Unusual tips!

This has always felt like a bug to me. Also, here's another tip: The hammer calculation for building settlers is different. Working a 4food0production tile willl generate more hammers than working a 1food1production tile. There appears to be a 3:1 or maybe 2:1 ratio for translating food into hammers, for building settlers only.

As for the bug: Stagnation should *only* mean that your *excess food* is translated to hammers at a ratio of 3:1 or whatever. (IE 9 excess food = 3 hammers)

It should not mean that you can't starve out the city building a settler. It's an exploit and a bug IMHO. But it has been for multiple versions of civ.

I love OP tip about rivers, it is so easy, obvious and yet (or maybe - because of that) so genius... When I read it I was like :0

And no, I'm not bad with geography

This one with Lake Victoria Rivers is also awesome.

Not sure how secret these are but here goes:

- Attempt to bribe an AI you intend to declare war on with a deal over time such as luxuries or GPT just before declaring. A great one is to convince them to declare on someone else. When you declare war on them, the deals are cancelled and you get everything back but they are stuck in their other war!

- You can sell buildings from a city you are razing, and it will lower the maintenance cost of the city while you raze it plus give you gold.

- I'm not 100% sure about this one: You can gift a city that you chose to Raze to an AI. I think this allows you to bypass the 5% science penalty for having "owned" the city.

- The AI is usually not smart enough to both move a ranged unit and shoot you with it on the same turn. There are some exceptions (boats mainly). If a unit is about to die, moving it into a position where ranged units have to take at least 1 step to get to it usually prevents them from doing so.

Something I forgot:

The AI almost always(possibly always always) attacks with melee units before ranged units. If your city is surrounded, the melee units will often attack and do heavy damage to themselves before the ranged units attack and bring the city to 0, meaning the melee units can't capture until next turn because they attacked in the wrong order. This can be helpful sometimes if you're overrun and can do a little bit of damage to melee units, get them to attack the next turn, and then be able to finish them off on the next barrage.

When AI attacks a city with melee units and archers is it better to finish off melee units first or archers first?

And is it better to damage as many of units as possible or focus fire on certain unit until it's completely destroyed?

You can sell all your GPT for lump sum 1 turn before DoF expires and DoW next turn without backstabber penalty

Camillo said:

When AI attacks a city with melee units and archers is it better to finish off melee units first or archers first?

And is it better to damage as many of units as possible or focus fire on certain unit until it's completely destroyed?

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Usually I try to weigh things based on the terrain and what reinforcements the AI has brought. If I can kill 3 melee units, it's pointless if there's a 4th one that can slide in there. Remember, if there's only 3 tiles available to attack from, the melee units beyond that are harmless and can actually HELP you by blocking a tile from ranged units. By the same token, if you kill an Archer and another Archer can step in and take its place, you've accomplished nothing.

My preferred strategy is to pick off all the melee units if there's only 3-4 and wipe them all. If there's more than that, then I go after the ranged units first. In either case, ALWAYS hit Catapults first. If you kill the Catapults you've cut a huge hole in the enemy.

However, I would only attack the melee unit if I won't give him enough XP to insta-heal which is something the AI LOVES. If you can't kill a melee unit in one barrage, I would generally only put 1-2 shots on a melee unit and then try and finish it off the next turn so you don't give it enough experience to promote and instantly heal.

Did you ever think about all the lost revenue from the sale of iron to the AI because you didnt get Bronze Working until after Education?

Camillo said:

When AI attacks a city with melee units and archers is it better to finish off melee units first or archers first?

And is it better to damage as many of units as possible or focus fire on certain unit until it's completely destroyed?

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Depends on how much force i have. If i have an army i will definity try to pick off enemy range first and have my melee units fortify around the city. If i have a lone city with a garrison, i will take out melee units and ignore range, sometimes even catapults if i am desperate. A lone city will never survive an ai attack formation unless you take advantage of the fact that the ai will not reinforce his melee force. often times it ends up with 8 range units shooting my 1hp city but cant take it. Also make sure you focus fire and beat every single melee to 0 hp. A 1 hp melee can kamikaze and take 20 hp off a city.

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Let yourself be bribed for declaring a war.

DreadMuffin said:

That's pretty neat, but I find myself getting angry that the player have not bought the tile.

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I have just realised there are people on this world who won't buy the most powerful tile in the game which is twoo tiles away from their capital...

And in the same time they waste production on granary, which will give them two times less food output...

My God, that hurts

They didn't get desert folklore either, two faith on turn 63 in the desert.

The "kill ratio" is approximately 3:1. Meaning: if the city's defence rating is 30 points, your horseman (12 strength) is likely to survive direct hit from it. It would take 36 defence rating empty city to take down your single horseman. Applies to units vs. units too.

Moriarte said:

The "kill ratio" is approximately 3:1. Meaning: if the city's defence rating is 30 points, your horseman (12 strength) is likely to survive direct hit from it. It would take 36 defence rating empty city to take down your single horseman. Applies to units vs. units too.

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Does the +30% city combat strength pantheon affect the rating? Or is it applied as a bonus during damage calculation? If so, beware...

budweiser said:

Did you ever think about all the lost revenue from the sale of iron to the AI because you didnt get Bronze Working until after Education?

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Actually, I prefer to remember all the times I researched Bronze Working and found no iron. That way, I keep my eye on the prize (Education).

On Continents map types, when you first build a caravel and are about to sail off to find other five, check the religions in all the citys in your continent. If one of them has afollower of a religion that was not founded on your continent, the new world lies in that direction. This could get you the world congress.

Might be common knowledge, but when I figured this out it revolutionized sieging cities for me.

If you plan on sieging cities by ranged attacks reducing the city's HP to zero and finishing with a "paper" melee unit, don't heal the melee unit to 100HP, heal it to "90-something." I usually move and fire with a bunch of ranged units, move in and set up a siege unit, and move a melee unit into place but don't attack, hoping the city (and garrison) will bombard the melee unit, who can take it, allowing the full complement of ranged units to attack the next turn.

But this never happens. The city (and garrison) will almost always bombard the siege unit, and in the rare cases that it doesn't, it will attack one of the ranged units. It seems to (intelligently) prioritize the unit that threatens it the most.

However, the one target that an AI city will prioritize over a threatening unit is a damaged unit, regardless of how trivial the damage is. So it will attack a pike with 92 or 98 HP, often allowing that unit to sit and heal 10 HP the following turn while the rest of the ensemble brings the city down.

DarthSheldonPhD said:

Might be common knowledge, but when I figured this out it revolutionized sieging cities for me.

If you plan on sieging cities by ranged attacks reducing the city's HP to zero and finishing with a "paper" melee unit, don't heal the melee unit to 100HP, heal it to "90-something." I usually move and fire with a bunch of ranged units, move in and set up a siege unit, and move a melee unit into place but don't attack, hoping the city (and garrison) will bombard the melee unit, who can take it, allowing the full complement of ranged units to attack the next turn.

But this never happens. The city (and garrison) will almost always bombard the siege unit, and in the rare cases that it doesn't, it will attack one of the ranged units. It seems to (intelligently) prioritize the unit that threatens it the most.

However, the one target that an AI city will prioritize over a threatening unit is a damaged unit, regardless of how trivial the damage is. So it will attack a pike with 92 or 98 HP, often allowing that unit to sit and heal 10 HP the following turn while the rest of the ensemble brings the city down.

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Yeah, this is a nifty tactic/exploit.

I like putting the melee units into a 3-unit train so I can always have a relatively fresh melee unit to suck in the damage while one heals outside of city bombardment radius while my ranged units and siege weapons pound the city with impunity.

Here's a tip from me though I don't know if it's all that unusual. If you want to play the religious game consider taking To the Glory of God as a reformation. It's not as competed as Sacred Sites and Jesuit Education (AI also likes Religious Fervor a lot ). It allows you to super effectively cherry-pick your late-game policies since you can forget about completing trees just to get the ability to buy GPs.

Here's a strange one:

If you annex a city containing a Guild you haven't built yet, you acquire that guild and *all of its accrued points*. For example, I got an Artists Guild from a city capture, and 5 turns later got a GA from it. This can be really awesome for conquest. Saves you building the guild and shaves many turns off your first GA/GW/GM. But, it can have unintended consequences, like preventing you from building the guild in the city you wanted to build it in. Unfortunately, I don't recall seeing the Artists Guild in the puppet screen. I don't think it appeared until I annexed. :-(

I suspect this is a bug, as the Guilds are essentially National Wonders and shouldn't transfer over.

I think someone mentioned some of these, but here are some tricks to figure out which civs are in the game:

1) Ask all players to DoW someone. It'll show the people you haven't met as greyed out options.
2) Click DoW on all CS. Don't accept. It'll show unmet civs who are protecting them.
3) If you see borders revealed by a map ruin, or just inside fog-of-war, and don't have the color memorized, or can't see it clearly, you can sometimes hover over that tile to see who owns it.

Other tricks:
* Hovering over tiles in areas of the map that you can't currently "see" but have revealed in the past will in some cases update them with information you shouldn't have. ;-)
* You can tell if someone has Fertilizer, Economics, or Chemistry by their tile output yields. This will tell you what they're researching... and how far along they are towards artillery, most importantly.
* You can tell who's roughly ahead in tech even if they're not #1 by which era they're in.
* You can tell who went a different tech path from you by hovering over a potential trade route with them. If you get 4 beakers from someone, and they get 3 beakers from you, you know they went a different route. It's not as obvious when you're just flat out behind. This can be useful when deciding who to steal from.
* Sometimes it's good to *NOT* get those cheap techs you've been ignoring. Farming the bottom of the tech tree reduces the total number of techs you don't have that they do have, which increases tech stealing time and reduces the value of trade routes. So, for example, if you're shooting for Artillery, you'll steal techs faster and get more beakers from trade routes if you ignore all those cheap 1 turn techs. Sounds counter-intuitive, but if you don't need a tech, don't get it until you need it.
* On the other hand, when you're just trying to catch up, for stealing bigger techs, *DO* farm the bottom of the tree, and try to finish up dependencies just in time for a steal. For example, if you're going warlike, and you stopped at Philosophy until someone entered the Renaissance, (T110 on Deity), then you should switch over to Drama & Poetry and Theology when you get your first Spy so you complete your first theft right when you finish Theology. This will get you Education as early as T125 without having to research it. Which isn't so bad. ;-)

slowcar said:

Let yourself be bribed for declaring a war.

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I've done this a few times, I haven't been able to get that much so far, just small stuff like a few gold per turn, but hey better than nothing right? You can however get MAAAAAAD money for agreeing to vote for someone as World Leader (requires them to have a diplomat in your capital, just look for green text when you're talking to someone). You can get crazy cash like 30 gold per turn if they're rich enough ... of course it ought to go without saying that you should make damn sure they don't have enough delegates to win with your vote.

Cromagnus said:

Sometimes it's good to *NOT* get those cheap techs you've been ignoring. Farming the bottom of the tech tree reduces the total number of techs you don't have that they do have, which increases tech stealing time and reduces the value of trade routes.

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I also like saving the cheap techs for a city state science quest, so I can unlock a bunch in a row and win.