Tips for extreme beginners

Sparta had both helots and slaves. The helot were no slaves - they even were part of the spartan army.
 
I understand the gripe against "limiting workers" and I'm not sure why this was included in a guide for beginners. However, there is something to be said about having a surfeit of workers. In particular, I feel that knowing how to manage workers and making the most of their actions should be more important to learn than to get a fixed ratio of workers to cities. I typically have an even number of workers to cities (1:1 ratio) and once I'm near or past the Liberalism stage, I'm usually at more cities than workers for the rest of the game, because workers stunt city growth and I want to get size 15+ cities starting in the ADs. What's key is focusing on these two things:

(1) How can I minimize wasted turns? In some cases, such as moving on a forest, it's unavoidable, sans India for flatland. But for a more general scenario, you should generally not have workers constantly criss-crossing the empire and wasting turns doing nothing but moving. Pre-building roads is also helpful.

(2) What improvements are of the highest priority? I.e. farming irrigated corn comes before mining a gold tile.

Of course, given that this article was written more than half a decade ago, I'm not sure how much this will matter, or if the author plays Civilization 4 anymore. :lol: But yes, the part about limiting workers should probably be ignored.
 
Invade with two or more siege divisions
Fight for one area (city) while breaking down the defenses of another

This is an interesting idea and I'll try it in my next war, but it works just fine with one big scary old stack too.

Use border cities for military production
Don’t produce military units deep in your territory where it will take them ten turns to get to the front lines

When I'm in warmode pretty much all my cities are producing units. Ten cities produce an army faster than 2 cities even if the units have a bit of travel to do.

Don’t build units you won’t use
Don’t produce low-tech units unless you’re going to war soon
Out of date units will hardly be used if newer units are available

Actually old outdated units are excellent to use once the target is sufficiently weakened with siege. And sometimes there's reasons for making cheap units and upgrading them instead of building the more expensive unit directly. (For example if you have the money but not the hammers, or if you want to get gunpowder-units with CR promotion).

Try to always fortify a military unit in each city
If you don’t its easy for the enemy to get behind you and take your city without a fight.

No, this is not the main reason, a single garrison won't stand a chance against an invasion anyway the real reason is because you get extra unhappiness if you don't.
 
1. BUILD SIEGE UNITS!!! A city's culture gives it defensive bonuses, the more culture the bigger the bonus (and the longer it takes to restore order in a city after you capture it), add a city wall and defensive units with City Garrison promotions and you got a tough nut to crack. The % shown on a city's info bar is it's defensive bonus.

2. Founding a religion is an excellent source of wealth once you get the holy shrine built in your holy city and spread your religion aggressively to foreign cities. You get +1 gold for every city in the world that has the religion once you have the shrine. This lets you boost your science spending and build more cities before running into maintenance cost. issues If you can covert your neighbors to your religion they will usually become buddy-buddy with you.

3. Hereditary Rule and Slavery is a powerful civic combo in the whole period from Monarchy to Democracy. The happiness bonus from military units in your cities helps neutralize the unhappiness caused by whipping your population to hurry production.

4. Manage your forests carefully. Time your chopping so you get the production from it when it does the most good, like when building a wonder, or when building an important building like a courthouse, barracks, granary, lighthouse, etc.

5. Cottages must be worked in order to grow in hamlets, then villages, then towns.
 
Founding a religion is an excellent way to lose a game.

It's more fun (and profitable) to let someone else found a religion, spread it, build the shrine... then kill them and pry that lovely, lucrative shrine from their cold, dead hands. :mwaha:
 
No, because you have to pay maintenance for them, as for every other unit.
-5 gold per turn for those 5 idle workers can harm. But I must admit that I rarely have idle workers in my games.

Wait, this is true!? :eek:
I thought we pay no maintenance for units without combat strength like Workers, Settlers and Scouts (Scouts don't even count for military garrison). I didn't know they still eat into the treasury. :sad:
 
Invade with two or more siege divisions
Fight for one area (city) while breaking down the defenses of another

This is an interesting idea and I'll try it in my next war, but it works just fine with one big scary old stack too.


Yeah, this is good. If you just go one city at a time, you end up wasting a lot of turns where your units just sit around waiting for the siege equipment to get the city defenses all the way down. So if you start bombarding the cities before your attackers get there, you don't lose turns having them stand around and wait.

Of course, you also have to defend the siege equipment, so you still have to divert troops to go with them to bombard. The best is when you get frigates and can just bombard all the coastal cities without needing troops to defend them.
 
Yeah, this is good. If you just go one city at a time, you end up wasting a lot of turns where your units just sit around waiting for the siege equipment to get the city defenses all the way down. So if you start bombarding the cities before your attackers get there, you don't lose turns having them stand around and wait.

Of course, you also have to defend the siege equipment, so you still have to divert troops to go with them to bombard. The best is when you get frigates and can just bombard all the coastal cities without needing troops to defend them.
If you have enough siege units with the Accuracy promotion, you can remove the cultural defenses in one turn. Most of the time 6 Accuracy units (catapults, cannon, artillery) is enough.

However, in the medieval era, mature culture, walls, castles, and Chichen Itza (if your opponent owns it--Murphy's Law says he will :sad:) can make it impractical (though not impossible) to have enough Accuracy cats to tear down the defenses in one turn. This tactic of sending a (protected!) pre-bombardment stack, then, works best during that era.
 
Wait, this is true!? :eek:
I thought we pay no maintenance for units without combat strength like Workers, Settlers and Scouts (Scouts don't even count for military garrison). I didn't know they still eat into the treasury. :sad:

They do if you have a lot (or if you're playing on Deity, a few) but military units are more expensive.
 
For extreme beginners, 1.5 workers per city is fine; a lot of newbies under-produce workers. For more advanced players 1:1 is better. Beginning players often don't know how to build one turn of roads on thier way some where or the most efficient time to connect resources. For beginners, it is better to over-connect and over-improve than not improve at all.
 
Limit the number of workers you create
Excess workers crowd your turns
Too many workers ten to make you build too much

Is generally a bad piece of advice. Most way underproduce workers. Depends how you are playing, if I am going fast war have about .5 per city, and slave off anything not worked. If going tech route though you should have more than 1:1. Be smart about worker turns, limit unnecessary roads in the early gameo. One normal road costs 2 turns, or halfway to a cottage.
 
Tips for extreme beginners:

-> go and play Civ I. Getting a simple but practical overview over the mechanics of the Civilization series lets one better understand what is more or less important. :D

That's the easiest way, actually, to learn Civs with higher degrees of complexity.
 
Commerce cities, Production cities, Great People farms ... all essential in specialisation.

But I'm curious why no-one ever describes how to actually DO this. 200 beakers in a commerce city. Awesome, but what buttons in the city window do I need to click to get to that target. Should I simply click the 'coin' symbol and the 'beaker' symbol and let the city grow? Should I build an academy there if I by chance happen to get a Scientist great person (I've read you can grow this guys on purpose but that's not part of my question) ? Research boosting buildings like Libraries, Monasteries should be in the mix for sure.

Even when I have 3 gold mines + a few mature Towns and all of the above ... I can rarely hit 100 beakers.

What am I missing ?
 
Think you need more towns for that! Maybe Scientist specialists (especially with Representation) and Free Speech/Bureau as well. What year is it when you can only get 100? University/Observatory/Oxford (in one city)/Laboratory (if the game isn't already decided by then)
 
I'm hitting that limit sometime around AD1000-1200, but which time i'm far enough behind the AI that I can't recover unless I somehow luck into a friendship with a powerful one who I can bribe to attack someone else and try to start a FFA :)
 
What context were the 200+:science: cities comments you have seen been brought up in? I suspect it was for a single city (the capital) during the mid game as the very late game, where other cities may reach this, is often not even reached before victory.

For a standard super science capital you first want to determine whether your capital spot is suitable, it needs enough food to grow respectably and a good number of riverside tiles. The city will want cottages, a Library and an Academy and you want to be running the Bureacracy civic! If the game lasts you will probably want the other science buildings, including Oxford too.

To that end, despite you mentioning it not being the question, it is still important to know how to get Great People in a planned manner in order to get that Academy!
You can guarantee a GS as your first Great Person, and get it very early, by simply running 2 scientists in a city till one pops up.The capital is frequently most suited to buyilding a Library and feeding scientists but not always as any city with +4 net food can do the job.
After your first 1-2 Great People your going to want to set up some kind of Great Person farm, a city with powerful food resources, some production, but not necessarily anything else worth working. Its role will be to run specialists and build wonders (National Epic for the +100% GPP bonus related to the great people you want to produce. Most wonders produce only 2GPP, some 1GPP but Temple of Artemis produces 5 mixed GPP, Statue of Liberty we'll ignore, and the GLibrary produces 8 scientist GPP making the Glib a highly prized wonder for scientist farming.

The types of great people you get are directly related to the types of great person points you are producing, as such relying on mased wonders to get great people isn't good for planning your future great people (this isn't always a bad thing by the way).
The best, most reliable way to fix the type of great people you get is to use specialists.
A single specialist produces 3GPP (mopre than most wonders) towards its obvious great person type, they are consistantly available, cheap to aquire with no risk of losing the race to them, and, can be used in considerable numbers at times
 
"What context were the 200+ cities comments you have seen been brought up in?" Malganis - post 12.

"You can guarantee a GS as your first Great Person, and get it very early, by simply running 2 scientists in a city till one pops up."

Thanks Ghstage - I found that quite insightful as I didn't know this.

However, please explain this ".. enough food to grow respectably .. ".
 
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