First to 3 cities (and maybe a religion) strategy

This is a strategy I have been working on from day 1. I know I probably am not the first to come up with this strategy, but in order to facilitate the post, I am going to call it the "UberCivver" (UC) strategy.

Build Order:
Worker (esp. works if the worker and warrior are 15 turns each).
Warrior
Settler
Warrior
Settler or Stonehenge (if you have access to stone, go for Stonehenge)
Stonehenge or Settler

I know what you are thinking, a worker being built first is crazy, but here me out.

Research to bronze working as soon as possible.
Once your worker comes out, have him chop down forests anywhere he can in the city radius(have him build a farm or mine while bronze working is being researched). This will get your warrior out in 3 or 4 turns, and your first settler out in about 4-6 turns after that. This means 25 turns into the game you have your settler built, a worker starting to improve your city. Once stongehenge is completed, then you can go in whatever direction you want technologically. This is my common route to get Judaism:
Mysticism
(worker tech)
Polytheism
Masonry
Monotheism

This strategy is nice to get to three cities quickly in order to grab some nice resources and/or strategic locales for your cities. Just remember to chop chop chop! 30 hammers is HUGE to a early wonder or settler.

One last note. Since you will get an early wonder, your first GP will be a prophet, which means if you nailed Judaism, you can build the wonder for it, but if you didnt, just wait until your GP will get theology for free to discover Christianity first!

Would love to know what everyone thinks of the UCS.

-UberCivver

Interesting. I will situationally build a worker first. If the nearby resources are right and I have the right starting techs (or quick access to them), building the worker, and getting a quick resource exploited can be more advantageous then growing to size 2 and then building the worker and exploiting the resource.

My main concern with the strategy is the lack of forests at later stages of the game. I can see the advantages of getting 3 cities started very early, but I wonder what sort of resource penalty and health penalty your starting city will be paying by not having forests later in the game.

Walkerjks,
Yah, I always worried that this strategy may hinder me later in the game; however, with the UC strategy, you only find yourself having to chop down 3 (maybe 4) forests, leaving plenty that will invariably grow back as you work to improve resource tiles early on. If you are seriously lacking in forests, this strategy may not work, unless you have some health bonuses nearby to counter the loss in health.
What I like most about this strategy is that you are pretty much guaranteed to found at least one religion, whether is be Judaism (by hitting monotheism first) or Christianity (by the way of the great prophet)

I'd have to actually try it out, but I'm not sure I would like that strategy. I usually produce workers and settlers on how fast my population grows, rather than having a rigid build order. I don't build my first worker until my population hits 2... and then my first settler until population 3.

Also, you have to take into account game difficulty. Spitting out workers and settlers is easy if you don't have to worry about ravaging barbarians every 2 turns. I'll be honest, I used to build a worker on my very first turn as well. But since then I've been increasing the game difficulty, and now I'm finding that a few Warriors early on is very necessary.

I love keeping as many forests around as well. ;-)

But you know, that's what's so great about Civ. So many ways to play.

PoweredBySoy,
You are absolutely right about the difficulty, this strategy has only been tested and successfully used up to Noble. I am still in the process of trying it on the higher ones.

As far as a rigid build order, I would also agree that building is all situational. I have definitely had barbarians or a rival civ on my doorstep early on and had to crank out a few warriors or go for archery earlier than I would like.

And for my last point of agreement
I LOVE how (almost) ANY strategy has a chance of working in this game and how much you have to ADAPT to your surroundings and leader traits ( oh my goodness just like a real civ!). In the future I will hopefully be posting lots of different strategies that we can talk about, pick apart, etc.
Happy Civving.
-UberCivver

While I'm a strong advocate of leaving all your forests up I could definitely see the use in getting an early chop or two in to give your civ a jump start early on. The sooner you get that settler out the sooner your city starts growing again. I'd rather throw 30 shields into my settler than 30 food.

I'll have to try this out. It would have to be a very heavy forest start, though. If I only had 2-3 forests in the city radius there's no way I'd chop them down.

I chop. Rushing a granary, forge, or units early is great.

While I don't use the original poster's build strategy, I am an advocate of heavy deforestation in the early to mid game. The bump I get in certain key production items early often outweighs the longer term health issue. I've never had health issues in my cities as long as I control their growth to match my resources/tech.

The bump I get in certain key production items early often outweighs the longer term health issue. I've never had health issues in my cities as long as I control their growth to match my resources/tech.

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Forget the health bonus. Forests are your primary source of hammers. My first couple games I was using the suggested worker actions that the game gave. This essentially meant chopping down all the forests early on. Only to find my cities taking 25 turns to build spaceship parts and just way more turns to build everything than they should have been taking. Good luck waging a war without any forest tiles too. Even your cities that are specialized for science/commerce still need forest as well. You do need to be able to build libraries/universities/observatories/etc in a timely manner.

Workshops come late and they reduce the potential food in your city until late in the game (I forget what removes the food penalty) but by then the lumbermills are around and forest tiles are even better than ever.

Chopping down all your forests will give you a slight early game boost but will severely weaken your cities for the rest of the game.

Shillen,
You are totally right, you HAVE to leave SOME forests laying around for later on, but if you can spare it, chopping down 2 or 3 near your capital and only your capital will give a great early game boost.

Look, it's all about balance. If your city needs more food than you can otherwise provide, you may have to replace those forests with farms. If you have a city surrounded by hilly territory, you might as well put down mines and chop those forests for the production rush. There's no point in having a city surrounded by mined hills with +4 hammers on them and no one to work those tiles because the forests only provide one food. And there also little point in having a city with only farms and no production. Though you can do quite well with a landscape full of almost nothing but towns... I'm finishing off a game now where one city is surrounded by towns on floodplains - 3 food, 9 commerce and 1 hammer per tile. And who cares if it takes forever for that city to build anything? With the commerce it's pumping out it can buy anything it needs.

That said, there's almost nothing I like more than seeing a grassland tile with no fresh water and a forest on it - 2 food, 2 hammers, and no work required. It's late in the game before you can improve on that.

UberCivver said:

Shillen,
You are totally right, you HAVE to leave SOME forests laying around for later on, but if you can spare it, chopping down 2 or 3 near your capital and only your capital will give a great early game boost.

Click to expand...

That's what makes this idea so intriguing and worthy of exploration. It's clear that if you are surrounded, you'll need to clear some in order to get enough food. Doing it early in order to jumpstart settler production seems like a no-brainer.

What is interesting is the more typical case where your city has a handful of forests (say 3 to 5). The question becomes, is it worth crippling your start city (making it food heavy) in order to jumpstart other core cities. As the last poster pointed out, the starter city can still be productive in other ways (such as commerce creation through cottages). Put another way, by deforestation of your starter city, can you end up with 3 cities (2 fully productive and 1 deforested specialty city) in the same amount of time that traditional growth would give you only 2 cities (both fully productive)? If the answer is "yes", then the extra city + the associated land controlled makes this worthwhile, particularly if you are going to get crowded early by AI civs.

The only thing I'll add to this is I'm almost positive that you can chop forests outside your borders and still receive the hammers from the chop (only reason I'm not positive is I don't have the game on hand to actually double check right now). If you want the forests in your capitol for the production just go somewhere else. Obviously you may be depriving yourself of forests in future cities, but if you're trying to keep you capitol as a major production center and won't need the tiles for food then don't chop the forests there. Same goes if you need the forests for health, not to mention possible defense and maybe even getting a woodsman II unit moving around. Also, if you're gonna build a new city somewhere where a forest is you'll lose the hammers from the chop if you don't cut it down before you settle there. building a city gets rid of the forest but doesn't give you the hammers that a chop normally would.

Interesting strat, but the chopping bugs me a bit. I've played two games (noble and prince), not enough to really have a feel for the best way to handle forests. Early growth seems so critical that right now my only rule of thumb is to get farms up on tiles with fresh water. But that's pretty much all the deforestation i'll do. Mines on bare hills, cottages on plains (except near fresh water) and leave forests be seems to work in most cases.

Related question: If you deforest and build an improvement, say a farm, early on, is it possible for forests to repopulate that tile, or do they only grow back on unimproved terrain?

jjones said:

Interesting strat, but the chopping bugs me a bit. I've played two games (noble and prince), not enough to really have a feel for the best way to handle forests. Early growth seems so critical that right now my only rule of thumb is to get farms up on tiles with fresh water. But that's pretty much all the deforestation i'll do. Mines on bare hills, cottages on plains (except near fresh water) and leave forests be seems to work in most cases.

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I've been mostly like you with this strategy. In terms of cottage on plains though I did this the first game and noticed that they almost nothing until much later since they aren't being worked. Now you could MM and put workers on them or set the governer to max commerce but otherwise until you've used up all your food producing and shield producing tiles they just sit there like little dots doing nothing. Now if your worker has nothing else to do then so be it, but other cities could use improvement or instead you can send him into neutral territory and chop down forests giving you extra hammers for production. It seems to me that as we all start play more and learn the strategy's for how to work the land will become incredibly important and valuable. Especially since no matter how good the AI gets at worker improvements it's something a human will be able to do better. Overall I think it's gonna require city specialization. Being able to choose a city site with lots of hammer potential and just enough food to get to the size where it will be most productive and using those for production. Then finding food rich and hammer poor places to make enough food so you can make a bunch of cottages and work them to reap huge commerce benefits. Cities will be able to do some things very well, but rarely will you get cities that just do everything like you used to.

ritterpa said:

Related question: If you deforest and build an improvement, say a farm, early on, is it possible for forests to repopulate that tile, or do they only grow back on unimproved terrain?

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Unimproved only. They don't seem to grow back over territory that even just has a road on it, either. In my experience, this makes roads a useful tactic to keep jungle from overgrowing plains and grasssland with no fresh water, especially early on when you can't spare enough workers to build cottages on every jungle-adjacent tile. But it also means that I don't build roads outside of my city radius, if there are forests nearby. Much better to let them grow wild and then cut them back for production rush when you need it.

So let me get this straight, you can chop down trees outside of the city radius and still get the 30 hammers?

Do these trees have to be within the city's area of effect? (full border to influence area)

What if the tree is equidistant between two cities?

I'm liking this strategy. I've always been an expansionist civ player.

I feel like I'm a little strategy-impared seeing how my total play time of Civ III is less than 24 hours. I never got into it that much. Too many games with only on iron square on the whole map.

I played Civ II as late as last week.

As far as I know you can chop outside your area of influence. The question of equadistant between two cities is a good one that I don't have the answer to. Won't be hard to figure out once I get home though.

WaxonWaxov said:

So let me get this straight, you can chop down trees outside of the city radius and still get the 30 hammers?

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I find that very hard to believe. But.... if it is true, omg. I'm going to have to create an army of workers just for this purpose! Not in my cities' workable area though.... because I like having trees there. All other trees though, hear my call, your time has come.