what can I do in this situation?

[guermantes]

Hello all,

I am playing at Warlord for the first time and for a while there I was doing fine I thought. But suddenly my capital has at BC150 started to have bad health and be too crowded resulting in 3 workers on strike.

I cannot pop rush because have have not enough citizens for that. And I don't really see what I can do in this situation to counter these 2 bad trends in my capital.

Am I in a bad position in relation to resources or have I just played my cards badly or am I overlooking something. (I have not been playing for a couple of months now so I am a bit rusty).

Could my problems be related to the workers having been automated the whole game? (I haven't learnt to micromanage)

Instead of trying to describe my city configuration and give an inventory of my techs and resources, I uploaded a savegame of my current plight in case some kind soul would not mind having a quick glance at it and recommend a strategy to deal with my problems.

Thanks a lot for any suggestions.

[SandMonkey]

Technology:Head for Monarchy for Hereditary Rule civic(happiness from units in cities)

As for your overgrown capaital: I would switch off all of that food production. Why do you need any more citizens? Each additional citizen takes up +2 food, +1 unhealthy, +1 unhappy. Instead, I would say you should switch all of the citizens to working cottages and shield-rich spaces.

And that brings up a good point: Why don't you have any cottages around your capital? You have a few plains squares that are just ripe for them. They generate tons of commerce by the end of the game, and makes your capital much more productive. Farms are really great, and I see you put them on a lot of Flood Plains squares. While they are really useful with farms, Flood Plains become gold mines if you build cottages instead.

[CerberusIV]

As SandMonkey has said, floodplains should get cottages not farms. DO NOT run automated workers - all that achieves is to drag you down to the level of the AI civs. Learn to manage workers in the early game or you will struggle.

So take control of the workers and get cottages on those floodplains. Farm all the plains tiles next to rivers as that maintains population and gives a hammer and a commerce per tile. They will produce more food later in the game (with Biology) when you will have higher health and happiness levels from buildings to support the extra population. Think about where you will start to chain farms once you research Civil Service (you will need to chain farms across to the city west of your capital).

The quick fix for your capital is to insert a library into the build queue ahead of Pyramids (Ctrl and click on library to insert) and then rush it immediately. This will take 4 pop but 3 of them aren't working anyway. Once you have a library you can force some of the city population to be scientists generating useful research rather than farmers producing unneeded food.

If you manage your own workers you only need one per two cities. There is enough room for about ten cities in total on your bit of land so you don't need any more workers.

You should consider 2 or 3 Axemen. The Inca don't like you and may eventually pay a visit. Even if they don't barbarian axemen will appear from the fog and Jaguars and Archers will struggle.

Research - you omitted Meditation. Monasteries are great for cheap culture and science. In the long term you will want to spread both your religions to all your cities to benefit from going Free Religion and in the short term for the happiness and culture from temples.

Research Code of Laws, not Mathematics as you need to think about getting courthouses up soon to avoid economic collapse from building later cities. It is too early for Construction as you aren't producing the hammers to build War Elephants yet. That, and Calendar, can come after Meditation, CoL and Mathematics/Currency.

Hope this helps.

[MilesGregarius]

I second what CerberusIV said about dropping a library ahead of the Pyramids in the construction queue and pop-rushing it. This will clean up the health problem entirely and even out your happiness.

However, if you don't stop working the farm tiles, your happiness problems will come right back. Fortunately, you can kill three birds with one stone: slow down population growth, speed up construction of the Pyramids, and speed up research on Monarchy.

Convert one citizen into a priest; this will get you an extra hammer and start generating GPP to get you a prophet to build either a Hindu or Jewish shrine.

Switch two citizens to 1 food/2 hammer tiles. Along with the priest's hammer, this will cut Pyramid construction time in half.

Leave one citizen as a simple citizen specialist this turn and convert him to a scientist once the library is up and running.

Finally, research Monarchy next. With the extra beakers from the scientist, and the library beaker bonus, you should be able to switch to Hereditary Rule before your population increases again. Once you do, just keep the city well garrisoned and you'll have no more grumpy citizens.

[Nacht]

Automating workers is almost as bad as building an obelisk at 4000 BC in your first city

At warlord you could get away with it probably.

[guermantes]

Thanks all 4 of you!

[Gasping for air] Jesus, there are so many things to think of in this game!

I see I need to stop automating my workers and get down to the nitty gritty of micro management, and also start learning a bit more how (and why) to run my cities (what you say about producing too much food I can see in retrospect, but wouldn't have been able to spot myself).

Cerberus:
"If you manage your own workers you only need one per two cities. There is enough room for about ten cities in total on your bit of land so you don't need any more workers."

Is this applicable generally, or just in my current case? I tend to have at least 3 workers per city since I thought that was a way of improving the cities fast and thus grow and thus expand my reach and be powerful in relation to my neighbours. I have never really been able to get my head around this thing about "growing too fast".

[Nacht]

3 workers per city is definitely too much. I say 1 per city. Generally if you feel you need more workers (that is there are tiles being worked that are unimproved, or too many specialists assigned) make more.

Also there are times in civ 4 when you need more workers. I generally have workers that have nothing to do just before replacable parts and too few after railroad and then again too many when those railroads are in place.

[CerberusIV]

The bit about workers is really about how fast you can expand. The cost of additional cities isn't too great on warlord but starts to be a factor as you move up to noble and prince (that's why I suggest working getting CoL into your research strategy now - rather than learn bad habits and neglect things on the easy levels).

I usually produce one worker per city for my first 3 cities and then add more to keep a worker per 2 cities as I expand (I play at prince at the moment). There is no point in improving every tile within the city radius straight away as there isn't enough population to work them all, especially as it is a good idea to make some of the citizens into specialists (priests, scientists, etc) for science, hammers and getting Great People. This also helps avoid unhappy or unhealthy citizens.

You only need one worker to improve 6 or 7 tiles to work then road to the next city and repeat. Also workers cost unit support and that is money you may need later in the game so having them stand around idle doesn't pay.

As you are at warlord and your current game has some jungle to clear then 2 workers for 3 cities would IMO be about right.

My comment about chaining farms was because I noticed the AI has cottaged a plains tile you will need to turn into a farm later. This is a bad idea partly because it wastes worker time and partly because the city may work that tile into a town rather than use one that you can afford to leave as a cottage. That is the sort of issue you need to micromanage yourself.

[guermantes]

Thanks a lot !
I will work on getting rid of my bad habits. :-)

[SandMonkey]

Originally posted by guermantes
I see I need to stop automating my workers and get down to the nitty gritty of micro management

One tip i always like to pass on, even though it's an in-game tip:

When a worker is active, if you hold shift you can chain together worker's actions. That way you can tell a worker to build a cottage/build road/move to a new square/build mine/build road, etc. This really cuts down on micromanagement since you're only telling your workers what to do every 10 or 20 turns, and you get exactly what you want - no more waiting for the bonehead automated worker to screw things up!

[Urban Ranger]

Re: what can I do in this situation?

Originally posted by guermantes
I am playing at Warlord for the first time and for a while there I was doing fine I thought. But suddenly my capital has at BC150 started to have bad health and be too crowded resulting in 3 workers on strike.

I won't worry about it. I often have one or two unhealthy pop plus one or two unhappy pop until I really get to develop all the necessary resources. That's usually after Calendar.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by CerberusIV
As SandMonkey has said, floodplains should get cottages not farms.

It depends. Farmed flood plain tiles produce at least 4f, which supports a specialist or a pop working a plains hills gold mine (say).