The-Hawk
Old Original Geezer
Hello to all
this is my first post, I hope some of you find it useful. 
First some background . I started playing Civ (Conquests) in the spring of 2005. During my first couple of months, I played the scenarios provided. Sometime in June or July, I played my first random map at Monarch level. Following that, I took a crack at Deity (I had such an easy time up to then that I figured I could skip a couple of steps). HAH! Silly, silly me!
I can vividly remember my first encounter with another civ
. it had 6-8 cities, I hadnt even finished building my first settler yet. I was stunned at how far behind I was. Needless to say, the game handed me my head. I started a few more games at Demigod, generally retiring in a few turns so I could look at the turn-by-turn post game replay. I could NOT understand how the AIs were getting cities up so fast (didnt know about their bonuses). I thought I was missing some technique for rushing my first settler or something, and was ready to give up in frustration
That frustration led me to my first (and by far most critical) discovery I decided I needed help, did a YAHOO search, and found civfanatics.com. I did some studying, learned a ton from the masters who frequent civfanatics, and started on a journey to beat the game at Sid. I went back to Emperor and took it step by step and in roughly 120 days had a Sid domination win.
Why the post? I have three goals:
, my advice for people who want to move from Monarch to Sid:
1) First and foremost read the lessons on Civfanatics. Face it, some of the worlds foremost analyticals (some would say geeks and nerds
) have dissected this game to the nth degree. From Air Missions to Zone of Control, you can find excellent reference materials to help you play really well. And, you will not win at Sid if you do not play well. By the way, I certainly dont agree with everything Ive read in the forums. However, even in cases where I dont agree with the author, the articles encourage me to consider other ideas and think things through. Well worth your time
2) You are a wimp, play like one. Your prime directive is to survive! Lick their boots, grovel, learn to like being abused. If they want to cross your land, let them. If they want to extort 50 gold from you, give it to them. Build embassies, become an expert at trades, set up ROP (as if you can stop them from waltzing through your territory anyhow). But check your ego at the door.
3) For those of you who are fans of Hitchhikers Guide, remember the words on the cover: DONT PANIC.
. However, an AI will never play as well as you. It has weaknesses and limitations
you can beat it!)
4) At lower levels you have lots of options early in the game. At higher levels, you must think in terms of closing the production gap. You must get as many cities into play as you can. You should be producing settlers as fast as possible right up until the point where there is no room to expand further. A second priority is workers to improve the land. And most important pack your cities tighter (2 empty squares between cities). My first instinct was to space my cities so there was no overlap. This is wrong to make up for the AI production per city advantage, you need to have more cities and space is limited. And if you are producing settlers and workers early, your populations will be small, so you wont use all that space anyhow.
5) This is a marathon, not a sprint. Make the investments in city improvements that increase your population, shields, or commerce. And make them early. While 60 shields may seem like a lot for that Granary, in a long game you will get huge return on your investment.
6) Sweat the details. Learn to micromanage and work the sliders. Pay attention to rivers when placing cities and when attacking. At Monarch, you can be sloppy. At Demigod, you cant. The AI has a huge production advantage on you already. Dont make it worse by wasting your citizens productivity. If you see that you only need one shield to complete that Granary, and your city is producing 10 shields per turn (hence wasting 9), you should feel ill
. You should have shifted a citizen on a previous turn to get it completed sooner.
7) Avoid early wars, let the AIs bash each other. And, be very careful with MPPs. MPPs can pull you into wars you dont want to be in. When Titans clash, the little people get ground up in the middle. Remember, you are the little person even if you get the stronger Titan as your ally, you still can end up just as dead.
8) They dont call those resources strategic for nothing, pay attention to them. At Monarch, I didnt worry too much about whether an AI had resources. Even if they have the same toys as me, I could build more. My war strategy was pretty simple attack head-on and overwhelm. At the higher levels, you need to be more sophisticated. The way to take down the AI is to take away his/her strategic resources. Now my war strategy is figure out their strategic resource Achilles heel and cut it. Deny them rubber and they are yours!
9) Learn to love your arty. At the lower levels, I never had much use for arty I could out-produce the AI, so I just built more tanks to throw into battle. Who cares if I loose 5 tanks for every mech infantry defending the city? There is always another tank. At the higher levels, the AI has more bullets than you. You need to be very stingy with your units dont throw them away! Use arty to redline the opponent and vastly improve your kill ration.
10) Learn to counterattack. Let the AI bring its SOD to you. Bomb their roads leading into your territory so they cant reach your cities and attack in one turn. When they stop in your territory, grind them down with your arty (based in your city), then kill as many of the wounded as you can. For a few turns, it might be discouraging because they will keep coming (just be thankful you are not in their territory where they can move and attack you on the same turn). However, eventually, youll see the attacks dwindling. Once the AI starts running out of gas, then counterattack hard.
So, there we have it. For those whove slogged through all that text to this point, I thank you. My apologies if it was all obvious and/or redundant. Comments, questions, and rebuttals are welcome in the mean time remember the golden rule: have fun!
The-Hawk
First some background . I started playing Civ (Conquests) in the spring of 2005. During my first couple of months, I played the scenarios provided. Sometime in June or July, I played my first random map at Monarch level. Following that, I took a crack at Deity (I had such an easy time up to then that I figured I could skip a couple of steps). HAH! Silly, silly me!
I can vividly remember my first encounter with another civ
. it had 6-8 cities, I hadnt even finished building my first settler yet. I was stunned at how far behind I was. Needless to say, the game handed me my head. I started a few more games at Demigod, generally retiring in a few turns so I could look at the turn-by-turn post game replay. I could NOT understand how the AIs were getting cities up so fast (didnt know about their bonuses). I thought I was missing some technique for rushing my first settler or something, and was ready to give up in frustration
That frustration led me to my first (and by far most critical) discovery I decided I needed help, did a YAHOO search, and found civfanatics.com. I did some studying, learned a ton from the masters who frequent civfanatics, and started on a journey to beat the game at Sid. I went back to Emperor and took it step by step and in roughly 120 days had a Sid domination win.
Why the post? I have three goals:
- Since I progressed from Monarch to Sid in a fairly short time, I have fresh memories of the major Ah-hahs! and eurekas! I experienced along the way. In other words, there are several major strategy and game style changes I believe you need to make to succeed. (My goal is not to advise on mechanics, this board is filled with posts from people WAY more qualified than me to do that.)
- Ive seen posts where people playing at lower levels express doubt in their ability to win at higher levels. I thought my story might offer some encouragement that Sid is very achievable. I consider myself a B player at best, I am not in the same league as many players on this board and I did it. In fact, I believe that if you are able to win at Demigod, you are well on your way. If youve won at Demigod, you already have the tools to win at Sid.
- Last but certainly not least
I wanted to offer a public THANKS! to all of the people who posted strategies, tactics, hints, and guides on this web page over the years. Not only were they entertaining to read, but I never would have progressed past Emperor on my own.
So
with all respect to the many A players on this board who are far superior to me at Civ , my advice for people who want to move from Monarch to Sid:1) First and foremost read the lessons on Civfanatics. Face it, some of the worlds foremost analyticals (some would say geeks and nerds
) have dissected this game to the nth degree. From Air Missions to Zone of Control, you can find excellent reference materials to help you play really well. And, you will not win at Sid if you do not play well. By the way, I certainly dont agree with everything Ive read in the forums. However, even in cases where I dont agree with the author, the articles encourage me to consider other ideas and think things through. Well worth your time
2) You are a wimp, play like one. Your prime directive is to survive! Lick their boots, grovel, learn to like being abused. If they want to cross your land, let them. If they want to extort 50 gold from you, give it to them. Build embassies, become an expert at trades, set up ROP (as if you can stop them from waltzing through your territory anyhow). But check your ego at the door.
3) For those of you who are fans of Hitchhikers Guide, remember the words on the cover: DONT PANIC.
- When AI hoards cross your land dont panic.
- When you see AI riflemen and your best unit is a pikeman dont panic.
- When the AI leaders all start dressing in fancier clothes (which means you are an age behind in technology) dont panic.
- When your advisor tells you a civ has completed the Pyramids and you are still trying to finish your first Granary dont panic.
- When one of your neighbors, in spite of all of your best groveling, decides to declare war on you and starts overrunning your cities dont panic (ok, maybe in this case you should panic a little). Try to survive a few turns until they will negotiate peace, then buy your way out of the war. Or, failing that, at least try to die with honor!
Bottom line
Dont panic! Go into the game knowing all of these bad things will happen. You will not keep up, dont feel bad when you dont. The goal is to survive to a point where your superior game play can overcome the production advantage of the AI. (Editorial comment: My background is computer science, as such I appreciate the immense challenge of developing AI. I think the game developers did an superb job on the AI, I am truly impressed . However, an AI will never play as well as you. It has weaknesses and limitations
you can beat it!)4) At lower levels you have lots of options early in the game. At higher levels, you must think in terms of closing the production gap. You must get as many cities into play as you can. You should be producing settlers as fast as possible right up until the point where there is no room to expand further. A second priority is workers to improve the land. And most important pack your cities tighter (2 empty squares between cities). My first instinct was to space my cities so there was no overlap. This is wrong to make up for the AI production per city advantage, you need to have more cities and space is limited. And if you are producing settlers and workers early, your populations will be small, so you wont use all that space anyhow.
5) This is a marathon, not a sprint. Make the investments in city improvements that increase your population, shields, or commerce. And make them early. While 60 shields may seem like a lot for that Granary, in a long game you will get huge return on your investment.
6) Sweat the details. Learn to micromanage and work the sliders. Pay attention to rivers when placing cities and when attacking. At Monarch, you can be sloppy. At Demigod, you cant. The AI has a huge production advantage on you already. Dont make it worse by wasting your citizens productivity. If you see that you only need one shield to complete that Granary, and your city is producing 10 shields per turn (hence wasting 9), you should feel ill
. You should have shifted a citizen on a previous turn to get it completed sooner.7) Avoid early wars, let the AIs bash each other. And, be very careful with MPPs. MPPs can pull you into wars you dont want to be in. When Titans clash, the little people get ground up in the middle. Remember, you are the little person even if you get the stronger Titan as your ally, you still can end up just as dead.
8) They dont call those resources strategic for nothing, pay attention to them. At Monarch, I didnt worry too much about whether an AI had resources. Even if they have the same toys as me, I could build more. My war strategy was pretty simple attack head-on and overwhelm. At the higher levels, you need to be more sophisticated. The way to take down the AI is to take away his/her strategic resources. Now my war strategy is figure out their strategic resource Achilles heel and cut it. Deny them rubber and they are yours!
9) Learn to love your arty. At the lower levels, I never had much use for arty I could out-produce the AI, so I just built more tanks to throw into battle. Who cares if I loose 5 tanks for every mech infantry defending the city? There is always another tank. At the higher levels, the AI has more bullets than you. You need to be very stingy with your units dont throw them away! Use arty to redline the opponent and vastly improve your kill ration.
10) Learn to counterattack. Let the AI bring its SOD to you. Bomb their roads leading into your territory so they cant reach your cities and attack in one turn. When they stop in your territory, grind them down with your arty (based in your city), then kill as many of the wounded as you can. For a few turns, it might be discouraging because they will keep coming (just be thankful you are not in their territory where they can move and attack you on the same turn). However, eventually, youll see the attacks dwindling. Once the AI starts running out of gas, then counterattack hard.
So, there we have it. For those whove slogged through all that text to this point, I thank you. My apologies if it was all obvious and/or redundant. Comments, questions, and rebuttals are welcome in the mean time remember the golden rule: have fun!
The-Hawk
