Newbie on Prince- some help needed

Hi all,
Since I'm new here, I'd like to give a bit of background info:

Managed to pick up Civ V on Steam about a week back- my first Civ game. Have never played a Civ game before this.
Spent ~90 hours playing on Chieftain- it soon got to a point where I was putting nuclear missiles on subs and nuking Napoleon for fun, just to see him sulk. I wanted a challenge, so I took to Prince. Hoo boy.

I'm being out-produced and severely out-teched, and it's like learning a whole new game. I'm even having trouble surviving the first few turns, when -in my latest game- the nearest civ declares war and comes over with 7 Hoplites and several archers. And it was only due to his ineptitude that I survived.

The fact that all my previous experience was on Chieftain meant that I was carrying over some bad habits, and having trouble learning better in-game practices.

Problem is, I don't know which ones. So far the only things I really picked up while playing Chieftain was that the best diplomacy usually lies at the tip of an ICBM.

What I'd like to know: What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong, and how can I improve it? I've attached my most recent save file- any help is welcome.

Sorry.I couldn't load your saved game because I don't have the DLC needed.

I'm probably not the best at this, but I'll try to help.

First off, if you're being out-teched, use research aggreements if you don't already.Also, consider using rationalism, which is very good for tech.But just be careful:If you're using peity to get happiness, be careful when considering changing to Rationalism, because they can't both be opened at the same time.

If you have more than one kind of the same luxury resource the excess ones don't give you any extra happiness.So sell them to other civs.I usually get 240 gold for each one I sell.

Be careful not to expand so much that it makes your people unhappy.It might sometimes be better to have less cities that are bigger rather than having many of them that don't grow very big because of unhappiness.So just be careful with that.

If you're being attacked, and if you have an artillery unit like a catapult, just try holding out against the advancing forces by bombarding them with it.You don't always have to have the greater numbers.

Hope something out of all that helped.Good luck!

I am not very good player. I just play prince level for fun but I can tell what you are doing wrong:
1. Not enough food in Karakorum. River tiles -->farms, sheeps not improved.
2. Three wars at once and you are producing bank in Beshalik?
3. Three wars at once and only 2 production citites? You have enough happiness to annex at least one.
4. Corinth was not bad city. Why you gave it to Oda?
5. Your forces are in wrong places at this moment.

Good things:
Hard to say, because I do not know how your game was at the beginning.

@Dedrytus
1. Food- yeah, the game was constanly screaming at me that the population was starving, I did not know how to go about planning the tile improvements.

2. I started with Japan, Rome and Greece on the same continent. Greece was warmongering, I took him out when his forces were tied up south fighting the Japanese. Then I just continued south to kick Japanese ass because their forces were depleted too. Then Russia landed settlers and started grabbing land. Shortly after all the AI players started hating on me- and then they declared war.

Thing is I don't really know what to do when a war's going on- production of new units takes forever and I don't have enough gold to buy them.

3. I was worried I'd take a happiness hit if I annexed one of the cities- glad to hear that isn't the case here.

4. Thought it was useless- I bypassed it and took Kyoto anyway.

5. You got that right! I was about to finish off Japan when Cath and Caesar declared war on me.

I pretty much consider the game as lost at this point- Rome's after me with cannon and rifles and I only have Keshiks that do diddly-squat to Industrial-era units.

Welcome to the forum

I had a brief look at your save file. Again I'm not a particularly good player (still learning the ropes on King) but a few things stood out to me.

I think your biggest problem is tech. Your science rate is really, really low for this late in the game. Part of the problem seems to be that you have ignored science Wonders/buildings/policies and just gone all-in with pursuing domination victory. It's well worth investing in tech reasonably early (build/buy libraries in your built/annexed cities and the National College in your capital; that will already help quite a bit) as if you don't the AI is going to out-tech you to the point where their units are several upgrades ahead of you, which you obviously don't want. As KP said, signing Research Agreements can help loads - although do avoid signing them with neighbours or people who you are likely to war with soon, as in the event of a Declaration of War, you will lose your money and not get anything to show for it. Darius seems like a good partner for Research Agreements as he doesn't totally hate you and is on a different continent (incidentally, it might be worth exploring the map fully if you get around to building a ship).

I might question your choice of social policies, too. I'm not sure how wise it is to go for the Honour tree first thing, even if you're going down the domination route. You're lagging badly behind in Culture too and I don't think the Liberty tree, with the free Settler it gives you, would have done you any harm. Provided you can control enough luxuries, happiness shouldn't be a problem with 3 built cities. Remember that having more cities will boost your tech, too - and an extra city in a production spot would give you another place to churn units out of. As has been suggested, I'd consider annexing one of your puppets, maybe Kyoto.

You seem to have undersold your luxuries. You should be able to get 240 gold for them, unless the AI is hostile or guarded. On the subject, one surefire way to make sure the AI hates you is to entirely wipe out Civs - for Domination you only need to capture their capitals (unless you've enabled 'complete kills' in the game setup), so if you take their capital and all their cities but leave them with one city, you will be less likely to get the 'warmongering menace to the world' diplomatic penalty. I'm guessing that the fact that you wiped out Alex is why Catherine and Caesar have declared war on you. Also beware of capturing City-States for the same reason (although the Mongol unique trait is basically telling you to do it).

Finally, the food issue - your starting location for your capital wasn't great, if that's where you spawned: plains is rubbish terrain for food; really you want to try and found your capital in a good food spot with some grasslands, next to a river or on the coast if you can. You have spammed Trading Posts everywhere but that's not doing your economy any good since Karakorum isn't even big enough to work those tiles yet. Tile Improvements cost maintenance so it's a real waste building too many if you don't have the citizens to work those tiles. Instead of building all those Trading Posts you should have built a Pasture on the Sheep near Karakorum and sent a Fishing Boat to work the Fish near Beshbalik, as soon as you can in the game. A Granary in Karakorum would have been good too.

Hope this helps. Prince can be a bit of a shock moving up to straight away from Chieftain, so I commend your bravery! It might be worth having a go at Warlord and see if that's any easier, and then trying Prince again...

blackcatatonic said:

Tile Improvements cost maintenance so it's a real waste building too many if you don't have the citizens to work those tiles.

Click to expand...

Well only roads and railroads cost maintenance don't they? But workers cost maintenance and worker turns are valuable. It might be OK to switch citizens around so you sometimes have unworked trading posts etc. but the golden rule, try not to work an unupgraded tile, its not worth the happiness. Just wanted to say that, I'm going to look at the save now.

Honour is only good for certain civs to start with and you need raging barbarians on. But it's a fun starting policy.

OK the capital only has 6 population so you are down on growth. High pop in capital is important because it gives research and mutiplies how much money you get from trade routes. I see you had to settle there to get gold and silver. You could have put a line of farms on the river. Pasture the sheep and put hill farms on river hills. These would be the first worker moves after hooking up resources. In a plains start you need this food. Farms on plains not next to fresh water are not good tiles until fertilizer. You get 2 food (which is consumed by the citizen) for 1 hammer. So 1 hammer for 1 . I think that's not a good yield. OK the land you started in is not good but you really need to use those rivers for food then. And a granary is such a vital building for the capital but they are pretty good in any city.

You must at your earliest convenience build libraries and get a national college in your capital, then get some growth there. It looks like you went for too many early rushes and didn't pay much attention to your cities infrastructure. You have conquered a few cities but they are quite spread apart so it's hard to take care of them. I'm not sure the game is lost because you arent far from chemistry yourself, but you aren't winning.

You could do your next game trying to start in a food rich place and growing a bit instead of war. Either traditon or liberty are good for growth early on. Liberty for more cities, tradition for less cities but with high population.

Thanks for the help guys. I just realised that I had missed out on a tutorial- The one where the game taught you how to improve tiles etc.

And I just discovered manual citizen management - Playing a Chieftain game as the Danes, mainly so that I can mess around with the manual control without someone backstabbing me every 5 turns.

Really appreciate all the help though. I'll see if I can upload a save once I'm done with the Danes- I think I've made some headway into wrapping my head around this management thing, but we'll see once the experts look at both saves.

nitevision: I've been in your shoes. That is the problem with starting on chieftain and stay there for 'learning' as the game recommends that when you first install it. This is true for all the civ games. At chieftain you just get stuff and the game is so easy that you can just run along and don't really have to care about how it all fits together.

Now I have not looked at your save game, but you got really good advice from others above. But I'd like to take a moment and give a quick guide into what is what in CiV.

- Science and the tech-tree is the driving force of the game. No matter how you want to win, science is the underlying force that drives this game from 4000 BC to whenever it ends. Science is the actual 'quark' you use to advance over time in this game.

- Science main drive is population. It's actually much more complicated than that, but for now just consider population as your true science generator.

- You get population by food. So let a worker farm a river grassland tile and voila, more food. That makes your city grow. And soon you have 2 citizens that can work another tile. That can give you more food.

- Except each new citizen 'you grow' comes with unhappiness and cities themselves comes with even more unhappiness. Hence you need luxury resources to create happiness.

- For population you can build a 'tall empire' which is many citizens in few cities, or a 'wide empire' with low population in many cities. It is always the happiness that caps your growth and playing tall is actually easier than going for plenty of unhappy cities. Take it slow in the beginning.

- If you are plus on happiness it will grow towards a golden age. If you go unhappy it will subtract to that progress. You really want to stay happy if you can. This is much easier if you play tall.

- So you want to construct buildings to help with all these things. So you need hammers. Plenty of hammers. Hence you want to build some mines so you add production to your cities.

- But notice how you need to grow first (but not over-grow so you are unhappy) before your city can even use a mined hill tile.

- Culture leads to social policies. Wonders are really wonderful. For each city you found or annex the cost of social policies goes up (fast). So a tall (small) empire can ride on culture while a wide (large) civ must use hammers and science to push through.

- Commerce are not to be underestimated. Most things in Civ have a maintainance cost. If you don't build an economy you won't be able to afford your empire.

- Specialists are not to be underestimated. Many buildings lets you add specialists in them. Specialists gives bonuses and adds Great People. They are like, Great. =)

- Don't start wars. Don't remove a civ from the game, Don't take a city state. Unless you are so powerful you don't have to care.

- Never automate. Manually control your workers, manually control city tiles and manually control specialists.

- Play the civ. Don't play England on a land locked map. Don't try to expand fast with India. Don't try to play a culture game as Mongolia. Don't play an early war game as Egypt.

- Most important: Enjoy and have fun!

nitevision said:

Managed to pick up Civ V on Steam about a week back- my first Civ game. Have never played a Civ game before this.

Click to expand...

- This comes with a manual, right?
- Nope! =)

@Nevyn
Ha! That was my original thought re: the manual. The civ-pedia or whatever you call it is full of flavour text- not much to go on, but then again I haven't really read it yet.

@Brichals and the rest-
As promised, here's the save file for Danes on Chieftain, with manual citizen control - did much more micromanagement here according to all your advice, as an exercise right after I completed the missed tutorial. This Science Victory is already in the bag- I'm so far ahead it's not even funny. That's Chieftain for you, I guess.

Must be fun to just buy this game out of the blue and know little about it. My initial mistake was to play Civ 5 as if it was Civ 4 and my initial mistake with 4 was to play it like 3 and so fourth. If this is all new to you I envy you for having to discover all this worker/food/hammer/gold concept from scratch.

Last bit of advice before bedtime. Even if you decide to become a Viking warmonger or a Egypt wonder builder, you are sooner or later gonna want artillery.

So why not jut fire up a game and instead of picking mining or pottery, you just click on that and watch half the tech tree light up? Because that would probably be the slowest way to get it.

Study the tech tree and try figure out would will be good in the long haul and what fits your immediate goals for now. Every game is somewhat unique.

Nevyn said:

Must be fun to just buy this game out of the blue and know little about it. My initial mistake was to play Civ 5 as if it was Civ 4 and my initial mistake with 4 was to play it like 3 and so fourth. If this is all new to you I envy you for having to discover all this worker/food/hammer/gold concept from scratch.

Click to expand...

Fun? I will tell you something about fun Admins: PLEASE DO NOT BAN ME!

At the beginning... imagine the world where nobody sells genuine games. You know nothing about new games, no advertisements, no internet - nothing. There is a place where you can "pay for a diskette" or "cassette" or "one game on cassette", but you do not know what are you paying for. Just the name of a game/demo/program, that's all. And in this environment you buy something named "Civilization" (4 disks, Amiga). No manual, no tutorial, no idea what is this, and why this guy is talking so long at the beginning (bad thing was, that when game was generating world and you clicked the mouse, game was hanging up) - clock 7,14MHz, ~10 minutes of waiting. Oh, and this strange language, without dictionary in hand it was not possible to play. In the past, in East Europe, English was not the second language. So, it was fun, at least for me.

Posting a save really is a good idea, I'll check your new one tomorrow. So many people used to do this for Civ3 and Civ4 and lots of advice was given.

Dedrytus that's pretty hardcore playing Civ on the amiga and translating with a dictionary. I played on amiga too, but I had no idea what I was doing as I was too young. I normally played until I could change governments then my entire empire just fell apart through unhappiness or debt

Tag. I'll look at your save too.

Yeah looking at your game I have a lot of the same responses that blackcatatonic made above. There are many problems with the basic plan in your game but the one that stands out most is that you need to make sure not to fall in tech as much as you have. Keeping your research rate at a competent level is probably the most important thing you can do to maintain a strong empire. At 1700 AD your capital should NOT be only pumping 9 science (3 from palace, 6 from pop). Build your libraries and build your NC in your capital. You have Education so get universities in there as well. I'd say that every city you own should include a library, university, market, and monument. Any other buildings are dependent on what you need in the city but I think when you're starting out it would be a good rule of thumb to focus on those 4 buildings.

The two river sites near your capital were pretty good places for your initial settlement. I think that Mongolia has a plains start bias, and sometimes settling on plains isn't bad, but your Mongolia is not really effective as it is at the moment. As blackcatatonic said, you have a lot of TRs when your city isn't even growing on them. The TRs on your east river would alone make a large boost on your capital if they were farms instead. TR spam on plains isn't a horrible plan, but only if you have the food tiles to maintain it. The stone/cotton/river area would not have been a bad city either, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible to settle there now.

Take the specialists out of your second city.

I'm not quite sure what you did to anger the AI so much. From looking at your notification log a research agreement was broken between you and Japan; did you declare on them or the other way around? Russia is upset with you because they're friends with Rome and they declared on you of course, but from what I can tell she's based on another continent and so I wouldn't worry to much about it.

I'd say your best bet is to sue for peace with Japan and then send your units back home because you are in a situation where they can easily take your capital if you don't. Luckily your keshiks are upgraded really well and I think that you can repel them. When you do kill off that wave of enemies I think you can go straight to hitting Rome while you build those science buildings you need. Oda and Alex are not likely to attack you again and Cathy seems to be on another continent so I wouldn't worry about her for now. Rome is what you need to focus on for now.

Okay this is just pure horsecrap- there must obviously be something in the AI code that causes it to hate Mongolia or something. I won a Prince game with the Danes- super-defensive Science Victory on an Archipelago map. Basically identical to the Chieftain save posted above.

I then switched to Mongols, playing on Pangea- and now I'm being rushed by 2 enemies at once- plains start, population starving. I had no time to even set up a proper defense-If I did, I would be out-teched by the AI (barely keeping up as it is). Either way I would have been outdid and ganged up on later.

Looks like I need to learn how to survive an early AI rush for long enough to tech up. On water maps this wouldn't be a problem- I advance fast enough to obtain Compass etc so I hold most of the advantage. With England and Polynesia it would be even easier.

But this situation? I have no idea. I suspect the AI get bonuses to production to make up for stupidity or something- but I know this is a controversial topic so I'll stay out of it.

Now I remember why I was wiping out entire civs previously. Retaliatory genocide feels good. I might just take a break and nuke me some Thai cities on Settler just to make myself feel better. But I know I'll have true revenge when Ramankhaeng is peeing himself in a corner of his palace babbling something about Mongols/Vikings/the English/Japanese Samurai at his palace gates.

Enclosed is the save in question- hope it helps illustrate the situation better, plus I think this was my problem in the very first save file: How do you tech up under attack? You dont even HAVE time to tech.

The AI gets no bonuses on Prince. I'll try out your save and get back to you. I have to wait for some downloads to get overwith first though.

Seems like drubell has things summed up pretty well.

Observation: So far in my games on Prince I have always been ganged up on by 2 or more civs on the same landmass by turn 60, usually with 6-7 Warriors and 2-3 Archers each. How can I survive this without relying on the game giving me defensible terrain?

My first Prince domination win came today- and only becuase I got lucky and rolled some sweet terrain to defend in the early game.

My first thought on your later comments about being early gang-banged is are you building a decent army from the start?

I suspect not as you mentioned if you did you get out-teched as you focus too much on military?

As you progress up the dificulties you find that increasingly during the early game you will be behind in most things and have to claw your way back up as the AI gets more and more advantages from the start and throughout the game so being behind is not initially a bad sign.
I tend to find the early key is focusing on military to defend against the inevitable declarations of war(DOW for future reference) because the AI will likely have more units than you and see you as weak.
If the AI sees you as weak it will DOW you simply because it thinks it can walk all over you so having a good military help to prevent DOW's from happening to start with and if they do they allow you to fight off the incompetent AI who's only hope is to swamp you.
I go with the initial rule of thumb of having one archer and two warriors for every city. This can be relaxed as your empire expands and you build roads so you can quickly move troops around but even then i always have a ranged unit stationed in each border city and a couple of infantry/cavalry within two turns of each city.

If you get a DOW then ensure you fight in a place of your choosing. Pick the most favourable defensive ground for your troops and let the enemy walk into your killing zone. Your infantry should ideally be fortified in forest/hills where your ranged units can still attack any units near them. Being behind a river also gives a debuff to melee/horse units attacking across it.
When you have defeated their attack only then move out of your chosen position...unless you are taking heavy damage then don't be afraid to retreat and heal to save your troops. Almost any city can hold out against the average AI attack for a while due to the AI incompetence, especially if you have softened them up a bit before they get there.
If you haven't noticed, the AI will almost always attack your most damaged unit which you can often use to your advantage as you know which unit they will attack. This usually works best on attack.e.g. when assaulting a city you can send melee unit in first that is damaged or to get damaged, fortify it in a forest/hill or prefeably hill forest, with a unit with medic next to it and the AI will only ever attack that unit with units in range of it, allowing your other units to focus on depleting the HP of the city unmolested.

When [counter] attacking you get warmonger penalties for DOWing an enemy (the first DOW is free) so you should avoid being the one to DOW if possible as all that will happen is everyone will hate you as you have already noticed. Also don't wipe out an enemy as this has major warmonger penalties also.
Let them DOW you, hold their initial rush, then push forward and take all but one city (the worst city they have) if you plan to remove them as a threat and then the others won't hate you for being a warmonger.
Capturing a city state(CS) counts as wiping out a civilization and hence the warmonger hate from it. Capturing a few CSs will also mean all CSs will go into permanent war with you.

If you have a good army in the early game to allow you to fight off eneimies and push back into their territory you can usually get favourable peace deals without even taking their cities, mainly your looking for as much of their gold as possible, which you can use to fund your growth or a bigger army.e.g. buy units or buildings....i usually buy units and use my production to build buildings.

Whatever happens neighbours will end up hating you because you are close by and they 'covent your lands'. As you grow others will hate you because you are doing too well, they think you are trying to win the game in the same way they are or they are simply are psycho (Monti....Bismark)

Signing pacts of friendship is also a recipe for mass hating as the enemies of your friend will hate you and your 'friend' is either likely to denounce you or DOW you at some point which will mean everyone else will hate you because you were denounced by a friend or a friend DOW you which makes you seem untrustworthy. Your 'friends' also have a tendancy to make unreasonable demands like asking for your only supply of a certain luxuary, which when you refuse because giving it to them will knock your happiness down will make them unhappy.

Denouncing is also a minefield as when you denounce an AI it often triggers a chain of denouncing against you which damages your reputation aswell so the best course of diplomacy is just to not bother. Don't make friends, don't denounce anyone and don't DOW. You get no penalty for staying neutral or refusing friendships.
The only thing 'diplomacy' is any good for is milking the AI's of gold from selling your resources which is the one thing that gets easier as you climb the levels as the AI gets increasing bonuses to gold accumlation and have increasing amounts of gold to buy your goods.