UknowsI's beginner's guide to Civ 5

Thank you UknowsI for your extremely interesting guide.

I have been a Civ II and III player, scenario builder and modder for many years but have just been presented with Civ V.
Unlike any game I have ever purchased, it was surprising to find that the purchased DVD required an enormous update before registration or play could commence. Thankfully I installed the game late on Christmas Eve when my broadband gave me an excellent 330kb/sec download. Even so the ridiculous 4670MB‘update’ took four hours to download. Firaxis should have included such a huge update into a new disc.

However, like possibly other ‘experienced’ Civ players, once it was installed (at 02h30) I climbed straight in. I found Civ V similar but also very different from Civ III.
I have only started playing one game but already I don’t like a few of Civ V changes:
1. It takes far too many turns to produce each unit.
2. The ability to alter citizen deployment amongst its tiles seems to have been removed when viewing the city area.
3. The ability of cities to cause devastating bombard two tiles away when opposing units can only move one tile. They are taken out long before they can get near the city. No doubt your advice to have ‘swordsmen and catapults’ should counter that?
4 The other irritating thing is that the introducing movie (excellent although it is) cannot be stopped by ‘Esc’, ‘Right click’, not even ‘Ctrl-Alt-Delete’. It goes on and on before miraculously ending a few minutes after all of the above moves.

However, now that I’ve found your useful guide, I will start a new game and try to improve my play.

very nice guide

an addition to December patch is Circus is now free of maintenance, will prob alter settlement pattern/tech sequence for some.

asix79 said:

I think you misunderstood what I said. By filling one of, or both of, the specialist slots associated with the buildings I mentioned, citizens become either artists, engineers, or merchants. There is a difference between individual artists and a Great Artist, for example. Furthermore, by having a temple fully staffed, you temporarily maximize the speed with which a Great Artist is born in that city.

Click to expand...

I still cannot follow this:
Here is that part of the screen; where are the slots associated with the buildings, for instance my library?
And how do I assign the worker to my library?

And how do I assign the worker to my library?

Click to expand...

The newest patch removed that ability, it was kind of broken to get a great scientist so early. Not every building has a specialist slot, those that do will have a circle with a person's face in it, click it and it becomes filled and changes color (blue for scientist, orange for engineer, pink/purple for artist)

When you get later in the game more buildings have these "specialist slots", like the university, windmill, research facility, public school, opera house etc...

Thank you

You're welcome, just keep in mind that a person working a building is a person that's not working a tile outside of the city.

So if you add a person to work a temple, and that person gets pulled from a farm that had 3 food on it, your city is going to lose 3 food per turn because no one is working that tile.

So adding a person to a building lowers either your food, production, or gold per turn (or a combination of any of these two), so keep this in mind when all of a sudden your city starts starving when you assign specialists

Yes, that is something I know, but the thing about assigning to a building was not properly explained in the game's help and also here I did not find it, so you cleared that up for me, thanks

You say get city that can produce great scientists and that you do this by assigning workers to the library in your city. I think I may have been missing something for years? HOW do you assign workers to a library on the city screen? Love some simple basic help if you've time. From the eternal beginner, Cormorant!

Necro thread. Libraries no longer have specialist slots. First science specialists come with universities.

A pretty nice guide for new civ players. However, I think that by insisting on avoiding specific strategies you're doing a disservice for new civ players, since random moves and constant improvising won't get you very far in civ, especially in the higher difficulties. In any match you need to decide what victory condition you're aiming towards and choose your nation and starting strategy accordingly. Sure, relying on very specific wonders and timings is not generally a good idea, especially for new players who don't have the knowledge and micromanagement levels to achieve it. However, they still should have clear goals on what they want to achieve and when. For example the decision whether to go tall or wide should be made early on according to the chosen nation and play style, and that choice should generally be maintained unless you have extreme good or bad luck that will either force you into(in case of bad luck) or greatly push you towards(in case of good luck) a different strategy.

Also, advising new players to not lock into specific nations and strategies is fine and all, but it doesn't mean that the nation choice should have no impact on the play style. For example, don't pick Babylon or Korea if you want a domination victory, as they are inferior nations for that play style and you completely miss on their greatest advantages. In the same sense, don't pick a nation like Japan if you're pursuing a peaceful diplomatic victory or whatnot, seeing that you completely waste their Bushido ability as well as the Samurai and to a lesser extent the Zero. You can obviously do these things once you're an experienced player who wants to challenge himself by intentionally handicapping yourself, but certainly not as a new player who tries to learn the game.