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I think that in the campaign, all research happens by completing quests and advancing the plot. So go exploring until you find whatever you have to do next. For casting spells out of combat, your sovereign should have a spellbook in their unit actions.

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." -- Napoleon Bonaparte I wouldn't expect a thorough review of Civ V from Gamespot, IGN, etc., but that's just because their staff reviewers don't know strategy games as well as most people reading Civfanatics...

Mechs are possible and BigDog is very cool, but giant death robots aren't a solution to this, they're just as vulnerable to such a weapon as tanks are. Give that weapon to the infantry and they're better than a mech because they're a small target and can do things like enter buildings. If you...

The questions on the survey were very thought-provoking about why I like Civ and strategy games in general. Let us know about your results! I wonder what you're going to do with all the write-in answers.

Seafood at the capital is good if the seafood is fish, you start with fishing, and you have a three-hammer tile to work. That will get you an improved tile very early, and you can use that tile build your worker, and then grow to 2 pop to work the tile the worker improves. It goes very...

Nice! I love food but hate farms. I try to get a food surplus any other way possible, so many of my cities will end up with something like one food resource plus many cottaged grasslands or coast tiles. One trick I like is settling a coastal city with freshwater lakes in its radius so I...

This change never got any hype because it sounds so boring, but it's a major part of why Civ 4 is so good. It's basically required for city specialization to be possible. At least is sounds like we don't need to worry about Civ 5 because a road on a tile reduces that tile's production...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but maximizing overflow is only useful in one specific situation: Wonders normally have a penalty to whip hammers, but overflow hammers avoid this penalty. So if you want to whip a wonder, you can do it by whipping something like an axeman so it has a large overflow...

Very nice post, Wreck. What exactly counts as a food resource? Sugar, grapes, whales, cows on plains?

I want to add my vote to this. I really wish there were different names for these two things instead of calling them both micromanagement. The "intelligent" type is a tough strategic decision where the various options have qualitatively different pros and cons. The "working the system" type...

I agree, but global warming, nuclear plants, and whales are pretty bad game mechanics in Civ 4, so it seems like they were included mainly for realism or politics. Global warming is no good because it affects all players equally randomly so there is no strategy decision involved that would...

My avatar is from Armageddon Empires, an indie TBS game. It's a 4X wargame in which all your assets are represented as a deck of cards, an my avatar is one of the bigger units belonging to the Machine Empire. This is the original version (it isn't much bigger)...

How's this for a blitzkrieg in Civ 4: When the AI's SOD enters your territory, don't attack it and send your offensive units to go capture enemy cities instead. You can use undefended fast units, or split your SOD because you know that they're safe from the AI SOD. By the time the enemy has...

Stacking unhappiness isn't that bad. You've already built five theaters for the Globe, so use the culture slider if you have to. It's a waste of commerce, but it is temporary and a small price to pay for an army that can conquer an opponent.

What do you do with these very early great scientists? An academy doesn't do much if you're running a low science slider while expanding quickly, and this early in the game your cities are small and unspecialized. The available techs are so cheap that lightbulbing seems like a waste. Is...

AFAIK, there's no cap on city size as long as you have enough food, health, and happiness. And you can get infinite amounts of those with globe theater, national park, future tech, food corps, and settled great merchants. Maybe the variable would overflow at 256 or something. HashedBrowns...

The two northern cities are good. In order to block, you want them to take up as much space as possible, and you're right that they have good land, too. You can settle a city for overlap later. Your city placement crime was ignoring all three seafood resources. One food resource is all you...

I like Civ 3 and I played it for hundreds of hours. But Civ 4 has civics and great people. Those two features alone make the builder side of the game much deeper and more varied. Civics let you build your own government and then customize parts of it as the game progresses, or change it all...

This might be a problem, but the cure is worse than the disease. Land=power is needed because it is the reason for conflict between players. If a small civ was as good as a large civ, there would be no reason to wage a war to conquer more territory. The best strategy would be to stay small...

Obelisks and madrassas have the unique feature that they allow you to run priest specialists even if you have no religion at all. Using a great prophet to bulb theology or COL pretty much guarantees you a religion even if you ignored the early religious techs. Two cites with obelisks, each...