Noob Seeking Help

[snoopy369]

I wouldn't say "every city should have a food resource", but "every early city should have a food resource". Later on you should build filler cities with the grassland areas and such that are great for cottaging up.

Don't stick to 20-30% for military - you have to be able to modify this number based on the game. Sometimes your strategy is military, so you need more like 50-60% of your core cities producing military; sometimes you have a commerce-oriented, and 20% is fine. If you start next to Tokugawa or Montezuma, add 10% (each). Etc...

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Chopper


When you guys say "chop", do you mean just a "chop", not a "chop & build" e.g. mine on forested hill where worker does a chop first but I think takes longer due to the mine build as well. This may help me understand how to time wonder builds I read in all the other posts. I am just building a mine on a forested hill knowing that I will get the chop bonus through this process.

Chop and Build are separate things done for different reasons. You chop to build a unit/building faster; you mine to get production from the tile. Certainly sometimes you will do both; but you should not USUALLY be doing so (at the same time, anyway). Of course, I will often chop tiles first that I know I'll want to mine... but the chop itself is done for the hammers specifically.

The time should be the same, anyway (you don't get a time bonus AFAIK; for example, it takes 7 turns to chop+mine a hill, but 3 turns to chop, 4 turns to mine, same 7 turns).

Chopping is done to speed up a production, so you would prefer to have it done faster; particularly using it in conjunction with whipping, for example a settler is 100 hammers. 2 quick chops take it to 60 hammers remaining, at which point you can whip it for 2 pop. This is how a size 4 city can still easily produce a 2 turn settler (with 6 workers, of course). Similarly, for your second worker, your first worker should be chopping a forest right away (often the first thing I do); 3 turns later, your city has hopefully contributed 10 hammers/food, and those 30 lets you whip out a settler in one turn, for a total of 4 turns to a worker.

In general, chopping for wonders is not the best use of a chop, except in a few circumstances; very early wonders (Stonehenge, Oracle, primary among them), and key wonders that you know you are competing for (still fairly early on). Most of the time, the chop should be for military units in a rush strategy, or workers/settlers early on, or early buildings (granary, library, theatre, etc. - the core buildings that make a size 1 city quickly become a useful size 8 city).

[Crossfire]

Ok, now a couple tips from a builder.

1. I am almost never even close to even on the power graph until I get to rifles or cavalry. But I maintain enough units to take out a stack or two if the AI does attack. This is a balancing act that you will have to learn. Occasionally I get crushed, but then if I never lost where would the fun be?

2. I play on Emperor or Immortal and I almost never use slavery. I find that I get better overall production by using my workers to work then I do by putting up with all the unhappiness that whipping causes. There are exceptions, but generally I don't really whip. I chop like crazy though, but generally just outside my cultural borders or on tiles that will get improvements later anyway.

3. In that I tend to build fewer units than all these warmongers, I have more turns to build buildings. Even a crappy commerce city does benefit if you add commerce buildings! 100% improvement (market, grocer, bank) in all your cities can mean the difference between 70% research or 80%, and that difference is often enough to win or lose the game. Also, those first two buildings generally add happy and healthy bonuses which let you work even more tiles.

4. When you do go to war, take plenty of units that can bombard city defenses away and take the units in that city down in health. And plan on always taking a city in 1 turn (except for the bombardment) so that there are no units that survive your attack that can get upgraded and become even harder to kill.

5. Courthouses are one of the most important buildings you can build and are the main reason to research Code of Laws fairly early. They cut your city maintenance in half! And the more cities you build, the more effect this has. I find that on a standard map with the normal number if civs, I want at least 10-12 cities that I settled. If you figure that each of those cities has 6 maintenance and you cut that in half you now have 30+ more gold to spend.

[DaveV]

Originally posted by Diadem
Why do people always insist in building the heroic epic in their city with the most hammers? What a waste! I'd build West point there! Probably combined with Red Cross.

Maybe my research path is not optimal, but for me it's a long time between literature and military tradition (and a very long time before medicine). More units right now may help me take an enemy capital that will produce more hammers later for West Point. I stand by building heroic epic in the best city available as soon as it can be built. As for having too many hammers, I play epic, and I can only remember a couple times where I had enough production to be cranking a unit per turn.

Originally posted by snoopy369
Later on you should build filler cities with the grassland areas and such that are great for cottaging up.

My problem with low-food filler cities is that they grow slowly, are terrible at whipping infrastructure, and may end up stealing tiles from mature cities that already have the multplier buildings. I guess a lot depends on how densely you build your cities.

[Supr49er]

Welcome to the Forums Burningbman.

Not much to add to the excellent posts, just wanted to say hi.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by DaveV

My problem with low-food filler cities is that they grow slowly, are terrible at whipping infrastructure, and may end up stealing tiles from mature cities that already have the multplier buildings. I guess a lot depends on how densely you build your cities.

Low food filler cities are never going to 'steal tiles' because you simply don't let them have tiles the larger city wants to use Basically, if you have seven or eight grassland tiles in between two or three cities that either aren't in their BFC or are but are not likely to be used (for example, a hammer-city that is using all it ever will need because it's not going to grow any further, or a specialist-city that needs only 8 or 10 food-rich tiles and doesn't need the extra tiles as the rest of the citizens are specialists), you give them to another city, which will never do anything but work 7 cottage tiles - but will generate a net bonus as a result (cost: 6gpt yield: 1+7*5gpt eventually).

Certainly it won't grow quickly, and you shouldn't divert significant resources to helping it, but if you just need 100 hammers to produce 1 settler, and extraneous workers to cottage the tiles, and then beyond that ignore it - that's not so much to ask, is it?

[DaveV]

Originally posted by snoopy369
that's not so much to ask, is it?

Not at all. I actually changed my original post while I was writing it to say "all cities", since I was trying to list a few simple rules that would be easy for a beginner to remember and follow. Cities without food specials should be very rare, or late-game, marginal cities. I messed up several games by building one of my early cities in a spot without enough food.

[snoopy369]

Oh, i'd say all of your early cities, not just one. Any city built before muskets at the very least that doesn't have a food resource is a waste (unless you are constrained by the terrain of course).

[rah]

Unless you need a critical resource. copper, horses, iron or ivory.

[Seedle]

Originally posted by snoopy369
In general, chopping for wonders is not the best use of a chop, except in a few circumstances; very early wonders (Stonehenge, Oracle, primary among them), and key wonders that you know you are competing for (still fairly early on). Most of the time, the chop should be for military units in a rush strategy, or workers/settlers early on, or early buildings (granary, library, theatre, etc. - the core buildings that make a size 1 city quickly become a useful size 8 city).

I actually tend to use my chops for wonders. This is particularly true if you have the resource that doubles production. Getting 100% more hammers for the forest is great. Of course, you still should only build the wonder if you have a strategic use for it. Don't chop wonder a just for the sake of getting the % bonus on the chop. But chopping wonders can give the absolute maximum hammer yield for each forest.

[Burningbman]

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone for posting on my thread, this discussion/debate/cutthroat argument is great to learn from different people with different strategies.

I just won my first game on noble! I played as Montezuma and won a domination victory in 2036 AD in a few minutes over 8 hours.

After looking through the discussions, I came up with more questions if you are kind enough to take some time and address them:

1. It is obvious that autoing workers is a horrible idea, how long do you keep them autoing and what is the deal with chopping (still confused after reading through debates)?

2. To help my domination victory, I had every city pumping out units, is this a bad idea? or is it good to totally submit to warfare?

3. Could you post screenshots or describe town locations that would make good commerce/hammers/great people farms. I have difficulty discerning what a town location will be good for.

4. When it is a good idea to start turning people in to specialists and not worrying about the town getting bonuses from the area around it?

Thanks so much for all your input and helping me win my first noble game!

[Skanky Burns]

And I'd like to thank you, Burningbman. As someone who is soon to play Civ4 for the first time, a discussion such as this is much more useful to me than those aimed at more advanced players.

[rjmatsleepers]

Here is a pretty good science city. (Not BTS - can't remember whether its vanilla or Warlords).



It is in a golden age, so commerce and production are boosted.

RJM

[edit] On reflection, this does not illustrate use of terrain. Most of the commerce is coming from developments such as cottages, buildings, civics and traits. However, I like flood plains - early cottages boost your research, or build farms and they will support a specialist even before biology.

[rjmatsleepers]

Here is a screen shot from my latest game.



I'm no expert, but I would be thinking about a high production city where marked. Farming the grassland will help work the copper once mined. The food special will provide scope for some more mines once the borders expand. And there are two more grassland tiles which can be farmed afte bureaucracy.

RJM

[Diadem]

Well let's count. That wheat there gives you 5 food (irrigated, but on plains) pre biology. The three grasslands can give you 9 food. But you need 4 people to work all those. So that's a 6 food surplus. Add 2 from the city itself and you'll have 8 extra food. That's 8 grassland-mines or 4 plains mines. Looking at the terrain you'll probably end up with 4 grassland-mines and 2 plains mines. So that's 6 mines total, one of them copper.

That's reasonable, but not very good. It would certainly make a good filler-city (a city later in the game when you have a good income, and good techs to make cities effective fast). Post-biology this site becomes very interesting. Pre-biology, and certainly pre civil service, it is pretty sucky.

If there's no better sites around, go for it, of course. But I hope there'll be better.