Unusual tips!

Carthaginian settlers cannot settle on mountains, but it would be cool if they could.

beetle said:

This does not work for me. Could that be a change from GnK to BNW? Seems like an odd tweak. Please try it and see.

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So I was mistaken. I saw, one day, a pics with a Carthagian city on a mountain in the Funny screenshots thread. So I believed it was possible.

No real harm I suppose. I just wasted a few hours on a couple games, it is all Civ, so all good.

I think this is the post you are thinking of.

D' Oh!
you had me!

maybe its one of those situations where the game displays a mountain, but if you hover your mouse over the tile it says "Plains". I see these a lot in the "lakes" map type. Its funny because you can build an improvement (or found a city) on the tile and the game keeps displaying it as a mountain. Moving troops across said tile is allowed, because its a plains tile.

I have noticed there is always a real mountain nearby. Must be a bug in the logic for creating a chain of mountains....

JeSuisNapoleon said:

D' Oh! you had me!

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Yeah, sorry about that. FWIW I had fooled myself too!

There are a lot of questions about how to reduce or undo warmongering penalties, and several tips about bribing for war; one of my favorite tips (a strategy, really) is to thoroughly ruin the reputation and international standing of a civ you'd like to conquer. Start out with positive relations (give them unbalanced trades, embassies, whatever) to get a DoF. Towards the end of your DoF with them, bribe them to declare war on other well-connected civs (surprisingly cheap) who already have lots of DoFs (Venice), and City-States if possible. If the target civ has any existing DoFs, get him to declare war on them, the more the better, but 2 or 3 usually does it. Ideally, they will eliminate one or two of the hapless targets you've set up. They'll be viewed as a warmonger and a backstabber, and will be universally denounced.

Your DoF with them will then expire, and you can denounce them along with everyone else for diplomatic bonuses. Before long, other civs will be pressing you to declare war; accept, for additional "fought against a common enemy" diplomacy bonuses. You may then proceed to invade at will. There will be only Minor warmonger penalties for most of their cities, which can be countered by liberating token cities of eliminated civs, preferably small cities somewhere in the tundra, for Major and Extreme liberation bonuses, not to mention Recalled to Life status (it's often easiest to put together a fistful of minor conquered cities as your peace conditions which can then be liberated).

By the time you're done, your victim will be reviled, at war with half the world, their lands and loot at your feet, you'll have built substantial alliances, and your warmonger penalties will be negligible. They'll be unable to build alliances against you (the world will only hate them more when they denounce you, rather than the other way around), and denouncing them will afford ongoing diplomatic bonuses with the rest of the world. He'll likely be eliminated by his many enemies, giving you an opportunity to repeat the process, eventually liberating his last city, getting Recalled to Life Diplomatic Victory votes, while still maintaining a 1984-esque 2-minutes hate to bring all your allies together against him. The best part is that this tends to create a more diplomatically close-knit world of DoFs, which means that your next target can be paid to declare war on his friends even more cheaply.



Some civs won't be bribed for anything (Ethiopia), but if you're near an aggressive civ (Huns, Denmark, Rome), you can tie up their resources for a long time in their many wars, build a more advanced army and have at it. It's a long strategy that takes many turns to unfold, but it's guided me through many a victory. Just don't wait too long after they start conquering cities, or they'll incorporate their prizes and outpace you.

Do only partially listen to those who advices you to build roads only when it's profitable, remember that you'll also need the roads to move your units around quickly when you are being backstabbed!!

Edit: Sorry, where are my manners, welcome to the forum "Deepthoughtless". That was actually some good advices about warmongering, I will try them out.

Oh, I always build them, I only just partially build them. I mentally outline the path of the road, and put 2 turns into each tile (on standard speed), then move on until the until path is 2/3 roaded. Once all those are done, I complete the road.

Sounds like a waste of time honestly. I'd just complete the road and suck up the maintenance.

Erneiz Hyde said:

Sounds like a waste of time honestly. I'd just complete the road and suck up the maintenance.

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I agree. The worker spends 1 additional turn for each segment of the road, 2 additional turns for each segment with rough terrain on it/a river that he has to cross, which not only means that he won't be improving other tiles for a long time, but also that the road connection will not produce gold in those additional turns - the total amount of gold you save is just very low and the opportunity cost (if you connected 2 big cities it would even be a waste of gold) for each additional turn that your worker has to spend building the road is enourmous. It MIGHT be useful if you have a straight connection with absolutely no rough terrain to slow him down AND if the additional maintenance would cause you to lose some science, but that's such a rare case that it will probably be a valid concideration in 1 out of 100 games or so.

/edit: Have been thinking about that some more - let's do some very basic math. Imagine you have a straight road to build, 4 tiles long, no obstacles. That 4x3= 12 turns you need to build that road. you'll get +1 maintenance every 3 turns, so you'd spend 3+6+9 maintenance until the road is finished - a total of 18 gold. Let's say a city connection produces 5 Gold per turn. That means that the additional 4 turns you need to revisit every single tile, you'll lose 20 gold of income - so a 5-gold-connection already eclipses the gold you're saving. And again, your worker would spend more time improving these tiles - so yeah... don't do it.

I'm not saying my math is 100% correct here (in fact I'm pretty sure it's not ), but it should be good enough to see that it's just not worth it overall.

Rather than almost finishing road segments and moving on, I just use multiple workers to finish the road faster. Normally, by the time I'm starting roads the resources in the area have already been finished, so the only other things the workers could be doing is building mines, farms or the civ's UI if it has one. By having all my workers building the road network, I save more maintenance than the partially completed plan does and start making the additional income from the completed connection faster.

So my tip is to start the roads after your luxury and strategic resources are done using all your workers for the roads. Then go back to any other resources you haven't finished like wheat, deer, stone and sheep.

I guess it's an unusual tip: I road spam my CS friends. They pay the maintenance. Then I get all kinds of tactical advantages in war. And I try to connect my roads thru the CS as much as possible.

S.O.T MAHak said:

Do only partially listen to those who advices you to build roads only when it's profitable, remember that you'll also need the roads to move your units around quickly when you are being backstabbed!!

Edit: Sorry, where are my manners, welcome to the forum "Deepthoughtless". That was actually some good advices about warmongering, I will try them out.

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No worries, thanks! I've been debating the road timing issue myself. I find it works in open terrain where you don't lose a turn by moving on, but in heavy terrain it slows down your worker too much. The math point is well made though, that you're only gaining something like 20-30 gold by delaying, and losing the tactical advantage. It's just that a few GPT feels like so much in the early game...

I use the road trick in open terrain, rough terrain gets fully roaded immediately.

Sometimes you don't need the completed road tiles absolutely right away, in which case the trick is fine.

If you see an AI has 2 copies of lux, trade them anything you can, even pay cash to get copy.

If you do not do it. AI will eventually sell it to an other civ and you will loose opportunity. When trade expired, you will be able to renew it for other lux or strategic, which you obtain in meantime.
On same note, when some other civ declare war, check bought civs, they might have new lux to trade.

Mutineer said:

If you see an AI has 2 copies of lux, trade them anything you can, even pay cash to get copy.

If you do not do it. AI will eventually sell it to an other civ and you will loose opportunity. When trade expired, you will be able to renew it for other lux or strategic, which you obtain in meantime.
On same note, when some other civ declare war, check bought civs, they might have new lux to trade.

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Nice tips - I'd like to add:
If you have an overflow of cash but if you're low on happiness, it might even be a good idea to buy a luxury that the AI only has 1 copy of, if you see that they have more than 1 copy of it in their lands - it's expensive the first time you trade it, but odds are that the AI has traded their second copy away to another civ and that it will NOT trade it away again as long as your deal is active (because it tries to always keep 1), which means that they will most of the time have 2 copies of it once the deal expires and will offer you to continue the deal. You can then buy it for the normal price, or trade it 1:1.

I you havent chosen ideology yet and notice some AI to reach industrial era you can buy all of their coal to prevent them from choosing ideology before you. Sometimes AI's wont have mine on coal tiles so you have to check trade screen every turn. But it's not necessary to buy all coal from every civ every time. For example if Zulus have lots of coal and you intend to choose Freedom it's kind of waste of money.

Latest trick I have learned on deity is to pick a fight early.

The ai starts with significant advantages. An extra settler and warrior as well as a scout and 2 workers. If you find an ai civ near your starting location try to achieve some or all of the following in the fist 20 turns.

1. Take out their scout asap. Gang up with a barbarian unit if possible. Also the ai will often fortify its scout if you bombard it with your city leaving it in bombard range till you kill it.

If successful the ai will essentially stop exploring and you will have far more time to collect ancient ruins bonuses.

2. Steal their workers. Easy to get 1 and occasionally possible to take both.

This cripples their early economic advantage and brings your civ back into line with civs elsewhere in the world.

3. Take out their extra settler. Nearly impossible since they usually build on turn 2 or 3 but awesome of you pull it off.

The ai will realize its not strong enough to attack your capitol and ask for peace asap after which they are quite willing to forget and be friendly.

valcurdra said:

Latest trick I have learned on deity is to pick a fight early.

The ai starts with significant advantages. An extra settler and warrior as well as a scout and 2 workers. If you find an ai civ near your starting location try to achieve some or all of the following in the fist 20 turns.

1. Take out their scout asap. Gang up with a barbarian unit if possible. Also the ai will often fortify its scout if you bombard it with your city leaving it in bombard range till you kill it.

If successful the ai will essentially stop exploring and you will have far more time to collect ancient ruins bonuses.

2. Steal their workers. Easy to get 1 and occasionally possible to take both.

This cripples their early economic advantage and brings your civ back into line with civs elsewhere in the world.

3. Take out their extra settler. Nearly impossible since they usually build on turn 2 or 3 but awesome of you pull it off.

The ai will realize its not strong enough to attack your capitol and ask for peace asap after which they are quite willing to forget and be friendly.

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....hhmm so if you DoW'ed your neighbor immediately, he won't have time to build up the big strike force that he will come at you with eventually, but rather come at you with smaller groups of freshly built units?!

An obvious tip for when you are at war and want to raze a city:

sometimes you will be able to take a city fast, but there are lots of enemy units still around. Take the city (puppet) and then retreat and let the AI re-capture. This reduced the population fast when you capture it again. Its a bit risky as you might loose your capturing unit, but it works well when you have the ability to do it. Make sure you grab any great works while your in control

doing this often leads to razing a city of pop ~4 instead of pop ~8, much faster. Fewer buildings to sell during the burn though, so think about that as well