What Should a Newbie Focus On?

David McMurdo

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 8, 2013
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23
Location
Scotland
Hi Everyone,

I love the community here. I've been following it for quite some time although have never felt the need to post until now.

I've actually played nearly five hundred hours of Civilization V, but I still have a feeling I don't know quite what I'm doing. It's hard to explain. I read the exchanges that go on here, and I see that you guys are paying attention to the most minute of game mechanics to achieve victory.

The fact that I'm not probably explains why I've never actually won a single game (except on lower difficulties) despite the fact that I've been playing since Civilization V was vanilla (I now have both expansions and all DLCs).
But, for example, I don't really manage my cities in as much detail as you guys seem to. If buildings appear to be taking ages I'll do something to improve its production, but the vast majority of the time I'm building stuff just for the sake of it ("guess I'll build an aqueduct here now").

I do fully grasp all game concepts, and I manually tell my citizens which hexes to work and assign my own specialists, but I still feel like there is something fundementally wrong with the way I'm playing. I play on King difficulty, just because I find the AI too passive on anything less, but like I said I've never won a single game.

In some ways I'm not sure how to. Lets say you reach the modern era on a medium sized map with seven AI Civs. Suddenly you get a notification that another Civ is working on the Apollo program, has begun to influence another Civ, or just something that indicates that they're on their way to a victory of some kind. I don't understand how it's possible to take the time to build up and army, sail maybe to the other side of the world, and stop them. Especially when the other AI Civs are working on their own plans.
I guess this is why I almost always go for a culture victory: it doesn't seem to require such apparently impossible conquests.

I know this is a horribly vague request for advice, but I'd appreciate any you could give.

(I typically play using the Standard Pace with Medium or Small maps, and either on continents or a single landmass, and as either the Celts or Romans).

P.S: How do I give myself a signature on this forum?
 
Focus on growth, try to grow some really big cities, like 40+, and staff a ton of specialists. Then take that population and learn to effectively maximize your science. Try to get a full era ahead of the AI, you should be able to get to modern before some are entering industrial on King.

If you enter Industrial before everyone else and have at least three large cities you should be able to hard build an army, march/sail it halfway across the world and start stomping enemy empires well inside of 50 turns. It may take you another 100 to mop up everyone for a Domination win after that, but the game is in the bag as soon as you start mobilizing.

I guess focus on growth for the first half of the game and then decide your VC when way ahead is my best advice if you are having trouble getting wins.

To change your sig go to 'My Account' linked off one of the top menu bars and then find the option on the left panel.
 
Science, science, science, science, science, and science.

Get science!

Buy science buildings, build science buildings, do everything you can to get science.

Get in the tech lead and you should be in a pretty good position to win.



More info:
To get science, you'll need big cities. Try to get 3 or 4 cities that grow big, and focus on science, food, and production before anything else. Get trade routes and connect them internally early, but make sure you protect your trade routes. Only focus on wonders if you're in the tech lead, and feel free to ignore culture for this strategy. Make sure to ally city states and complete quests for them if possible.

If you have more questions I'll be happy to answer them. This is the general framework though for a successful BNW strategy.
 
This will probably be unpopular advice, but if you are having trouble winning, try not setting your own specialists. I have no problem winning on king using automated workers and letting the governer do all of my specialists.

This will allow you to focus more on what is really required to win.

What I do is always have a strategy as to how I want to win. Going down tradition is usually the best. My build order is typically something like monument, scout, worker. Its not optimal to automate your workers once you get them, but who cares? I do it do to laziness often and I can still easily win on king. If your strategy is science, then focus on science buildings. Stay friendly with others civs by signing open borders etc. Don't worry about a religion until you get more comfortable with winning the game. If you just focus on growing your 4 cities large then you should do fine.
 
Thanks guys.

One practice I have that I sometimes question the soundness of is in making an early rush for culture, faith, and science. I usually go for Stonehenge, The Great Library, the Pantheon, the Oracle, and the National College in that order. These all provide great benefits, but obviously while I'm producing them in my capital I'm not producing anything else, and they very much dictate the direction of my research in the early game. I rely purely on social policies to provide me with my first worker and settler.

Is this a sound way to go about things?
 
Stop building every Wonder available to you, and construct NC as soon as you can afford it. This will help you get through higher difficulties or to devise other strategies.

Do you always get GL after Stonehenge?
 
Stop building every Wonder available to you, and construct NC as soon as you can afford it. This will help you get through higher difficulties or to devise other strategies.

Do you always get GL after Stonehenge?

Yeah, since I figured that since it comes before the AI would build it first, so I should beat them to it.
 
On king do this (its not pro strat but it works):
1) Get your normal lower techs and make sure to focus on luxuries while settling.
2) Rush to great wall and build great wall. The AI follows the pro strats and generally great wall is easy to get even late.
If you get to (2) you generally win.

Followup steps:
3) If someone invades let them enter your territory and then abuse the fact that they can't move. Cut off their escape path (cause they cant move) and then destroy their entire army with an envelope. Now look for an opportunity to take their cities. If nothing is working fall back and bait them into your empire. If nothing is working do NOT take peace unless you are fighting two wars or getting an awesome amount.
4) Meanwhile tech to education like most people rush.
5) Tech to dynamite and push out a bunch of arty (have cannons ready to upgrade).
6) An ai that has been at war with you the entire game and has lost tons of units to great wall advantage never survives an arty rush... ever...
7) Puppet everything that AI has. Puppets are the key to beating the ai to a space race. With puppets your empire goes into over-drive.

Rinse repeat arty spam on any AI that looks vulnerable. Puppet as much as you can handle. After most of your continent is puppeted you will find your space race wins itself.

GG.
 
On king do this (its not pro strat but it works):
1) Get your normal lower techs and make sure to focus on luxuries while settling.
2) Rush to great wall and build great wall. The AI follows the pro strats and generally great wall is easy to get even late.
If you get to (2) you generally win.

Followup steps:
3) If someone invades let them enter your territory and then abuse the fact that they can't move. Cut off their escape path (cause they cant move) and then destroy their entire army with an envelope. Now look for an opportunity to take their cities. If nothing is working fall back and bait them into your empire. If nothing is working do NOT take peace unless you are fighting two wars or getting an awesome amount.
4) Meanwhile tech to education like most people rush.
5) Tech to dynamite and push out a bunch of arty (have cannons ready to upgrade).
6) An ai that has been at war with you the entire game and has lost tons of units to great wall advantage never survives an arty rush... ever...
7) Puppet everything that AI has. Puppets are the key to beating the ai to a space race. With puppets your empire goes into over-drive.

Rinse repeat arty spam on any AI that looks vulnerable. Puppet as much as you can handle. After most of your continent is puppeted you will find your space race wins itself.

GG.

Something tells me you'd get a kick out of playing Venice
 
Stop building every Wonder available to you, and construct NC as soon as you can afford it. This will help you get through higher difficulties or to devise other strategies.

Do you always get GL after Stonehenge?
Add in stop building every building available in every city. Only build buildings that will help. Building a ton of buildings that aren't providing their fair share are just a drag on GPT.

This will probably be unpopular advice, but if you are having trouble winning, try not setting your own specialists. I have no problem winning on king using automated workers and letting the governer do all of my specialists.

This will allow you to focus more on what is really required to win.
Not sure if troll.......

This will be unpopular advice because it's not very good advice. These very things are what newbies need to learn how to use in order to get better at the game. The governor is an air head and should be fired for the terrible job he will do. Not learning this key part of the game is a one stop method of not being able to advance to higher levels. Getting by on King or destroying the AI by 30 techs from baby sitting your cities....

Automated workers are okay later on in the game sure but early on, automating workers is a recipe for GPT loss and wrong improvements on wrong tiles.
 
I think religion can be good, but religion either requires a good deal of focus or tithe to be good. I would recommend avoiding a religion entirely unless you play as the mayans or byzantines or a civ that has a religious focus. You do not need every wonder, and the higher difficulty you go, the more you will realize that wonders aren't all that amazing by themselves. The great library is really nice if you can get it, and the oracle is nice if you have nothing else hugely important to build (the computers don't prioritize this), but the national college is the best building early on. I would cut out the parntheon and stonehenge from your opening build, and add in maybe a settler, a granary, and a worker (depending on the situation of course). Your science and growth will move up more quickly.

I really like opening with a scout or two before anything else (barring Ethiopia, of course). The ruins and meeting city states and civs is really awesome. Make sure that you're trading your excess luxuries with the computers to get that extra money. Also, if you want to game the system a little, you can always steal a worker from a city state or an enemy civ once they get them. If you only declare war on a city state once and don't conquer it, you will earn a minimal diplo penalty, and the benefits can be really huge.
 
Brothers, would any of you be so kind as to check out the save game I've attached to this post and tell me what you think? The situation I'm in is rather typical: entering the twentieth century and in control of my starting continent (pretty much). However there is another Civ on the opposite continent (the Assyrians) who are really powerful. This is the problem: I've got a little over two hundred turns to take them on, and this will involve a massive migration of soldiers to their continent. But it's not like I can leave my homeland completely undefended from the battered, but not useless Brazil and Mongols.

In fairness this is a much better situation than I'm usually in. Usually there are two or three other far away powerhouses to contend with, and as I'm fighting one, another achieves a victory of some kind. I also tend to fall behind in tech at the start of the twentieth century too.
 

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I tried to open your save but it said I needed DLC. I actually I thought I had all of the DLC except the map packs. My DLC menu shows BNW, GNK, Mongolia, Denmark, Spain, Inca, Polynesia, Babylon, Korea and Wonders of the Ancient World. What am I missing?
 
Your Problems sound very familiar! I have been in the same position as you once. There are two things that helped me most:
1. Watched a lot of Maddjin LP's on youtoubue. Sadly costs a lot of time too
2. Most important Tip i ever got: FOCUS
Focus, focus, focus, chose a victory condition and focus on it.

Got me from winning on Warlord to Emperor in no time (except the time watching maddjin...)
 
I tried to open your save but it said I needed DLC. I actually I thought I had all of the DLC except the map packs. My DLC menu shows BNW, GNK, Mongolia, Denmark, Spain, Inca, Polynesia, Babylon, Korea and Wonders of the Ancient World. What am I missing?

I'm using the beta patch, could that be it. Other than that, the DLCs I have not in your list are:

Cradle of Civilization: Asia, Cradle of Civilization: Americas, Cradle of Civilization: Mesopotamia, and Explorers Map Pack.

Maybe the explorers map pack contains new wonders or something?
 
I did it!

Won my first proper game as the Celts on King at Standard Pace and on a Small Map. Attached the save below to prove it.

I took the advice given in this thread and focussed more on food and science instead of production and culture as I usually do. In a twist of irony, I won via culture victory. Boy it was tense! In the save file I've attached all you have to do is take Brazil's last city to win. They were the only ones resisting my tourism, so I took their capital thinking that obtaining their culture buildings would strip away their resistance. But that must not happen while the city is in anarchy, so I decided to head north and surround the city state they had taken earlier; their final refuge. I nuked it twice then moved my troops in before saving my game to show you all.

The Assyrians became a threat just like I thought, and the game hung in the balance because of them at one point. I settled on their continent to establish a power-base there, which I did after taking the Songhai capital and exterminating them in the process.
Eventually I went to war with them as they were very powerful politically. But I severely underestimated them. I managed to just take a city of theirs, but only as they were about to take the original city I'd founded on their continent. Because I took one of their cities, they agreed to a peace deal when they were one turn away from taking my city. If they had taken it, I would have lost that war and the game, no doubt. Unbelievable.

Phew. I know you guys routinely win on hardest while blindfolded, but I'm very satisfied at this :) Thanks for the advice!
 

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Grats and well done!

I feel a little late to this thread but I felt like adding a couple of tips that helped me succeed the climb from Prince (when I started) all the way to Immortal (and rising).

1. Patience and (as Whiterussian astutely points out) Focus- This is what ended up holding me back more than anything. Don't be in too much of a hurry to get your exciting moves done and start mashing that "Next Turn" button. Take your time to check on your city management, great person generation, to take stock of global politics, city state quests and available trades at least every few turns.

2. Focus on growth. Science (still) rules CiV, and no matter which victory condition you go for, being tech leader (or at least having tech parity) goes a long way towards ensuring you're in a strong position for the victory. Growth is the most direct way to science. To that end another interesting tip; is while you're learning the minutae of city placement and management, when in doubt err towards making (and working) farms and picking sites with lots of food potential. As you become more familiar with the game, you'll get better at these decisions, but as a learning player when in doubt go for the farmland.

3. Don't sweat the "leaderboard." You could end up facing a runaway that's thousands of points ahead of you in score, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that AI is actually "winning." A Player that sticks to a solid strategy while being flexible with his/her tactics can easily snatch a win from seemingly insurmountable scoreboard odds.

4. Learn as much as you can from these boards and the plethora of extremely skilled players that frequent it, many of which who have guides and videos LPs that cover advanced concepts of the game. For example, if you want to learn the finer arts of Domination victory you cannot go wrong watching a master such as Moriarte at work. There's a whole wealth of information both here and on Youtube if you're willing to take the time (but there's so much out there that learning can eat up a lot of your time, lol.)

Best of luck.
 
My advice regardless of strategy:
Growth and Science first, not ignoring culture/tourism and production.
Try to grow each city to at least 32 as that means you will be able to rush any wonder in any city with a great engineer(on standard). Internal sea routes provide more food than internal land trade routes so try to settle on the cost.
Build all the science buildings as early as possible. Cities settled next to a mountain can get a potential +200% to science(NC, Uni, Observatory, Research Lab).
Build at least 1 nuke if you can as that means any/most hostile civs will go to 'guarded'
 
I don't know if this will help but adopting this metaphor seems to have helped my play:

We often hear that winning this game is all about building science. So imagine for a second that you could play the game with zero opponents or barbarians and the objective was just to complete the tech tree. Right away you'd notice that without any need to defend yourself, that you could complete the tree fastest by chasing the techs and buildings that help science first. That would be these, and they will form our biggest overall goals:

Library
National College
Education
University
Observatory (only if you settled next to a mountain)
Public Schools
Research Labs

You'd also notice that since Science is largely based on Population, increasing Population will help a lot. Population also helps with production and gold so it's a triple boon. For population we need food, which means:

Pottery (always our first tech, and its on the way to sci techs anyway)
Animal Husbandry (for internal trade routes)
Sailing (a second trade route)
Aqueducts -- but we get these free with Tradition finisher and its part of why people consider Tradition extremely powerful
Civil Service, which gives us free food near rivers and lakes (which is why we always build farms there first)

The other critical thing we'd need is happiness to keep growing. The resources available every game change. But we need to assess our early priorities to grab:

Calendar (on the way to science stuff anyway)
Mining (out of the way but cheap)
Trapping (furthest out of the way and usually lower priority than 2 above
Masonry


If we started in a jungle or heavy forest we may need to veer off course to grab:
- Bronze working


The pattern that basically emerges is this, for me:
- open with Pottery
- Writing
- combo of policies needed for early happiness
- Animal Husbandry and/or Sailing with plan to send internal trade route to our second or third city. Should have a Granary built.
- Philosophy
- [assess safety of situation: may need to "hit the breaks" and make a run for Composite Bows roughly here]
- Civil Service
- Education
- back fill tree up to Metal Casting or so
- Astronomy


Now obviously, in the "real" game enemies do attack you and barbarians do exist. But the way to think about that is "hitting the breaks." Generally whenever you chase military tech in the lower half of the tree you are metaphorically hitting the breaks on science. You're basically saying you're far enough ahead and to pause briefly to grab extra defense or military strength. Winning the game comes down to finding the balance between hitting the breaks and zooming forward.


As for manually working specialists, here's a way to make it super-easy for you: only ever assign Scientists. This isn't an "ideal" approach but I find it a decent tradeoff between micromanagement and effectiveness. You get Scientist slots from Universities and Public Schools. I'm not saying Great Engineers aren't effective, just that they require more practice to know what to use them for. You pretty much can't go wrong with Scientists as long as you just plant early ones and bulb later ones (after public schools or so).


For selecting wonders, a general rule of thumb is if it provides points toward a Great Scientist, it's a goal worth considering. If it provides points towards some other great person, it's usually safe to skip it. This doesn't apply 100% of the time but at least sets some basic priorities. The only major exception is the Great Library, which most people agree is too difficult to obtain past the early difficulties, and will become a crutch that holds you back in trying to transition to higher difficulties.
 
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