what do I do now?

[Cyrus The Mike]

now... I've been trying to play noble ever since I started playing multy. and I just can't get the hang of it. I never get the resorses I need (and I mean never) and by the time I hit the late medevil era I'm behind by at least 5 techsI've never acctually finnished a game.

can I get a some help so that I can at least start a war when I want too (and It still have a chance)

[Blake]

It's likely your expansion strategy. If you "never" get the resources you need, that suggests you "always" use a slow opening.

Get a worker quickly (with the required techs for improvements)
Get a second worker quickly! Usually before your second city, but sometimes after - but never go for a prolonged period with fewer workers than cities! You want a minimum of 1.5 workers per city throughout much of the game! (for average game settings)
Get your second city as soon as possible, because double the cities means double the production.

Remember:
Workers, settler, units.
You don't really need to build anything else, except the essential infrastructure like Granaries, Monuments (maybe), Lighthouses and the odd barracks.

Only build other stuff when you run out of room to expand, or when your economy really can't take another city.

Also once all the good spots are taken, start building cities in the marginal spots (basically anything with at least 5 green tiles, or a food bonus). But don't do this as aggressively as expansion, if you're above 50% science you can probably afford to add marginal cities (every additional city adds upkeep to all cities, so courthouses in your mature cities enable you to found new marginal cities without suffering such an upkeep hit).
If you're conquering a lot you don't need to bother founding the marginal cities, although it doesn't hurt to, they do pay off quite well.

[Rockoon]

Multy as in multiplayer? anyways...

My advice is city specialization..

..and that, as has already been recommended, requires workers.

Workers are the foundation of just about every strategy (there are a few One City Challenge strategies that dont require workers unil the late game) ..be it founding your own empire.. or capturing someone elses..

A size 3 city working improved tiles is better than a size 6 city working unimproved tiles.. the only exception to this is a city on the coast with a lighthouse in the hands of a financial civ.. who can get 2 food 3 commerce out of every coastal tile.. (I do recommend playing financial civs until you learn the ropes)

If you really want multi-player advice then its a whole new ballgame.. research bronze working ASAP and then found your second city right on top of copper..

[Cyrus The Mike]

thoes seem... odd... how does 60% science help when even in my last game I kept it upbove 80%? and as to the resorses... I'll need Iron and it'll be across the continent 3 squares away from a rival civilisation's capital

I do use workers. I usually have 3. Maybe its true that I don't use enough workers but how does that help my war?

( prepare for rant ) Why is it that every time I start a war the enemy has my entire army in one city???( rant over )

I'm sorry for being like this but it doesn't seem like it'll help

[Rockoon]

Originally posted by Cyrus The Mike
thoes seem... odd... how does 60% science help when even in my last game I kept it upbove 80%? and as to the resorses... I'll need Iron and it'll be across the continent 3 squares away from a rival civilisation's capital

I do use workers. I usually have 3. Maybe its true that I don't use enough workers but how does that help my war?

( prepare for rant ) Why is it that every time I start a war the enemy has my entire army in one city???( rant over )

The % isnt equal to .

Keeping it above 80% is probably a sign that you have not expanded your empire fast enough. With expansion comes upkeep costs and those costs force you to lower your slider. Never-the-less, you will be producing more real per turn empire-wide, and that is the bottom line.

A good way to produce early research is libraries and allocating scientist specialists in cities with libraries. These specialists produce that goes uneffected by the science slider.

As far as Iron.. you dont need Iron to go to war. Whats wrong with some combination of axemen, horsearchers, elephants, catapults, and longbows? (several of these require no resources at all and can be used all by themselves)

[Blake]

Okay, what's the most important build in the game?

It's workers. The workers form the foundation of your empire. Even cities exist primarily to give workers something to improve.

A comparison is valid.
A library costs 90h and provides +25% science and +2 culture. We'll say that the culture is useful, and you pay 60h for the +25% science, just to simplify things.
A worker costs 60h and improves a plot every 4-8 turns.

Lets say, you have a second city it's early in the game and the city is producing 8 raw beakers, it's probably working a gold mine or something. The library's +25%, will result in +2 beakers, this number will increase slowly over the game...

Now look at the effect of a worker. For arguments sake, we'll say the worker is on a football field (ie a large expanse of grasslands) and is walking along plopping down a cottage every 5 turns.

Turn 5: +1 (1 cottage)
Turn 10: +2 (2 cottages)
Turn 15: +4 (2 cottages, 1 hamlet)
Turn 20: +6 (2 cottages, 2 hamlets)
Turn 25: +8 (2 cottages, 3 hamlets)
Turn 30: +10 (2 cottages, 4 hamlets)
Turn 35: +13 (2 cottages, 4 hamlets, 1 village)
Turn 40: +16 (2 cottages, 4 hamlets, 2 villages) (Financial would be +22)

The worker, so far, has actually only improved 8 plots, that's not that many. Workers are not that land intensive.

Now for the yield. After 10 turns, the worker has caught up to the Library. At 40 turns, the worker is generating as much commerce as a Library operating on 64 raw commerce, which is an early industrial era commerce figure! And that worker is only just getting started! He's got a whole game of terrain improvement ahead of him!

Workers, improving plots which will be worked, have an incredibly high yield! It's MUCH higher than buildings. The return on investment is extremely high!

Workers are such a good investment, that not only should you be training them as long as your improvement lags being your city growth, you should also claim more land as quickly as possible such that they'll have more plots to improve! More cities working more plots, is more useful than fewer cities with better infrastructure.

The only real reason to stop spamming workers is because they've caught up with city growth. Even a bankrupt economy is not a good reason, because it only takes 5 turns for the worker to lay down a cottage and be paying his upkeep. But with a bankrupt economy you probably do want to be getting some courthouses and marketplaces where they'll do the most good.

You need A LOT of workers. As I said in my previous post, 1.5 per city is a minimum. On maps with jungle you can require 2 per city or even more. You generally want your workers to be coming out before the city needs them - where possible, a city should be founded and already have a plot improved (ie if your capital border expansions have brought a corn tile into range...), cities, when they grow, should have an improved tile waiting for them and should never be working unimproved tiles. Cities which are working unimproved tiles, should have workers whipped out, or the growth should be stalled training workers.

In reality the AI tends to expand fast enough that you need to get out settlers earlier than is ideal. Getting enough workers to keep up can be difficult, I suggest:

The BARE MINIMUM is 1 worker per city. If you fall below this count, you're severely hurting your game and need to boom workers to catch up.

Ie: If you choose to go go with a settler before your second worker, you'll then have 2 cities and only 1 worker - you should pump out 2 workers (one from each city) so you're at 1.5 workers per city and they can "catch up" to the bare minimum improvement rate.

Always make sure to have that minimum of 1 worker per city, at least on average.

OPTIMALLY, you want at least 2 workers per city, as long as work lags behind growth.

You can compromise on this in the name of beating the AI to city sites, or claiming particularly good city sites which bring nice bonus plots into your empire.

It's BETTER to have too many workers, which run out of things to do and sit idle, than too few workers, which ends up with cities which are perpetually under-improved.

When a city grows, there should be an improved plot waiting for the growth. When a city is founded, it should have a pre-improved plot if doing so is possible. The quicker you have every population on improved plots, the better. A worker surplus does mean that you'll have workers sitting around idle for periods of the game, but the larger worker stockpile also means you can implement new improvement technologies (like Windmills, Watermills, Lumbermills, Railroads etc) more quickly.
And while there is such a thing as too many workers, it's far better to have too many than too few!

Being a good CIV player, basically involves focusing on workers, settlers and units, and only building wonders and buildings when it's extremely justified to do so. This is simply because workers are the best investment in the game, and settlers let you employ more workers, and units let you keep your investment (or make it larger at the expense of others).

[snoopy369]

The above post is basically 100% true, and leads to in my opinion this suggestion for Civ5:

Instead of (most) buildings providing bonuses to commerce, the buildings should provide the possibility of commerce.

Libraries, albeit one of the more productive buildings in the game with a high tech rate, are still only worth building well after units and workers, unless you need the culture (and then a monument is generally better).

Thus, the successful player generally does not build them, or any other commerce building, unless there is literally nothing else to build (already built more useful buildings, have enough workers out to ensure every productive square is improved and then some, have as many cities as you can reasonably build in the area you have, and have as many military units as you can afford to maintain [and do not have an effective war to pursue].

I consider this a problem in the game. Civ is about empire building, not land management. Workers should be AN important element of the game, but not THE game. To fix this, my solution is to require certain buildings in order to gain commerce. Without those buildings, your commerce goes unused, or at minimum is heavily penalized.

For example, you can build a Library in order to build 10 science points. The library does not grant you those science points, but with the library you may use up to 10 commerce points on science. A market allows the same 10 commerce points to be turned into gold.

Of course you'd probably need some 'early' buildings that allow small amounts of commerce; maybe a town center (built automatically upon city building) allowing 2/2/2/2 (sci/gold/cult/esp), increasing sizes of town center that increase along with the city size (similar to cottage/hamlet/village/town); palace gives some also, maybe 4/4/8/8 or something.

This ultimately will make buildings much more important, and is actually fairly similar to the GS strategy in basic concept [you have to build GS buildings like libraries in order to make science]. It forces buildings to be relevant, is realistic for all that's worth, and gives a bit more advantage to builders.

The other potential modification is eliminating the % slider and making it entirely building related. Basically, if you have a library and a market, then 10 commerce gives you a certain benefit to science and a certain benefit to gold. You could either make them operate both on the 'net' commerce amount (meaning a city with only a library gets less net gain than a city with both market and library), or have them split the pot so to speak. The former advantages players who build up large cities with many buildings; the latter advantages players who build only one type of building per city [as multipliers then increase].

[LzPrst]

interesting ideas snoopy. and while we're at it, I would suggest adding a quantification system to resources. as well as the possibility to spread certain resources like horses, grains and similar. and a system for trading said resources. and using them. anyone on the civ5 team yet?

[snoopy369]

Um... quantification for resources is effectively there for corporations; I don't think it's a good idea for the regular game (and this was discussed ad nauseum in the civ4 list). Spreading resources is interesting but ultimately imbalancing (the more of any given resource you have in the game, the weaker its bonus to the tile it's on must be). To be honest, resources in Civ4 are already probably too important to the game... adding more is probably not good for game balance.

[Cyrus The Mike]

wow, I had no Idea I was so off. Thanks guys I'm pretty shure I get it now. expancion first, then work on improving reserch %. more workers (I've been scolded on that before) so... thanks

[Dominae]

Superb post Blake!

In reality the AI tends to expand fast enough that you need to get out settlers earlier than is ideal. Getting enough workers to keep up can be difficult, I suggest:

Sometimes it also makes sense to engage in heavy expansion yourself at the expense of tile improvements; lots of Settlers, not so many Workers . This is especially potent when you're Creative or Imperialistic, or decided to grab Stonehenge. In this case what I tend to do is set the first build in every new city to a Worker. The first Worker is then tasked to improve whatever tile is around with the highest yield (techs allowing) - usually a Food resource, but I'm nore than happy to use a Gold in this situation too (since the city is not growing). Most cities then proceed to a second Worker, which comes out a lot faster when that first improved tile comes online. This set of early Workers either builds Roads to new city-sites, or focuses on other tiles improvements around special cities (like a military pump).

While this breaks the "every pop point should work an improved tile" rule (which I generally agree with), the inefficiency is more than made up for by the rapid expansion.

It's not always ideal to grow your cities to their Health/Happy caps as fast as possible.

[Arrian]

The other option, of course, is to build a small core of cities, a good number of workers, and then leverage that developed core into military to go bonk some heads - essentially allowing the AI to build your cities for you. If you have barbs on, the empty land will also spawn barb cities you can capture.

It all depends, of course, on who you are, who your neighbors are (and indeed whether or not you have any!), what the resource distribution is, etc.

As for workers, sometimes what I do is build workers after I've whipped a city. The worker build stalls city growth and gets you through (some of) the whip anger. The two things seem to go hand-in-hand. Even so, I think I need to build more workers in the early game. I definitely have periods where multiple cities are working at least some unimproved tiles.

-Arrian

[Rockoon]

Originally posted by snoopy369

Instead of (most) buildings providing bonuses to commerce, the buildings should provide the possibility of commerce.

I cannot agree. We already have improvements that only generate 'potential' benefits .. they are called tile improvements .. farms, cottages, mines, workshops, ...

If anything.. city buildings should also need to be put on tiles..

[SpencerH]

I didnt notice a bug thread so I'll post my observation about workers here. After my empire is reasonably sized I tend to automate my workers. What I've noticed in two games is that some of the automated workers seem to become defective ie I will find them sitting in a city despite that there is work to do. I noticed it after acquiring railroads and I realized that there should be more guys out there connecting up cities.

[ben04]

There is already a limit provided by buildings. It's called happiness. Well it would be if resource happiness wasn't so cheap.

Also there are alternative strategies to settler spam. A very effective one is immortal spam. Why found cities and use up all the room when you can just go and conquer them and fill up the land afterwards? 1 settler = 4 immortals = at least one city taken + several workers captured