How do you beat Isabella???

[Gumbolt]

That is a good start. Double corn is great. I might of moved settler to the plains hill. Settle in place gets you the river. Let me see what dates I get for second city. I would likely whip with double corn.

 

[Gumbolt]

Okay didn't micro the unimproved tiles in capital so may be 1 turn off best result.

2720bc and settler is built. It will grab the double fish corn site. Bit far away but amazing city site.

 

[Void_nul]

If it matters, I normally prefer to not chop out units. Most build too fast to justify, and I don't like wasting the excess hammers (if I do attemp it, its for a settler). I mostly only chop for buildings and wonders, which I rarely build. A decade ago people here told me to never ever build anything, just conquer other civ's cities. Not that I go crazy with wonders (though I did in the cultural victory game, which paid off quite nice, I got like half a dozen cities through culture alone, and I never engaged in one war). Normally the only 'wonder' I build is the moai statues, or maybe the oracle if I can get it just for the free tech.

As for settler placement, I tend to prefer to place them at choke points rather than at the nearest destination. In the case of this game, I probably set it to the north up there to cut off the AI (I figured both civs were to the north since their units both came from up there). This may be way my city production tends to be a bit slow. I decide my final borders, then I build in between there and my capitol.

 

[Gumbolt]

Up to 3 cities. 2nd worker 3 turns off.

Chopped about 4 forest.

Don't you want to win and build a big empire as fast as possible? Settled on ivory for extra production. Will have cows too.

Will whip workboats once size 2.

 

[Void_nul]

Honestly, I didn't notice that corn and fish up there. If I had, I would've prioritized getting that and the gems, rather than settling near the goldmine in the east.

Also, why did you place Hague so close to your capitol? Their workable tiles overlap for 2 spaces. Surely that would neuter both of them in the long run? Besides, putting them farther apart does technically get you more land. I admit though, I am a bit annoyed with the fact that you can't interlock your cities so you can use ALL tiles within your borders. Still, I wouldn't place them so half their tiles are being shared.

As for my starting settler, I was told to just plop it down where it spawns regardless of the situation. Turns are more precious than resources. More of the 'advice' I was given. Also, when I gave them my save file, I think they hacked it. They were somehow able to conquer the entire map in just a few turns, including on a continent I didn't have the tech to access with just the units I had. I saw no way my units could've even covered that much ground in that short span of time. That post was why I left this place a decade ago.

 

[Gumbolt]

Honestly, I didn't notice that corn and fish up there. If I had, I would've prioritized getting that and the gems, rather than settling near the goldmine in the east.

Also, why did you place Hague so close to your capitol? Their workable tiles overlap for 2 spaces. Surely that would neuter both of them in the long run? Besides, putting them farther apart does technically get you more land.

The Hague will be working cottages for the capital. Speeds up the capital's development. It shares corn and grabs cow too. Ivory connected once I have hunting too.

If I really want to be cheeky I could of grabbed the pigs/double gold too with the second settler. I would only do this with a creative leader. I think he would get his border pop before I could do this now.

On immortal you would never settle 10-11 tiles way as upkeep costs are much higher. Plus AI get their second city 2700-3000bc as they start with workers and 4 archers.

 

[Void_nul]

Willem is a creative civ. Didn't you notice your borders expand despite not building a monument? I chose him for the space race attempt btw since the wiki claims he's one of the best for that. Besides, I find creative to be OP. It pushes back borders and can even net you cities. Besides, if I don't play one I often find myself going to war against creative AI civs just to preserve my border. It was a bit of a running gag for a while taking out Louis in just about every game. Fortunately, he was never much of a challenge.

On a side note, I did struggle with warlord myself for a time I think. Now its a joke to me. I did used to play on noble regularly, though clearly I'm out of practice.

 

[Fippy]

You could read my guide about things like "why are close / overlap cities often good".
(i wrote it so peoples don't need older ones that might be somewhat outdated)

It's a very complex game (if you look for steady improvement), so if you forget past experiences and start new that should help.
Moderator Action: Added a link to Fippy's most excellent guide --NZ

 

[Gumbolt]

Yes Willem is creative and financial.

I played on a bit. 600bc 9 cities and China is dead.Lost 3-4 HA. Capital defended by 1 archer. Captured Great Wall. I lost a worker near Mongol city. Wasn't expecting the wandering warrior. Settle double fish next. Need Calendar next after IW. Which should help me claim the gems. Traded for silver. I am now the only one the Mongols can attack. He has metal.

450bc and 10 cities. Might build 1-2 axes in case Mongols get silly. Construction after Calendar to take them out?

 

[Void_nul]

Honestly, I'm kinda surprised you're still using warriors and horse archers. Normally by that point I at least have access to axemen, swordsmen, and spearmen. Of course, I tend to prioritize science above all else. Probably why I'm almost always ahead of the AI in tech. Been thinking that maybe that's why I keep losing; I'm not investing in anything else. In particular, I'm getting really sick of spies blowing up my stuff. Honestly, I've been thinking of switching back to Warlords just so I wouldn't have to deal with the stupid espionage mechanic or those annoying random events.

Oh, and holy horsehocky Shanghai is a god-city. Four hills, two with gold, and 4 flood plains plus pigs all within city radius. Personally, I would've placed the city on that forest next to it just so that one useless desert tile wouldn't be in range, but oh well.

Also, I'm curious: how exactly do you plan to win the game? I was going for a space race victory. The continent doesn't have enough land to achieve a dominion victory. Engaging in a war on the other continent could be problematic, especially given how much land they all have over there. The only time I ever did an overseas war was in civ3, and oh my god it was a grind. I actually won through a dominion victory (seriously, how can you win through elimination when you'll achieve a dominion victory long before that?), but I kept playing it just because I wanted to eliminate all the other civs. Oh my GOD that was a long grueling grind. Honestly, I don't think I would even know how to transport my troops across the sea in this game. This is the first game I've played since starting again that wasn't on a pangaea map btw.

edit: typos

 

[Gumbolt]

Warriors? 15H city guards? Pikemen require engineering I think you mean spears. Land = power. More land = more science later on. My science is good here. Got civil service just after 225ad. Wasn't even beelining it and I have had to self tech pretty much all techs here. BTS has spies. Spies really are not that big a deal. You feel the missions more as you have so few cities and have been playing late game.

No I didn't raze it. Yes very nice city.

At present I have 17 cities. Planning 2-3 more cities. Mongols have mids. Overseas wars are far but you need to galleon chain units to speed up the process. Most AI will capitulate the minute they meet me if I have advanced units. I doubt the AI has close to 6-7 cities let alone 17 each.

760ad and in middle of golden age. First GS for edu got 1900 or so beakers. 2nd for astronomy. I have printing press. Got music first albeit too slow on Great Library. Up to 20 cities. Not sure what to do about Mongols. Seems pointless to leave them alive really. 871 beaker a turn at 100% science. Things pretty much get teched in 2 turns at 100%. Wonder how far I could go with Lib,

960ad - Met all the AI. Only tech I am missing is Theology. I am 3 turns off MT. Maybe should of taken via Liberalism but Ai are not even at paper yet.

From your Willem save I am about 600 years ahead of you in techs. Missing feud but thats about it.

See what happens tomorrow. Cuirs and UU of Dutch. See how quickly the AI cave in. I figure 2-3 cities per AI might do it.

 

[Void_nul]

To be honest, I'm not getting much out of this. Why are you building so many of your cities so they overlap? Why did you take out china but not mongolia? Mongolia's got double silver along his northern coast. Are why a lot of cities building wealth rather than science?

Of course, I did realize myself that city on the southern tip of the continent wasn't a good place, but I wanted a city down there, because it was empty space. The reason I didn't place it where you did was because it would've overlapped with the coastal city to the northwest. You built that one further north, so that clearly wasn't a problem. Clearly when I place cities, I need to take into account how it'll affect the placement of future cities. I'm still not too keen on letting cities overlap. Besides, that does give me more tiles overall.

As for why I didn't take out china myself, honestly I was just being a carebear. I used to go to war with everyone, regardless of whether it made sense or not, just because I wanted to mindlessly eradicate everyone. Now I pretty much only go to war with civs if I'm losing territory to them (aka, they're either a creative civ and I'm not, or the took a city from me). Also, china was pleased with me, and clearly posed no threat, so I found it hard to justify taking his stuff. He was also shielding me from mongolia, who wasn't getting along with me (he hated china, and I kept siding with my neighbor, so he didn't take too kindly to that, I wasn't worried about thought since he obviously wasn't going to get an open borders agreement with china).

As for what I would've done in this game, I may have tried to put a production city in that jungle, specifically in a spot that was nothing but grassland. With state property and workshops, that thing would have an insane amount of production. Maybe I would even make two purely because of how extensive the jungle is. Besides, it would double my production of military units. Maybe defaulting to spamming cottages on all cities isn't such a wise idea.

 

[coanda]

Why are you building so many of your cities so they overlap?

This is a very common question.

At the start of the game, your happiness cap for cities quickly ends up somewhere around size 5 or 6. That's as big as they're going to get for a while. Eventually that cap starts rising, and by turn 100 you might be having some size 10+ cities. By the time that you actually care whether a city has 20 workable tiles or not, you're talking turn 200+. You don't care about anything that far in the future when you're settling your early cities. First priority is making sure they have some good source of food they can work at size 1, preferably without even needing a border pop, to start growing immediately. Then you want them to have good general productivity at size 4-5, and you care about that a lot. You care a little bit about how productive they are at size 8, 9, 10. Anything past size 10 is so far off on the horizon that it doesn't matter.

And on the other side of things, there are some useful benefits to overlapping cities. It cuts down on settler and worker travel time, and means you need fewer roads and it's easier to defend from barbarians. It reduces maintenance. It lets you swap improved tiles back and forth so whichever city will benefit most from that particular tile at the moment gets to work it. It can let you make sure that some cottage tiles are growing constantly, getting you fully upgraded towns faster that can then be handed off full-time to a city dedicated to using that commerce. It gets more tiles in a small area worked faster, which is useful if you're in a situation where your land is being squeezed by the AIs and you don't have enough room to just peacefully fill the land with as many cities as you feel like building.

In general, tile overlap is a good thing, not a bad thing, for early cities. This ties in to a broader general principle: small, fast gains are much more important than nebulous large gains happening at some far distant point in the future. Civ4 is a game about exponential growth, collecting immediate benefits and snowballing those little advantages into a big lead.

That's also why players recommend aggressively chopping down forests rather than preserving them until late game. It's why most buildings other than granaries are situational builds at best, because they take a long time to pay off and you can often get better short-term results by just taking more land. It's why placing cities where they don't need to wait for 10 culture and a border expansion before they become useful is usually a good idea. It's why land full of jungles (which require a lot of worker-turns to clear and improve) tend to be lower priority than other areas when settling early, even though jungle often has lots of juicy-looking green grassland and resource tiles. It's a whole mindset: don't think about what will be good in 50, 100, 150 turns. Think about what will be good in 5, 10, 20 turns.

 

[AcaMetis]

Are why a lot of cities building wealth rather than science?

In short, it's more efficient. Building Wealth or Research directly converts a city's output into or, but this doesn't go through multipliers like a Library or Market provides. So it's optimal to build Wealth until you can run your science slider at 100%, which does get the Library multiplier, and only afterwards start assigning cities to directly build research if more finish building other things.

 

[Void_nul]

This is a very common question.

At the start of the game, your happiness cap for cities quickly ends up somewhere around size 5 or 6. That's as big as they're going to get for a while. Eventually that cap starts rising, and by turn 100 you might be having some size 10+ cities. By the time that you actually care whether a city has 20 workable tiles or not, you're talking turn 200+. You don't care about anything that far in the future when you're settling your early cities. First priority is making sure they have some good source of food they can work at size 1, preferably without even needing a border pop, to start growing immediately. Then you want them to have good general productivity at size 4-5, and you care about that a lot. You care a little bit about how productive they are at size 8, 9, 10. Anything past size 10 is so far off on the horizon that it doesn't matter.

And on the other side of things, there are some useful benefits to overlapping cities. It cuts down on settler and worker travel time, and means you need fewer roads and it's easier to defend from barbarians. It reduces maintenance. It lets you swap improved tiles back and forth so whichever city will benefit most from that particular tile at the moment gets to work it. It can let you make sure that some cottage tiles are growing constantly, getting you fully upgraded towns faster that can then be handed off full-time to a city dedicated to using that commerce. It gets more tiles in a small area worked faster, which is useful if you're in a situation where your land is being squeezed by the AIs and you don't have enough room to just peacefully fill the land with as many cities as you feel like building.

In general, tile overlap is a good thing, not a bad thing, for early cities. This ties in to a broader general principle: small, fast gains are much more important than nebulous large gains happening at some far distant point in the future. Civ4 is a game about exponential growth, collecting immediate benefits and snowballing those little advantages into a big lead.

That's also why players recommend aggressively chopping down forests rather than preserving them until late game. It's why most buildings other than granaries are situational builds at best, because they take a long time to pay off and you can often get better short-term results by just taking more land. It's why placing cities where they don't need to wait for 10 culture and a border expansion before they become useful is usually a good idea. It's why land full of jungles (which require a lot of worker-turns to clear and improve) tend to be lower priority than other areas when settling early, even though jungle often has lots of juicy-looking green grassland and resource tiles. It's a whole mindset: don't think about what will be good in 50, 100, 150 turns. Think about what will be good in 5, 10, 20 turns.

I thought that's what I was doing. My starting cities are going to one day become my biggest cities, just because of the amount of time they've existed. Newer cities won't have that advantage. Besides, let's be real, its probably going to take them the entire game to get to size 21 anyway. And yes, I know they won't be able to work than half a dozen tiles until much later, but its not like later cities are going to be quicker off the line.

And yes, I know jungles are a lot of work, but honestly by the time I do take them my workers have already finished every other city, so its not like they have anything better to do. You'll notice that the late-game save I uploaded, pretty much all my workers were up in the jungle, that's because they were all there clearing jungle and building improvements (though right before the end I had sent some of them south to build lumbermills). Normally I go 3 workers for every 2 cities, because that's what this place told me to do (again). I didn't bother with that this time though, because honestly I didn't need more. Heck, I couldn't even find anything for some of my workers to do I needed so few of them. In the past I just set them to automatically build roads everywhere, and then they would sleep until I got railroad. Not sure why I'm not doing that here, though to be honest it is getting rather annoying. My combat units often take far too long to get to the front line just because there isn't a road leading in every direction. In civ3 I think they were a double-edged sword, because they helped enemy units too, though that doesn't seem to be the case in this game (I can never get more than one movement when in enemy territory, even if the unit does have a movement speed of 2).

 

[coanda]

If you get a good fast start, the game is in the bag (or even outright won) before any of your initial cities hit size 20. That's why you don't really care if a decision will mean that eventually, the city will be weaker when it hits size 15, 18, 20 - because that phase of the game is so far in the future it's not even worth thinking about. You're aiming to work a lot of good tiles fast early in the game, and the way to do that is with more cities, earlier. Not fewer, more spread out ones, even if they will eventually end up bigger.

 

[Void_nul]

Well, you're not going to be 'creating' new cities later in the game. The ones you plop down first are going to be the only ones you're going to make. Normally you're just going to conquer the cities of AI civs, regardless of whether they're any good or not. I always work under the assumption that my capitol is going to be the largest city in the end. I admit though, perhaps I shouldn't think that way. Often times cities will simply never be able to produce enough food to work all their tiles. Been thinking that when I'm looking for a new city spot, I need to think about how high of a population a city can sustain in each possible tile before I place one down. If only the game gave you that information itself. It literally doesn't give you that info until you've built the city AND its borders have expanded (unless you built it on the edge of your territory). Even then you still got to sit there and add up all the food yourself. I have to use my calculator A LOT when playing this game.

 

[Qactus]

You still seem sceptical about city overlap. I looked through my recent games to find a good example, here's a screenshot:

Spoiler Screenshot :

The capital was very food-rich. The second city Beshbalik overlaps 6 tiles with the capital. It borrowed the capital's corn until its own one was farmed. City NW borrows a clam.
In this game these small overlapping cities do not hurt the capital. Beshbalik takes care of cottages which it will later give back. Depending on the happy cap, the capital will get every tile it needs, especially with Bureaucracy later on. The smaller cities will then work whatever is left and maybe stay small, so what?
In the moment of the screenshot all that matters is the empire is compact and efficient for a quick (well, for me at least on imm) Rush towards Elepult, while also grabbing the Pyramids along the way.

 

[Void_nul]

Wouldn't building a small empire just make the other civs grow larger? If there is empty space, they WILL take it even if makes absolutely no sense for them to do so. Thus if you leave free space, the ai will get more cities and far more land. Considering that they seem to love to overlap cities, this means they would have the same density as me. What, do I need to build 20 cities early game just to make sure the AI doesn't get that extra 10? From what I've read, I'm not alone in being opposed to overlapping. Short-term gain in the real world rarely offers anything in the long run. Besides, as I said some cities just can never sustain enough population to work every tile (such as cities with desert tiles in their radius, or a bunch of plains maybe). In light of that, maybe I need to calculate food requirements on the number of tiles worth working, rather than just all of them blindly. Besides, lets be real its hard to get a city to work every tile anyway. Few produce more than one food, its hard to get their happiness up to 21, and then you got the health issue which happens to increase with population, and then you have situations like where I built a city in an obviously crappy spot just for access to that marble. So, if a city can only produce enough at max to sustain 18 citizens, why not let the remaining three go to another city? at least that way its still getting worked. I still don't think much of overlapping cities that will clearly grow to be large (such as the capitol). Maybe I'll do more overlapping, but only after MUCH thought. I will admit though, I do find it a bit silly to be spamming cottages everywhere knowing most of them won't be getting worked for quite a while, and a good number of them never. I only started doing that because this place told me to. Clearly, my experiences here from 10 years ago didn't pay off. Thinking about, all the feedback I got back then has only done more to hurt me, despite somehow letting me beat warlord.

What I really need to do is just trust my own assessments and closely analyze everything. At least that way I know someone didn't exploit my ignorance to make me do something obviously stupid.

So what will I do? Less cottage spam, more focus on production, perhaps overlap cities that can never support population 21 anyway, actually keep my military up to date somehow, don't be a carebear, and move quicker with placing cities in the early game. Guess now I can play the game again. I was wondering what I was waiting for. I mean, is this guy playing my save even trying to help me or show me up? He hasn't been explaining to me what he's doing unless I directly ask him. No offense, but like I said I'm clearly not learning much looking at his saves either way. Guess I need to just jump back into the game and try to come up with my own optimizations. Farewell and thanks for what help I did get from here.

 

[Fippy]

..but don't expect much help next time, peoples are spending their time on helping and you just ignore it.
If you have problems on Noble there are lots of basics missing, and all we do is (politely) trying to explain that.
You can keep playing Roadrunner or stop being stubborn, your choice.