Civ presentation from the player's perspective

I thought that it would be useful if there was a thread where there would be presented some strategies for each one of the "unpopular" civs in CIV4. As far as I have noticed, there are plenty of threads for the popular ones, like Incas, Catherine, and Ceasar, but nothing for the rest. I would really like to see some potential strategies and problems when you play someone of the other civs.

I will start myself the thread presenting the Greeks, that I have played quite a lot of times and also seem to me to present extremely interest challenges. (An interesting poll might be to find which is the civ you feel it's the more difficult for your game.)

Alexander and the Greeks

Greeks are Phi and Agg and start with Hunting and Fishing. That makes them, imo, one of the most difficult civs to play with, since both the starting techs aren't the most useful, and the two traits don't combine well. Philosophical "cries" for wonders, buildings, etc, while Aggressive is made for early war.

To unleash to the utmost the power of Phi you must build some wonders, in order to get the GP machine started. In higher levels this is tough, and you must set priotities: usually you can't get more than 2 wonders, so you try for Stonehedge and Pyramids (if you have Stone) or Oracle (if not). You usually don't want to try for a religion, and expect to find one from your neighbours.

The power of phalanx

Phalanx is a tremendous defensive unit, that makes all kinds of early horse aggression against you a real joke. A phalanx in the hills is very tough to beat even by axemen, since if you fortify it there for a long time you equilize the axemen "anti-melee" advantage. And, of course, with its' +100% against mounted the opponents can forget any kind of horse raid against you - it's pure suicide EVEN WITH KNIGHTS, thanks to the useful extra Strength you also get from Agg trait.
Plalanx is equal to the Axemen against archers, which makes it also a good offensive weapon. The combo "axeman+phalanx+horse archer", or even "anti melee axeman+phalanx", is practically immune, unless the opponent is willing to accept tremendous losses. That means YOU CAN go to war and give really a hell. The only "difficult" early opponent for phalanx is praetorian, which is both historically accurate and also ... well, Praetorians have no counter in this game. But other early civs are piece of cake (Persians, Egyptians, Incas (after Bronze), etc), so you make a priority to have good relations with Romans - or kill them before they get iron.

A general strategy

One possible general strategy for the Greeks is the following (assuming Emperor or Immortal and at least Epic speed, so as to have some "time" for the attacks). Also, I assume large continents or Pangea - in smaller maps there are probably better strategies with a bit more warmongering, and Archipelago is a different game.

1. Bronze, for one additional reason (phalanx).
2. Build the Stonehedge, to get some culture and also great prophet's points. You will use them to build the shrine to "equalize" a bit the financial deficit.
3. Kill one close neighbour, but DON'T overexpand - you have neither Organized nor Financial to help you. Usually just use your opponent to get a religion and a holy city. If necessary, DON'T CONVERT to that religion: wait first to see what is happening close to you. You have the Stonehedge for culture, and you will usually try for Pyramids to get some happy faces.
4. According to the resources, try Pyramids or Oracle. Pyramids is by far the best, since in Phi civs each specialist gives "additional" bonus.

(3 and 4 may come with a different order, according to the situation. The ideal case is when you can stage a war when you are close to Alphabet. In this case you usually don't whipe off the opponent, but just take the main cities and all the techs you can leaving him with just a distant small city. The point of the expansion is to acquire SPACE for cities, not cities.)

5. Expand carefully but without a "halt", focusing on the "money" path - Code of Law, Math, Currency. Money is the bigger problem in the early game in slower games and higher levels. Take care, as usual, the cottages, but also plan 1-2 GP farms. You don't need to be extremely "purist" - Phi means you can allow yourself the luxury to have big GP production even without "only farms" land.
6. DON'T EVER upgrade your phalanxs until you reach Riflemen (that's an additional bonus). Usually someone will attack you in ancient times, but if you take care your diplomacy it would be a far-away one, and he will use some mounted units to come to you. Don't forget: until Cavalry, no mounted unit can be a threat.
7. At the medieval focus a lot on knights (the perfect defensive companion for your phalanx): usually AI will create War Elephants to "block" you, and this means you will have an easy time at this era too. You have to have knight to prevents guys like Toku from slaughtering you. Continue to focus on money, but probably ignore the Theology+Divine Rights path (unless you happen to have handy some great prophets to find it first). Your general plan is to use GP for covering the financial disadvantage you have - either by putting them in the cities (except great scientists), or (more rarely) by having them find techs for you. The two wonders you really want are Great Library and Hanging Gardens - the others are "optional" - of course, if you happen to get your hands close to them, try for them.
8. Usually at this point of the game you must be first in land and close to the top in techs. After corporation it's "game over" for the opponents, as their financial advantage has been almost annuled and your land size will somehow tell.

P.S. Financial means 1 extra commerce for tiles with two commerce. That means that early on (in cottages) they have a tremendous commercial 33% advantage over you (the "net money" advantage is usually different). At the age of towns their commercial advantage has become equal to 1/8 - at this point YOUR advantage of GP is decisive, since (for example) each extra great prophet you have put in the cities is giving +3 GOLD, not to mention the effect of the extra great scientists! This is true for ANY philosophical civ.

Interesting article. I think the Greek's Phi/Agg combo is interesting, although I haven't been able to win with it yet on Prince. I think I may need to put more effort into making a good GP city...

The Fast Worker UU can quickly rush down those trees for you, increasing your expansion speed in the early game, and at the same time Organized matches that early expansion in cutting maintenance by half, and gives you courthouses for half the price.

The Spiritual trait is a bit less interesting, since I generally don't really care for religion, but having no anarchy means adapting your government civics quickly to changing circumstances without penalty, and important civics like bureaucracy can be instantly implemented.

If I can manage to have a good expansion and no strike until I've got Currency and preferrably Code of Laws, I know wether I've won the game or not.

The downside is no early military UU, which means you'll have to use stacks of axemen or horse archers for your early expansion wars.

i wonder why egypt hasn't been mentioned in any article before. their UU, the war chariot, is tremendous. you just need to get to animal husbandry and connect some horses to build them. they're really cheap and what you get is 5 strength 2mp unit which is immune to first strike!

those archers are no match for a war chariot. you're able to conquer and pillage like a madman in the early game. they're mounted units and if the AI has bronze it will build axemen most of the time instead of spearmen.
a promoted war chariot is superior to axemen. and it only costs 25 hammers (axemen 35). so they last until macemen or longbowmen come along.

egypt's traits, spiritual and creative, aren't that good. but creative is nice to get a huge chunk of land and no anarchy means you can quickly switch civics throughout the entire game.

i wonder why egypt hasn't been mentioned in any article before. their UU, the war chariot, is tremendous. you just need to get to animal husbandry and connect some horses to build them. they're really cheap and what you get is 5 strength 2mp unit which is immune to first strike!

those archers are no match for a war chariot. you're able to conquer and pillage like a madman in the early game. they're mounted units and if the AI has bronze it will build axemen most of the time instead of spearmen.
a promoted war chariot is superior to axemen. and it only costs 25 hammers (axemen 35). so they last until macemen or longbowmen come along.

egypt's traits, spiritual and creative, aren't that good. but creative is nice to get a huge chunk of land and no anarchy means you can quickly switch civics throughout the entire game.

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I like hatchepetsuh's traits!
creative and spiritual = open door for cultural victory.
Two main gains :
1) you can aim for at least one religion, having mysticism to start with.
2) building temples is very cheap for you, and building theaters also!

=>when playing Egypt, i like to have open borders to let religions come in (come in! don't be shy!) and to build every temple in every city. build also those really cheap theaters!
If you play it right, this makes a lot of cultural pressure on your neighbours. You'll need an army quite soon, and i don't rely much on the chariot (maybe i should, but i often had no horses!), but having a wide spread religion can help you having friends (don't need to spread YOUR religion to others,just take theirs, you don't want more fight).

In the end you should have 9+ cities with cheap temples for almost every religion, making it possible in your 3 "culture" cities to have 4 cathedrals, 4 temples, 4 monasteries
=12 culture points + 200% = 36 culture points/turn just from religious buildings!
if you add the cheap theater and your creative trait, that makes 17+200%=51culture points/turn without much efforts.
In the final stage, you can use every cultural strategy (slider + free speech+great artists) but you have a head-start of 2 free temples and a half free theater in each city.
185 hammers ahead for every city is quite a deal, leaving you time to build the rest (missionnaries obviously, other cultural buildings, army...) in your outer cities and cultural buildings in your core cities.

normal temple = 80 hammers
normal theater = 50 hammers
let's say you can have 8 hammers in your average border city
building a normal temple will take 10 turns, building a normal theater will take 7 turns.
Let's say you start with a theater, your egyptian city as finished the theater after 4 turns, and has already 8 culture points.
after that you build 4 temples: 40 turns for your other civ,
20 turns for your egyptian city.
After 24 turns, your egyptian outer city is ready to go, and already has 138 culture points, while your other civ city has finally achieved it's first temple and only has 58 culture points. guess which is going to flip soon ;-)

the 24 turns (185 hammers exactly) ahead leaves you time for 1 monastery (60 hammers) and 3 missionaries( 40 hammers each)!after those 48 turns, your normal city finally has it's theater and 4 temples, 187 culture points and 7 culture/turn, while the "outer" egyptian city has the same + monastery + started 3 missionaries for other cities to go up, has11 culture/turn and a total of 386 culture points.

Of course, there are big difficulties:
first, it's hard to get the 4 religions in one city (gives a real bias to my claculation!), the first can come "all alone", the second can come through a missionary without difficulty, the third will come through a missionary but you may need to send 2 of them, and the fourth will be quite a fight.
4 missionary tries maybe on average?

(but think that with hatchepetsuh you had time to send 3, while the other civ still hasn't sent even one!)

Anyway, you won't just build all 4 temples in a row, just a calculation example, showing what you can gain...

Qin Shi Huang's Chinese

Financial + Industrial sounds very practical. For industrial, there is 50% bonus wonder production, and 50% faster forge building. For financial, there is this 1-extra-gold bonus on 2-gold tiles, and 50% faster bank building.

I like to chop 3 workers at the beginning, and make them chop more for stonehenge, oracle, and pyramid as early as possible (stone resource) in the GP farm.

Except for your future production city & GP farm, cottages along the river (2 food, 3 golds) helps a lot. Only build cottages on 1-food ties after all 2-food tiles have been harvested.

Early-on over expansion with Qin Shi Huang may not sound right at higher difficulties, because our emperor is not Organized. Your research rate might drop and will lag behind for a while, but thanks for your financial trait, you will start to pull off around medieval age. In one of my games my research rate had to drop to 0%, but I still pulled ahead at Guild/Bank. If that sounds too risky, then stick with the 50% research rate rule would be fine.

I find that one worker / city is a nice ratio to work on. You don't pay too much upkeep, and they finish the job at the same rate of your town growth. No improvement built too early or too late.

All towns (except the GP farm and production center) -- build nothing but cottage and windmills. Watermills are tempting, but cottages are much better in the long run.

Great person farm: Besides lots of extra food, this city better has a lot of forest nearby, because you are going to chop rush a few wonders here for the GPP boost early on. The most important ones are: the stonehenge (since you are not Creative), the oracle (for the free tech to usually alphabat), the Pyramid (if you have stone), and the Great Library (for 2 free scientists). All flat tiles are farms, and all hill tiles windmill. Oh, and of course the national epic.

The most useful type of GP is the engineer for wonder rush (Parthenon, Notre Dame, Taj Mahal, etc.), then it might be the artist for a fast land grab. Later on when your cottages prosper, the great scientist + academy becomes significant.

Production ceter:

The emperor is industrial, so Forge is a top priority everywhere. We still need a production center, since we want everywhere else to spawn cottages. Pick a place with at least 4-5 hills, and some extra food. No windmills on the hills - only mines. No cottages on the flat land - only watermills wherever possible, and then the rest workshop. Later on with State Property, those workshops will kick in nicely.

Tech Research

1) Bronze working (chop trees) -> Wheel -> Pottery (for cottage) -> Writing.

2) Food techs. You can really skip most of them. The AIs will trade them to you even on Deity. Fishing really helps a seafood city to grow, and allows you to harvest from nice inland lakes (2 food, 3 golds).

3) Depending on how well you are doing, you can risk for chop rush Oracle (Mystism -> Meditation -> Priesthood) then pick the almighty free tech Alphabet. Or go straight for Alphabat. You can tell whether you can get Oracle by how much time you wasted on food techs. If you didn't bother ANy food tech, and you picked some essential techs from goodie huts (such as a free Bronze Working, everybody's daydream), then you have a good shot at Oracle. It is actually CHEAPTER to research Mystism -> Meditation -> Priesthood combined than Alphabat alone. If you have lost of forest and at least 3 workers, chance is you will have the Stonehenge, the Oracle, and even the Pyramid. Otherwise, don't bother with the earlier two. Focus on the Pyramid. You really need the happy faces on higher difficulties.

4) Trade for Mathematics, and go for Drama -> Music (free great artist, and theater is the cheapest building to give culture, and the AI seldom travels this route meaning you can trade it for other useful techs). Then follow Metal Casting for a forge in every single city of yours.

5) Currency (market for smile faces, and you can finally sell cheap techs to weak Civs, lots of cash from this point on) -> Code of Laws (court houses saves a bunch on higher difficulties) -> Civil Service (Buracracy in capital). Then you will have machinery & construction, ready for another wave of expansion with maceman, preferably before your nieghbors even get their longbow man.

6) Guild -> Banking. Your win is usually in the bag at this point. Your income is flying, and the AIs start to drag behind in tech more and more. You can prusue all kinds of victories from now on -- I like to finish off my neighbors for all those agreesive town spawnings surrounding my well-planned cities.

Special Unit (Cho-Ko Nu, the powerful crossbow man)

I find them pracitcally useless, too bad.

You need to have Machinery to build them. But if you have Machinery, you are one step short of maceman (Civil Service). Both Cho Ko Nu (STR 6) and Maceman (STR 8) have 50% bonus to melee units. Even if they are in the same stack while defending, your maceman (STR 8) usually takes the field because they have a even better winning odds.

If you ever needs Cho Ko Nu, then you are defending a city. This means you will watch helplessly that the enemies pillage your improvement to nothingness. Also, you are not doing very well in diplomacy. If possible, in advance, bribe someone to deal with the aggressive Civ, or bribe themselves to attack someone else.

I thought it was impractical to use Cho Ko Nus for city defence. They cause collateral damage and have 2 (sic!) first strikes. If you suicide them against an enemy city, they have a good chance to survive, unlike the cats.

For Alexander with the Philo trait, I would opt for Parthenon over Pyramids, provided that I can get marble, the extra +50% GP birthrate outweight what you can get with Oracle or the Pyramids.

Qin on the other hand is very easy to play, Build defense and chop wonders like crazy. I am able to usually get 3 or so of the ancient wonders with him and the financial trait as we all know is incredibly strong. Unfortunately, I have no use for the Cho-Ko-Nu.

Fallen Angel Lord said:

For Alexander with the Philo trait, I would opt for Parthenon over Pyramids, provided that I can get marble, the extra +50% GP birthrate outweight what you can get with Oracle or the Pyramids.

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This is debatable, but what isn't debatable is the fact that going for the Parthenon needs both Marble (usually hard to find) and a tech (Polytheism) that you must normally delay for good if you are planning any kind of aggression. It's simply a matter of priorities - in both cases you need Masonry (to get the Quarry) but for Parthenon you need an extra tech, and in the specific game plan there is no time for that (i.e. Polytheism) since you must urge to find some "money techs".