Hello,
I've just started playing Civ4 after finally getting it to work on my PC (swapped my old Radeon 9800 Pro for an nVidia and no more crashes - hurrah!). So, although I registered a while ago I'm very new to this.

I've been having a read through some threads and I'm recognising what gets called 'buildaholicism' around here in myself. I'm slowly getting the idea that banks are only really useful in cities with higher gold output, that there's not much point in putting barracks in a city that won't get used for military production etc.

The general cure seems to be to only build what you need. Great. Sounds sensible enough, but the thing is I don't yet understand enough about the game to know the right questions to ask; the questions that will help me determine whether I need a particular building.

Someone please give me a start by explaining why I don't always need to build a granary. My reasoning is that a city grows quicker with a granary in it and a new city needs to grow to be productive (the sooner the better), therefore I build one as soon as I've knocked out the first warrior. It seems like a no-brainer but I have this nagging feeling that I'm missing something and getting things a bit wrong.

Please explain to me why I might not want to make a granary the second or third thing I build. Thanks.

Someone please give me a start by explaining why I don't always need to build a granary. My reasoning is that a city grows quicker with a granary in it and a new city needs to grow to be productive (the sooner the better), therefore I build one as soon as I've knocked out the first warrior. It seems like a no-brainer but I have this nagging feeling that I'm missing something and getting things a bit wrong.

Granary is tough, because in my experience every city will need one eventually.

For simplicity, I ignore the health bonus. With that simplification, first recognize that a granary only offers benefit to a city that is growing. In a city that has reached its happiness limit, and is going to stay there for a while, the granary doesn't have any upside. Even if the city hasn't reached its limit yet, if the city has reached its limit before the granary is finished, you still get no immediate benefit.

Beyond that (and this is especially true of your first city) it is a matter of priority. It may be more important to you to acquire some culture then it is to start growing. Or to get a worker out to start improving the local terrain. Or some defenders to hold off the raging barbarians. Or a couple of settlers to claim some important resources. And by then the city has stopped growing, so you have a few more builds to slip in.

In practice, because the whip is such a dominant production tool, cities are basically "always growing", so you seldom see the granary delayed very long after both Pottery and Bronze Working are discovered.

OK. I've only played a few games and I'm still working my way up through the difficulty levels to find one that's tough, but not too tough. Since I've been playing the lower levels happiness hasn't been a serious problem for me yet, and certainly not in the early game. Barbs aren't so bad and the AI seems pretty mellow until you've actively done something to upset it. Based on that then I haven't had much of a disincentive to build granaries yet but I should be prepared to change the way I'm playing on the harder levels when priorities may change. Thanks.

I haven't made that much use of slavery yet but I've resorted to the whip a couple of times when I've had particularly hefty food surpluses and very few shields (coastal cities). I've noticed that some people think it's slightly over-powered and excessive whipping is borderling exploitation so I don't want to become overly reliant on it, but I think I can see how it might become very useful when the happiness limits get tighter, and before you are able to run specialists. Am I thinking along the right lines?