Basically, what’s good, what’s not? Are the Americans any good? Can you have many cities or is this always a gimp strategy? Is upgrading units something worth bothering with?
There are some other Civ 4 threads, but as a quick summary:
The game has expanded to include religion, Great Persons and new Civilisations and leader abilities.
All excellent in my opinion.
The American’s special unit only comes in late in the game. However you can play a gamestart in Modern Times, when it would be very strong.
I don’t know what you mean by a ‘gimp’ strategy.
In Civ 3, you could have as many cities as you wanted. The computers all played to expand rapidly. This meant the player keeping track of say 32 cities, each with build queues and requiring hordes of workers.
Many people (including me) didn’t enjoy loading a saved game and trying to remember what each city needed next.
Civ 4 imposes financial penalties on large civilisations. I find 6-10 cities are fine on Noble level (=average difficulty), reducing to 3-4 on Monarch.
I can micro-manage each city, only need a few workers to do all the terrain upgrades and can pick up the thread of a saved game in seconds. 
Upgrading units is important and shows you should make a profit from your budgeting.
Romans are commonly considered to be one of the strongest civs. As far as strategy, one of the things to know about Civ 4 is you really need to keep improving your economy to expand. Cottages are very useful to put down early because they grow, and they are one of the best ways to get you enough commerce to continue expanding. Siege units are very useful in war, unless you attack before catapults. Bring many, and use them even in the field if the enemy has a stack of units.
Courthouses can start to be useful once the per city maintenace is higher. I’m by no means an expert, but I enjoy playing spiritual civs the most so I can change my civics around whenever I want.
Civ4 has some major gameplay improvements. Big change is maintainence. In previous versions, you were charged maintainance per building. In this version, you are charged maintainance per city. This means it’s easy to overexpand in the early game and find yourself unable to fund your empire. As your cities expand they start generating more income and can pay for themselves, but ancient era cities don’t generate much wealth, and so if you build too many you’ll find yourself on 100% gold and still losing money. That’s not good. But far away cities aren’t completely useless due to corruption, like in Civ3.
To chose a favorite Civ, look at the leader traits, the unique unit, and the unique building. Industrious is my favorite trait, since I love building wonders. Pick a Civ with a unique unit that coincides with your favorite time to expand your empire. If you like to spend the ancient era building up your empire and staying out of wars, then an ancient unit is worthless. Think about when the map is likely to fill up, and pick a unit that amplifies your style of play.
Upgrading units is often a good idea, but only if your gold output is larger than your shield output. If your cities don’t have good things to build, then build modern units and disband your obsolete units, or keep them around as bullet sponges for when someone attacks your cities. But if you’ve got tons of money and lots of things to build, by all means upgrade, but always upgrade experienced units first.
In the basic Civ IV, I really like the Indians (with Gandhi as the leader) as that is a combination of Spiritual and Industrious. So you can build lots of wonders and get an early jump on a religion (or sometimes more than one). Plus, with the Spiritual trait there is no anarchy for switching religions or civics. In the latest expansion, they’ve changed that and there is no longer a civ that has those two traits. So these days I mostly play the Romans with Caesar Augustus as the leader. That’s Imperialistic and Industrious, which is again quite a good combination. Build wonders fast, build settlers fast, and get some other benefits (mostly financial) as well.
Financial is usually considered the most powerful trait. A financial civ gets probably close to 15% more commerce than other civs, which means 15% more gold and 15% faster research.
Settler rushing is no longer viable. The game gives you great rewards for focusing your efforts into fewer cities, and planning your civ layout to maximize the number of resources you control. It punishes civs with lots of cities ruthlessly, by causing each new city to reduce the commerce of every other city in your empire. Until you have a solid commercial infrastructure, it’s not a good idea to build more than a few cities.
Unit upgrades are good for units with lots of experience and promotions. It’s the only way to get promotions like city raider on some more modern units. It’s usually not a good idea to promote ALL of your units, though, because it’s very expensive, and building new units is usually pretty fast and easy. Always remember to disband and replace your old units with new ones, so that you aren’t wasting as much commerce on unit support costs.
Civ4 is much less friendly to warmongering than earlier Civ games were. It’s likely, even typical, for your civ to crumble apart if you’re playing on an appropriate diffuclty level and trying to go to war in the late game. War weariness stacks up quickly, enemy culture makes it literally impossible to solidify any short term gains, and combat HEAVILY favors defenders. Unless you have an overwhelming tech or money advantage, expect to make absolutely no progress in a war after the industrial revolution.
I play Winston Churchill of the English.
I like the English mainly for the redcoats. Its plus against gunpowder is really helpful. Plus they can be upgraded from Swordsmen who I upgrade with the city attack upgrade. The moment Redcoats are unlocked I upgrade everyone and I go on a conquering spree that’s only stopped once other civs have found, I can’t remember the name, the one above Rifleman.
As others have said, there are financial penalties for expanding too quickly early on, and they can cripple you if you do a blind settler rush. However, large late-game cities can more than pay for themselves and you can eventually have a massive empire of dozens of cities with a minimal tax rate.
It’s often worth it to upgrade units, especially if those that have racked up several promotions. Units gain promotions as they accrue experience points; usually one or two per successful battle. Promotions are gained around 2, 5, 10, 17, etc. experience point totals, and new units have starting experience based on buildings (such as barracks or stable), wonders, civic choices, and (with the expansions) the presence of a great military instructor. 10 experience points for a brand new unit is a lot, but doable. Any unit will retain its promotions after being upgraded (even if it’s upgraded to a unit that normally can’t attain some of those promotions), but it won’t retain more than 10 experience points. A very experienced unit that gets upgraded and knocked down to 10 points will find itself very very far away from attaining another promotion, but will still be relatively strong within its new category.
Each civ has its own unique unit and unique building, but many have multiple leaders from which you can choose. Washington, Roosevelt, and Lincoln each have separate traits. Some civs, like Japan, only get one leader, though.
The recent rash of Civ IV threads has inspired me to reinstall my game and load up a campaign but it made me wonder if it’s worth going out and buying any or all of the expansion packs.
What’s the consensus? Should I buy Beyond the Sword? Do I need to buy Warlords first? I’m not a particularly strong player and I never play online but I enjoy the heck out of this game, are the expansion packs for me?
I think Warlords is great!
The extras weren’t too hard to cope with, and really gave some interesting options, such as Great Generals (military bonuses) and Vassal states (an AI can submit to you and become an obedient partner).
Try some of these options (most available without the extension kits):
- Inland Sea (a clearly defined map, with both land and sea
- raging Barbarians (they attack everyone!)
- marathon speed (really keeps the game slooow, allowing you to practice in the early stages)
- Barbarian Horde (a **wonderful twist ** where you play the Barbarians against a load of civilisations)
Incidentally, Beyond the Sword will also give you everything that’s in Warlords (and more), with the exception of the Warlords-specific scenarios. It’s nice to get everything, of course, but BtS is the “must”.
That’s kinda what I guessed. I don’t play the scenarios very often simply because I don’t play often enough or well enough to get bored with the basic game. Adding in the disadvantages of some scenarios just gets me killed. One time I loaded up the American Revolution Scenario and promptly got my ass handed to me, luckily I wasn’t commanding us in 1776.
There’s a pretty good chart of the original 18 Civs and their traits over here.
Personally, I always play as Russia. Not just because being Catherine the Great makes me feel awesome, but also because the Financial and Creative traits do a lot toward helping me dominate my neighbors peacefully. But, even with the help of the armed Cossack units, I usually end up being attacked and crippled around the industrial era. 
I haven’t played past the Noble difficulty yet, so this may not be viable at a high level, but I’ve found Blitzkrieg By Missionary to be pretty effective: if you can scramble your research quickly enough to found an early religion and proceed to molest all of the other civs with your missionaries until they convert, you’ll get a massive bonus to your relationship for sharing the same religion.
Oh, I do this too, but it’s more for the commerce and espionage boost. When a Great Prophet founds their special building in your holy city, all the cities with that religion give a little gold to your civ. Very handy!
I suppose I should be doubly aggressive in spreading my religion in the hopes of keeping good relations, tho. But then, there’s only so much I can take of some nobody with a lot of horse archers demanding that I give them Calendar. :rolleyes: 
Seems they’ll always find some reason to hate me.
Hmm. If you’re playing as the Russians you’re probably one of the two or three richest civilizations in the early and mid game, so have you tried sending frequent, small gifts to the cultures that’ve started bristling with archers? I’ve never tried this, but in Meier’s Alpha Centauri it went a long way towards keeping people juuuuust nice enough not to invade you.