Civilization IV is my 1st Civilization game (and I suck at it)

First of all, I'd like to say hello to everyone, this is my first post. Hello!

I got this game for my girlfriend a while back, but she couldn't get it to run on my PC. A few months ago I discovered, quite painfully, that my video card (Radeon 9800 Pro) was in the process of literally falling apart. Basically, the cooling fan fell out and it over-heated, but this was the final result of its problems. For the last few weeks of its life, it had been causing numerous crashes and bizarre graphical corruption (a sim's face melted), but I was never aware that the video card was the problem; I assumed the new games were just in need of a patch. Then one night, while I was playing Half-Life 2, the screen turned purple and the PC froze and refused to boot up again. When I opened up the tower, the cooling fan on the Radeon 9800 Pro had falled off and was hanging by a single wire. So I bought an NVidia GeForce 6600 the following day, and now all is well and Civilization IV has worked ever since.

But it wasn't until lately that I started to actually play the game, and wow! This game is good and all, but it's hard as heck! I guess I'm just stupid. For my first several games I played on a Standard Terra map and could never get beyond three cities because there simply wasn't enough room, and I just don't have a good grip on fighting wars yet (i.e., I die), so expanding through brute force just wasn't an option (I play as Elizabeth, by the way, on Noble difficulty).

Tonight, however, I tried on a Continents map, and things got way better. The land was very fertile, lots of lakes and grasslands, cows, rice, wheat, everything I could possibly want, and not many neighbors grabbing everything before I could even get out my second worker. So I saved the game, and will get back to it later, but I just wanted to drop in, say hello, and maybe ask for help, though I wouldn't even know where to begin. I feel mentally inferior in this game, I really do. So many people are good at it, and I can't even win my first game. I hope I'm not alone in this.

If you wanted to post your game, I'm sure that several people would be willing to offer helpful tips. England - however - does have a great unique unit in the Redcoat, that is like mini-Infantry, so if you're in the Industrial Age, you should look at your opportunities with that unit.

Welcome to the forum

Maybe you should check which difficult level you are playing on... Try the easiest in the begining and then advance to something more harder...

Civ 4 is your first Civ game, and you start on Noble? Boy, you like punishment, don't you?

Work your way up from the Settler difficulty. No, really. A slightly more stupid AI makes learning the ropes that much easier, especially in a Civ game.

There's two things I've leearned from civfanatics:
1: build lots of cottages
2: if someone takes a good cityspot, take the city (but maybe you should try it on easier levels first)
3: build more cottages
4: and you gotta have good military

You aren't alone Nevordan.

I spend a lot of time cursing at the computer. Civ IV is my first game and Noble is challenging to me as well. Not sure if this is a good strategy but here is what I am doing... I have a starting map saved and I play through the first 100 turns (roughly) then look at my score compared to the the AI. I try to analyze where I think I went wrong (reading the boards here), make some notes and reload from the beginning. I have found this useful because it lets me see how different opening strategies work and how bad decisions can really slow you down. Good luck and hang in there.

thats3-4 things

in my first noble game i over expanded and was on 40% reseach so cottages help. i'm in the same situation as you got the game a week ago and never played civ before so here's what i did.
1.play tutorial
(optianal) i read guides on this site they helped a bit. the most aid was reading sulla's game that taught me alot.
2.play a game on each dificulty upto warlord then play two games on that.
3. play noble until you think you have grasp and mastered all concepts in the game.
so far this is what i'm upto i guess next i will try to perfect my noble game then move up difficulty at a time.

Since it is your first CIV game you have lots to learn. CIV is a complicated game for a first timer and you should expect to have trouble the first few times.

Welcome and good luck.

MitchCJ said:

I have a starting map saved and I play through the first 100 turns (roughly) then look at my score compared to the the AI.

Click to expand...

The score doesn't really tell you much. It's based on trivial facts which doesn't really tell if you're in the lead or not. If I rush for technological advantage, I neglect my militairy. Since points count towards vast armies, naturally I'm dead last, yet I can build musketeers and the AI is usually stuck with axemen/swordsmen, close to macemen.

The same can be said for people who use the CS slingshot. They will be far behind untill he slingshot triggers, at which point they will be well in the lead, just not in points.

If you really want to learn, you could try and read a Succession Game. Here you'll see how more experienced players deal with different situation, but more importantly, they tell you WHY they will do it that way. Playing on higher levels forces you to think in advance. Like skipping a good tech and rely on trade to get it.

Also most of them are just plain fun to read

To succeed you are likely to need to develop your cities, establish and maintain a sufficient military and to keep up in the tech race. Early on, and to some degree throughout, you must also explore and learn as much as you can about your surroundings.

Giving the right priority among these things at the right time is challenging and it is only really when you have played through to the end a few times that you can hope to have a clear idea of exactly why you need to do what you do need to do and when.

Meanwhile there are numerous variables - the terrain, the faction you play, the factions you run into and how many barbarians you encounter to name just a few. So playing by rote is not generally a good idea.

I have played a whole lot of Civ - from I to III plus SMAC and related games - yet it has just taken me about twenty tries before (yesterday) managing my first Civ IV win playing on Emperor. You may well have to wait as long.

I wouldn't bother with settler but if you lose quickly three or four times more drop down a level and see how you get on. The earliest phase of the game is the most fun so you may well enjoy a series of losing games which at least allow you to play most of the time in that early phase.

But you won't advance very fast. Because you won't gain experience of where you want to finish up - with a mature civ able to outstrip the AI.

Eventually, as you get used to the game, switch to Epic and Marathon games. Normal speed is cool when you are trying to learn the tech tree and how it flows.

Keep playing Warlord until you win easily, then work at Prince.

Besides Continent maps, Lake maps can be fun, too.

OCC (One city Challenge) is a great way to learn the basics of city building as you have only one city. You should be able to eventually win this easily on Warlord or Prince.

Don't automate workers

Mess around with Custom maps if you want. Maybe try a game with yourself vs. the Barbarians and no other civ's, just to learn.

You need patience as well as losing some games. You can learn a lot when you lose. In CIV IV, I find it hard to be a total warmonger. You can conquer an enemy but doing so before courthouses may kill your research.

Get bronze working and switch to slavery. This allows you to build up faster while sacrificing population.

Just hang in there.

Nevordan said:

I got this game for my girlfriend a while back, but she couldn't get it to run on my PC. A few months ago I discovered, quite painfully, that my video card (Radeon 9800 Pro) was in the process of literally falling apart. Basically, the cooling fan fell out and it over-heated, but this was the final result of its problems. For the last few weeks of its life, it had been causing numerous crashes and bizarre graphical corruption (a sim's face melted), but I was never aware that the video card was the problem; I assumed the new games were just in need of a patch. Then one night, while I was playing Half-Life 2, the screen turned purple and the PC froze and refused to boot up again. When I opened up the tower, the cooling fan on the Radeon 9800 Pro had falled off and was hanging by a single wire. So I bought an NVidia GeForce 6600 the following day, and now all is well and Civilization IV has worked ever since.

Click to expand...

Well, that explains it. We were wondering what took you so long.

Just hang in there Nevordan. Use the community here and you'll be up and conquering in no time. Everyone remembers those first fitful attempts early on in their Civ experience. It's an impressive game.

Welcome!

kmr said:

Civ 4 is your first Civ game, and you start on Noble? Boy, you like punishment, don't you?

Work your way up from the Settler difficulty. No, really. A slightly more stupid AI makes learning the ropes that much easier, especially in a Civ game.

Click to expand...

I most heartily agree with kmr. You are not the first one I have seen say "I suck at this game - it's so hard" In all cases, it's new Civvers playing at Noble. Noble was too hard for me when I first got CivIV and I've been playing this game since 1991. Play the easier levels, it's great fun whumping the AI big time. Then move up when you get bored.

Regarding this site, keep in mind it's Civ Fanatics, not Casual Civ Players. A lot of people here have been playing Civ for years and years. It has changed a lot since the original game, but obviously playing Civ IV is easier when you're already very familiar with half of the game dynamics. (Civ IV did probably add more new stuff than any previous version though.)

Terra maps are, in my opinion, the hardest. (But also the most fun.) I would strongly suggest a new player not play on terra. One third or more of the land isn't available for settling until halfway through the game, making the early game very cramped and thus quite challenging. If you don't have the skills to pull off calculated early wars, you are very likely to fall behind. (An advanced player could do well without the wars, but that would also require a lot of skill at micromanaging what few cities you have in order to get Galleons a.s.a.p.)

So I advise you to stick with maps other than Terra or Pangaea. The map you eastart on determines a lot in this game. Cut your teeth on easier maps (and an easier difficulty level, as others have suggested) and you'l find yourself walking over your opponents and moving up in difficulty soon enough.

As for general strategies, it's kind of hard to reply to these "how do I play the game" posts. Overall I'd say it's most important to get to know the key "milestones" in the game (usually a technology.) In the early game Bronze Working is a huge milestone which opens up Slavery, forest chopping, and the Axeman. Feudalism is a milestone because it allows Longbowen, which double a city's defense over Archers. Code of Laws and Civil Service are milestones which open up key infrastructure options for your empire. And on and on.

Read articles on this site for specific strategies, e.g. early chop-rushing, great people farms, etc. Put them all together and you will get the idea. This game is a balancing act. You will learn each aspect that needs to be balanced before you learn how to balance them, if that makes sense.

Thanks for all the replies, everyone! Let's see, where to begin... I guess I have been playing this game for about a week and a half now, almost every day (it's addictive!). The first thing I did was play through the tutorial, but I must say that even then I was completely lost (well maybe not completely, but I was anxious). I also read through the entire Civilopedia as well as the manual that came with the game, but there was still a lot that escaped me. I guess this is because I have never played a Civilization game before, and perhaps the manual was written with the experienced in mind. It was only after I played a few games and got my butt kicked that I could clearly see that seeking help from experienced players was probably the best path to take. I loaded up Google and did a search, and read a guide on Gamespot.com, but it still wasn't sinking in. I even went out and bought the official Brady guide, but it too seems to have been written for the experienced Civilization player. Finally, in the end, I found this place.

My first few games were probably the funniest. I agreed to open borders with the AI, and I traded technologies when I thought the deals were fair, but I never gave anything away for free. I had no idea at the time that aggressive civilizations took great offense to this, and so my head usually ended up on the end of their pole. I also didn't know how short the sessions were. 460 turns on Normal Speed doesn't seem like a lot, but last night I played all the way up to 2045 before being destroyed, and the game did last for hours on end, so I was impressed. I already knew I was going to lose, so I built a few ICBMs and launched them on the two civilizations that had been the most rude to me; it didn't do what I expected, though. Well, it didn't stop them from killing me, that is.

I read a great deal of material in the Strategy section before playing again, but that's when things got really frustrating. In the end, though, I believe it was the Terra maps that was messing me up. They all seem to be at least 50% water with a few narrow islands, and so all the opponent civilizations are crowded together. Most of the time I would only be able to get one or two cities up before the AI grabbed everything (at least, everything worth taking); sometimes I would get lucky and end up with three cities, like last night. It makes sense that everyone was so far ahead of me. Even three cities full of cottages probably wouldn't get you a technological edge all the way to 2045! But I was still happy that I was able to build nuclear weapons before anyone else even thought of it. And I did help Isabella take down the Chinese empire, and it was the first war I fought and actually won, for a change. I had knights, catapults, musketmen, pikemen and had just gotten the ability to build riflemen, so I think I did pretty well. At the end of the game Isabella loved me, but she was last place on the scoreboard and I was just above her, so we were a couple of losers!

Well I certainly did ramble in this post, but before I go to my appointment, I'd like to thank everyone again for taking the time to talk to me! I thought I was getting to a point in this post... oh, well I would like to win a cultural win! And how would I post my game here for others? Thanks!

Hi Nevordan and welcome to CivFanatics.

Not trying to toot my own horn here, but I wrote up a Walkthrough for Civ4 when it came out that you might find helpful. I know it was useful for a lot of players who were just getting started when the game came out.

http://civ4info.com/Sullla/civ4_walk_1.html

hahahahahahhahah vary funny get civ1 I think you should conquer it before moving on hahahahhah or keep playing civ 4 till you get good

^^^^he's probably pretty good by now... 4 years after this thread had died!

Do we have a mummy smiley?