Hi there,

I recently bought Civ IV with the two expansions, I have never played the series before and even after doing the tutorial, playing a few games on the easiest setting and giving myself a migraine trying to understand the manual I'm still having trouble with the learning curve. I'd really appreciate a bit of help on getting started.

1 - first and foremost - should I dive straight in with the expansions? I'd like to experience the game as fully as possible, but by doing so will I lose gameplay elements present in the original game? What I mean is, does Beyond The Sword incorporate all the elements of both the original game and Warlords, as well as its own content? If so I'd like to go with that unless it's strongly recommended I play the original first.

2 - cities, hamlets and farms etc. I'm slowly getting to grips with what these do but city micromanagement confuses the hell out of me... what's the benefit of training civilians? If my city starts to stagnate, do I just build more farms around it? Are link roads essential for making cities work or do they just help? Should I be building improvements on every available square of land in my territory? Also after a certain point, once I've built cities and improvements I often just find myself clicking through turn after turn to get my research done - I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to be doing - probably because I don't get how city management works.

3 - trade and production. Does, say, mining for copper produce one unit of copper per turn? How can I view what resources I've built up? If I make a trade deal that says 1 of my copper for 1 Gold per turn, does that mean I make a one-off loss of unit of copper and I receive 1 Gold indefinitely, or am I losing 1 copper per turn in exchange for 1 Gold per turn? Do I need to build roads into rival territories to improve trade? My trade seems really basic at the moment and I'm having trouble making it better.

I don't expect answers to all these questions, but if someone could point me to a place for complete and utter noobies like myself, somewhere that just explains the basic game concepts in simple terms, I'd be really grateful - this looks like a fantastic game but I'm just finding the learning curve too steep.

pre-emptive thanks to you good people :crazyeye:

Hi there,

I recently bought Civ IV with the two expansions, I have never played the series before and even after doing the tutorial, playing a few games on the easiest setting and giving myself a migraine trying to understand the manual I'm still having trouble with the learning curve. I'd really appreciate a bit of help on getting started.

1 - first and foremost - should I dive straight in with the expansions? I'd like to experience the game as fully as possible, but by doing so will I lose gameplay elements present in the original game? What I mean is, does Beyond The Sword incorporate all the elements of both the original game and Warlords, as well as its own content? If so I'd like to go with that unless it's strongly recommended I play the original first.

2 - cities, hamlets and farms etc. I'm slowly getting to grips with what these do but city micromanagement confuses the hell out of me... what's the benefit of training civilians? If my city starts to stagnate, do I just build more farms around it? Are link roads essential for making cities work or do they just help? Should I be building improvements on every available square of land in my territory? Also after a certain point, once I've built cities and improvements I often just find myself clicking through turn after turn to get my research done - I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to be doing - probably because I don't get how city management works.

3 - trade and production. Does, say, mining for copper produce one unit of copper per turn? How can I view what resources I've built up? If I make a trade deal that says 1 of my copper for 1 Gold per turn, does that mean I make a one-off loss of unit of copper and I receive 1 Gold indefinitely, or am I losing 1 copper per turn in exchange for 1 Gold per turn? Do I need to build roads into rival territories to improve trade? My trade seems really basic at the moment and I'm having trouble making it better.

I don't expect answers to all these questions, but if someone could point me to a place for complete and utter noobies like myself, somewhere that just explains the basic game concepts in simple terms, I'd be really grateful - this looks like a fantastic game but I'm just finding the learning curve too steep.

pre-emptive thanks to you good people :crazyeye:

Welcome!!!

The best thing to do is read some artciles on these forums, they are very good. Second is to read some walkthoughs that are Stickied under sample games at the top of the forum. Orion's games are great beginner walkthrough's. Sisitul's ALC games are great top notch games. My RPCs are more entertainment.

1) Yes, my suggestion is to go for the gusto and load them all. Learning all the added materail at once will make games easier, but you can play my minimizing these feature (meaning ignore them mostly). Also almost all posters here have BTS installed so most advice comes off that.
2) Farms are for food, build as many as you need then stop. Cottages get you commerce and improve over time build them, particularly on rivers. Build improvements only on those tiles within the cities Big Fat Cross (BFC). Connect cities and resources with roads first, when the workers get bored then build extra roads. Be sure to build roads to friends for trade routes and fast access to back-stabbing them.
3) trade and production: If you have access to one copper and trade it to another leader you lose use of the copper (thus you cannot build axes) but get access to what the AI gives you. Best to trade something you have duplicate in, such as 2 corn, trade one for something like wheat, gold, or whatever you can get.

Enjoy, there is always someone on these forums that will give advice. Try asking specific questions once they come up.

1. I would start with just the normal game. Then if you like it you can still get the expansions and they will be easier to understand since you now understand the basics.

2. Every city has a BFC (big fat cross) with 20 workable tiles. The size of your cities tells you how many tiles can be worked by citizens. So if a city is size 6, 6 tiles are worked. You choose yourself which tiles will be worked by going into the city screen.

Roads are necessary to get trade networks going (rivers also connect cities). So if city A mines copper then the worker has to build a road so the copper gets connected to city A. If city B wants to use copper too (to build for example axemen) then city A and B have to be connected via roads. If you want to have some trade relations with the AI then also build a road to their cities (remember that the technology sailing will almost do the same on map with water).

Farms provide extra food. So if you want a city to grow fast build some farms. There are some good guides out there. Cottages are a way to increase income. They need time to mature. The more they mature the more coins they will bring in.

3. Trading. If you have 1 source of copper you will be able to build all the things that require copper for example axemen/spearmen. Now if you trade your sole source of copper for some gold per turn then you will not be able to produce the axemen/spearmen anymore.

To get a better understanding of the game check the ALC series from Sisiutil for example. Also check http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=132711 for some really good pointers on how the game works (sulla's walkthroughs got me going in this game).

Sisutil also has a guide in pdf form, explains a lot of stuff.

The screens are going to be confusing until you get used to them. The manual can't explain them fully.

As far as resources, you only need 1 to supply your whole empire. 1 gold will give you +1 happy citizens in every city connected to your trade network. Then if you acquire a second gold resource you can trade it to a rival civilization for either gold per turn (money, totally different from the gold resource) or another resource, or sometimes both.

Welcome to civilization!! Be prepared to lose friends and jobs due to becoming civ-addicted :crazyeye:

Go with the whole package, warlords and beyond the sword. Also be sure to download whatever the latest patch is... you can do this from within the game itself (it's somewhere in the opening menus) as long as you have an internet connection.

Read some of the walkthroughs and guides as suggested by the others, but...

Most importantly, just play the game and see what happens and how stuff works. Play a small world on the easiest setting and just try different things. Use the civilopedia in the game, it's loaded with lots of useful info. Don't worry too much right now about advanced strategies like great person farming or cottage economies, those things will make sense later, right now, they'll just be confusing. Try trading stuff and see what happens, try building different improvements and see how it affects your cities, try attacking things to see what works and what doesn't.

In my opinion, the manual that comes with the game is garbage; it lacks a lot of vital information.

Just play it on the easiest difficultly level, the computer opponents and barbarians will (usually) be pretty tame at the lowest level.

Oh, and have fun!!!

Thanks to everyone who replied, it was really useful. I fired up a game on the second easiest difficulty last night, played as Boudica and was still leading my Viking-allied, dye-dealing Celts to victory at 1.30am so I think we can safely say I'm getting the hang of it :lol:

A few things are still confusing -my towns keep stagnating, and building extra farms nearby doesn't seem to help. I get a lot of angry faces on my cities too, with people keep saying 'it's too crowded' - does this mean I have to up the culture until the borders expand, or is there another solution? Also, I'm getting to grips with how 'specialists' in cities work, but what good does training citizens do?

The infiltration thing's still a bit unclear too, though I'm guessing putting money into it provides information about other territories. My spies keep getting caught before they have a chance to do anything... will pumping more money into infiltration help? The way religion works is also a bit of a closed door to me... will spreading a religion I founded in rival cities help me keep order and establish borders more quickly there once I've conquered them?

there's probably a lot more for me to puzzle out still but playing for a good 4-5 hours last night actually helped more than anything... thanks again for the help

edit - one more thing about hamlets, 'City needs to work to become town' - what does this mean? does the city need to expand its borders or something before it can progress?

cities can stagnate for a number of reasons; are they happy and healthy? are you running specialists? are your citizens working the best tiles?

your people say its too crowded when there are more of them its just the way the game limits city growth, you can't get rid of this but can counteract it by creating more happiness. (by getting happy resources, using civics, religion or buildings) there is a useful guide on happiness in the war academy

i'm not sure about espionage I tend to just ignore it

your state religion produces culture in any city it is present (if you have no state religion all religions present produce culture) the state religion also makes 1 citizen happy so yes to both

hope this helps

A few things are still confusing -my towns keep stagnating, and building extra farms nearby doesn't seem to help. I get a lot of angry faces on my cities too, with people keep saying 'it's too crowded'

This is all the same phenomenon: angry faces don't work anywhere (including those farms), so they don't make food (or anything at all), so your cities run out of food, so they stagnate.

Every new person that grows in your cities gives a new unhappy face. As long as you have at least as many happy faces as unhappy faces, it's no problem. Once you have :( > :), every extra :( gives you an angry face :mad:.

If you would like to be warned before the first angry face grows in a town, get BUG:

http://civ4bug.sourceforge.net/

(BUG also provides many, many other benefits, and has a fire-and-forget installer. This message has been sponsored by BUG Mod, Inc.)

- does this mean I have to up the culture until the borders expand, or is there another solution?

In the long term, you need to create as many :) as :(. There are many, many ways to create :). See this article, solely about ways to create :):

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=189559


In the short term, you can also stop growth just before a :mad: would appear, either by working low food tiles, running a lot of specialists, or by whipping away multiple citizens at a time, or by building settlers or workers (these turn your :food: into :hammers:).

Also, I'm getting to grips with how 'specialists' in cities work, but what good does training citizens do?

Citizens (not to be confused with citizens as in "a person in your cities") are an extremely weak kind of citizen (see?) that give nothing but 1 :hammers:. Their only real advantage is that you don't need to do anything to be able to run them. Avoid them; the only circumstances where they would be useful involve things that you should learn about AFTER you learn the basics of cities.

The infiltration thing's still a bit unclear too,

Ignore it for now; you will get more benefit faster if spend your mental energies on getting the happiness system down pat first.

edit - one more thing about hamlets, 'City needs to work to become town' - what does this mean? does the city need to expand its borders or something before it can progress?

No. Someone in the city must "work" that tile for a certain number of turns to improve it.

Remember how you needed non-:angry: citizens above to actually get the benefit from your farms? Non-:angry: citizens (people in the cities :)) that are not specialists can each "work" tiles, that is, they can give you the output of that tile. So if the game doesn't slap a citizen onto your freshly built village automatically, you need to either wait some turns until it does, or do it manually, by going into the city and clicking that tile.

(BTW you can nudge a city's citizens toward working the tiles YOU want by using the :food:, :hammers:, :commerce:, etc. buttons at the bottom of the city screen, towards the right. So for example here you could just click :commerce:. If you click the city center after doing this, the city will immediately auto-adjust the worked tiles to match your preference.)

Whew!

great, that's cleared a few things up. will give that thread a look-over when I get home then get on with clearing these pesky Persians off the map :king:

A few things are still confusing -my towns keep stagnating, and building extra farms nearby doesn't seem to help. I get a lot of angry faces on my cities too, with people keep saying 'it's too crowded' - does this mean I have to up the culture until the borders expand, or is there another solution? Also, I'm getting to grips with how 'specialists' in cities work, but what good does training citizens do?



The others answered this well, I think. I would just add that some people in your city will automatically be happy and others will automatically be unhappy, the number of happy vs. unhappy depends on the difficulty level... higher difficulty equals more unhappy people. Buildings, luxury resources, and other things will also change unhappy people to happy, you'll find out these things as you play.
The "citizen" specialist... the one at the bottom of the little "specialist column" with the white outfit, is sorta useless, avoid them if possible.


The infiltration thing's still a bit unclear too, though I'm guessing putting money into it provides information about other territories. My spies keep getting caught before they have a chance to do anything... will pumping more money into infiltration help? The way religion works is also a bit of a closed door to me... will spreading a religion I founded in rival cities help me keep order and establish borders more quickly there once I've conquered them?


None of the others really touched on this... your instincts are right about infiltration/espionage, the more espionage points you have for any particular opponent, the more you know about them (for example, what they're researching, what's going on in their cities, etc.). The others ARE right that you can ignore this for now, it's not a game-breaking feature, just keep looking at it from time to time to see what's happening. Spies do get caught if they hang out on the same enemy controlled space for too long, moving them around helps lessen this, but I've noticed spies tend to get caught a LOT.
The religion question depends on some things too. If you have a state religion, then spreading that to opponents will make them more likely to also convert to that religion (which will improve your relationship with them). Spreading non-state religions doesn't really do much other than encourage them to convert to that religion. There are times when you want to spread particular religions around (for example, if you control the city that founded that religion and you've built its holy building) but it really does depend on what your own civilization's religion is (if any). And yes, religions in a city stay there even if the city is captured, that may or may not help expand the borders... it depends on whether you have your state religion in the city or not. Basically, it's usually a good rule of thumb that if you have a state religion, spread that sucker everywhere! Keep in mind though, that if an opponent has adopted whatever religion you want him/her to have, they will also spread it to their own and other cities too, so you don't have to do ALL the work yourself.

Hope you're having fun while learning!

A few things are still confusing -my towns keep stagnating, and building extra farms nearby doesn't seem to help.

The infiltration thing's still a bit unclear too, though I'm guessing putting money into it provides information about other territories.

If by stagnating, you mean your cities turn a nasty pale green color and has a face like this :yuck:, that's because they are unhealthy. You can increase your cities healthiness by making buildings that increase health, like aqueducts; or you can increase your health by harvesting health resources which have this symbol :health:, like corn, wheat, or bananas. You will receive the benefit for health resources only if you have built the proper improvement on the tile (mouse over the resource and it will tell you) and that tile is connected to your trade network (roads, rivers, etc.)

Espionage you don't really have to worry about. I usually just use espionage passively (most games I don't even make a spy). By increasing your espionage points (buildings like courthouses, intelligence agencies, jails) You can see how strong your opponents' are compared to you, what they're researching, you can see they're cities, and you can even investigate them to see what buildings they have and what they're producing.

Since it appears most of your questions were answered, I'll just say if you bought all the expansions then install and start with BTS. The added functionality makes the game much more fun.
As far as the manual goes, it is best used to prop up the table your computer sets on if one leg is too short. There is too much BS in it and it really doesn't tell you anything that you can't get either by mousing over or using the civopedia.
Start on settler difficultly and choose how you want to win (space race, conquest, domination, culture, diplo or religious) then just start working towards that goal. It will help to focus your game play and stop you from just trying to do everything.

The best advice I have been able to use is to not try to build everything everywhere. For example, if your city is say 5 below the happy cap, then there is no reason to build a coloseum. It doesn't help you and it cost maintenance every turn.

Also the civopedia is a great resource. With the hyperlinks in it you can checkout a topic and then read all the related stuff too.

The most important thing is to have fun. Only do stuff you understand and always move up in difficulty once you can win most of the time at the level you are on.

Welcome to the forums and in no time you will be spewing civ logic to other newbie!!

Welcome to the forums and glad you're having fun!

I suggest posting a game in the forums (similar to Neal's King of the World Series, madscientist's RPCs, Sisutil's ALCs, etc) so the community can help you along.

The best advice I have been able to use is to not try to build everything everywhere. For example, if your city is say 5 below the happy cap, then there is no reason to build a coloseum. It doesn't help you and it cost maintenance every turn.

Buildings do not cost maintenance in Civ IV. This is still good advice, though.

Basically religion is useful for 5 things:

1. Adopting the same religion as a rival grants you a diplomacy bonus. In some cases this can be huge, such as with Isabella or Saladin. Also having a different religion than them cause a negative diplomacy modifier.

2. City improvements. You can only have one temple per religion, so more religions means more temples which means more happy people. Same thing with monasteries and their 10% science, etc. Also these improvements provide a lot of culture, culture could almost be its own point in this list- hard to get tons of culture without a lot of religions.

3. Civic benefits. Most religious civics provide a benefit for cities with the state religion, like theocracy provides extra experience to units built in cities with state religion. Free religion simply provides extra happiness for any religion in the city and has no state religion.

NOTE: Adopting free religion causes you to not gain any positive modifiers with rival civs for having the same religion, but at the same time you don't have any negative ones either for being a heathen. It's a great religion to adopt to have the benefits or religion but lessen the diplomatic consequences in some cases.

4. Money! If you own the founding city of a religion then you can build the religious super temple with a great prophet and it'll generate 1 gpt per city that the religion has spread to, including rival cities. On some huge maps this can be in excess of 100gpt. And it counts as raw gpt so it gets further increased by improvements like banks.

5. Victory! You can win a diplomatic victory through the apostolic palace. Basically it works like the united nations wonder but instead of using population size for votes it uses the size of the religion it represents. If you want more explanation on it check the civilopedia and sisutil has a game he played with Isabella and won an apostolic victory listed under his alc played thread.

The easiest way to learn Civilization IV is the same as the hardest way to learn to swim. Just dive in. You won't drown playing Civilization, though.