A failed over-expansion

[zeace]

I thought I'd relate a tale of a horrible over-expansion I played last night. I was playing a continent, prince, Cathrine, marathon game. I've just recently moved to prince, and you'll see I'm still struggling with it.

I started with a moderately poor capital (cows and rice) and decided to expand early. I started researching BW and building scouts until I hit size 2, and then built a settler.

I got BW just before the settler built, but finding no copper within reach, I decided to try AH. The settler went to a nice city site near the capital with lots of river floodplains and some pigs. The capital started on a worker and I swithed to slavery.

During this time, I popped the wheel and lots of gold. I also found two more great city sites that would probably get taken if I didn't grab them early.

AH finishes, and there's no horses. So I decided to press my luck and go for Iron Working. I figure since I won't have anything good to build for a while, I should build two settlers and take the two sites. I'll also need lots of workers to keep everything connected. So for a while that's what I built.

I got cities 3 and 4 built, and with nothing else to build, made nice barracks in all my cities. I finish IW research and find iron beside my capital. Yay! I start reasearching Agriculture as many of my cities can use it for specials. Everyone starts building Axes and Swords, and I pick my target: Roosevelt.

Around this time my economy starts failing me. My research is terrible, but with all the gold my scouts had found, I wasn't too concerned. I start researching Writing so I can get some libraries going.

My war machine was unstoppable, and the constant income of war spoils kept masking my underlying economic woes. It wasn't until I had nearly finished the Americans and started building libraries that my problem became apparent. With fewer new units coming to the war machine, I couldn't keep the spoils coming. I even started a war with Saladin just for the income, but eventually the causualties ended my war.

I took a step back and decided to do everything I could to save my economy. As I checked my cities, to my horror I found that my maximum gold I could make from working squares was 7. And that was with 8 cities! I had failed to research pottery, or even fishing. No markets or temples meant no specialists. None of my cities had gold specials I could use before calendar. The only squares that produced any income at all were river squares, and those were rare. My research was so bad that I couldn't even research fishing for over 30 turns. All I could build were units that would immediately go on strike and disband, or libraries to enhance my no-research per turn.

I ended up with un-garrisoned cities and workers building useless mines and farms, and still losing money. Eventually Saladin decided to return the favour, and took 3 cities without a fight. My economy recovered, and I finally learned fishing, but it was too late to stop the advancing hordes.


Chalk up a lesson learned: Research pottery, or at least fishing, BEFORE you drive your economy into the ground.

[LDiCesare]

What map size were you playing? I usually won't build my fourth city until quite late in the game, and definitely not before I have spotted specials nearby (barbarian cities tend to spare building settlers for me).
I disagree with 'moderately poor' assessment of the capital. Cow + Rice = Lot's of food + good production = Ripe for slavery.

[Saurus]

I have had my fair share of similar experiences as well. On high difficulties such as on emperor, already your fourth city can sometimes (depending on the cirumstances) hurt your economy so badly that is is impossible to recover if that happens before some key techs are reached. Fishing, Pottery and Writing are the prime techs here of course.

However, since you already had reserached writing, the libraries would have saved you! You don´t need to have a high science-output to benefit. The only thing you need to do is to put 2 citizens into science specialists in each city with a library witch would yeld 7,5 science/turn (6 + 1,25 from library bonus) in each city.
If you would have done so in just one city, the 7,5 beakers/turn would have been enough to get you fishing quickly.

[Cort Haus]

I use libs and scientists to keep the tech rate going while expanding and paying higher maint costs. A GS from the scientists can then build an academy in the capital.

Sailing (for trade routes) can bring in extra gold too if open borders are available and there's no road-route to the neighbours. If you get to Currency you can build wealth with hammers to keep the economy afloat until CoL's courthouses.

[couerdelion]

Re: A failed over-expansion

Originally posted by zeace
I started with a moderately poor capital (cows and rice) and decided to expand early. I started researching BW and building scouts until I hit size 2, and then built a settler.

I got BW just before the settler built, but finding no copper within reach, I decided to try AH. The settler went to a nice city site near the capital with lots of river floodplains and some pigs. The capital started on a worker and I swithed to slavery.

Good idea with the scouts. I tend to hurry the first scout out but then maximise growth. When building settler, do remember to change your population to get high production (using +50%) and I would also be tempted to whip the settler out to get city two working quickly.

As for the financial problems, the issue here is not just pottery (though this is important)

Actually libraries won't help much at this stage because you are not researching anything at 0% science.

With 8 cities you MUST have Code of Laws and build some courthouses.

And I would have considered razing some of those cities you managed to win. Unless you have the ability to build courthouses they will just cost you too much to keep.

[Cort Haus]

Re: Re: A failed over-expansion

Originally posted by couerdelion
Actually libraries won't help much at this stage because you are not researching anything at 0% science.

You can still run scientists, though.

[zeace]

I should have thought of the scientists getting me some science for fishing and/or pottery. That would have been better than sitting there watching all my units decompose... Thanks for the tip Saurus.

Usually I manage to research pottery fairly early, and failing that I'll have fishing. Getting neither was a bit of a shock later, and something I'll definately have to avoid in the future.

As to why I expanded to 4 cities so early... The 3rd and 4th city sites were both so beautiful, I couldn't help myself. Both had lots of food, and would have lots of commerce after fishing and/or calendar. And both close to other civs and would have been taken. I knew it would be bad for my economy to build them, but my scouts had found up so much gold that I figured I could manage until I got them up and running.

I just forgot to get them up and running and built my army instead.

[Rancidlunchmeat]

Forgive me.. but it doesn't seem like your experience or your conclusion match your title.

Did you change your mind about the true cause of your failure while you were writing your recap?

That happens to me alot, I'll think I'm writing about one thing.. and then as I go through exactly what happened, I realize that the cause (subject of post) has changed.

In your case, it doesn't appear to me that over-expansion was the root of your problems. Rather, it merely highlighted/brought to light/aggravated the root of your problems which was a near total neglect for economics based research.

A large part of that neglect due to the vast importance of copper in Civ IV. (I could go on forever about how unbalanced copper is in this game.)

[Addled Platypus]

gota save ?

[Blake]

Yeah.. Libraries really help if your economy goes bust. You can run the Scientists and also generate Great Scientists. In this situation you should always settle them, an Academy will produce at most +3 beakers (50% of the 6b generated by 2 scientist specialists) while a settled GS generates +7b, +1h (the settled GS benefits from the library).

Courthouses aren't nearly as important as some people make out, they are a great boon for Organized but otherwise they are pretty low yield.

The keystone techs for economic recovery are of course Pottery, Writing and Fishing.

Also one final thing, if you overextend yourself and are stuck in the negatives (this shouldn't happen if you can work coast/lakes... but maybe it's highlands or you have a fear of water)... you have too many cities and they increase upkeeps too much. It's best to keep your units because units are more expensive than cities (4 units can take a city...), so what you do is gift your most distant cities to an AI. This has the bonus of +4 in fair trade so you should be relatively safe from attack while rebuilding. The AI will also build stuff for you, the one time I was forced to perform the gift city gambit one of the cities was the Jewish holy city and the AI actually built the shrine for me.

As always in matters of war in CIV, it's better to lose some progress but survive than to be destroyed.

[Tokyo Sexwale]

I really wouldn't know what to do if I didn't build at least 2 or 3 cottages per city early on. Pottery is absolutely key.

Actually, that might be an interesting challenge. Play a game without building any cottages at all. Hmmm... I suppose you'd have to resort to the library / scientist approach, but you might still be in trouble.

[Addled Platypus]

multiple religons goes well for generating money, even if you spread to within your own civ.

If I run with two religons, I try to have to cities cramk out the missionaries to spread my filth and pull in the dough, heck if you get enough of your neighbors cities, they just might convert to your religon...more money....more money

my best was about 25-30 gpt from relgious resources