Tips From a Newbie

I have only been around these Forums for a while, but I have not seen these tips for Civ2: ("Square" = Hexes, lozenges, quadrilaterals, whatever)

1. When possible, site your cities in Forest squares. You will two extra shields to start off with. A head start!
2. When possible, have your settler/engineer Irrigate at least one adjacent square to your new city. It will get more food and grow faster from the git-go
3. With Engineers, if they are going two squares to end up in a square to irrigate at the end of a turn, consider putting a Road in the intervening square.You will get your Irrigation/Farmland in the same time, and get a free Road.

If you already know these, thanks for reading, anyway

Watching someone get back into a classic like Civ2 is always a pleasure (and often a temptation to pay that good old game a visit myself).

I'm not convinced by tip #1, though. Sure you'll get two "extra" shields from the city square, but you'll get just one extra food as opposed to at least two food you'd get from grassland or plains. That's a significant cut in your food surplus and the speed of population growth.

Verrucosus said:

Watching someone get back into a classic like Civ2 is always a pleasure (and often a temptation to pay that good old game a visit myself).

I'm not convinced by tip #1, though. Sure you'll get two "extra" shields from the city square, but you'll get just one extra food as opposed to at least two food you'd get from grassland or plains. That's a significant cut in your food surplus and the speed of population growth.

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That's why you Irrigate a nearby hex, first. Then you get the extra food as well as the shield bonus. Admittedly, you have to build some extra roads

Thanks for reading! And commenting

As far as output is concerned, there is usually no difference between founding a city in a forest and working an irrigated plains or grassland in its radius and founding a city on that plains or grassland and working the forest tile. There are two advantages to the second approach: (1) it saves you the time to irrigate the plains/grassland; (2) grassland will always produce a shield when used as a city square even if it doesn't when merely worked inside the city radius. Even the second approach is not what I'd usually recommend; unless these shields are urgently needed, I'd prefer the even fast growth from having both the city square and its first worked tile in open and (if helpful) irrigated terrain (your tip #2).

Verrucosus said:

(2) grassland will always produce a shield when used as a city square even if it doesn't when merely worked inside the city radius. .

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Did not know that. Thanks

Verrucosus said:

Watching someone get back into a classic like Civ2 is always a pleasure

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I second that.

Lilyblack said:

1. When possible, site your cities in Forest squares. You will two extra shields to start off with. A head start!
2. When possible, have your settler/engineer Irrigate at least one adjacent square to your new city. It will get more food and grow faster from the git-go
3. With Engineers, if they are going two squares to end up in a square to irrigate at the end of a turn, consider putting a Road in the intervening square.You will get your Irrigation/Farmland in the same time, and get a free Road.

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As Verrucosus already pointed out, tip 1 is counter-productive. Never build on a forest unless you have to (for getting specials in your city radius for example).
Tip 2 is often not a good idea either. In general it is better to build the city faster rather than wait for an irrigated square. Furthermore, this does not apply to grasslands in despotism since any resource beyond two are reduced by 1 in despotism.
Tip 3 is technically correct, but should arise rarely. Terrains that benefit from irrigation also benefit from a road (tundra and hill are the exceptions). In general it is better to build a road first and irrigation next because roads are always faster to build and besides giving you extra arrows (on most but not all terrain) they allow your units to move around faster as well. By the time you get to irrigating, your workers should be travelling on roads.

Have you looked up tips and tricks for new players by ElephantU in the strategy subforum? If not, definitely check it out:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=96725

After that, the best way to improve your game is to join the game of the month subforum where you can compare your play with others who start with the exact same save.

Ali Ardavan said:

I second that.


As Verrucosus already pointed out, tip 1 is counter-productive. Never build on a forest unless you have to (for getting specials in your city radius for example).
Tip 2 is often not a good idea either. In general it is better to build the city faster rather than wait for an irrigated square. Furthermore, this does not apply to grasslands in despotism since any resource beyond two are reduced by 1 in despotism.
Tip 3 is technically correct, but should arise rarely. Terrains that benefit from irrigation also benefit from a road (tundra and hill are the exceptions). In general it is better to build a road first and irrigation next because roads are always faster to build and besides giving you extra arrows (on most but not all terrain) they allow your units to move around faster as well. By the time you get to irrigating, your workers should be travelling on roads.

Have you looked up tips and tricks for new players by ElephantU in the strategy subforum? If not, definitely check it out:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=96725

After that, the best way to improve your game is to join the game of the month subforum where you can compare your play with others who start with the exact same save.

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I get out of Despotism quick as I can. But, the Game of the Month? Emperor diff? I tried Prince, once, and hated it

FWIW, when one of my Units is about to enter a hex, even Mountain, but don't have enough Moves left to make it, I save (to another designated slot), and keep trying and reloading till I get my Unit where I want it to go. I once Destroyed Chinese Civilization that way, with a Cavalry unit with just a 1/3 move left. But, I'll bet everybody does that

Lilyblack said:

.. the Game of the Month? Emperor diff? I tried Prince, once, and hated it

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We do indeed usually play at the higher end of the difficulty spectrum: King, Emperor, Deity, and an occasional Prince or Warlord. As you get better at playing the game, you will inevitably move on to higher difficulty levels.

What I didn'tlike about Prince was that my cities kept revolting. I guess that it gets worse?

Indeed that is the case. At Deity you have one content citizen per city and the next one is a red head. At Emperor it is 2, at king 3, prince 4, warlord 5, and chieftain 6. Furthermore, as you may have noticed some of your blue heads (content citizen) become red heads when the number of the cities in your empire gets past a certain point. That limit is lower at higher levels.

This primarily means that you have to put more emphasis on crowd control at higher levels which is an interesting aspect of the game that you can afford to ignore for a long time at lower levels. Happiness wonders (Hanging Gardens, Cure for cancer, Michelangelo, Bach, ...) become more important. Similiarly temples, marketplaces (when you do have lux), ... become more important.

The biggest challenge, however, comes from the rivals. At lower levels the AI is deliberately dumbed down. I once read somewhere that the designers considered King a level playing field. Above that the AI gets production bonuses among other things.

Climbing the difficulty ladder is one of the joys the game has to offer. The highest levels really force you to optimize your strategies.

At the moment, the attraction of Civilization is a different one: this simulation of an alternative history, imagining what it's like to be at the helm of an empire in this fascinating world. For that purpose, I find King level best. It's not without its challenges, but it leaves enough room for roleplaying.

Maybe I'm wrong but my impression with "playing your best game" is that it frequently means extreme strategies like rushing or heavy use of caravans at the expense of a more balanced approach. When using the game as a simulation, the balanced approach seems more enjoyable.

Not for nothing the game's motto is "In omnia paratus".

I beat the game on deity a couple of times but I don't enjoy that difficulty setting.
I was cutting it pretty close and was annoyed to see that an AI with smaller cities, half the surface area of my civilization, MUCH smaller industrial output, managed to not only keep up the tech and wonder race but also churn out massive numbers of units, because of the tremendous bonuses it has at those levels.

I have always disliked facing an AI that cheats (and it does cheat frequently, more so on higher difficulties) or gets production boosts. In computer games it's a very lousy method to compensate for poorly executed AI programming. So sad it's still the basic way to escalate difficulty in modern strategy games.

The tipping point after which I ceased playing on deity was when I lost the race to build Isaac Newton's college in my SSC, despite being the first to start it in a size 15 city with KRC and four railroaded, mined hills. I did not believe it happened so I reloaded, used cheat menu and voila - some size 5 Viking city with 7 shields/turn was halfway to the end and managed to miraculously complete this wonder the next turn without rush-buying it or using vans (I checked that too, they had no vans, no railroads to transport them even if they switched production, no gold to rush buy anything at all...).

After this, I'm comfortably sitting on king and while the AI still cheats, it's within reasonable limits, not ridiculous stuff like the above situation.

Also from personal experience, AI on deity and emp is invulnerable to barbs - they successfully defend against massed hordes of barb knights or horsemen with a fricking settler, while I struggle with veteran pikemen or phalanxes and sustain heavy losses against the very same barb units. That's just not fair.

I've always found comfort in imagining a forum for the Civ2-AI, full of complaints about the unfairness of production boosts for the human opponents on Chieftain level, not to mention humans violating the spirit of the game through ridiculous spamming of cities and caravans and cheating by reloading.

On a more pleasant note, I've had quite a few pleasant surprises with "fricking settlers" of my own fending off barbarian horsemen (not so much with knights). Settlers have twice as many hitpoints as those units; they can get a veteran bonus from a successful defense that can put them on equal or better footing than their attackers when combined with a terrain bonus.

Blasph23 said:

I beat the game on deity a couple of times but I don't enjoy that difficulty setting.

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I have played, and won, numerous times on Deity and I do not enjoy it not because of AI bonuses but because of:
- unhappiness after the first citizen. Cities have to get to size 2 before they can produce a settler and producing a settler is all you do at the beginning. This requires too much micro management early on. The game is already heavy on micro management, I do not enjoy more of it. Furthermore, this skews the game too much towards happiness management. While happiness management is an important part of the game, there needs to be balance and I feel at Deity the balance is somewhat off.
- The appeal of Deity is supposed to be that it is tougher to beat than Emperor; the next level down. In reality it is not. You want the ultimate Civ2 challenge? Play at Emperor. While the AI bonuses are larger at Deity, that is more than made up for by giving you an extra settler at the outset. That settler is a HUGE advantage. Furthermore, while the extra unhappy citizen slows you down at the beginning, after mid-game when black heads appear it is actually advantageous because it makes black heads appear sooner than they would otherwise. So the early disadvantage turns into an advantage after mid-game.

Blasph23 said:

... or gets production boosts. In computer games it's a very lousy method to compensate for poorly executed AI programming. So sad it's still the basic way to escalate difficulty in modern strategy games.

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It is not lousy. It is the simplest form of increasing difficulty and it is almost universally applied.

Good AI is much preferable of course. But extremely difficult to design.

It is the simplest and most common and by extension, it's also the lousiest. Doesn't matter if it's universally implemented, it doesn't make it a good way.
I'm saying it's lousy because it's cheap and stems out from the developers' insufficient knowledge of their own game.
If beta-tests were really carried out like they should have, such annoying features as Civ2's notoriously cheating AI would never happen.
Yes, coding AI in a complex game such as Civ is and always will be difficult but it's no excuse for the tricks that are implemented instead.

I'd imagine the proper AI to understand and use all the neat tricks that the human player uses - ship chains, van spam, wonderbread, ICS where applicable etc.
Depending on the difficulty level, the AI would either use none of them or progressively more of the tricks that it took players months to figure out.
Finally, deity AI would be full blown, with black-clicking, suitcase nukes, SSC, celebration pop growth, key civ gifting etc.

Instead, the AI arbitrarily knows the entire map, whether it explored it or not, it will send a single trireme with a single unit, directly to your one unprotected city at the end of the world, without sinking throughout the oceanic journey that takes years, without any preceding exploration, and capture it.

It can and will nuke, without fail, your 1 out 50+ cities that does not have an SDI, WITHOUT any scouting with spies/dips or any other form of intelligence gathering, with nukes showing up out of thin air and crossing impossible distances.

Their randomly sent non-vet dips will ALWAYS steal space flight from you, if the AI doesn't have it, even if there's 30 other techs that dilute their chances and dips don't even offer tech selection when stealing.

The above examples, as you all well know, are just the tip of the iceberg and being a part-time coder myself, I can't imagine how it was impossible to do it better, even back in 1996. They just didn't care and went the easy way, short-cutting on a lot of stuff.

I'm sorry for the tirade, it's nothing new, nothing that has not already been said a hundred times before but my love for this game is constantly put to the test with this vast plethora of cheap tricks that detract from the game-play and annoy me enormously.

Food for thought: Just imagine if chess AI had these advantages. You're going for the check mate with a well-planned series of moves, only to have the AI suddenly teleport its queen to other side of the board and check-mate YOU, while your rooks mysteriously disappear, just because the coders didn't feel like designing a proper algorithm for the human to compete against.

I agree with you on the rule breaking: unsinkable triremes, infinite range nuke missiles, ... These do stink and are sign of lazy programmers.

My earlier comment was simply in regards to production bonuses at higher levels which is a universal tactic. That does not bother me. In fact, I look at it as a challenge.

In a random map Civ IV BTS Deity level played in 2015 I was curious to see bonuses of AI.Using a renaming of a folder to 'chipotle',I saw all map.In production no more problems,is like in Civ II,for a wonder with 600 hammers(shields) necesarry,AI have 475.But...with money can't cheat like in Civ II,taxes 10 %,treasury is increased every turn,and you if use taxes 10% can't keep buildings,sold,sold sold.More times AI in Civ IV have 0,1,2 gold per turn,because every city have maintenance,a city far away makes your treasury dust..But Civ II is Civ II,BTS is BTS,different games.
The question :
After years of Civ II,in 2016 I still don't understand,AI starts wonder,in few turns is ready,in a city with 4 shields production,no payment for wonder hurried,treasury is like treasury from previous turns.
Is a cheat like infinite nukes range,programming 'error' ?

Ali Ardavan said:

... after mid-game when black heads appear it is actually advantageous because it makes black heads appear sooner than they would otherwise. So the early disadvantage turns into an advantage after mid-game. ...

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Assuming "black heads" are unhappy people, how are they advantageous after mid-game?

Verrucosus said:

Assuming "black heads" are unhappy people, how are they advantageous after mid-game?

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Citizens of a city in Civ2 have 4 modes: happy, content (blue), discontent (red), raging (black). Any city with happy<red+black will riot. Any city with happy>=content and no reds and no blacks will celebrate. Rioting is disadvantageous and celebrations are advantageous; both regardless of the government.

There are multiple ways to pacify your citizens. Structures such as temple and military units in non-representative government turn reds to content and blacks to red. Using these two methods, it is doubly difficult to deal with blacks vs. reds.

However, luxury spending has a different effect. It turns reds to content and blacks to happy. This is what makes black heads so advantageous. With blacks, it is a lot easier to maintain celebrations and maintaining celebrations is the quickest way to grow in Republic and Democracy. (Celebration also has advantages in other governments.)

Initially you start with only content citizens and as you grow new citizens are all red. Eventually you get to a point when all new citizens are black. Typically it is mid-game before blacks appear.

As the difficulty level goes up, the threshold for reds and blacks goes down. Thus you get black heads sooner in Deity than you do in Emperor and sooner in Emperor than you do in King...