REX.. wait, what?

Hello all, this is my first post. I've recently became addicted to Civ IV BtS... ...and I love it.

I'm learning the lingo, but acronyms slay me. One that I keep running into here, is REX, or "Rexing". What does this mean? What is it used for? And is this still useful?

Also, if you think there are other acronyms I should know, denoting a strategy or tactic, let me know?

Thanks all, and great site!

Rapid expansion.

It means different things to different people. A good rule of thumb is to expand until you're close to striking ASAP, although make sure you can recover (IE get pottery/writing).

There is a list of common acronyms in this forum somewhere. I'll try to find it for you. Welcome to the forum btw.

Here it is:

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/reference/acronyms.php

You'll probably find a lot of useful information/advice in the war academy.

Thank you!

Just to expand on the above a little bit...

REX (Rapid EXpansion) was a strategy commonly employed in previous versions of Civilization. It basically involved settling cities like crazy until all the land was taken. You could pretty much guarantee a win this way, as land = power (and still does in Civ IV).

However, for Civ IV, the game developers purposely wanted to prohibit most if not all of the sure-fire strategies that had worked in Civ III--especially REX. So they changed the way city maintenance works so that founding too many cities before your economy could handle it will cripple you.

Generally, then, you have two options, and this ties into your other question about other acronymns and strategies you should know about.

If you run a Cottage Economy (CE) where you improve and work most tiles with cottages to generate more commerce as the game goes on and support your economy, then you should try to follow the "60% rule". This rule (though it's more of a guideline, really) says that you should expand until you have to pull the research slider back to 60% to break even or stay in the black. Once you hit that point, build up your economy until you can handle more expansion. The CE is better for beginners such as yourself.

If you run the more advanced Specialist Economy (SE), you can get away with more expansion, because you can allow the slider to go down to 0% in order to break even/stay in the black. You're going to rely on specialists to make up the difference.

Shameless self-promotion: I describe all of these things in more detail my Beginners' Guide (link in my sig).

Sis' pointers here are good if you want to play low levels and immerse in the game, but after that, drop them.

Do NOT improve and work "most" tiles with cottages unless you hate production or expansion for some reason. If you want to improve quickly, look up a guide on city specialization (in short, you have 3 basic kinds ----> cottage improvement cities, cities that whip a lot or work hammer improvements, and cities that farm extensively or use high food for specialists). If you're going with a standard play, you want around half of your cities on cottages, most of the rest on hammers, and 1-2 on food+specialists. For more war, use more hammers. For more tech, use more cottages.

If you want faster GPP or your land is terrible for cottages (lots of plains with high food specials), work more specialist cities for research and try to capture better land.

You can watch me through the links in my sig although I've improved a bit since then.

I also suggest ignoring "SE" and "CE" terms like the plague and concentrating on how you distribute your specialization of cities. SE and CE were terms developed in civ IV's infancy that far from adequately describe what you actually need to do to succeed, and they tripped me up when I started too.