Recent content by Handel

Spiritual leaders are hard to play; they can give good advantages but need some micromanagement of the civics and therefore need a lot of practice. Without such micromanagement the trait is useless and that's why even if the spiritual AI gets strong start, near the middle game it usually...

From what I understood it depends on which difficulty you play and what kind of player are you. Myself, I am an empire builder and I am a casual player on monarch. As such I like huge and well developed cities. So for me the overlapping is not that really needed. BUT - on high difficulties...

Providing the AI produces settlers like rabbits... better to turn off domination victory at all.

On the topic of flanking - it is priceless if you have cavalry and have to battle cannons. Several cavalry units succeeding to retreat will exterminate all of the enemy cannons (I myself found this the hard way).

Steel of course. Except if you plan to finish the game one way or another right after you got the rifling. The AI always go for rifling. Get the grenadiers and the riflemen are toast. You probably will need cannons only to lower the defenses of the cities.

Most simple way said: Use every city for what the city is best to be used. If it can generate a lot of hammers use it to produce units. If it has a lot of grasslands/floodplains use it to spam cottages. If you decide to build some wonders it is generally a good idea to chop them - and you need...

Most player consider building a wall to be waste of hammers. Still the wall may be useful sometimes if only to delay the attack couple of turns (until AI catapults reduce the defenses) on an relatively new city. On the other hands it depends on your number of the defenders and the number of...

Every time I enter the forum I succeed to find something new. Wonder how much still I don't know:-)

When the AI is 2-3 turns (marathon speed so it means 20-30% till the end of the research) the tech in question becomes red from my side; I cannot give or sell it and the mouseover says "We have nothing to gain" (I think) Exactly what I said - the inadequate diplo AI instead uses rigidly fixed...

Not true it requests techs in the final stage of research. Actually in the final stage of the research the AI will not accept them even as a gift. I don't know if the requests and the techs are random or not; it is just another way of the devs to compensate the AI for their inability to make a...

Basically - to really use a cottage you need a worker to "work" on the tile. So it depends on how many people you city can support at this moment. It is both food related AND happiness related. At the same time if you build more farms you can support more population providing the city happiness...

Using the slavery to "whip" buildings is actually a way to transform the food into hammers. Besides in the early games you don't need all the available buildings in all the cities. Often granary, library and courtyard are enough for a very long time and they are easy to whip or chop (plus a...

I didn't play Civ 4 for a long time (any Civ actually after the huge disappointment from the lame Civ 5), so I surprised to find out the power gives 2:yuck: even with Three Gorges Dam, no matter if the city has a factory or not. So this effectively kills the The Three Gorges Dam wonder although...

But I play at monarch, not on Deity, and I do have a highest score on my landmass (or the second at worse) at the time when the active barbs appear. And they still do try to target my cities. Not only this - as I already wrote before, even when I chop the GW, the barbs are still are coming to my...

Both. That's why on small maps the barbs are not a problem - the map is quickly oversaturated with cities, wandering scouts and other units.