You may also wish to see where the “offending” city has replaced the citizens from that tile. The computers selection is not always great.
And another point- check regularly to ensure that a city is working every tile. It is pointless having cottages and farms if the population has been placed onto forests for instance.
I have to chime in and say that Worker first is almost always the correct play, simply because working an extra unimproved tile a little earlier is usually not much of a net benefit. Your starting fat cross will almost always have an improve-able resource (like a Cow, Wheat, etc.), and getting the relevant improvement on that tile as early as possible is more important than growing to size 2, especially since working that improved resource usually grants you practically two tiles’ worth of stuff (food, hammers, or commerce) anyway, with only 1 population expended to work it.
Of course, if you literally don’t have the techs to do anything with your start (all forest, seafood resources, don’t start with Fishing), then Warrior first is probably correct. In that specific scenario, I’d research Fishing ASAP and get Fishing Boats ASAP as well.
I manage to win my first Chieftain game. But I am getting increasingly frustrated in the Warlord difficulty; There is usually some trigger happy warmonger right next to me, or I kept being squeezed out.
What are some tips for diplomacy and expansion? I would like to try out-teching my competition (on Warlord difficulty) in term of military; what leaders should I try?
I like going with Caesar, hurrying to Iron Working, then crushing all before me with my legions of praetorians. Use slavery as a civic so you can hurry production.
I don’t have any suggestions for leaders (I don’t have a favorite) but if you like military, go for axemen asap. You can do a lot in the early game with a stack of 6 axemen.
Another hint: when moving up to the next difficulty level, turn off some of the other Civs, and learn how to win with the fewer enemies. Once you can win with, say, 3 other civs, bump it up to 4 and try again.
My tact is to play as England and rush for Riflemen. In the mid game nothing is better than the Redcoats.
One thing that works GREAT for me that I’ve never seen recommended anywhere else: For every tech I’m researching, I always have the research slider all the way up to 100% if I can, or at least above 70%. Except when I have only one turn left to go to finish whatever I’m researching. At that point, I slide the beaker graph as low as it can go (sometimes down to zero) while still allowing me to attain the tech in one turn. That way, I not only have a new tech just one turn later, I also have a pile of gold! (From the gold that didn’t go into research.) As long as I remind myself to put the slider back to 100% right away each time, I can actually build a net increase of my gold position over time.
There used to be a common tactic like that, where you would run 100% research as long as you could afford, then 0% for a little while to rebuild your coffers, then back to 100%. In vanilla civ4, this prevents the games from rounding off fractions, and saved you a few coins of commerce. At least in BtS (I forget if Warlords also), the game just keeps track of fractions so it doesn’t help anymore.
Commerce isn’t lost, incidentally, so dropping your research on the last turn just means that your next tech will take that much longer to research. When you need the money, you don’t need to worry about timing it for the end of your tech or anything.
Oh well. It has a psychological benefit for me, anyway, so I’m stickin’ to it.
One early game strategy I’ve found useful is to get out 3-4 warriors asap and camp them at the edge of any rival civs you can find. Keep them near a resource tile. As soon as the AI goes to improve the tile move your warrior onto the tile to capture a free worker.
If you’re near enough to a couple civs you can get a fair bit of free workers this way. And usually the AI civs will ask for piece in just a few turns and forget all about you stealing their first workers within just a few more years.
And if You’re really nasty you can just fortify the warrior you just took their worker with on a forest/mountain/forested mountain tile near the civ’s city. It could easily be centuries before they can take a fortified warrior on a good defensible tile and in that time they’ll never send out another worker or settler, and probably no scouts or military units either, so you basically just cripple the civ’s starter city all at the cost of one warrior. Maybe reinforce him with an archer a bit later. They’ll likely never recover from being put so far behind and you can obliterate them pretty much at your leisure or just force them to become your vassal if you keep them down long enough to research the necessary tech(I can’t remember which it is, Monarchy?).
The thing about scaling back research was essential in Civ3, but it doesn’t matter, in the long run, in 4. On the other hand, you can pull things like that by specializing your cities: Suppose you have two cities, one with a library, university, etc., and one with a marketplace, bank, etc. Each city has some tiles that are good for food, and some that are good for money (which may even be in the overlap of the fat crosses). What you do then is you put your library-city on commerce tiles and crank up your research percentage, while your financial city is on food tiles to grow quickly. Then, you move your financial city onto money-tiles, pull the tech slider down to 0, and put your library-city onto food tiles to grow quickly, and so on.