First moves and getting those huts.

[TruePurple]

Reading Beginner help - the basics thread it talked about building worker first. But let's consider the following. First finding huts.

I find huts to be very valuable. You get gold, you get free tech sometimes, very nice. But you got to be quick to get those huts. Thus I will build a warrior first, this allows me to start exploring and finding those huts and learning the layout of the land (I am big on exploring) If I am near water with fish or clams I will research fishing first. Otherwise I might research Hunting. Since scouts die to barbs too easily I have my explorers come behind my warriors to pop the villages, even if it means no hostiles, that's still a nice improvement. And of course I build fishing ships to match the amount of fish/clams near my cap. After that I build a worker and then a settler. Depending on things I might get two workers first. Since I like playing indians I can also use workers for exploring when they have nothing else to do. With three moves they can go carefully and never risk being killed. (like move onto a forest or hill and you still got a move to retreat if a barb is there)

I of course get road in the mean time and have my worker road to new settler spots reducing travel time for the settler and making sure the cities are connected for trade immediately.

So it's "slower" in a way, but since I'm getting more hut stuff, that could compensate.

Thoughts?

 

[soundjata]

Most here play without huts or events.
So yeah. Worker first. Few exceptions...

 

[Gumbolt]

Delaying worker for huts is a big mistake. Unless you plan to worker steal. On lower levels the AI can take many turns to actually build a worker.

This strategy would only work on lower levels like Noble. On Emp/imm/Deity you would find barbs unless you had a scout. Hunting as a first tech is never great. Sometimes lack of hunting helps for warrior production when you have copper..

The AI lack scouts on Noble. On immortal and higher the ai start with 2 scouts. So you would be second to most huts anyway.

Snowball effect. Worker late. First 1-2 farms late. 2nd city delayed. 3rd city delayed. Cottages/resources improved much later. Vs free techs and gold from huts. I guess on Noble it hardly matter as AI second city comes out about 2000bc.

 

[TruePurple]

Most here play without huts or events.
So yeah. Worker first. Few exceptions...

Well then their advice doesn't apply to games with huts...

 

[TruePurple]

This strategy would only work on lower levels like Noble. On Emp/imm/Deity you would find barbs unless you had a scout.

The AI lack scouts on Noble. On immortal and higher the ai start with 2 scouts. So you would be second to most huts anyway.

This isn't true. I play immortal level and have experienced beating AI to huts and getting gold and tech even if I use a warrior. Like my latest immortal game I got 4-6 huts? or so and got a good tech and gold a few times (about 4x each time) from them.

Sometimes lack of hunting helps for warrior production when you have copper..

I don't know what you mean

 

[antimony]

If you have copper and don't have hunting, you can build a warrior. If you have hunting and copper the warrior build option is replaced by spearman. Warriors are good as cheap units to get the happiness bonus (one at minimum per city or more with monarchy).

 

[antimony]

So it's "slower" in a way, but since I'm getting more hut stuff, that could compensate.

Thoughts?

How could you figure out if it does compensate, assuming you get average luck on the huts?

 

[Gumbolt]

You have 15% weak barb and 20% chance strong barbs on immortal so you will find barbs if you scout with warriors. 100% true.. If you start with a scout fair enough you might get a few huts. AI could also get free gold/techs from huts. If your warrior dies from barbs it's 3-5 turns wasted building a warrior.

On immortal the delayed cities are not worth it as barbs will enter borders around 2000bc AI will grab more city spots that you should of taken.

Free techs and gold are no use if the AI have taken 1-2 of your city spots. That would kill your early game. Or force early war. It creates culture pressue too that was not needed.

I get what your doing but even if you had huts on it's not optimal to go for scouts if you lack hunting. 4-5 of them would be very annoying.

 

[TruePurple]

Well like I said you could build a scout after who can go behind for the huts.

Also having better vision of your surroundings helps city planning.

it's not optimal to go for scouts if you lack hunting.

Not optimal to go for scouts if you lack hunting? I don't get what you mean.

Do you have a resource that lists the various hut odds for various units popping it or generally know like do you still get hostile barbs from getting a hut with a worker and so on?

 

[Gumbolt]

Tribal Village (Civ4)

Back to the Tile improvements in Civ4 A Tribal Village is a feature, technically an Improvement, representing small uncivilized Villages. Tribal Villages are randomly placed on the map when it is generated; they do not appear during play. The first civilization to expand cultural borders onto...

civilization.fandom.com

I mean it will take 7-8 or so turns to tech hunting while you probably should of been teching agriculture or a key tech you need like BW. On Larger maps it take much longer to tech all techs.

I am fine scouting capital on a normal start with warrior or scout. It's standard play.

Do you play with a certain civ or do you play all civs? Normal sized maps? Pangea or continents?

Going warrior followed by scout means you are scouting the same area twice. Also means you don't trust the dice roll on huts with warriors.

 

[antimony]

Thanks for that better reference. So if you remove the barb odds for a scout, remove the healing, then free tech 1/6 of the time and low gold 5/12 of the time on Immortal. You can also get a warrior or scout production 1/6 of the time, or some lesser rewards like exp or map 1/4 of the time.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Huts are kind of spread out, so I actively search in likely spots a decent distance from where I find one.

Does anyone else feel they spawn near rivers more often?

Or is it totally random?

 

[konata_LS]

Most people in Strategy & Tips play the games without huts. But Huts can be powerful in HoF games. If you aim at HoF, then you're certainly allowed to play with huts and try to get Feudalism or Astronomy from a tribal village. After all, the motivation and the efforts to play for HoF deserve encouragement.

For those who are still learning about the basics, playing without huts offers better learning experience.

 

[TruePurple]

HoF

Which is?

Huts are fun. A bit of reward for quickly looking around the map. I bet if you aren't a big map explorer then no hut setting is EASIER since that means the AI isn't getting those rewards either. So you are saying playing a easier game helps you learn to play better.... I suppose you mean to learn better to play against players?

I recommend playing India for those wanting to learn since it's spirituality and fast moving workers make it forgiving of mistake and easier to experiment. Indias special workers apply through the whole game too rather than a certain window you need to hit.

 

[antimony]

HoF is hall of fame. The goal is to beat existing records for fastest victories so players will use tools like mapfinder to generate many maps and find very strong starting positions, and also pick games where they are lucky with huts in order to beat those high scores. (There is more to it of course but it's for the context of this thread.)

 

[TruePurple]

One question is, is it even worth it for you to get a second city a few turns earlier if they aren't connected? With building the worker and a settler at size 1, your cap will be smaller. So are you actually getting any extra production food or energy this way?

Tribal Village (Civ4)

Back to the Tile improvements in Civ4 A Tribal Village is a feature, technically an Improvement, representing small uncivilized Villages. Tribal Villages are randomly placed on the map when it is generated; they do not appear during play. The first civilization to expand cultural borders onto...

civilization.fandom.com

That's not really useful since it doesn't give the odds for scout or worker hut getting. Like if scouts don't get hostiles, does every instance of where they would get hostiles get replaced with map exposure or something? How much better are scouts at taking huts? And some have said that workers taking huts work like scouts, is that true? Can you get hostiles from worker taking a hut?

Do you play with a certain civ or do you play all civs? Normal sized maps? Pangea or continents?

I'll assume you are talking to me. I always play India because it's best for learning with how forgiving it is for experimentation and changing my mind as well as useful for going for any kind of victory at any kind, a jack of all trades sort of. I use all the standard map settings, I usually start next to water with one clam or fish, which makes fishing my top priority research and fishing boat a top priority production once I can (might finish a warrior a turn or two short of finish after getting the tech first)

If I was land locked and didn't have anything that could use a camp (aka hunter tech), I might get agricalture and a worker first if I got something that could use it, at least if the special had fresh water. A rice or wheat with 3 food after irrigating but not being irrigated because of no fresh water, is hardly a great improvement over forest with 2f 1p.

I play immortal level

 

[antimony]

One question is, is it even worth it for you to get a second city a few turns earlier if they aren't connected? With building the worker and a settler at size 1, your cap will be smaller. So are you actually getting any extra production food or energy this way?

I don't think anyone recommended worker then immediately settler in general. If you look for example at Fippy's Beginner help article, the general strategy presented (that's a start with no fish, if I remember well) is:
- start with worker
- improve strong resource tiles (esp. food)
- let your city grow so it works those tiles (during that time you can build your warrior/scout/etc.)
- once you're working your strong tiles, build first settler.

For a start with fish when you have fishing, I'm sure in most cases boat first becomes a strong option for the reasons you already mentioned. For a Civ like India that doesn't start with any techs useful for food production, I think you have to really look at it map by map, and compare what's there on land and sea.

That's not really useful since it doesn't give the odds for scout or worker hut getting. Like if scouts don't get hostiles, does every instance of where they would get hostiles get replaced with map exposure or something? And some have said that workers taking huts work like scouts, is that true? Can you get hostiles from worker taking a hut?

Further down on the page it says that for a scout the "Barbarians" outcome are thrown out / rerolled, and for a healthy unit the "healing" outcome is rerolled. So if you remove those possible outcomes from the table (for a healthy scout), the rest of the odds add to 60%, dividing each of them by 60 you get the new odds I wrote down before. (so 10/60 instead of 10/100 for a tech, etc.)

If I was land locked and didn't have anything that could use a camp (aka hunter tech), I might get agricalture and a worker first if I got something that could use it, at least if the special had fresh water. A rice or wheat with 3 food after irrigating but not being irrigated because of no fresh water, is hardly a great improvement over forest with 2f 1p.

Rice tile is 3 food before the farm (normal grass is 2 food, rice is +1 over that), farm makes it 4 if non-irrigated and 5 if irrigated. Wheat before farm is 2 food 1 production, becomes 4 food with non-irrigated farm and 5 food with irrigation. So same food as rice, but the 1 production means it's better than rice (and as good as corn) for producing settlers and workers.

 

[TruePurple]

So no difference between a worker taking a hut and a warrior?

I don't think there is any point in starting to build a worker before your city is size 2. You will need time to get the tech to improve things and get road. More importantly size 2 does not take long yet constitutes a significant reduction in build time of worker. Might as well build a warrior during that time. Maybe a improvement will be a bit behind, but a little bit of extra production and food will not matter in the long run.

Said warrior could avoid taking huts but even just locating them is useful, then sits by or circles around it exploring ready to take it if opponent comes by that could take it, unless the hut is in a obscure corner then I might risk it unattended.

So first warrior. Research best special tile improvement.
Then fishing boat or size 2 worker. Researching hunting
Build a scout who will go behind the warriors to take huts and scout shorelines and stuff during free time.

I don't see any way this will cause players to be "behind" in their gameplay, but it could result in some nice profit from hut and a better idea of your current situation.

 

[TruePurple]

Started a new game.

Gonna try it several different ways.

What recommendations do people have for build and research order?

In a test run when I got a hut with a scout it gave me animal husbandry. very convenient and lucky, another hut just gave me a map.. Other huts for some reason quickly got barb archers on them before my scout could get to them. Is there a way to grab huts with guards on them with a scout? Like a way to clear the tile so a scout can take it?

I would say fishing first and fish boats taking the fish first or second as most food. But I can't build the boats till I get fishing, so might as well build a warrior. And not to even start a worker till I get all 3 fishing boats. This will give me time to get animal husbandry if I don't luck out and get it from a hut and then road and then chop tech. I think it would be a good idea to build a scout after my first boat though.

When I build the boats I work highest production tiles I can except for water tiles already boated.

 

[antimony]

I don't think there is any point in starting to build a worker before your city is size 2. You will need time to get the tech to improve things and get road. More importantly size 2 does not take long yet constitutes a significant reduction in build time of worker. Might as well build a warrior during that time. Maybe a improvement will be a bit behind, but a little bit of extra production and food will not matter in the long run.

Size 2 does not make the worker build much faster if you only have unimproved tiles. For example imagine you have a standard city center (2 food 1 prod) and you can work 2 grass forests (2 food, 1 prod each), but any other combination is similar because unimproved tiles always have (food + production) of at most 3...

Size 1: City center provides 2F + 1P. Worked tile provides 2F + 1P. 2F gets eaten by population. So you get 2F surplus + 2P = 4 hammers per turn for worker, worker in 15 turns (that's standard for size 1).

Size 2: 2F + 1P from city center, 4F + 2P from two forests, but 4F gets eaten by population. So now it's still 2F surplus + 3P = 5 hammers per turn for worker, worker in 12 turns.

@Fippy's article "Beginner help" gives a similar example to show how unimproved tiles don't add much to worker/settler production (because they only have a sum of food + hammers of 3, and because each additional population eats 2 food).

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Warrior first:
Now let's say you work the forest and build a warrior, warrior is done on turn 8, but the city needs 3 more turns to get to size 2 (turn 11). Alternatively you can work a 3 food, 0 production unimproved tile to grow to size 2 by turn 8, but then your warrior is not done. So either way to finish the warrior you need to wait turn 11, then 12 turns for worker as mentioned above, so on turn 23 you just finished the worker and the warrior has explored for a bit.

Worker first:
Now instead assume you get unirrigated rice, the worst possible food. You finish the worker on turn 15 and start growing, building a warrior while the worker sets up a farm. On turn 20 the city is 15/22 of the way towards growth and the worker finished the farm. Now you add 4 food per turn and the city grows to size 2 on turn 22. In this scenario you don't have a warrior until turn 25 maybe, but you have a farm on T22 and your worker is free to build something else (by T22 , besides agriculture you have the time to research hunting, or mining if you don't start with it, perhaps not animal husbandry but you'd be very close). So if there is any tile your worker can improve besides the farm, by T28 you are size 3 and 2 improved tiles. You probably could even have hunting at that point and build a scout in 3 turns if you have a mine or camp.

In comparison for the warrior-worker start on T28 you just finished the farm and haven't grown to size 3 yet, and maybe you have a scout that just came out if you could put 3 production into it x 5 turns since the worker was done on T23. Your scout came out a few turns faster (3 turns in my estimate for warrior-worker-scout vs. worker-warrior-scout), and you had a lot of extra scouting with the earlier warrior. Can you show that this will lead to extra goody huts and that they will allow you to catch up? I think that's what it comes down to.