Some small tips

Here are some small tips I have learnt, just thought I should share. Please reply with some more.

- If you move an upgraded building you will lose the upgrades if you move the building.
- Focus your citizens on food and production exclusively. (Then sell the excess in market and buy what you need - as food & production are the most expensive items)
- Build your houses by the coast and adjacent to each other, this will boost their happiness and therefore their productivity.
- Always build the improvement building and upgrade them as soon as possible. (granary, lumber mill etc.)
- You can build over a resource and if you delete the building, the resource will still be there.
- The caravan minigame caps at 1000g. You have to wait for the prize money to build up though.
- Build roads under resources (wood, metal, iron) to increase their yield by 10. (PieceOfMind)

(how-to)
- Recycle, click 'build' and select the 'move/recycle' option. Then click on the building you want recycled and click back on the 'build' button.

Good points!

There's so much focus on Production and Food that there might be some balancing needed. At the moment if you focus on Prod and Food and sell of at the right times, you can just buy the other stuff you need.

Well it's about grinding whatever has the highest market value, which indeed are currently Food and Production.
ATM you can sell one (100) Food and buy and get six (100) Culture. Of course the market will adapt.

-Buy low, sell high
-As the game goes on, the Caravan minigame becomes more and more a waste of time. Near the start of the game, the reward is actually good compared to your income so make use of it!
-Remember to put roads under sources of production.
-When you're not doing anything (and you are incredibly bored), hover over the little coloured bubbles that pop up above the heads of citizens to get extra income.

Keep in mind you have to produce science to get moves in the maze, which can give huge prizes. I currently have 50000 science because I solved 3 10k mazes in a row (which, by the way, was awesome).

Although food and production are pretty much the best.

PieceOfMind said:

-Buy low, sell high
-As the game goes on, the Caravan minigame becomes more and more a waste of time. Near the start of the game, the reward is actually good compared to your income so make use of it!
-Remember to put roads under sources of production.
-When you're not doing anything (and you are incredibly bored), hover over the little coloured bubbles that pop up above the heads of citizens to get extra income.

Click to expand...

-Sometimes the Caravan game has a 1000g cap so it may be worth finishing a few 50g one to get it again.. But yes the reward gets smaller.
-Roads *under* ? I'll try, tx.

xerex said:

-Sometimes the Caravan game has a 1000g cap so it may be worth finishing a few 50g one to get it again.. But yes the reward gets smaller.
-Roads *under* ? I'll try, tx.

Click to expand...

Actually, I have noticed that. It seems to happen more often after I've just loaded up the game again, though it could be coincidence.

The best way to 'fish' for the high bonus might just be to purposefully fail the minigame so it generates a new one. If the 1000g prize is less likely to come along from repeated attempts, this wouldn't work though.
The point is it's really not worth wasting time working out how to connect 3 or 4 towns for an average 25 gold or less. A few clicks of a food or hammer bonus resource would probably earn that much.

I'm logged in, but i denied playing Caravan (getting bored of it). well the prize money increased from 100g til 200g, and increased again to 300g. I'll keep waiting a bit more then

Edit: now it's worth 600g. But road segment still costs 1% of it, i.e. 6g each.

I suspect 1000g would be the maximum. I wonder how it increases over time.

The longer between caravan games, the bigger reward, but also bigger cost for roads. It seems to increase rather rapidly, maybe every 20 mins or so. I think it is actually more profitable to wait with playing the game instead of every time it is up.

I got 2000g Caravan game, so the income may increase even higher.

Yeah, I saw 1400 at one point today.

It is due to the World Bank - Wonder . But they should increase Caravan income in the late eras...

Use all your harvests in one go if you think you will be gone for a long time.
Buy all the luxuries in the same scenario. When you get back sell them all for a small profit.
Stacking up on Art Puzzle turns and using them in one go gets the multiplier rolling, in turn for a higher turnover.
Build houses next to trees as often as possible.
The most important building is a granary.

newly bought and produced units can be joined to ones already in combat without taking up an extra slot, but this doesn't happen automatically like it does when not in combat. just go to the battle screen and add them to the battle normally. this is useful when you're fighting a two-front war and win one of the battles.

House placement:
Houses love being by water and/or forest. Also they enjoy being by others of the same profession (espcially useful for scientist, artist, merchant as those will likely be in blocks together). Also, obviously, they get more production if they are close to their work.

Building types:
The upgraded buildings (museum, university, bank) make your science, art, and merchants more effective and this does not stack with library etc so sell the originals when you build the new.

As far as I can tell a factory is a total waste of money. Its expensive and gave no increase to production over a lumber mill, iron forge etc.

Multiple units working single tile
When you have multiple workers working a single tile their production may go down. I think its tied to the total resource - for example a 30 orchard could not under any circumstances have more than a 15 and 15 house working it. In general its easiest just to work one house per one resource tile.

Is the only way to get resources (aside from mini-games) clicking on the resource bubbles above the workers' heads? I don't see the workers adding to the supply piles by themselves, looks like I always have to click the resource bubbles? Bit confused about this. At the moment the game is both dull and confusing...not sure how to improve my play, and resources are trickling in REALLY slowly.

The bubbles are just extras. Your city will accumulate food, hammers, gold, culture and beakers over time. In the beginning the amounts are small. Harvests are 'cashed in' for bonus resources.

GambleFish said:

Keep in mind you have to produce science to get moves in the maze, which can give huge prizes. I currently have 50000 science because I solved 3 10k mazes in a row (which, by the way, was awesome).

Although food and production are pretty much the best.

Click to expand...

This. Food and hammers are intentionally more expensive because you can't win any through the mini games.

Trying to figure out exactly how much faster you get moves, because the maze game has the biggest payoff of any of the minigames I think. In the current era I'm playing I tried measuring it out a number of times and it seemed to be around 45 beakers required per maze point (hard to tell exactly when you get a resource rollover that gives you a number of beakers). That may increase by era, no idea.

I also parsed out that my science rate more than tripled if I attentively sat and played whack a mole with the bubbles heh. 3 times I sat there between maze points and clicked every bubble I could, and every time doing that it took about 11 minutes to gain a maze point. Then I just let the bubbles go, was kinda doing other stuff and checking back often, and that next maze point took around 37 minutes to get. More specifically, I was getting around 4 beakers per minute by clicking every bubble, then got 1.2 beakers per minute clicking no bubbles.

So yeah, I dunno what to think about that. You should be able to do better by actually playing than by being away/offline, but having your production more than tripled in such a mind numbing / repetetive manner... probably not a good thing?

I agree. The bubble popping yields way too much income as a reward for such a mind numbing task. Popping bubbles for farms or production clusters would almost always be more profitable than doing the caravan minigame. I think it's poor design in the first place, but if this feature stays in I really think it needs to be toned down.