Help/opinions please

Hi again,

I'm quite new and doing research can be a little confusing at times (varying of opinions + advanced tactics and overwhelming amount of information etc). I thought i might just ask some simple questions here.

I've uploaded my save here to this message.

I think i've started off with some success, researched the relevant techs to enhance my pop as suggested. Now i have a settler and not sure exactly of where the best place to settle my second town is. I read recently that you should overlap cities, can someone explain why that is to me in laymen's terms? Also if you have a look at my save, the computer suggests a settlement quite far from my first city, and i tend to agree with it just because the land is good there. Plus i want to build West-North-West towards my potential enemies. But it certainly is not overlapping my first city.

I would love some opinions on where you think i should build my next city and how I should go about things in general. I ask so I can start understanding how Civ players think about the game. I'm sure this will help me enjoy the game more.

Cheers

Moderator Action: Moved to Strategy and Tips as its own thread.

Not going to go too deep into reiterating the generalized guidelines as to how to beat the lower levels, but here's some situation-specific advice to get you going:

I'd settle 2NW1N from capital. The new city can work the PH mine for 6 turns and produce a workboat (1h from the city tile + 4h from the mine = 5h for 6 turns = 30h (the cost of a workboat)). Capital can grow to size 6 and 3-pop whip another Settler. As soon as you finish Bronze Working, switch into Slavery. Try to aim close to 39/100 of the Settler production in the production bar. When you're between ~30-39, click the red upwards arrow near the bottom of your screen.

I suggest that you add screenshots to your questions because it's often quicker and sufficient to analyze a screenshot, especially since one or the other player here on the forum watches from a mobile device and cannot access a saved game file so easily. Make sure you turn on the resource view when you capture a screenshot.

Adding a screenshot here for other players who want to look:



Regarding why city overlapping is good I've got a great explanation here. The problem is that those explanations almost don't apply at all to your situation because the grassland tiles where you could build cottages cannot be reached by any other city. The only reasonable place that overlaps with your capital is 1N of your settler (=2W of clam). (Same place that JSS suggests.) It's the only tile that can reach the clam (due to your current capital location). But it would only overlap with the plains hills and I'm not sure if overlapping to share just a lot of mines has any value. I think the blue circle tile is quite OK (food resource in first ring, securing the important Ivory (especially important because you don't have horses), lots of grassland for cottages and farms). But it might be better as your 3rd city due to its distance from the capital.

Just a few other things I noticed:

You are moving the settler alone towards the dark fog. Might be dangerous as there could be barbs or animals waiting for you. I'd rather prefer to escort the Settler with the Warrior from your capital (if you want to settle blue circle). With 3 good food resources in your capital's BFC another farm is not needed in my opinion. It's probably better to reserve the grassland tiles for cottages. What is your Worker doing in No-Man's-Land?

I'm not an experienced player, so definitely take JSS' advice more serious and/or wait for more opinions!

His worker scouts cos nothing left to improve
So what you can learn first, do not found religions and you get bronze working quicker.

This layout probably makes GLH very good, so i would also want sailing and masonry instead (and you are Org = cheaper lighthouse).
That's because your land is commerce poor and GLH fixes that (strongest wonder in the game and never too early learning how i can best build it). Also most food lies along coast, and it's encouraging you to think about good locations so all cities get 3 trade routes and 1 food.

So that would be one possible game plan here, GLH and spamming cities (blocking one west first if needed, on higher levels).

1 more vote for 1N from settler but ONLY because you have not roaded to ivory/cows spot. Otherwise I will settle there

You have connected cows and corn early with roads - that is the mistake. You should not build roads early except those you really need hard. Roading to the 2nd city is better roading option that connecting health resources.

You also dont need a warrior fortified in capitol so early. Better send him for exploration

Hey guys thanks so much for your feedback.
I'm now watching Sullla's lets play from enKage's signature and finding it very helpful.

A few follow up questions,

To JSS:
What does PH stand for (PH mines)?
When you say 'Capital can grow to size 6 and 3-pop whip another Settler' do you mean that once my pop is 6 i should use Slavery to whip 3 of those 6 pop into a Settler? I just wasn't sure about what you mean there. Also when you say aim for 39/100 in production bar do you mean wait for it to reach 39/100 and THEN whip those 3 pop you mentioned before?

To Todelotti:
Thanks heaps for the link to the explanation about sharing tiles between cities for the purpose of growing cottages quicker, that sheds some light on things. Also i'll post screenshots from now.

To Fippy:
I think i'll go back to an earlier save (1st turn even) and change my tech. I thought founding and spreading religion to foreign cities was good cause i can see what's going on in those cities. Plus the financial benefits of eventually having the holy city, but maybe i thought wrong. Do i still get to see inside those converted foreign cities even if i've declared war on them?

To enKage:
Is it possible for workers to build roads outside my borders? If so i didn't know this and certainly would have started building towards my potential second city.

All in all i think i'll go back to turn 1. Watching Sullla's lets play is giving me more of an idea of what's important etc.

Cheers

vajrabud said:

I thought founding and spreading religion to foreign cities was good cause i can see what's going on in those cities. Plus the financial benefits of eventually having the holy city, but maybe i thought wrong.

Click to expand...

Setting up a shrined holy city is very expensive. You'd need to build a lot of missionaries to spread the religion, possibly some monasteries to be able to build the missionaries, and you need to use a Great Prophet for the shrine. You get the financial benefits very late, after all the work has been done to spread the religion and setting up the shrine. So why do it yourself when you can have someone else do it for you? Let the AI waste their hammers on missionaries and burn a GP on the shrine, then you conquer it. This way you get the same benefit for free. And as you learned now, going for religious techs early will significantly slow down your early game when you lack worker techs.

Even if you have a holy city, it's quite questionable if you should generate a prophet to build the shrine. Instead of a Great Prophet, you could generate a scientist for immediate 1500-2000 through a bulb. Even if your shrine would make 20/turn, it takes very long before it can make up for the lost bulb. Most likely it never does, because the immediate benefit of the bulb by far outweighs any small benefit that comes 50+ turns later.

The GLH enables +2 trade routes in all coastal cities. What does that mean? What exactly is a trade route in this context? I thought all resources, as long as they are connected to a city network via roads, rivers, coastlines etc, can be shared throughout the empire?

Trade route is additional commerce in cities just for the fact of beiing connected to each other. It is quite powerful and in fact you can gain most of your commerc this way. Depending on location and city sizes and modifiers 1 route is from 1 commerce to even nearly 10.

With Glhouse most common are 2-3 commerce routes early and 5-7 commerce later. It means that with GLH your city gains 4 routes (with Currency)*3 base commerce = 2 fully developped riverside towns in the early game, what is huge (3 commerce is base for oversea international trade)

Traderoutes are independent of resources. (They have also nothing to do with deals with the AI regarding resources, only open borders are relevant.)

You see them in the upper/middle left of the city screen. They are established automatically as soon as the city in question has a road or a sea trade route to enough other cities. For international trade routes you need open borders AND a road or free coastal passage (it can be "blocked" by barb or enemy cities). The trade route yield depends on several factors, best are "intercontinental".
Therefore the GLH can be very powerful but is also very map dependent. E.g. when isolated it is not so good, unless you can settle several islands. As soon as you have international trade routes you can sometimes generate as much or more revenue from trade routes than from land tiles.