Condensed tips for beginners?

If your question is supposed to be: "the enemy is coming at me! I'm not sure I can hold them off, what would help more - building a wall or just building another defender?" then hmmm... I'd probably say the wall because it will help ALL of your defenders as opposed to just giving you one more guy with lower bonuses.

The wall could make it so that each defender kills 2 attackers rather than just 1, so if you have 3 defenders and they are bringing a stack of 8 at you, building the wall means you kill 6 and lose 2, you saved the city (and hopefully have reinforcements on the way from somewhere else to hold off the last 2 injured attackers). If you built another unit, you only kill 4 and you lose 4 - you lost the city. *These figures were just made up as an example.

If the AI has researched Construction, walls will buy you time because they always bombard first. Enough to get 5 more units from various cities.

Hello all

My first post, although I've been playing Civ4 for years and years...

Caste System - it looks kind of good, but I'm concerned I don't get the most out of it. You get 'unlimited specialists' or whatever - but does this mean you then have to go into each of your cities and activate them by hand?

I've never really got into the fine-tuning of specialists in cities... Even way back when I was playing the original civilization when I was a school kid!


A sort of two-part question, then -

A) am I totally missing out on a huge aspect of the game if I can't be bothered with switching the specialists in each if my cities every few turns?


B) is caste system at all worth using if I *dont* do that?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

A) No, you aren't. Although micromanagement often helps, but only if you do it correctly.

B) Much better if you micromanage it, but Slavery's normally considered better.

Thanks, TheSunIsDark!

Just to clarify - are the specialists 'automatically' there under caste system? Or do I have to actually activate them myself?

Same question for the Statue of Liberty - free specialists! Great! But since I never actually go into cities and select them... Does nothing happen? Or does the AI automanage it?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

@frankie: under Caste system you go in and manually take citizens off working tiles and becoming scientists or whatever. With SoL you get one free specialist of whatever types you'd already be allowed to run -- it just doesn't take a citizen from working a tile. I do not recall whether it automatically starts running a real specialist or instead runs a weak "citizen" specialist that just adds 1 .

And welcome to civfanatics

The Statue of Liberty (same continent only), or Mercantilism, both provide a free specialist in any open slots. The city with the National Park will have a number of free specialists equal to the jungle/forest preserves in its BFC. Some wonders, like The Great Library, provide specialists and preassign them (such as the two free scientists of TGL.)

A building or wonder that provides specialist slots must be completed in the city under consideration. There are also unlimited slots for Merchants, Scientists and Artists under the civic Caste System in all of one's cities.

In the case of free specialists, the city governor by default will assign them to what it considers is the best specialist slots. For example, it will usually pick Spy specialists over all others. Although it (spy) is the best specialist (1 Bpt + 4 Ept), such a specialist may not match your strategy (for example a deep scientist bulb of Philosophy, Paper, and Education [2 bulbs] to get a really early 1st to Liberalism technology bonus).

Sun Tzu Wu

SoL will run a specialist in each of your cities on the continent with SoL, if there's a slot available. The governors' picks tend to be a bit screwy (they have a love of spy specialists), but you can run through your cities and reassign them.

Mercantilism works similarly (except for all your cities).

As dalamb said, Caste will give you unlimited slots for scientist, merchant, and artist specialists but you generally have to manually reassign citizens from working tiles to being specialists (the governors will on occasion decide to assign a citizen to be a specialist rather than work a tile.)

x-post with Sun Tzu Wu

Ok, new one:

What do you often find the best tactic for dealing with an enemy at war who also has a vassal state?

In my ideological frame of mind, I like to try to lead righteous crusades to liberate that vassal state from the yoke of their oppressors, but in practice it rarely works out that way. In the end, it almost always ends with a clear win/loss scenario within which the vassal state, although it may well have played a significant role in the actual war, has no bearing on the outcome of the peace settlement (this for me is an obvious omission to BtS's diplomatic options)

But that's by-the-by! What do you find is best? Work to liberate the vassal, or aim for all-out conquest?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

frankiethefrank said:

But that's by-the-by! What do you find is best? Work to liberate the vassal, or aim for all-out conquest?

Click to expand...

Keep in mind that regardless of the overall diplomatic situation, you're going to earn a sizable diplomatic demerit for declaring war on the vassal. I know, I know... you're actually declaring war on their master. But in the Civ IV game engine/rules, that makes no difference. So after the war, if you're expecting hugs and gratitude from the newly-liberated vassal... guess again. Basically, you've taken on the thankless task of an intervening cop in a domestic dispute. The abused wife is more likely to whack you over the noggin with one of her deadbeat husband's whiskey bottles than to praise you as her savior.

To decide what to do with the vassal, you have to ask yourself what type of victory you're aiming for. If it's diplomatic or conquest, it probably makes more sense to wipe out/conquer the vassal along with the master. At the very least, your newly conquered cities will likely be facing cultural pressure from the former vassal's nearby territory. If the culture is strong enough, there may even be "rejoin our motherland" happiness in some of those cities. If you're going for another victory condition, your war aims are likely to be more limited (obtain a needed resource, weaken a potential rival/threat, etc.) and will likely not require liberating a vassal.

what is the culture win in standard map, standard settings?

is it 3 cities with 5000 culture?

in recent game i noticed an AI having 14900, 4700, 4200, cities in victory screen , so I panicked and only with great losses managed to raze some of those cities... (cavalry vs. infantry)

so is it 5000 or more? if 5000 thats very easy to achieve

Nicol.Bolas said:

what is the culture win in standard map, standard settings?

is it 3 cities with 5000 culture?

in recent game i noticed an AI having 14900, 4700, 4200, cities in victory screen , so I panicked and only with great losses managed to raze some of those cities... (cavalry vs. infantry)

so is it 5000 or more? if 5000 thats very easy to achieve

Click to expand...

Its 50,000

Hey guys! a simple question here

Let's say you have several quite developed, specialized cities. What do you produce, if there's no 'priority buildings' left to build? As an example - a commerce city: All money (and/or science) reffered buildings (bank, etc.) buildings are built, happiness and health are on decent level, culture is redundand as the city is inside the country. Producing units takes ages, buildings like forge or temples is just wasting turns. Producing wealth? Small amount of hammers won't add that much commerce this way...
The same in production cities: forges,factories built, almost no money/science produced so libraries and banks are redundand, producing units during peace time (or when the army is already well developed and our civ is defended well) is just pumping the upkeep cost. Again, building temples, universities or happiness/health buildings is wasting turns.

What do you guys do in such a situation?


Another thing:
Great People - what do you usem them for? Golden age? The first ~three golden ages cost low (1,2,3 GPs) but later it takes too much. Researching a tech? Joining a city as a super-specialist? Building an Academy or Shrine is a good idea, but what else?

Ghpstage said:

Its 50,000

Click to expand...

Just imagine it would be 5000... sneak culture victories with three great artists all over the place.

@fid: Wealth is always good or failgold if you have modifiers (resource, ind, org rel) and can wait.

fid said:

Another thing:
Great People - what do you usem them for? Golden age? The first ~three golden ages cost low (1,2,3 GPs) but later it takes too much. Researching a tech? Joining a city as a super-specialist? Building an Academy or Shrine is a good idea, but what else?

Click to expand...

CW is that you try to get your first several GPeeps to be GScientists. Use the first to build an academy and the rest to bulb.

Other considerations (esp. if you've done some wonder-whoring and are getting mixed GPeeps):

Golden Ages get stronger the larger your empire is, so you probably want to get those later (no earlier than late classical) rather than sooner.

It takes a long time for a settled GPeep to generate enough // to catch up to a bulb, so if you're going to settle, settle early. (Not applicable to GGs.)

Generally better to capture a shrine then use your won GProph to build it, but if you've captured a non-shrined holy city of a well-spread religion, it may be a good use of a GProph. Otherwise use the GProph for bulbs (esp. up to Theology) or GAges.

If not going for culture, GArtists are goo GAge-bait.

fid said:

As an example - a commerce city: ...Producing wealth? Small amount of hammers won't add that much commerce this way...

The same in production cities: forges,factories built, almost no money/science produced so libraries and banks are redundand, producing units during peace time (or when the army is already well developed and our civ is defended well) is just pumping the upkeep cost. Again, building temples, universities or happiness/health buildings is wasting turns.

Click to expand...

The same in production cities? Those can always be building wealth if they have nothing else to build. That can make a very significant jump in research possible. Or wonders for fail gold. Or banks, universities and theaters to enable National Wonders. Have enough Workers? No? Build more!

thanks guys, that's what I was hoping for!

Hi everyone,

I'm currently playing a game which I have utterly totally lost (which is fine, it was a good game regardless) but one thing was really prominent - at a later stage of the game (circa 1850), something strange was happening with my economy which I couldn't and can't understand. Even with research, culture and espionage set to zero, and projected income per turn at over 1,000 , my actual income was less than 50 gold per turn. It was insane.

Now, I've seen it's commonplace to not actually receive as much gold as you've been projected, but I've never really understood the mechanics of why, and *this* situation was just baffling.

Can anyone explain, in an idiot-proof way, why this happens? Where does that projected gold go?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

If you are in universal suffrage civic and have the city governor on for choosing what to build, the governor will spend your gold to rush buy things.