Sisiutil's Strategy Guide for Beginners

caps said:
I am unable to open up your guide. I am not sure why but a blank screen comes up.
Do you have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed?
 
Revised yet again. I cleaned up the grammar, style, and formatting, incorporated more of everyone's suggestions and corrections (thanks again, everyone), and added sections on war weariness and victory conditions.
 
Checking my previous comments against the April 16 edition.

The commerce city section (now 4.3.4) still betrays a lack of understanding of commerce. Bluntly, a commerce city is not a wealth city.

Except in those circumstances when the commerce sliders are completely committed to one product, commerce cities benefit from all of the gold multiplier buildings and all of the science multiplier buildings.

Wealth cities can get by without the science buildings - but the key feature is that a wealth city will typically have a shrine (to generate income for the bank to multiply).

New Item: you've got the "Whipping Strategy" as a bullet item all by itself, which looks like a typographical error. I'd recommend revising that (maybe moving it to the next lower line?)
 
VoiceOfUnreason said:
The commerce city section (now 4.3.4) still betrays a lack of understanding of commerce. Bluntly, a commerce city is not a wealth city.

Except in those circumstances when the commerce sliders are completely committed to one product, commerce cities benefit from all of the gold multiplier buildings and all of the science multiplier buildings.

Wealth cities can get by without the science buildings - but the key feature is that a wealth city will typically have a shrine (to generate income for the bank to multiply).
This is likely a betrayal of my own ignorance, but I don't understand the distinction between wealth and commerce that you're trying to make here.

On the one hand, I intended this document as a beginner's guide to levels up to and including Noble, so I'm trying to avoid esoteric analyses that really only make a big difference at the higher difficulty levels. I sincerely apologize if that statement offends you, but I've been winning pretty handily all the way up to Prince level without fully grokking what you're trying to get at, so I'm not sure why a beginner would need to know it. (When I start getting my butt kicked at Emperor, however, I will probably come begging to you for advice.)

On the other hand, like all Civ addicts, I'm always open to learning better ways of playing the game. And I may already understand the distinction at some level, but not be able to verbalize it.

So my challenge to you, VoU, is to explain the point you're trying to make about wealth versus commerce simply and succinctly, in say 50 words or less, and I'll include it in the guide. Fair enough?
 
Sisiutil said:
This is likely a betrayal of my own ignorance, but I don't understand the distinction between wealth and commerce that you're trying to make here.

On the one hand, I intended this document as a beginner's guide to levels up to and including Noble, so I'm trying to avoid esoteric analyses that really only make a big difference at the higher difficulty levels. I sincerely apologize if that statement offends you, but I've been winning pretty handily all the way up to Prince level without fully grokking what you're trying to get at, so I'm not sure why a beginner would need to know it. (When I start getting my butt kicked at Emperor, however, I will probably come begging to you for advice.)

On the other hand, like all Civ addicts, I'm always open to learning better ways of playing the game. And I may already understand the distinction at some level, but not be able to verbalize it.

So my challenge to you, VoU, is to explain the point you're trying to make about wealth versus commerce simply and succinctly, in say 50 words or less, and I'll include it in the guide. Fair enough?

I hope I can sum this up well enough: Commerce is what you get through trade, i.e. from cottages, rivers, trade routes, etc. Wealth and science are what commerce is used to generate, if your science slider is at 100% all of the commerce you generate becomes science beakers/flasks. If the sliders are at 0% you generate 100% wealth. Some buildings, specialists, etc. generate just wealth or science, or mixtures of both. Thus a commerce city should be used to either create wealth (banks, great merchants, shrines, etc.) or science (libraries, acadamies, great scientists, etc.)

I hope this helps.
 
Thanks trianglman, that does help. It definitely falls into the category of something I understood at some level without being able to, or not previously bothering to, verbalize.

I'll try to work this into the next version, though it may not be to the depth some of you would prefer. Frankly, I hadn't really noticed the importance of this distinction until I started playing at Prince level. Only then did things become so tight that I really noticed when my "Wealth" city wasn't generating as much money for the treasury as I would have liked.
 
Sisiutil said:
Thanks trianglman, that does help. It definitely falls into the category of something I understood at some level without being able to, or not previously bothering to, verbalize.

I'll try to work this into the next version, though it may not be to the depth some of you would prefer.

Again, I recommend checking Next-level City Specialization, then deciding how much of that depth is appropriate to your guide, and finding a useful way to articulate it.
 
VoiceOfUnreason said:
Again, I recommend checking Next-level City Specialization, then deciding how much of that depth is appropriate to your guide, and finding a useful way to articulate it.
I'll do that. I think when I followed your link there before, it was late at night--after another umpteen turns of gameplay--and didn't give that thread the attention it deserved.

What I'm thinking I'll include is a sub-section under the City discussion that deals with the tile "products" (food, production, commerce) versus the civilization "products" (wealth, culture, research) and their relationships--especially how, as you've pointed out, commerce is transformed into the latter three. The "Commerce City" should really be called a "Wealth City", too--but the former term is what I've seen used here on the boards.

Now that I think about it, it's interesting how food and hammers are pretty much only used within the city that produces them, while commerce is contributed to your civilization as a whole.
 
Sisiutil said:
Now that I think about it, it's interesting how food and hammers are pretty much only used within the city that produces them, while commerce is contributed to your civilization as a whole.

Yeah, I remember that lightbulb catching my attention too.

It's a big part of the justification for production centers: hammers aren't transferable, but garrisons, workers, missionaries, workboats are.

Not relevant to the guide but: this distinction also shows up in Great People: the amount of research you get is based on the population of your civ, but the number of hammers you get from a Great Engineer is based on the population of the city where you are rushing.
 
Great work! Just what you need to get started.

More advanced players might need more info - but for a beginners guide you hit it RIGHT on!
 
In the previous version I had fine results using the strategy you describe, but not in 1.61.
 
Scandinavian said:
In the previous version I had fine results using the strategy you describe, but not in 1.61.
Interesting. I didn't think there were that many changes to 1.61 that would make a huge difference to overall gameplay--it just balances things a little better. People are still chopping, building the Kremlin, choosing the Representation civic and building the Pyramids to get it early, even though all of those have been "nerfed". I'm still doing those things on Prince and find they're still valuable, if not as powerful as before. That means they should be even more effective on Noble and lower levels.

Maybe I'll start a thread in the parent forum of this one to see if 1.61 has made any changes to people's winning strategies--unless there's one already there.
 
Newest revision posted. I tried to incorporate the outcome of the very productive discussion around science and commerce and tweaked a few other things.
 
Hello all, I'm new to the game and to the forum. I wanted to drop a big thank you to Sisiutil for writing this Guide it help me out. Specially, when you consider I have never played any of the previous Civ game. ( I was a Age of Empire fan)

I did really well with your guide Sisutil in chieftian. ( I found myself to be more of a builder in my first couple of games in Cheifian and Warlord.) I guess my biggest issue in Prince levle is I still having problem getting ready for war in the early part of the game. I'm unsure of when I should start building my army. I notice during my army building phase. I start getting invaded by armies of Barb. I find I don't have enough to prevent them from destroying my outter city improvement.

In my last game it was 600 BC and I only had 1 defender(Archer) in each city( 6 Cities) and about 4 Axeman and 4 Swordman. (I was running around trying to defend my cities from the Barb Armies. :rolleyes:

What am I doing wrong? I'm I starting to build the army to late?

I usually play a Large map (I notice you guys play a Standard map)
I play against 6 AI Civ.
 
jsolo15 said:
I'm unsure of when I should start building my army. I notice during my army building phase. I start getting invaded by armies of Barb. I find I don't have enough to prevent them from destroying my outter city improvement.

I tend to watch the power graph - if my power level is dropping relative to the other Civs I've met, I start taking steps to rectify that at once (meaning no, not after one more building, but NOW).

There are three approaches I've seen work for handing barbarians. You can have a strong army on hand to guard the borders, you can have a fast army on hand to run back and forth and respond, or you can station units outside your cultural borders to "bust the fog" - barbarians can't spawn on a tile you can see, or in the cultural borders of an enemy civ (I'm not sure if fog busting by the AI counts or not).
 
As of the 1.61 patch, building a fort no longer removes the forrest (they are now like camps, in this respect). This, I think, increases their utility from "not at all useful" to "useful, but only in very specific circumstances".
 
Latest revision posted May 2nd. Added a section on city specialists. Kudos to jsolo15 for engaging me in a discussion on the subject, which made me realize I had neglected to discuss specialists in the guide. That's now been corrected.
 
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