Are advisors really helpful? (and other strategy questions)

Are CiV advisors really helpful?

  • Yes - they give great advice!

    Votes: 6 3.8%
  • No - do things your own way. They don't know what they're doing.

    Votes: 82 51.3%
  • Sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they aren't.

    Votes: 69 43.1%
  • Other (please post below)

    Votes: 3 1.9%

  • Total voters
    160

CivRulez07

Warlord
Joined
Apr 2, 2009
Messages
217
Location
Central Illinois
I'm curious as to what everyone else thinks about advisors. Are the suggested spots for founding cities, researching techs, and producing things in cities good pieces of advice from the game's advisors?

I'm also asking this because I have been having issues winning regular games on the third difficulty level (Warlord?). I tend to follow the advice given by the advisors, because I don't really have a developed strategy of my own. Is this a good idea or not?

Are Declarations of Friendship worth the diplomatic repercussions? I don't usually accept friendship requests because I don't want to make any enemies. However, it seems like the AI likes to declare war on me anyway, destroy 1 or 2 of my units (and I destroy one or two of theirs), then ask for peace (pointless war). Not sure if Declarations of Friendship would help with that or not.

Any help is appreciated! :)
 
DoFs can be useful. Not sure if the actual civ is less likely to backstab you, however other leaders that have a DoF with the same leader as you will like you more. Those that hate them though, will also hate you. Most of the time declaring any DoF will get you into trouble at some point. You also actually don't want anyone to hate you, so they'll pay the full price for your luxuries and do research agreements with you.

About the advisors. In theory they might be useful to a player new to civ. The city placement one for e.g. looks out for resources, if there is enough food etc. However it will advise you to build a city as soon as it found a place that is good enough in it's opinion. It does not take into account that if you went one tile further you'd get twice as many resources. And it also takes tiles that are already in range of your other cities into it's conclusion, which can be very bad.

They're pretty helpful with the Tech research though for newer players. If you got unimproved resources for e.g. it will advise you to research the tech that allows the improvement needed for these resources. But yeah... that is again only helpful to total newbies. If you played the game twice or thrice you should know this already. Learning what to beeline/skip though and some other techniques might take longer to find out about.

Summary: Never listen to the advisors unless it's your very first time you play the game.

PS: Wondered why the spell checker would underline "advisor". Turns out officially this word is written "adviser". Advisor only is an 'allowed alternative' - I've never ever seen somewhere written it with an E though -.-
 
In the Advisor screen they remind you when that coastal city (or near coastal city) has finally expanded its boarders to a water resource when you have neglected to notice it. However, with land resources I find they ofter "remind" you to improve land resource tiles which you had already improved many turns ago.

They can point out extra resources you might be able to trade with a particular civilization. However, when you try to make the trade, the civ won't necessarily give you a decent deal anyway.

As has been noted, their settlement recommendations need to be viewed with care. They always want me to settle cities closer together than I like to. In another thread someone noted you could mouse over their settlement recommendation icons and see an explanation of why they select that tile. I hadn't noticed that before.

When I resume a saved game, I check all the info screens including the Advisor screen as a way to reacquaint myself with the status of the game. But, I certainly don't accept everything they recommend.
 
I'm not too crazy about the military adviser. It seems to advise a lot to make peace at all costs possible--even though I am kicking the crap out of the enemy.

I tend to ignore the settling advice.
 
The military advisor only takes in account the size of your military to your enemy's military. It doesn't matter how many casualties. So if a country with 30 warriors marches into your country which has 12 warriors, then you kill 10 and they kill 2, they still have an overall advantage.
 
Civ 5 Advisers have a major problem. Mainly its impossible for you to actually ask them for advice you may actually need, or to watch for things that you feel that may need watching for.
 
I have never had any use for them. God, i miss Elvis from CivII sometimes. At least those advisors were fun to watch.
 
so far the only use of an advisor is irritate me to no end when it tells me im "unhappy". its the only reason to really disable advisors altogether. otherwise they get looked at maybe 2 or 3 times a game, usually by mistake because i wanted to look at my social policies.

but they were quite helpful when i was learning the game. things like telling me i had an "extra cotton and so-n-so doesnt have any and would like to trade for it" really helped.
 
The irony of the thread is that by asking the question you've ended up with fifty additional advisors - but these advisors are far better than the game's.
My favorite is when, after a major beatdown by a foe, my military advisor gently chastises me by saying it wasn't our finest effort.
Ultimately though, the advisors don't ever provide 'misinformation' or steer you completely wrong. I guess I believe that more info is better than less. Also, what the advisors say is very helpful in learning the game. Since its such a complex adventure, why not come up the learning curve quicker - and then turn them off later. While you may come to disagree with their advice, it's still better to be aware of the issues they raise.
Sometimes i'll scroll through the advice to see if they picked up on something that i might have missed - usually too late to do much about it though :)
 
I do not know. I always forget to look in on them. Perhaps thats a habit I should try to change. :)
 
Nah, they're all useless. Sometimes I'm curious about what they have to say so I'll have a look, but I ignore their advice.
 
Advisers are useful for telling who has a bigger military and who has a smaller military. This is information you can't get just from looking at the demographics screen (only the best, worst, and average)

But most of the time, no they aren't useful.
 
I'm also asking this because I have been having issues winning regular games on the third difficulty level (Warlord?). I tend to follow the advice given by the advisors, because I don't really have a developed strategy of my own. Is this a good idea or not?
Asked and answered. :) Learning how to make strategical decisions by your own not relying on AI advisors is one of the most important steps towards improving at this game. Checking demographics and military advisor for relative strength is one thing, however following their suggestions regarding improvements/city placement/production/research is just bad. Period. If you really want to get better, my advice for you is to turn them off.
 
I use the military advisor from time to time to find out how strong my opponent might be (after they DoW, before I see their nonsense). Past that, I hardly use 'em.
 
I'm curious as to what everyone else thinks about advisors. Are the suggested spots for founding cities, researching techs, and producing things in cities good pieces of advice from the game's advisors?

Not really. The only times the advisors seem to get it right is in the same cases a novice player would, that remains sound advice throughout the game. They can't take account of context - a city is always desirable next to a luxury however many of that luxury you have, regardless of where it is in relation to other cities/civs, their advice for a building won't take account of your plans for a specific city or whether you have enough of those buildings elsewhere in your empire, etc.

I'm also asking this because I have been having issues winning regular games on the third difficulty level (Warlord?). I tend to follow the advice given by the advisors, because I don't really have a developed strategy of my own. Is this a good idea or not?

No, it's a good idea to get a feel for why you'd build that there/then, research that tech at that point etc. Only follow an advisor's advice if you can see why it's a good idea ... in which case you'd normally go for it anyway.

Are Declarations of Friendship worth the diplomatic repercussions? I don't usually accept friendship requests because I don't want to make any enemies. However, it seems like the AI likes to declare war on me anyway, destroy 1 or 2 of my units (and I destroy one or two of theirs), then ask for peace (pointless war). Not sure if Declarations of Friendship would help with that or not.

As you get to higher difficulties and war becomes difficult to win, you will find that a lot of the game's diplomacy revolves around declarations of friendship. You don't want to make friends indiscriminately, and over time you'll find that declarations are less likely to be renewed or have less lasting effect with some leaders than others. You'll also get a feel for who's aggressive, and making friends with them can prompt them to attack someone else - admittedly at the expense of upsetting the other guy. Civ V diplomacy tends to play out as the development of 'power blocs' that face off against each other - a few civs with mutual friendships, and if a civ is a friend of your friend, you're more likely to get friendship with them. The identity of powers in a bloc isn't always stable, but you'll want to consider which bloc you'd rather be a part of - not just whether Civ X wants to be your friend, but whether you want to be friends with Civs Y and Z as well. If you make friends with India, say, but India is friends with Japan, you can be fairly sure that at some point Japan is going to declare war on the other guys. To maintain good relations within your bloc, you'll probably find it helpful to do the same (usually, unless you do something to keep your friends happy, they'll be increasingly less inclined to renew DoFs in future).

One example of a case where DoFs can be particularly important is India. India likes to play diplomatically, by building up a big network of friends. Then, they will usually denounce somebody - as a result of which all their friends will start denouncing the same civ, and sooner or later someone will declare war. You will usually want to be India's friend in those kinds of situation, unless it's weak in that game (hasn't made many DoFs).

Advisers are useful for telling who has a bigger military and who has a smaller military. This is information you can't get just from looking at the demographics screen (only the best, worst, and average)

This is somewhat useful, but only so long as you bear in mind that this seems to be based on a straight unit count - I've had civs that could "wipe me off the face of the planet" with giant armies of warriors when I've got several Swordsmen and catapults. And as for the 'who's winning the war' bits, I can't even work out how that's programmed - I've had wars where I haven't lost a unit, the enemy's lost a dozen, and I'm in their territory - and "the war is not going well".
 
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