I'm set up, you'd better believe I"m gonna run some serious commerce (and in fact, I am tending toward setting commerce cities up such that they are about the only ones I allow to "grow like weeds" (typically, if I declare a city a commerce city, I'll let it keep growing indefinitely, and any tile that makes 2+ food will get a cottage instead of a farm, but that's just me).

-=Vel=-

[Arrian]

I'm still strugging with specializing commerce cities. You want 'em big. Ok, that means you must build at least some health & happiness buildings (temple + market for happy, granary + either harbor or aqua for health). You want to maximize their commercial output. Ok, that means libraries, observatories, unis... maybe markets (if not already built for happy benifit) if you're running more than 20% tax...

If they're coastal, you're gonna want lighthouse + harbor (if not already built for health benifit).

Looking up at that... it's quite a list of builds. For a city specialized for commerce, that's going to take a long time!

-Arrian

[Cort Haus]

I like to grow fast early too, but I said what I did because I suspect I've been generally over-emphasising food & hammers. In my games, I keep finding that Civs with half my pop or cities can still out-research me in the late game, and that's only on Prince, with all the science improvements, plus some wonders & specialists.

Sure, hammers are needed to build Infantry that's been researched, but cash can upgrade your Rifles to Inf. Also Great People, free techs are all rewards from a tech lead.

It is difficult to get all the builds into a commerce city with few hammers, but it takes a long time to grow a hammerless, foodless tile into a town. A tricky balance that so far the AI must be doing a better job at than me, as I need to be twice the AI size in some cases to stay level - and that's only at a medium difficulty.

[Arrian]

The AI is a cottage spammer, which is why they can hang with you. The thing is, though, if you're even in tech and ahead in production, you can out-produce them and do bad things to 'em.

I often check the F11 (?) screen and have a look at the graph. So far in my CivIV career, I'm typically about even in GNP (perhaps #2) and food output (until I hit biology and shoot ahead) but I'm WAY ahead in MFG... and way behind in military power. That last bit, however, can change in a hurry.

-Arrian