MyBabylonIsBig said:
In this attempt capturing everything I see led to a bad result. I figured that I probably should to try another approach – and I just razed everything, planning on putting my own cities there later. No half-measures allowed. The result of that action got me thinking, and since I was rather unsure about how I should’ve played that out, I went here and wrote a post to collect my thoughts and to bother people with my questions. I also drew an owl sketch while at it. Multitasking!
So, each cities cause your maintenance costs (which can be viewed in the Financial Adviser screen) to increase. This means that unless a given city generates a certain amount of income (the precise "break-even" amount, obviously, varies with circumstances), that city will be a net drain on your finances.
What this means is that it's best to raze AI cities that you capture in the early game unless there's a compelling reason to keep them around. Compelling reasons include a wonder, good land, well-developed infrastructure which survives the city's capture, or resources you don't have (or want to secure more of for trading).
Because of the way maps are generated capitals tend to have good land with some food and at least one or two luxury/strategic resources. Holy cities should usually be captured, not razed, because you can use a Great Prophet to construct a shrine which will give +1 gold for each city with the religion in question - a source of gold income that can be extremely powerful under the right circumstances.
When a city has the potential to add something important to the empire, razing is not advisable as you then must build your own settler, settle the city, and replace any important buildings that were present when you captured it. All this takes time, and in this game getting an imperfect benefit early is preferable to getting a perfectly optimized benefit later.
So. I take it expansion is the way to go, even if it hurts economy like mad? How to make it hurt less? I know only about Forbidden Palace, Courthouses and State Property. Or should I just ignore science spending in favor of expanding? I mean, I still should get Optics and Alphabet first, since I’m on an 2-men island, right? Or just ignore it too? I feel like I need a plan.
The crucial tech with respect to expansion is Currency. Currency allows cities to build Wealth, and allows you to trade for gold with the AI. This gives you much more breathing room, so to speak, with gold and expansion.
You don't want to expand so much that you're stuck running the slider at zero and get currency too late (if I try to put a date/turn number on 'too late' for Currency the better players will just laugh at me
). Once you get currency you will find everything relating to gold easier to deal with.
Some tips for getting to currency faster: manipulate your slider such that you're always at either 0% research or 100% research. You can run the slider at 0% to accumulate gold, which can then be spent on keeping the slider at 100% until you research key techs like Currency and Alphabet. Building wealth makes this process even easier to manage. EDIT: the 0-100 thing (also called 'binary research') is useful the whole game through, not just pre-Currency.
MyBabylonIsBig said:
Well, it’ a few turns earlier since I forgot to save, but it should all be more or less the same:
http://imgur.com/q65rRNI
Library is for a scientist to get me a Great Scientist, Odeon for happy faces, Barracks were built prior to getting Horse Archery, so my guys can heal with promotions if needed. Granary is Granary. Aqueduct is here because I planned my capital to grow and Forge… well, I thought I had Gold, so I chopped it in. But I didn’t have Gold, it’s near Paris and I saw Paris burn. I’d build it eventually, though, but not before I’m done with barbs raiding my Fish again.
The capital is building Heroic Epic, so it’s in hammer mode. I’ll switch it to specialist when it’s done. I’ll probably chop it too, to speed it up. I’m not really sure what to do with Great General, since the war is over.
Also, your emphasis on slavery got me thinking about putting farms instead of cottages and trying out whipping in my (sigh) third attempt. I’m not sure what to do with angry faces, though. And I think I’m going to need a Granary first. How large should I allow my city to grow? The more people, the slower it grows, so probably somewhere around… well, 5? 6?
A few different things here.
1) the typical strategy most players use is Bureaucracy in the capital, the capital is typically not used to produce units except relatively early so unless you're moving the Palace somewhere else (which is certainly not bad play if your capital lacks a lot of river-adjacent grassland) building Heroic Epic in the capital is generally less than optimal.
2) you don't need to build happiness or health buildings (Odeon, Aqueduct) until you've actually reached the happiness/health caps and your city can no longer grow effectively. In fact, managing the happy cap is more effectively done with slavery which leads me to...
3) Slavery! Yes, it's the most powerful civic in the game. Since you can whip population away it can be used to manage happiness without needing to build the happiness buildings. Basically, since each citizen gives +1 "it's too crowded"
, whipping away more than 1 population decreases your net unhappiness since each time you crack the whip it adds only 1
. You can then manage the city's growth (typically by working hammers instead of food) to prevent yourself from growing more "it's too crowded"
before the "cruel oppression"
disappears. You are correct that lower city sizes make for more efficient use of slavery, which is why players generally keep cities smaller in the early game (the exception being the capital, which gets happiness and health buildings to work the maximum amount of high-commerce tiles, to take advantage of Bureaucracy). The whip is used most effectively when the amount of stored food allows the city to grow immediately after cracking the whip, to minimize the lost output from the reduced number of citizens (generally this means whipping when the orange bar is near full and the blue-gray bar is near empty).
4) Finally, the Granary should be the first building you build in every city. There are exceptions but Granary is generally the best bet. It effectively doubles the growth rate of a city so it makes doing
everything easier. Whether you're whipping stuff or just working tiles you always want the granary, the sooner the better.
. 1 
can be almost 3 
at medium sizes, at low sizes it's something like 5.5 
.
. I guess I shouldn't mention that I play CIV with a calculator nowadays 
.
