I agree, I can run 4 instances of EVE Online and surf the internet on mine [and drive 2 monitors] and about 1300 or so it starts going slow, and about 1500 the textures off the main view are kludgy, and I get the red and white checkerboard. Something is a bit whacked.
Yeah, they must add the CS food to the centre tile then. It’s odd that they’re not counting the centre tile in the food though. I’m pretty sure they do for me.
I was pleasantly surprised with the way the demo ran on my (min spec) machine. The full game ran just as well as the demo. It does take a while between turns on decent sized maps in late game though. Same thing happened to me on Civ4 and I really appreciated the faster turns when I eventualy got around to upgrading my pc! 
Well, I tried to start a game last night, but I think I did badly at the start and decided to scrap it until I could actually devote some time to it.
Its my understanding that huge, sprawling REXing empires are not the way this game works, which is fine…I just have to get used to that. I think I’m also a bit thrown by the pace. Going from 4000 BC to 0 AD seems to take a longer time and that keeps making me worry about my progression. Especially when I get messages that “unmet player has reached the classical age” and I’m still working on Bronze working.
I don’t quite understand the city states either. Can more than one civ be protecting them? Because I’ve pledged to protect one only to find that the AI does so a bit later. Does that mean I’m no longer protecting them? At what point do they start giving you stuff?
Heres how I usually start out.
As America, warlord difficulty (I’m not a hard core player, obviously) standard map:
- Found Washington
- Send my warrior out to scout out the area. Start building a scout in the capitol. I’ll research whatever seems to fit the area. If I’m near a herd of animals its animal husbandry. If I’m near a resource, mining, etc. Though I’ve begun going right to archery in my last attempt, figuring I can’t really exploit the resource yet.
- When scout is built, send him out, bring warrior as close as possible to home while exploring still. Start building another warrior or archer for defense. The first warrior will escort the settler I’ll build next to found a new city.
- Heres where I get confused on what to build next…a settler or worker. I usually build the worker so he can start improvements.
I don’t get much further than that, but it is usually because of time. I’m trying to get a feel for the flow of the game, but I haven’t yet. Any advice would be welcome. I’m not even sure how many units to have for defense. 1 per city?
If you are friends or allied with them, they give you food (maritime), culture (cultured) or units (military). Protecting doesn’t change whether they give you stuff or not, its the gifts of gold and doing what the city states want that boosts your standing with them.
Roughly 1 unit per city is fine in the early game. There’s no need to build tons of settlers right off the bat though. You should build monuments in the cities at some point so their borders will grow and you get some culture to buy policies with. Workers cost quite a bit of gold to upkeep so I usually only have 2-3 of them.
The game changes quite a bit after the initial slow start, so IMO you should just keep on playing a game past 0 AD to see what happens next. The computer AI is rather poor so even if you get into a war against a bigger army you can usually defend your cities as long as there’s no huge tech gap.
Can you screenshot the miscounting of food? All of my stuff is counted just fine.
You get benefits if you are their friend, and more benefits when you become an ally. More than one Civ can be friends with a City-State and everyone gets the friend benefits. However, if two have ally worthy statuses, only the one with the most points gets to be the Ally. When they ally you they declare war on whoever you are at war with, so it makes sense that they can’t ally two Civs. Pledging to protect doesn’t make them like you anymore, it’s just makes the Civs less likely to attack them.
I always, always, always make a Worker first. The difference between working improved tiles (even lambda, resource free tiles) and rough terrain is just too great to pass up. Chopping forests for prod is a nice plus as well, although not as crucial as it was in Civ 4. Still, farming earlier means more pop, which means more science, which means more useable tiles and tech. It also means faster settlers since those treat food as hammers. Also, before a city gets at least one mined hill or mineral resource its regular production is laughably slow.
So, worker, warrior or two (depending on the apparent size of the continent, how close the neighbours are etc…) then worker+settler - I want my fledgling cities to work improved tiles right off the bat too.
Scouts are entirely worthless. Warriors move just as fast in all but one situation : gigantic forests. Otherwise, they can just move one space into a plain, and the second into a difficult terrain (hill, marsh…) and reap the same benefit as treating all terrain as 1 move. And they can clear out barb villages on top of that, which scouts decidedly cannot.
That used to be my mantra too, however, in Civ V I can’t hate on scouts. An early scout grabs you an extra 15 gp’s for every minor Civ you discover first, those natural wonders net you 1 happiness each just for finding them and that helps a lot with early growth too.
An early warrior gets you two, which is enough to start busting up barbarian encampments for profit and other Civ’s captured workers, especially if your German.
I kinda miss roaming animals, though I do really like the ability to get back your kidnapped settler.
I’ve noticed that if I automate my workers they will sometimes completely screw up a city, especially later in the game. I kept wondering why some of my cities would suddenly be starving until I realized that, for some reason the workers had trashed the farms and kept trying to build trading posts everywhere. 
-XT
Worker automation is always terrible in every Civ game.
My ideal worker interface would be the ability to draw where you want all your future improvements; trading posts here and here, farms here and here, mines here and here, put a lumbermill here when we learn the tech, roads from here to there; and the automated workers would try to build those improvements in the most efficient order possible. So, a little like an order queue, but without a predetermined order, and the orders aren’t tied to any worker in particular.
Meh. 15 gold isn’t really worth crippling my early growth for. Even a lowly scout is worth what, 270 gold to rush buy ? Not to mention the upkeep hike. 15 gold is like one turn worth of city production. A farm 30 to 50 turns earlier (I usually play Epic or Marathon speed) is definitely worth that much.
The goody ruins are nice enough I suppose, and there is certainly an opportunity cost there by building a worker first, but I reckon (rightly or wrongly) that the AI “cheats” there and homes in on them, so I’m not all that likely to get a fat load of them with a second explo unit anyway. The natural wonder happy is overshadowed by the 5 happy you get by farming your first luxury (be it through calendar or mining), and AFAIK you don’t have to be the first to discover the wonder to get the bonus so there’s no rush.
I do sort of miss animals too, although stupidly losing a settler to a bear squad out of fucking nowhere always was an instant restart then and there 
Cripple nothing, it usually takes 5 turns to build a scout and 18 to build a worker. If you built an early worker how long will it still take to produce that hexes development? How long will it wait until you have the technology to do it anyway? How useless is it’s ability to establish an expensive road network to nowhere yet?
I’m not even sure monuments aren’t a good first build.
ETA: Though I’ll grant you Epic or Marathon speed makes workers a better purchase.
Doesn’t matter either way. Assuming that with whatever tiles you’ve got mean a scout is 5 turns and a worker 30, building a worker is still better - because factoring out pop growth (which applies evenly to worker or scout/warrior builds) you can build 100 scouts, and a worker will still take 30 turns to make, whereas building the worker first means the scout may take only 4 turns, or you get roads two or three turns earlier because your city popped a few turns faster.
Monuments are iffy. If they definitely could let you use a resource tile instead of a generic tile in a timely fashion, maybe they’d be worth it, I haven’t done the math. They don’t seem to to me, at this point (I’ll have to wait until my fucked up computer works again to test it out). Then again, capitals very rarely start without at least one special tile in their [del]fat cross[/del]fat hex, and considering how long it takes for culture to flip tiles early on for anyone not French I’m really not sure the one or three turns you gain on that one tile is a significant benefit. Unless there’s another civ angling on it already, in which case you’re going to buy it anyway…
Build a worker first and he’s barbarian chow; build a scout first and you know what’s out there.
The value of a scout on first build is just immense. A worker can’t do a heck of a lot to start, so what benefit they’re conferring in those first few turns I cannot imagine. Scouts deliver immediate intelligence and financial benefits - and it’s worth noting the benefits they deliver are denied to your opponents.
this. scouts first for map dominance
I usually do scout, worker, settler, settler, while my warrior makes a scouting loop, so it’s back to the city when the settler is spawning. The scout will give you 30g for first discoveries of city states, while the other civs will only get 15g. The free movement through anything does really make a huge difference in scouting faster too. It’s not just forest, but also free movement through hills, jungle and rivers. Scouting out the best places for your 2nd and 3rd city is quite important too. A scout can also get you free workers from city states.
Scout first also makes a huge difference in getting to ancient ruins before the enemy. Getting a technology from a ruin is a huge advantage in the early game. Getting gold, culture, or population for a city is great too. The AI doesn’t seem to cheat with ruins as far as I can tell, but it gets several free scouting units at the start on the higher difficulties. There are also some odd glitches in the AI. At Immortal difficulty I’ve had the AI ignore city ruins that were directly in front of their scout a few times. A scout that gets a ruin upgrade will become an archer that still has the free movement upgrade. The archer will keep it through all further upgrades too.
Well, I found out you can do a cultural victory with 6 cities, at least on warlord, if you maximize culture at every opportunity. By the end I was pumping out 642 culture per turn. Took me 381 turns (1961 at normal pace). I was so powerful and ahead of everyone that I could’ve won any sort of victory easily
My capital is bad ass. Size 42 and still growing, it has 23 wonders built (I would’ve had more except I had to put at least 1 wonder per city to get the cultural bonus from one of the policies), puts out (non-golden-age) 149 production, 252 science, 104 gold, and 203 culture per turn. It also generates 41 great artist points, 23 great scientist, 25 great merchant, and 25 great engineer points.
Anyone else have a city better than that?
Still on the demo - I’ve managed to control my impulses so far. 
Anyone know of a decent set of criteria for city placement? I can do CivIV placement in my sleep but I don’t have a decent grasp of tile values + future buildings to guide me yet.
I tried the scout/worker/settler thing, and it seems to work out well. Of course I’ve not made it to AD yet, but I’m largely trying to understand the game right now. What does a pact of secrecy do? Several AIs ask me to enter one, and it says will not cause me to declare war, but I don’t know what it does exactly?
One thing I’ve noticed…the AI still tries to screw me. They’ll complain if I found a city “too close” to them, but if I demand they don’t do that to me, they respond with “How dare you!”. (iroquis). What I found odd is that they plopped it right next to my capitol, a fair chunk from their own capitol when there was plently of open space on the map for them to build elsewhere and with similar resources!
I kind of like the fct that you don’t need a buttload of units at least in the early game, as it makes it easier (for me at least) to keep track of what is going on. I just wish it didn’t take so friggin’ long to build workers at the start. I must be doing something wrong. Everyone reaches the classical era before I do and Bismark had 2 cities and about 4 warrior units that I could see running around. His 2nd city was size 5 while my capitol was still 4 and my 2nd city was 2. At least I figured out that claiming happiness resources is a big help. I was at happiness 3 or so and when I claimed a gold mine it went to 10. I guess in my next attempt I’ll have to concentrate on that and plan a 3rd city sooner. I just didn’t want to cripple myself with expanding too rapidly…especially if I didn’t have enough units to defend new cities.