Beginning Strategy - growth first

Divaythsarmour

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I've been giving some thought to the different beginning strategies for a single player game. Like anything else, you take a certain amount of risk no matter what you do. And like anything else the degree of benefit or loss correlates directly with the amount of risk you take.

So if I wanted to take the most risk and thereby realize the most gain (or loss) I would put both of my workers on the same type of tile to maximize the effort.

My tendency would be to put both of them on food first and grow the city as a first move. It's true that other options like producing a quick warrior or researching HBR get put off for several turns. But as soon as you reach population 3, you have significantly greater leverage on your next move. You can quickly make up for the shortcomings in regards to lost production or research by emphasizing 3 worked tiles toward that endeavor (depending on you terrain of course). You could take a really balanced approach and switch to 1 food tile, 1 production tile and 1 research tile. You're also in a position where creating a settler is one of the options.
 
here's the issue for this (growing five turns instead of producing units, or in rare cases teching):

you're only advantage to this is gaining one extra worker in your capital for the years 3500BC-3000BC. Basically, for those turns you can have an extra 2 hammers, 2 science/gold, or 2 food (it takes 30 food to grow to 3 pop, so that's not extremely useful this early to have 2 extra food).....

right after growing, you're gonna still have to produce units. with 6 production in your cap, you can produce 3 warriors in 5 turns, but that's only if you have 3 forests by your cap. If you only have two forest by your cap, you'll have to take the assingment of one worker off another square for the 1 production value an assigned worker gets, and you'll have 3 warriors in 6 turns, or 2 in 4.

basically the importance to getting warriors out fast is to get a lay of the land, find huts and barb villages faster than others, and to mark you territory and prepare to rush others or prepare to be rushed... stunting exploration for 5 turns is not worth the 10 hammers, 10 food, or 10 trade you'll get from growing those first five turns.

it may get stale from time to time, but usually producing 2 warriors in 5 turns, then growing in your cap for five turns to get to 3 pop is the best route to go. As soon as I get 20 gold, i go ahead and rush another warrior while i'm still growing in my cap, an early warrior will almost always pay for itself. Usually I can have 3 warriors out in 5 turns no matter what civ i am. but by not getting to know the map until after 7 turns (five to grow, 2 for first warrior), you're really putting yourself behind the 8 ball in exploration.


this may work for you against the AI, because the AI is often ******ed. I stopped playing the AI seriously after I beat Deity by prodcuing one warrior in my capital, then I pumped out a settler and gift wrapped it to the next closest civ, letting the have an extra city, then i grew my cap up to 2 and proceeded to easily beat them. the AI is a joke and you have to find ways to handicap yourself to make it intresting after you've beaten Deity enough.... I'm not trying to talk myself up and make it sound like I beat Deity the first time I played it, on the contrary it was very hard for a long time, and i'm sure it is for anyone else that's getting to know the game, but now I pretty much use the AI as a lab to test out new strats for online.

I think you'd have a tough time with this strat against a human opponnet on MP.


but,,, i don't wanna come down on you hard or anything. if you're just doing this for your own fun, i don't wanna spoil it. but I personally don't think it's sound strategy, though i would be more than willing to read and contemplate any counterpoints. I learn new stuff all the time, and usually it's from thinking outside the box like this.
 
Your points are all very well taken.

I play emperor level against the AI. I'm probably ready to move up to deity as I've been winning steadily with every leader.

I've noticed that the most experienced players describe a start similar to yours (creating 2 warriors). I should try experimenting with it. Do you use that 3rd. warrior to defend your city?

I really like starting with horsemen instead of warriors. It's certainly a delayed start to try and focus on growth then research (for HBR) and then production to spam horsemen. But you're pretty much gauranteed to have a military advantage real early in the game. Your horseman armies can wreak havoc with the AI, stealing cities, stealing settlers etc.

Obviously, I have a lot of room to improve. Maybe I'll jump up to deity and force myself to start with warriors. :)
 
yeah, i skipped emperor and went straight to deity, i lost a lot of games at first, but then quickly figured it out....


as for the third warrior, i don't leave him in the cap. in multiplayer I'll consider leaving a unit in the cap so i won't let others have an easy walkin. but in general, the ai will avoid you the first 20 turns or so.... they'll take a settler, but usually they steer clear of you cap. but if there is one within a few turns of you cap, it is still a good idea to hammer out a unit to put there.

as for horserushing, it's still wise to go ahead and spend a few turns to get a warrior out then research horseback riding, that way you can have some gold to rush your first horseman.

easy horserushes:
with the Aztecs: rush a warrior for 20 gold on the first turn (u start with 25 gold). set your workers to science and get HBR. explore and get barb villages and huts with your warrior to get gold to start rushing your horseman army.

with americans: set your reseach to HBR on turn 1, explore for a few turns with your Great Person, and then sell you GP for some gold, or use him to build a horseman, and then go get huts after 5 turns. When you find a friendly village with your exploring great person, you'll often get HBR, which makes the rush quicker, because you can go ahead and start hammering ou the horsemen.

with china: there's many ways to do it. i always get my warrior in two turns, then I set 2 workers on science, 1 on hammers. This will get you a horse in 7 turns. But an even better way to do it, you set one worker on science, and two on forests and research horseback riding. It takes a while, but when your done researching horseback riding, you'll get 2 free horsemen (set your city to build a wonder so you can bank hammers before getting horseback riding). so in about 12 turns you have 2 horsemen, 1 warrior, and you're only one horseman short of getting an army.

and btw, any horserush with the arabs in the BC is usually pretty powerful too.

hope that helps. just remember to expand a whole lot. you don't need to win in the BC. it's better to expand till you can't, and don't build libraries until you're done building about 10-15 cities.
 
My tendency would be to put both of them on food first and grow the city as a first move.

I have also been toying around with this. Grayson's points are good (as it relates to an early rush), but that extra population has a long term benefit that I think gets overlooked. Then again, the early food approach gives the enemy five extra turns to explore the map, get barbarians, and get huts.

I stopped fooling around with the early game rush tactic after reaching my first enemy capital a little too late and being foiled by archers.

BTW, I did not realize this minor detail until recently but all cities seem to have a little (or big) flag in them unless there is nobody home. If no warrior or archer is inside there is no flag there.
 
the reason not to set both workers on food asap is not just for the early rush, but mainly to get gold.

I rush early in the game with a few civs, but mostly I prefer to just get gold, secure of the map for future expansions, and tech up to something more powerful.

You're first goal in the game is getting another city, whether that be by taking on, getting 100 gold, or rushing/buidling a settler. That's what you're shooting to do in the first 15 turns or so. Yes, you need to tech and produce units and grow in that amount of time too, but wasting 5 early turns on growth doesn't help much at all.


by this method, the earliest you have a unit out is in 7 turns, and people could be knocking on your doorstep by that time. You have plenty of time to grow later after you kick out a few warriors and decide whether or not you need Bronze Working, or you need to grow to 3 pop.

the goal I have for any civ is @ 2500BC:
1. Capital at 3 pop
2. Have got 100 gold
3. Have researched Bronze Working and have some archers
4. Have enough gold to rush another settler out of my capital (40 gold).

sometimes one of these suffers, but this is what I shoot for if I'm not going all out rushing the other civs, and even so, I'd still like to accomplish these things even if I am rushing.
 
Grayson - Your early game strategy sounds a little more like a rush for the sake of exploration / gold than an all out bum rush to tackle an enemy capital. I am a much bigger fan of this strategy than the capital strategy. Also, you seem to be geared toward a MP game whereas I am playing against the computer still. Your strategy is sound for certain.

Do you know how many apples it takes to hit the first few city growths? I can't find that on the forum.
 
I guess the thing is to not be a one trick pony. There's no point trying to rush caps or cities if it's just not there, but if the occassion arises, you should jump on it. But most civs are really suited to go for the early rush every game. For example, I play the Spanish a lot, and there's not any good tricks to getting an early rush going consistently with them, other than trying to use naval support and horsemen/warriors, but that won't come up often, and it's not something that you should go for every game with the Spanish.

Learning to pump out a few warriors, then grow to three, then get bronze working, and start rushing settlers and more settlers is really the easiest way to beat the AI, short of using an aggressive civ and trying to get a dom win early.

It takes 20 apples to get to a population of 3.

City growth goes like this

10 food to grow to 2
20 food to grow to 3
30 food to grow to 4
40 food to grow to 5

etc.

there is some changes to the growth rate later, and the requirements go down and change as the game progresses, but what I have listed above is all you really need to know for the most part, because your cities will be on of those sizes when you do the bulk of you expanding.

remember, almost always is best to build more settlers, an not a library in the early game, unless you've got a lot of gold early, and you're not needed a city to rush another settler out of.

Also, you say my strategy is geared more toward MP, but the only real difference is that you are a little safer against the AI. It's still a lot more sound to get warriors and tech to Bronze Working, and then expand out to about 10 cities against the AI, than it is to not do these things.

The key to beating the AI is just defending well, expanding a lot, teching up and killing them when you can, usually with more advanced units.
 
I have just started playing Civ Rev. I have owned it for months, but preferred playing Civ IVas this seemed like a watered down version at first. Now that I have played Civ IV too much, I have sat down in the living room and enjoyed the simplcity of this game on my big screen (rather than playing Civ IV on my laptop).

I guess that would make me a novice. I have also been playing around on the easier difficulties as I learn the best strategies. What I have found so far is that this game really is all about the early rush. No matter what victory condition I play for, I want to take out all of the AI players (leaving one capital city) as early as possible. After that I can play for which ever win I want as I out produce, out grow, and out tech the lone AI player left on the map.

Thoughts?
 
the reason not to set both workers on food asap is not just for the early rush, but mainly to get gold.

I rush early in the game with a few civs, but mostly I prefer to just get gold, secure of the map for future expansions, and tech up to something more powerful.

You're first goal in the game is getting another city, whether that be by taking on, getting 100 gold, or rushing/buidling a settler. That's what you're shooting to do in the first 15 turns or so. Yes, you need to tech and produce units and grow in that amount of time too, but wasting 5 early turns on growth doesn't help much at all.


by this method, the earliest you have a unit out is in 7 turns, and people could be knocking on your doorstep by that time. You have plenty of time to grow later after you kick out a few warriors and decide whether or not you need Bronze Working, or you need to grow to 3 pop.

the goal I have for any civ is @ 2500BC:
1. Capital at 3 pop
2. Have got 100 gold
3. Have researched Bronze Working and have some archers
4. Have enough gold to rush another settler out of my capital (40 gold).

sometimes one of these suffers, but this is what I shoot for if I'm not going all out rushing the other civs, and even so, I'd still like to accomplish these things even if I am rushing.

The other things you said are good, but I would add something here:

Having the capital at 3 pop is needed in my opinion, but, bronze working and some archers aren't needed. You are going to waste 20 beakers (or 20 hammers/gold) plus the archers if you don't need. I am going to say this, but some rushers knew months ago I kept building a lot of cities and I usually use horsemen to defend them, and don't have many defences. Why? Let's say you have a horsemen army. That's 2 archer armies. If you got 3 cities 2 space from each other, and you move the horsemen in the right tile, you can prevent enemies from taking these cities just killing them (and in the early game you won't meet archers plus other units unless you play against arabs). You would need only 1 archer per city if the horsemen can't go there in one turn, then you kill every unit you meet. You shouldn't sell the horsemen army if you got it because it's worth 3 archers while it can still destroy some units. Not everyone build an archer army plus catapult army (if that happens) and remember, if you got an hill to use, you can kill the archer army first then the catapult army with not many problems.

What I could suggest with horse rushing using other civs is to build 2 warriors, then you choose horseback riding (or you bank beakers just pressing b, but this is going to work more in sp because if you meet a galley in MP it could drop a warrior in your capital; then you choose horseback if you got enough gold or another technology).

If you got 100 gold, then going for the horsemen rush is worth. It's going to take all your gold but you can explore and defend much easier, and if you WANT, you can take free capitals. As Grayson said, this is hardly going to work, it's better to build 2 warriors then you grow. That's what I usually do if playing average civilizations

If you don't want to build settlers, then you can just grow to 3 and if you got 100 gold, work on 2 grasslands 2 turns then you can rush a settler. If you want to rush more easier, work other 2 turns then you would have 16 food. You would have then 8 food / 20 to grow from 2 to 3 needing only 3 turns but it all depens on what you want to do.

You can still steal gold from the AI and I think I wrote it somewhere in this forum, it should be in the archive as "A lot of tips about the game" or something like that.. You should read how to get 25 gold. It's not an exploit in my opinion but a powerful thing that you can use to win a lot of games. That means 2.5/4 gold needed for a settler and if you count 4 AI it's 2.5 settlers free
 
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