Recent content by bob_d

I played with your save, and your position looks pretty screwed. The enemy has too many forces arrayed against you, and half your army is halfway around the world. Long-range military expeditions are almost always a bad idea, only to be done if you need to prevent an AI from getting a victory...

Karadoc, thanks for the reply about Archer rushes. I didn't mean to imply that Better AI was necessarily "better" because it never Archer rushes, but it's an observation that I've played a LOT of games of Civ4 and have never seen an Archer rush by the AI until I played with K-Mod, so you've...

Yes, the archer rush is a good strategy for the AI to use extremely early in the game, because as you know, at the higher difficulty levels, the AI starts off with Archery and a free archer or two. If as the human, you focus on researching worker technologies and founding a second or third...

ARCHER RUSHES BY AI? I have been playing this game using the Better AI mod. I learned about K-Mod, so I decided to try it out. In my first game, at Emperor level, very early in the game the enemy AI (Japan) declared war and moved in with a stack of archers. This was deadly because all I had was...

After emancipation, a forest with a lumberbill and a railroad is a better improvement than a workshop. HOWEVER, that's a long way down the tech tree. Between now and then, the production from workshops will allow you to build the miliary units you need to crush your enemies. An early military...

I think you need at least one city that is a heavy production city and that can pump out a unit per turn. For most cities, you want cottage spam. (Once you get US, those cottage spam cities will actually have pretty decent production anyways.) Adavanced cottage spam is when you cottage over...

Map type also makes a difference. Pangea maps are the quickest to play, they have smaller land area than other maps, and you can usually win a quick early military victory and then the other civs start falling like dominos. Wars fought across oceans are more time consuming, there's a lot more...

You need to build even MORE cottages than you would if you were financial to make up for the loss of commerce :) I don't think that building farms to run more scientists makes sense unless you have the mids.

You're right, that's a typo. I corrected the original post. At Immortal and Deity, tech-trading makes the game easier, no-tech-trading makes the game harder. This is because human players tech-trade more efficiently than the computer civs, so expert players uses this to keep up with the...

I always play with NTT because I don't like that aspect of the game. I think that NTT makes the game easier at lower levels of difficulty and for less experienced players, because it's one additional thing you need to account for. If you don't tech trade, the computer civs WILL trade with each...

Slavery is better if you don't have any workshops and if you are Creative or have Stonehenge. But the slave revolt event is annoying, so slavery is a bad civic if you aren't actually using it to whip anything. Slavery is a key civic if you have cities that have food resources but no...

To keep the game length manageable, I usually play small maps. Even then, end-of-game wars can bog you down and take hours upon hours. I usually quit when I feel that I've won or lost rather than playing out the game to its final conclusion.

If you have at least 1 military unit per city, then HR gives you at least +1 happiness in every city. At the stage of the game when you get Monarchy, you always need the extra happiness. HR is a no-brainer unless you have the Pyramids. Whether you should build lots of cheap military units to...

I only played Civ V for a few hours. I was immediately turned off by the slowness of everything, having to click a zillion messages on the interface, the inability to alt-tab away from the game (which I think was a bug afflicting only some comptuers). What a waste of $50.

East Indiamen allow you to rule the seas prior to Chemistry. They are like the Praetorians of the oceans. Dikes are the most powerful UB if you make it to Steam Power. Some may argue the game is won or lost before you discover Astronomy, but that's not always true. Also, Willem's Creative...