Hello all, and thank you for reading. This site has provided me a lot of great information and I really appreciate it. I still have a few questions in my attempt to develope a more efficient play style though, and I was hoping some of the knowledgable souls here at Civ Fanatics could help me.

Here's a few questions I have that I would love to hear your opinions on:

1.) In the long term, are spending a couple turns moving a settler to optimize the placement of your Capital City generally worth immediately falling behind researching techs, especially from a cultural standpoint? (...Without Mysticism as a starting tech I know I can kiss founding an early religion goodbye, and I'm thinking I might even be drawn into a COL slingshot strategy to get one at all under those circumstance.)

2.) Would it be wise to wait until a city's border expands to the fat cross before stunting growth by producing a settler or worker unit there, or does delaying that initial border expansion make much of a difference?

3.) Would strategical placment of a few cities to block off AI land advancement in the early game stages be worth the likelyhood of those cities producing less FPC than an optimal resource placement if AI naval transportation is inevitable anyway?

4.) As a beginner, I'm still trying to get the hang of which improvements need to be built for a given city an when. I understand the basics, but I don't trust my knowledge at this point to maximize efficiency throughout the course of a game. So after I've made all the odvious improvements myself, is it a bad idea to let workers auto-improve my cities for me until I get a better grasp of it? (I know relying on AI for tile improvements is risky and can lead to mixed results, but so can relying on me at this point.:lol:)

I want to thank in advance anyone gracious enough to lend me a helping hand, and I apologize for the long thread. Have a good day all, and happy gaming!

Justin L.

Well I'm no master at Civ but I'll give these points a go

1) 95% of my games, I settle in the starting location. It's engineered by the game so that spot should almost always make a great city, with special resources, plenty of food and production. If I can see a really awesome spot elsewhere close by I may move, but I generally don't - those couple of turns at the start you may seem like you're not doing much but if you haven't settled and started building your civ, then you're always going to be two turns behind.

2) No, don't wait. Your starting city will expand its borders while you're building that first worker anyway. And you want that worker as fast as possible because quick and extensive terrain improvement is fundamental to accelerating your civilisation's development.

3) Yeah it can be a good strategy, although I tend to focus on growing my civilisation in more natural locations for expansion and I'll rarely put a 'blocking' city - although I will usually prioritise settling the 'center' of continents before competing civs especially if there are things I like such as lots of grassland and jungle resources.

4) Don't automate your workers. You'll learn more doing it manually. The only thing automation I use is 'route to' (Alt+R) to build a road to a spot. Focus first on improving food resources for city growth, then production resources like metal mines (especially gold, gems, and silver) and horses, then you want to build farms, mines, and cottages as needed to give your civilisation the economy it needs to dominate the world.

A good strategy is to give each city enough food to grow with a surplus of at least 3-4 food per turn - food special resources and farms on grassland or flood plains will give you what you need for that. Then you want to focus on either mining hills (if its a production city - bear in mind you need to provide extra food to support the citizen who will work the hill) or building cottages if its going to be a 'commerce' city.

Also don't forget if you've got fishing resources within your borders to build work boats - those can be automated because they'll simply go to the spot and settle.

1) I settle in place. If I'm tempted to move occasionally I will but usually I'll just regenerate the map. I try to avoid too easy starts and "illogical" starts, mostly having to do with odd-ball river and single tile lakes.

2) Worker first is the assumed play. Some exceptions are workboats for seafood; 3 hammer tiles and hunting for an early second scout; warrior to assist in scouting; lack of worker techs and/or available land to improve.

3) Blocking cities are good. It forces the opponent to build boats to settle if they want to try and expand beyond your territory and even then boats require open borders as well. Whether I would misplace a city just to allow it too block is situational (am I going to attack them anyway, can I get the third border pop before it is going to matter, what tiles am I giving up - especially food)?

4) Don't worry so much about optimization in the long-term. Technology improvements and worker turns availability have a huge influence in being able to specialize the cities. As the game progresses don't be afraid to re-evaluate the tile improvements once you have more and larger cities and have a better idea of how they will be specialized.

2) the cultural expansion is unrelated to unit builds. What you should look at is instead the city size. I would hold off building your first Settler until the capital has grown to size 4.

Building a Worker first is often a good idea, though. (Except when starting with seafood is a better idea)

If you have plenty of forests and aren't completely lacking hills, and can get to Bronze Working straight away, it's a perfectly good strategy to chop two or three Workers and a few Settlers, even if that uses up all or nearly all those trees.

3) If you are playing an Creative civ, you can quite easily block off the AIs both on land and on water. But even otherwise it might be worthwhile - if you know what you're doing. That is, you need to practice "controlled crashing" your economy... :)

4) Don't automate your workers.
Automating your Workers is fine at Noble or lower difficulty levels.

Eventually you will want to take manual control, but you should focus your learning on other things until you pull of Noble wins fairly consistently. :)

Automating your Workers is fine at Noble or lower difficulty levels.

Eventually you will want to take manual control, but you should focus your learning on other things until you pull of Noble wins fairly consistently. :)

I agree but use the city specialization buttons etc. You still definitely want to specialize cities.

Once you get used to using workers you can take over and save worker turns/make more optimal improvements.

I wish you could assign a complex array of instructions to each automated worker individual - like "this guy CAN change old improvements, but only in 1 city" etc. Or "prioritize strategic resources at all costs" to deal with obnoxious spy pillaging etc. Not a necessity but would be a nice convenience thing as the game goes on.

Edit: When in multiplayer and playing at "blazing!!!" speed, you need to automate them eventually if you get really big, or you won't be able to get the military movements done in time ;).

1)It's worth taking a turn or two to move the initial settler if there is a better site obvious. However the map generator is set up so your settler will be in a good location for a city, so it is relatively unusual to find a better site nearby.

2)Your borders will expand whether your city is building a worker/settler or not. Building these units stops population growth, not culture.

3)Blocking out land with your borders early on nis a good way of ensuring a decent amount of territory. I'd still want the cities to be in decent locations though. It'd be more a case of settling the further away cities first, and then backfilling the sites near the capital than settling in sub optimal sites.

4)Auto workers gives very poor results. Even improving completely at random is likely to produce better results (since the auto workers have a tendency to waste time building over existing improvements). I'd strongly recommend managing them yourself - you'll pick up the basics soon enough.

1.) In the long term, are spending a couple turns moving a settler to optimize the placement of your Capital City generally worth immediately falling behind researching techs, especially from a cultural standpoint?

As a rule, the initial position will be "good enough". Moving the settler, when you have a specific reason to do so will improve some positions. Exploring with the settler is not generally to my tastes, although some players have had success with it.

4.) As a beginner, I'm still trying to get the hang of which improvements need to be built for a given city an when. I understand the basics, but I don't trust my knowledge at this point to maximize efficiency throughout the course of a game. So after I've made all the odvious improvements myself, is it a bad idea to let workers auto-improve my cities for me until I get a better grasp of it?

Not a bad idea. There are game options that prevent automated workers from pessimizing the work you've already done, so turn those on. Eventually, you'll take complete control, but it doesn't need to be your top priority.

I had the same type of question when I first posted here. You should look up on specialized cities threads here. I made me learn how to play much better. It took me awhile to get it (a few days) but in the end, I was happy that I learned the skill of specialized cities. Cities include a money city, a science city, production city, and a great person city. Oh, I also learned how to block AI's with cities in where you seal off ur area and then backfill your area later with cities.
Oh, manual workers work best =] You do indeed learn better.

1. Moving your city is ok. You can do it to get a better position for a rush, to get an early production boost, to get a better commerce city, or to move inland. If you're trying to found a religion (which is often unnecessary), it's not ok.

2. Huh?

3. Yes. Ideally, you can get both, often you can grab some important resource and use that to define your block.

4. I can't imagine automating my workers early. Imagine if I have a corn with fresh water tile, and my workers very first action is to road some desert tiles or cottage a plains tile or mine a desert hill. Suddenly my cities growth to size 2 is delayed 6 turns or whatever.
Or imagine if I've hit my happy cap in a city, and instead of my workers running to develop another city or chopping, they decide to mine some more hills in my city. Or even worse, I have beavers somewhere and instead of investing some turns to get +1 happiness all over my empire, my workers are building roads to nowhere. Or if I want roads to my opponents cities so I can hit them with a surprise attack, and instead my workers are farming plains tiles.

When your workers don't have much else to do then maybe automating them is ok. Unless they ruin your super science city or cottage your GP farm.

Or if they chop a forest on a deer/fur tile. Arg.

The only time where it is really beneficial to search with your settler for a few turns is in Marathon games with a few exceptions. This is because that a turn in Quick speed accounts for a greater percentage of turns than a Marathon turn.

In general, though, settle in place unless a nice spot can be seen so your settler spends 2 turns minimum to FOUND it.