I play Noble and Prince levels. If it’s me and another civ on an island, they’re going down like a drunk chick at the prom. If it’s a continent I’m stuck on, then the conquer and backfill applies. Choosing a militaristic civ and forgoing all other development in favor of the military is my key. I lose sometimes as well, but it has worked better for me this way. It’s not to say that all civs are going to die. I like to make friends with those on one side of my civ, then crush the other side and make friends with THEIR neighbors. Tends to work out well enough.
Heaven help them if I get a settler from a hut. That is usually the death knell because I can build up the stack to around 12 units much faster.
This is interesting to read: I’m another one who feels he’s not quite gotten the hang of the game. I play on Noble, and I win more often than I lose, but it’s generally in the 1980s or so that I win, which isn’t grand. (I’ve got vanilla Civ IV).
I’m still not clear on the advantage to just 5-6 cities. What kind of victory do you aim for with this small number? If you attack other civs, do you just raze every city you encounter?
There is no long term advantage. The idea is to grow at a controlled rate so that you are not spending a huge percentage of your income on maintenance, not to stay small until the end of the game.
In the early game each city produces only a small amount of gold. As the game progresses and you build gold multiplying buildings, and populations rise and work more tiles, each city can produce more and more gold.
But each city requires X amount of gold per turn in maintainence, after X free cities. Which means in the early game you can easily be bankrupted if you have too many cities, because each additional city after the first 4-6 consumes a lot more gold than it provides. Conquer your bronze-age neighbors and you’ll have to crank your science down to 0%.
In the late game, each city is producing lots and lots of gold, so each extra modern city can more than pay for itself, even if you conquer a dozen or two.
Well, “it depends”. Go by your investment slider. If you’ve got postive cash flow at 80-100% science, then you can afford another city. If you’re dipping below that, then you’re overextended. But the answer then isn’t to give away your cities, but to concentrate on ways to build up your cash flow until your cities become more profitable. The trouble is, in the bronze age there just aren’t very many ways of doing this. In the modern age, there are dozens of ways.
As for fast wins, one way to win at an early date take advantage of the AI bonuses on higher difficulties. You’ve got a handicap in research and so on, so you attack and vassalize your neighbors and make them do the research and you force them to hand it over. But I’ve never been able to make that work. Another way is to play as a pure conquerer. But I like building, so I never do that. I play to “have fun”. For me, winning the game is fun, if it’s too easy it’s not fun but if I constantly get my ass kicked that’s not fun either. The sweet spot is always being just on the verge of not winning, but then pulling out a victory anyway.
Most of the strategy that you have been giving hinges on explicit knowledge of where all the AIs are in comparison. How are you getting this information? Do you have tons of scouts out at all times keeping you updated on a Civs technology and military status? Where do you pool all this info?
There are some good tips on civfanatics.com (particularly in the forums), but two techniques I use:
fast win: Romans, with Praetorians. You need iron for this, so if you don’t find iron within the first two cities, restart. But once you get iron and can build Praetorians (which come very early), grab a 5-stack and head for the nearest enemy city. Even without catapults, a 5-stack can usually handle most enemy cities fairly easily in the early game.
later, but low-stress win: custom game, Always Peace box checked. I used Ramses (which may be Before the Sword content), and build wonder after wonder. Place a couple of new cities strategically so as to block your opponent’s expansion (I typically play Duel, one opponent). When Great People start appearing (and they will often, if you build the right wonders), I have them join the city so they add to production and gold (or science and gold), and I never have to build a cottage. Mix in a market and I’m wallowing in cash. With this approach, I typically get a domination victory around 1800 or so, depending on how well I’ve placed my cities. I usually get one or two enemy cities that have joined my nation.
How can you culture-crush somebody? I experimented with this today on game. I was unhappily squashed onto one tiny and resource-poor end of the continent, and I was had to really fight up my culture to avoid being squashed. I got curious, and popped my culture slider up to 100%. I did start driving the enemy back, but it was very slow. Maybe with another 25 turns I could have taken some cities (following 50 turns of this). This was also after a “Great Artist” bomb.
smiling bandit, I find that on the “always peace” scenarios my capital gets Legendary culture fairly early (maybe 1200AD or so). When I have a choice of buildings and wonders, I focus on those that increase culture first, followed very closely by those that increase Great People.
Be sure to include Temples, Monasteries, and other things that may not explicitly say they increase culture, but do. Also ensure that you change civics when available to those that increase a need stat, such as culture. IIRC, Ramses has a bonus that he does not experience any turns of revolt during a change.
This is for levels up to and including Prince. I’m not smart enough to play higher than that.
How much do you whiz players care about the score? I usually get my ass kicked on Noble, and lately I’ve been watching the scores. It seems like I’m on top of the pile until about Iron Working, then I start to go down, down, down. When I’m 600 points below the next lowest player I usually give up and start a new game.
Should I just push through and persevere? Or is the score an accurate summary of how I’m actually doing?
The score is a very rough indicator; I don’t pay too much attention to it. There are times when I’m the smallest nation with the smallest army, but my army is several ages ahead of everyone else’s (like, I have Riflemen and they still have Longbowmen). But land area, population, and army size all contribute to score, so the computer decides my tech lead doesn’t equal as many points as those other things.
Hmmm…when I find myself low on cash, I research until there is one turn left, and then I drop the science until I’m cash positive and until it takes me two turns to complete research. I usually remain cash flush (or cash flush enough). This doesn’t always happen with every tech, but it happens more than enough, even in the early game where I’m still cash positive with the research at max. I wonder if I’m actually gaining anything.
I thought those fast wins were with normal conditions, i.e. max players, standard size continent (the smallest), culture, war, and spaceship victories all set to on, and always peace turned off. I never build the spaceship, because I’m researching always for tanks, fooling around with the best, most efficient tech tree to get there. Then I’m too busy conquering to figure out what I’m doing about the spaceship. I had one game where I was literally rolling everyone with tanks (I didn’t care if they recaptured cities), and as I was getting to the last of the [del]nations[/del]victims, they launched the spaceship. Most of the time, though, my score is double my next nearest opponent.
As for smiling bandit’s culture issue, I always try to be the first one to establish a religion and I’m always building temples and other cultural wonders (great or otherwise). Depending on your civ, I think, other buildings build culture, too, like barracks (I think). However, some are necessary to keep the populace happy like temples and coliseums. Then I slide the culture meter between 10-20% based on my cash needs.
I like the idea of Praetorian stack. I don’t quite make all 5 because even at 4, they all seem to die if I at least don’t have an archer or a horse unit of some type along for the ride. Then again, 5 might be the magic number.
Would one of you hot shots out there feel up to sending me a save game at around 0-200 AD, or 2-4 cities, whichever comes first? Preferably on Noble, and Beyond the Sword, but any version is fine (I have them all).
I just can’t seem to get over this hump, and I’d like to see what you all do to make it work. My email is in my profile.
With me, it’s also that I really love the early game (exploring, early tech, etc) and I just don’t like the later stuff as much. Partly because I’m usually getting my ass beaten if I’m not on a ridiculously easy difficulty.
How do I know what technology the AIs have? When you enter the diplomacy screen, they’ll have a list of what techs they have that you don’t have, and you’ll have a list of what techs you have that they don’t have. Of course, this is only after tech-trading gets enabled.
In the early game, tech leads are important so you can be the first to discover a wonder-enabling tech, or a religion-founding tech. In the late game technology trading becomes more important, since there are always lagging Civs. When I discover a new tech and I don’t need to keep it a secret, I’ll just go down the list of Civs and see what I can get for it. Remember that AIs value a tech more if fewer Civs have it, so you might want to sell/trade with the richest/most advanced first. Just remember that if you are missing several technologies it’s best to trade with the middle tier Civs first, that way you might find you can get that missing tech without having to trade your latest and greatest. And even racking up 40 gold from the real laggards adds up, and anyway those guys are going to be buying the tech from each other anyway, so you might as well get a bit of gold.
If you want fast technology advance you have to trade. There’s a sweet spot where almost everyone is behind you. You research cutting edge technologies, and sell non-critical technologies for cash and technology you’ve skipped.
For culture: Religion and wonders are the keys here. Founding religions gives you a huge culture boost, and the holy city gets gold for every religious building in the world. So you get gold for every Taoist (or whatever) temple the other guys build. So spreading your religion gives you cold hard cash, and makes your neighbors less likely to attack you when they share your religion.
I hardly ever increase my culture slider, you’re always better off adjusting each city. The “culture bomb” is mostly just using a well timed great artist to boost your border cities against enemy border cities. It won’t work at all against established cities. If you’ve pressed your culture border to where it’s touching his city, a great artist will usually make the city defect. And if his city is surrounded by your culture borders, don’t bother because that city is going to defect soon anyway.