The Civ5 Guide

Good guide. I approve! However, recent patches have changed things a bit. Is there any chance of the guide being updated?

For those who asked, I have converted Trickster7135's posts into pdf format (48 pages)
Current as of Novemeber 1, 2010
I will check back occasionally and update the pdf

Great effort, cheers
 
Actually, the recent patches render a lot of this analysis totally obsolete on everything from building effects to policy effects. When we start talking about the relative value of buildings or policies in various strategies, everything needs to be rethought.
 
(hopes for an update that adds to the Civilization Analysis the DLC civilizations and thinks the OP would be super duper awesome should he feel like doing this)
 
Hey guys I'm going to get back into Civ5 now, see a lot has changed from patches so I'm going to take some time getting readjusted with the game before updating this guide. Glad to know its still popular :D
 
Nice guide :)


One thing that I don't agree on : the +food buildings.


Granary +2 Food.
Technology: Pottery
Cost: 100 hammers;
Maintenance: 1 gold.


WATERMILL - +2 food, +1 production.
Prerequisites: The Wheel, city must be built by a river.
Cost: 75 production.
Maintenance: 2 gold.


You say this buildings convert 1 gold//2 food or 2gold//2food+1production which is true. You seem to ignore the fact that +2 food in most cases equals a FREE EXTRA CITIZEN for the city. I find the +food buildings to be always useful.

How did I arrive to that conclusion ?

When it comes to food generation[citizen grow] my cities only have 2 gears:

A
. 0(excess food =0) STAGNATION - maximizing the city's production//gold output without running the risk of "accidental" growth. Lets say the city has x population at this point. You will need 2*x food per turn not to lose citizens due to starvation.
You will need to assign y citizens to +food tiles to produce the food necessary.{ y varies with the amount food available around the town - a town near a river with civil engineering researched will need to use less citizens for food generation as they produce more food/tile } Regardless of the food availability//tile upgrades, when you add a granary the food you need per turn goes from 2*x to 2*(x-1). This, 9 times out of 10 also means you will only need y-1 citizens to provide extra food. So you get an extra citizen to use as you please - as a specialist, running a high productivity tile[mine], ...The +food coming from the maritime allies can be used in the same way - IT FREES CITIZENS FROM FARMING DUTY AND ALLOWS THEM TO DO MORE EXCITING STUFF LIKE WORK PRODUCTION TILES, GOLD TILES or AS SPECIALISTS.
(one simple example: instead of needing to work a [+3 food] tile you can work a [+1 food +3 production] tile with a granary...
so now the conversion rate for the granary in a city with a 50% production bonus goes to [1 GOLD] per [4.5 PRODUCTION]. Later on as tile output increases and the city % bonuses to production//gold generation increase the conversion rate goes even better... )

B Maximum excess food -> the city is now producing citizens at maximum speed. When I deem it necessary to grow a city [enough +happiness window, "city loves the king" event, +food from maritime states, enough high yield improved +food tiles] - all citizens are assigned to +food collection and city grows fast an furiously. In those growth periods the extra food from the granary and watermill will shave a few turns from each citizen production...


So there you have it "short bursts of population boom" fallowed by "long periods of stagnation and maximum generation of gold//production//specialists". +food very useful no matter the source at all times.

Will end this with a quote from the game manual:

"Plentiful food is the single most important factor determining the rise of human civilization. While humans had to spend virtually every waking moment hunting and gathering food for themselves and their families or tribe, they had little time or energy for other pursuits – making cave paintings, for instance, creating a written language, or discovering muons. Once surplus food is available, all else is possible."
 
Nice guide :)


One thing that I don't agree on : the +food buildings.

-snip-

While everything you said is correct, you forgot one very very important factor: happiness. Wide strategies usually cap population of every city but the capital at about 7 or so, or else you wouldn't be able to keep building new cities. Medium sized empires can as well run into a happiness deficit, so the only way to have a continuously growing population is in tall empires. Furthermore, if you are capping, you may or may not already be able to supply food for your populace even without the food buildings. If your city is on mostly grassland with even just one or two food resources, a granary is a waste if you want to keep the city small. And even for cities in plains or tundra that lack food, the cost of time or gold to build the food buildings can easily out way the food they will provide afterwards, unless it is fairly early in the game. Maritime city-states, despite their nerfs, usually still far out weight the maintenance of food buildings compared to the gold gifts you must give them, not to consider the other benefits they provide.
 
ROME
The Glory of Rome – +25% production to any building already built in the capital.
Legion - Replaces swordsman, increased combat score and production cost.
Ballista - Replaces catapult, increased ranged combat score.
Start Bias - None

The Roman civilization has two unique units, both encouraging city attacking, and both in the same era as well. The leader trait, The Glory of Rome, increases production for any building already built in the capital by 25%. In Civ4, this ability would have been ridiculous, but Civ5 has a production problem. Normally, building maintenance and long production times for buildings will lead to city specialization: only trade post cities build markets, only production cities build barracks, etc. This would result in a rather weak trait if you don't accommodate for it. Make sure you capital is a production city - save forests to build lumber mills, for example, and try to build every building available in the capital. It would be helpful if your capital has iron or marble to enhance its production, but you can't accommodate for luck like that. You will be paying a bit more in maintenance, and not building as many wonders or units as you normally would in a production city, but the long term benefits for a large empire would overshadow these penalties.

The Legion costs 10 more production to build, and have 2 more combat power over the swordsman. This unit works very well with the Ballista, and a classical era war to expand the empire has great synergy with the leader trait. This makes playing Rome somewhat luck based, as your exceptional units are limited by iron resources. Having few or even no iron weakens the great power of the Roman Empire.

The Ballista has four more ranged combat score, and comes in the same era as the Legion, both excellent city attack units. It only has two less ranged combat than the Trebuchet, but costs much less production. It can be more cost effective to build Ballista even into the medieval era, and not upgrade the ones you have leftover from the classical era. The unfortunate problem with both unique units, is that they both require iron resource, making it hard to fully capitalize on both units in the same game.

This is how I view the romans.

Remember that the +25% production bonus is received by all cities BUT the capital, and that it only works for buildings already up in the capital.

To best (ab)use this bonus [DEPLOY THE LATEST RESEARCHED BUILDINGS IN A FEW TURNS AFTER UNLOCKING THEM EMPIRE WIDE] [think +11 universities in under 6 turns from researching them [beware of maintenance spikes]; think +11 banks[will not add much on a mostly production based empire but it will still be significant] within 10 turns after researching them; +11 walls in 1 turn and +11 castles 2 turns latter +11 Arsenals 4 turns after that [+33 happiness in 7 turns] - PROFESSIONAL ARMY(HONOR)] you need to :

a. Have many production cities - [most of them] - look for hills and forests before settling. Improve the production tiles. Build the production relevant buildings on most cities[will add maintenance costs ...] ...[unless the 25% percentage bonus applies to a big production base it will not add much to be significant]

b. No matter how much you pimp Rome's productivity :
-you either start production of the new critical buildings on the same time empire wide and chances are some will built it ahead of Rome [better position, railroad bonus,..] and the others will just use the bonus for a few meager turns. wasted bonus.
-you delay starting the production of the critical building on the empire until Rome finishes it. Now you are using the 25% production bonus BUT you delayed the deployment of the critical building empire wide for a significant period of time.
-you purchase the newly developed critical building on the turn its unlocked in Rome so the rest of the empire can start deployment using the full power of the 25% bonus from the same turn.

c. You will run into maintenance problems having all those production buildings. Dropping advanced buildings *X number of cities empire wide will generate serious maintenance spikes. You will need a few gold focused cities to keep up with the maintenance problems. Rome with some luck can be turned into a gold focused city to take advantage of unlocking commerce.

+
The high production capabilities can/should generate solid military.
Production focus should generate a few Great Engineers to net you a few world wonders.
-
Culture will suffer - you might not afford the maintenance for the advanced culture buildings.
Budget and number of policies available will suffer - you will not be able to maintain many CS allies..

Favors domination victory. Science victory also possible because of the quick deployment of the science buildings and many production powerhouses to build the spaceship parts.

About the Legion - the ability to build roads might come handy.
-freeing the workers to improve productivity tiles
-building roads will remove the movement penalty for rough terrain [forest,hill] for your land armies[mobility around the battlefield is a great tactical advantage] while preserving the combat bonuses[again without having to displace a worker to do it].

Same for the build fort ability - build forts on borders[useless desert tiles] during peace time - workers will replace them latter if the land is valuable ..
 
Wow - great guide.

Just one thing needed to make it a complete guide to Civ 5 - Techs.

Cheers.
 
This is how I view the romans.

...continued
..

I have started a Deity game with the romans and recorded so far. If I manage to win it I might someday turn it into a youtube LP Civ...

This would be my first deity victory [got fixed on a Tall Roman empire deity win :crazyeye:]

Watching some of the recordings I find a lot of mistakes and missed turns in my play so there is VAST room for improvement. I post those images more as a proof of concept ..


3 Relevant cities

Rome 24 pop University and National College {no montain :sad:}
Antium 15 pop University and Observatory
Cumae 10 pop University

all universities have working specialists

Spoiler :


Turn 194 I finish researching Public School [late, but remember this is meant as a proof of concept ] . Empire is pushing 181 beakers.

Spoiler :


I sunk 920 gold on the Public School into the capital for an immediate + 28 beakers into the capital [forgot to set the specialist for an extra 4 beakers and GS points - ..noob remember] . Queue up public schools on Antium and Cumae. [they get the 25% production boost and take 8 turns to finish]

Spoiler :


8* turns later
(*the public schools finished on turn 202 , the screen shoot is on turn 203)
With 3 Public schools and specialists settled the empire is pushing 264 beakers...


=======================================================

A 46% increase on empire science beaker output in 8 turns. A better player having setup say 4 cities(instead of 2 like I did) might be able to take better advantage of situations like this ...

Policies used full tradition and full honor {finished on turn 203}
 

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^^ You seem to be playing it right with the Romans so far (going tall, buying buildings in the capital while producing them elsewhere), and it got me to think that since there would be so much free production in the capital, it may even be a good idea to actually build the military buildings in the capital and use it to spam units all game.

I've playing Romans a few times and while I like what they do, the only reason I consider their ability good instead of great is that it doesn't really change the game like many others. But if you think about their ability in terms how much quicker science/gold/ect buildings are built and thus the faster extra science/gold/ect, their ability most assuredly comes out ahead in terms of raw numbers... well that's the theory anyways. If you can, keep track of how many turns are saved while playing Romans and how much extra science/gold/ect this is making for you and lets see if we can't apply some number crunching to just how effective the Romans are. :)
 
I just finished playing a series of games. The Granary is seriously buff! Granted, you won't want to build it everywhere, but at a reasonable two compatible food sites for a city, the Granary grants +4 food for a nominal hammer cost and 1 maintenance. With three Wheat or any combination of Wheat, Banana, or Deer amounting to three, you're looking at +5 food - same as a hospital, half the output of a World Wonder!

It's... ...good lord, it's really strong in the right locations.

The Lighthouse is similarly buff. Assuming you can get three sea resources in a clump, building a Lighthouse gets you +6 food for 1 gold per turn. Even the more reasonable two resource clump gets you +4 for for 1 gpt and a nominal hammer cost. That's fantastic!
 
Thanks for this article - it was a great help.

I think you're a bit harsh on trade routes, because you're considering the cost of the road to be the cost of the route, but you'll need to build roads any way for strategic reasons, so if the road 'only' pays for itself, that's great! As a consequence, I think you're a bit harsh on the Machu Pichu. +25% trade route yield, in an empire of even moderate size is going to be about +20 gold per turn, in addition to the +5 gold from the wonder itself (which will benefit from city multipliers). For the production cost of one and half banks, that strikes me as a pretty good deal. On the other hand, I do have to concede that the Arabian bonus is weak: it can never be more than +1 gold per city, which is peanuts at any point in the game. (On the last turn of my most recent game (as Arabs), I had 293 gold/turn from trade routes, compared with 672 from cities. The Machu Pichu would have added 81 gold/turn (including both bonuses), but I was only gaining 13 gold/turn from the leader trait.)

On the other hand, I think you might be overstating the strength of the Taj Mahal - or at least, it's not strong for all games. The question is: does the golden age return a worthwhile yield on 500 production? If it lasts 15 turns, it would need to yield the equivalent of 33 production/turn. Supposing that gold and hammers are equally valuable, you need to be working at least 33 tiles yielding one or the other to break even. So it won't be worth building unless your population is at least 50, say, and it wouldn't be worth rushing it unless your population was substantially larger than that. However, I notice that in the recent patch it's been buffed to also give 4 happiness.

I think you're also harsh on the Great Wall. Fighting wars in your own territory is great: you can use the city attacks, you can hide units in cities between attacks and you can easily reinforce your army by buying or relocating units, whereas your opponent cannot easily reinforce. Once you've wiped out the invading army, you're in a strong position to counter-attack. The AI rarely pillages at all effectively, and if he does, improvements are now fairly cheap to repair.

As I said I've just finished a game with the Arabs (emperor, marathon, large, diplomatic). I found that the resource benefit from the bazaar was only occasionally useful: it relies on having opponents who (a) lack that resource, (b) are still alive, (c) have something worth trading in return and (d) are willing to trade. In addition, the game tends to cluster resources together, so you will generally have multiple copies of resources in any case. Having access to incense 14 times, for example, was not a great help to me. On the other hand, the oasis bonus is very worthwhile in the early game, since the start bias means that your first couple of cities are likely to have access to a number of oases, and the extra gold is very welcome at this point in the game. Generally I would say that bazaars are only really useful up to about the half way point of the game.

The camel archer is exceptionally strong. 3 camel archers can wipe out a much larger invading force before they even reach your territory, by repeatingly shooting and falling back, and using the terrain advisedly. They make great city defenders, because of their strong ranged attack, and ability to leave the city, fire and return, which gives them a ludicrous effective range when roads are taken into account. They also make great city attackers, because they outrange the cities. Since they scarcely ever take damage themselves, they can (and should) attack every turn, and rapidly acquire the range, logistics and indirect fire promotions (as well as city attack and march), and they become hugely powerful (and worth keeping until you can upgrade them to tanks).

Since you also have the late game oil bonus, I would say that the Arabian Empire is well suited to a domination victory.
 
I have to weigh in to support the position of Camel Archers being hideously strong, both offensively, and defensively. Used right, they're essentially Medieval Artillery, and better than Longbowmen by a quite a bit. They're only a little less powerful than Keshiks, in fact, and one of the strongest UUs in the game, despite appearing only at Chivalry.
 
Can anyone provide some tips for me?

I'm playing emperor level as Montezuma. Then Suleiman dow's on me. I easily beat him (artilleries are very powerful!) and take his capital, puppet one other city and raze a few others. Now I have a huge unhappiness problem! and Suleiman refuses peace, even when I'm owning him!

This huge unhappiness do to conquest is really annoying, in Civ 4 you could at least combat war weariness with jails, mount rushmore and police state civic (irc).

Also very irritating is the there is only one source of aluminum on my continent (playing continents map) and it's on the other side.
 
Can anyone provide some tips for me?

I'm playing emperor level as Montezuma. Then Suleiman dow's on me. I easily beat him (artilleries are very powerful!) and take his capital, puppet one other city and raze a few others. Now I have a huge unhappiness problem! and Suleiman refuses peace, even when I'm owning him!

This huge unhappiness do to conquest is really annoying, in Civ 4 you could at least combat war weariness with jails, mount rushmore and police state civic (irc).

Also very irritating is the there is only one source of aluminum on my continent (playing continents map) and it's on the other side.

I have similar problema, and Im playing Domination, emperor with Gengiskhan. After adopt all polices for honor, 1 unit garrisoned in every sit, still getting unhappiness with 4 cities and all other cities make puppets. Thanks for any advance.
 
Can anyone provide some tips for me?

I'm playing emperor level as Montezuma. Then Suleiman dow's on me. I easily beat him (artilleries are very powerful!) and take his capital, puppet one other city and raze a few others. Now I have a huge unhappiness problem! and Suleiman refuses peace, even when I'm owning him!

This huge unhappiness do to conquest is really annoying, in Civ 4 you could at least combat war weariness with jails, mount rushmore and police state civic (irc).

Also very irritating is the there is only one source of aluminum on my continent (playing continents map) and it's on the other side.

Once the cities have finished razing the unhappiness from them will go away.

For the Puppets
Garrisons (Military Caste)-> 1 happy
Defense buildings (Professional Army) ->1-4 happy [Puppets will build these at some point]
Culture or Science buildings (Organized Religion or Humanism) -> 1-2 happy, 3 in some [Puppets will build some of these]
Connection (Meritocracy)-> 1 happy
Size 10 + (Aristocracy)-> 1 happy
Courthouses (Police State)->3 happy (but you have to annex them)**** note: courthouses are bugged, you get the +3 happy even without Police state
(Order)-> 1 happy
Specialists (Democracy)->1/2 happy for each [Puppets might run Merchant specialists]

Plus Puppets will naturally build happy buildings if your empire is unhappy
OR you can annex them and force them to build happy buildings (and courthouses)
 
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