Recent content by SDEngineer

QFT - the governor loves to work plantations, ivory camps, and the like - which are usually terrible choices early in the game. Low food, low production, and high gold - but you should be getting your early game gold from AI trades, and mid to late game you'll be rolling in the stuff.

This is optimal, but only if you micro every city such that you move the worker back to food after each growth "tick". If you are prone to forgetting to micro the cities this way, you wind up losing a lot of city growth over the course of the game. Since I'm often guilty of this, I keep my...

Food. Food gets you city growth, which improves everything - more worked tiles (i.e. more production), more base science, and more pop for specialists. I will manually lock additional production tiles as needed when I need to produce something fast (like a university), but otherwise, my...

Figure I'd go into puppet/annexed/annexed with courthouse happiness a bit more, since it's vital to understand how this works if you want to be a good warmonger :) One thing that is very important is that a puppet city produce a LOT more unhappiness than an annexed city with a courthouse...

Notre Dame is huge, as another noted (+10 global happiness), but the Forbidden Palace can be pretty big too, and even if it doesn't help your occupied cities, it reduces the unhappiness in all your non-occupied cities - and considering those are likely to be much larger than your occupied ones...

The happiness boost from that policy only is for NATIONAL wonders. Regular world wonders don't count for it. If it counted world wonders, it'd actually be a pretty good policy to pick, since it'd make the happiness hit from conquering a big wonder spammer's capitol easier to deal with. I...

Yeah, the National Wonder happiness boost (common among all ideologies) actually is pretty terrible for conquerors. There just aren't that many national wonders - most of the time, I'll probably build only 3 or 4 of them in a given game. Every other happiness boost from ideologies is...

Improve lux tiles first, that gives you additional happiness when you found new cities, as well as giving you spare luxes to sell to the AI to help you over the early game money woes, after that, focus on improving food resources (wheat, cows, deer, sheep), then building farm tiles adjacent to...

Once I start closing in on negative happiness (dropping below +10 happiness usually) from a warmongering spree, I start annexing puppeted cities. A puppeted city produces less unhappiness than an annexed city without a courthouse, but in general, more than a city WITH a courthouse - and you can...

I'm personally a fan of going both. Policy order when I want a fast but tall start is usually Tradition opener -> Liberty opener -> Republic (Liberty) -> Collective Rule (Liberty) -> then go back and finish up tradition tree. Most of the time I'll finish the Tradition tree (if I get the Great...

I go scout-scout to open on any likely large landmass world, for the same reasons that others have stated - city state gold gifts + ruin pops. The more ruins you can pop quickly, the more likely you are to get the really nice ruin rewards. A culture ruin snapped up by a built scout just paid...

Besides, 0 food tiles are total growth killers. At least a 1 food tile means that you just need to work 1 3 food tile to pay for it, so I vastly prefer a 1/2 tile over a 0/3 tile, even before civil service. Growth == both science and production. Production is easy to get incidentally - I've...

I don't think multiple wonders is required. Just the GBR with a coast/hills/mtn city location where your initial city also starts with a hills/mtn location is most likely all you will need. My best time so far has been T235 with a lucky, but completely honest start (though with legendary start...

No joke. I was aiming for a science victory as the Shoshone last night, had a decent (275) amount of tourism, but was influential over only 1 civ, and popular with just 2 more (6 remaining opposing civs). Won the Games bonuses, 20 turns of 550+ tourism (modified to OVER 800 tourism on most of...

With regards to your surplus of Great Writers - the AI governor for your cities REALLY likes to fill up the specialist slots on things like the Writer's Guild on Default Focus. You may want to check that and move the specialists somewhere more useful if you either don't care about GWs, or...