Acken
Deity
This is a long guide. I hope you will learn a few tricks even if some of this is well understood already. I try to give my reasoning for why I give those advice in a way that is coherent with the plan of having a productive and efficient early game. Understanding why will give you the knowledge to adapt your game plan or improve on what I write. This guide is also designed for no specific civ or leaders and no memento. It will be up to you to adapt to what you play with. At some points I will mention some civ specifics but for the most part the principles will ignore the exact combinations you play with. This is important when you read about my opinion on food and growth for example. Some of the principles here apply to exploration but for the most part this is about Antiquity. It is mostly a guide for helping players understand the city/town dynamic and how to have a highly productive early game.
I strongly recommend participating in community games (like GotM) to either test those ideas or propose different ones. Only playing from the same starts and leader+civ makes useful benchmarks. In my experience with previous game it's one of the best tools to explore the meta and share ideas.
Part 1. Yields
Food:
Food allows you to grow. Its value depends on how it contributes to future yield worked on by the pop. It's an investment for future return. You spend (either directly like when building a granary) or have an opportunity cost (working a food tile instead of hammers) which value depends on how much extra pop it will create in the future and what those pop will be doing. However food in civ7 has strong diminishing returns for 2 reasons:
* The time to the end of the game decreases .
* The food requirement increases.
So what used to be 100 food to get a pop working for the next 100 turns can now be 500 food for a pop working 50 turns, a huge decrease in value. And let me tell you, the food requirement in antiquity increases massively. See for yourself:
x here is how many times the city already grew. Note that this is different from the population number (rural + urban).
Next time you play, pay attention to how often your capital gets a new pop. If you are not playing with large growth bonuses (like Confucius+Khmer) then you will definitely see a massive drop off after the 7th and 8th growth event. Around 2/3 through antiquity when you get your town feeding going to the capital maybe you will be happy to get +100food in the capital with 2 or 3 towns. Sounds great ! Well... if you are already at 8 it would take 14, 20, and 27 turns for the next 3 pops. That's approx 3 pops for the whole rest of the age. It's pretty clear the value of food quickly drops down. In the next age, since the curve shifts down (and you get more food anyway) it will get back up.
Food can also be transfered from towns to cities at a 1:1 ratio with no loss. This isn't the case for production !
Another important aspect of tiles is that contrary to past games you do not have the freedom to switch everything all the time. There is a little bit of room when replacing a rural with a urban tile but that's it. Therefore for the most part you have to commit to the type of yield a settlement will produce. On the other hand, this technique is actually important when conquering cities. The AI often builds very bad city. When acquiring one, build or buy building on rural tiles to shift what it does to the specialization you want to give to that settlement (convert farms in cities and woodcutter/mines in towns).
From this here is my recommendation for antiquity regarding your food strategy:
* A good capital (and other cities) works production tiles (and therefore a bad capital is one in flat terrain with farms) and will get its food from a town. Trying to put more than 1 or 2 food tile in a capital will lead to low production and a difficult start. You can work some food early to reach 5 pop quicker but you should be ready to replace those tiles to reallocate to prod. For example: this not sexy snowy Tundra start is actually a superb start with many potential mines, 2 +2 prod tiles and a sheep:
* Having a capital work production is a capital that will really struggle growing by itself. Find a high food yield location (coastal, grassland) for a dedicated town to keep it growing past 5-6.
* Get additional cities early rather than late and try to have town food split between your cities. It's better to have 3 cities receive +33 each than a single one receiving +100 (assuming no bonuses). The value of food drops hard the more you have AND antiquity has very few mechanics that scale well with pop. On the other hand finishing the age with 3 or 4 well developed cities will make the rest of the game a walk in the park.
* It is probably a better investment for the future to keep a town growing than to stubbornly make it feed a city that needs 20-30 turns for the next pop. In the later quarter of the age I often put my towns back to growth to improve their yield for the next age.
Note: It is impacted by growth bonuses (like Confucius +25% growth) and food bonuses (like the Oligarchy Celebration +20% food). Growth bonuses decrease the food required to get a new pop and accumulating multiple of it (Khmer + Confucius for example) will allow you to bend the above rules and bring back up the value of food. For example if you have Confucius + Hanging gardens + the +10% expansionist (+45% growth which would ) then your food required is divided by 1.45. This means your food has 45% more value and you can probably aim for higher pop counts like 13/14. If you go even further like Khmer + Confucius + Hanging Garden + something else then just ignore this section and grow your capital even higher.
Gold:
Gold has 3 main purposes in civ7. Buying buildings/units, converting cities and promoting units. Buying units and buildings appear to be at a 1:4 ratio to production in Antiquity (and I don't think it changes in other ages since nothing in the files suggests it). This buying ratio can be improved through buying bonuses like Augustus or the Gold resource. The benefit is not as strong as it is for growth as it seems the reductions are multiplied on the denominator rather than being added (20% and 15% will be cost/(1.35)) but you will nonetheless get a much better trade off with a few of these bonuses than without. For example, the gold resource which reduces building costs by 20% decreases the ratio to 3.3. Again, if your civilization specifically benefits gold, the value we can put on it would shift up.
There aren't a ton of ways to get gold in antiquity. Typically it will come from town production and policies. While you wouldn't expect a 1:1 ratio (gold allows you to get something immediately anywhere) usually purposefully trying to get gold at the expense of something else is a bad deal. Town production conversion to gold is essentially a bonus rather than what you really desire.
However, do not turn your back on it and get just enough for what it is mandatory. It is mandatory to improve your towns and convert your high production towns to cities. Do look for good deals like Priesthood (+2 per settlement) early game, setting a town temporarily to mining focus until you can buy it as a city etc. But when I am to build something, usually the market is one of the last thing I'd build. The value just isn't really there.
Note: I see gold often be praised on the forum for how easy it makes buying stuff especially in Exploration and Modern. And it's true ! But even if you don't focus for it you will get a lot of it from towns anyway. Also, I think the production requirement of these ages is too low to begin with so this also de facto mean that they are too cheap. My own opinion is that costs are not balanced properly in Exploration and Modern. There are too many ways to get a ton of yields and everything is much cheaper than it should (techs, prod etc.)
Production:
It's the king maker of the early game. A good prod in the capital will bring in wonders, settlers and whatever your heart desires. Hammers in antiquity will be the main driver of success. Find ways to increase them in your cities. Prioritize resources that give hammers (sheep, cotton etc.).
Culture/Science:
These yields are used to unlock things for production to be used for. They are tricky to get right in Civ7. In previous iterations you could pretty much get a ton of these and then you'd be fine because as you race through the trees you would unlock better and better things until your chosen victory. Civ7 has a different approach. Because of ages you can plateau if you get too much. Additionally, you have objectives (milestones) to fulfill during the age and 3 of them require you to build stuff (with production). The trick with these is therefore to increase them steadily neither too fast nor too slow.
Specialists and adjacency bonuses are an important component of success here. Try to identify spots for the following districts:
* Science (and prod) buildings have adjacency and wonder bonuses
* Culture buildings have mountains and wonder bonuses
Every specialist will give you 2science 2culture and an extra 50% of the adjacency bonuses and will be an essential step to increase the science and culture output of your cities even in Antiquity. Speaking of which, Currency is a very important milestone tech in antiquity as it will unlock specialists. There is a trick here, as you remember above when we discussed food you should be aware of the future cost of a citizen. Therefore, you should aim for a growth event to come soon after Currency to be able to use a specialist. To control that you can put your food towns on and off to delay an incoming growth just enough to fill a specialist.
My recommended path for raising science is therefore: Libraries > Specialist > Academy. And for culture you would go Monument > Specialist > Amphiteather.
Endeavours if supported are a superb source of early game science and culture especially very early. Later you should consider befriending city states instead. Cultural and Science city states will boost everything. Each have a bonus that boosts the science or culture buildings scaling by the number of suzerain or give you free tech/civics. You should aim for these bonuses (which imo are just stupidly OP and should be flat). This makes a civ like Greece top tier in my opinion with their 50% bonus policy to befriending.
Finally, the tiles have often science and culture yields that you can use. Get them when they align with your settlement objective yield.
Happiness:
Happiness is not a simple yield to rate. Much like food, it has strong diminishing returns on celebrations but it also enables things like over-expansion and helps against some crisis. The more celebrations you have the more policies you can fill. But the thing about Antiquity is that it will take you time to unlock the good policies making getting them early typically not worth it in my experience. Additionally you are usually not getting that much from the early celebrations bonuses. Typically, I never care much for happiness until the last third of an age and only will get it as extra like trying to settle on fresh water when I can (+5).
Influence:
One of the best yield you can get as long as you have some friends and/or city states to use it on. If you have enemies you can also use it for war support. A very versatile yield that you should increase. There's not much to say here though. The thing is that you often don't have that much choice to get this so take it when it's available (monument, villa) and that's it. And note that to increase it you once again have to build it !
I strongly recommend participating in community games (like GotM) to either test those ideas or propose different ones. Only playing from the same starts and leader+civ makes useful benchmarks. In my experience with previous game it's one of the best tools to explore the meta and share ideas.
Part 1. Yields
Food:
Food allows you to grow. Its value depends on how it contributes to future yield worked on by the pop. It's an investment for future return. You spend (either directly like when building a granary) or have an opportunity cost (working a food tile instead of hammers) which value depends on how much extra pop it will create in the future and what those pop will be doing. However food in civ7 has strong diminishing returns for 2 reasons:
* The time to the end of the game decreases .
* The food requirement increases.
So what used to be 100 food to get a pop working for the next 100 turns can now be 500 food for a pop working 50 turns, a huge decrease in value. And let me tell you, the food requirement in antiquity increases massively. See for yourself:
x here is how many times the city already grew. Note that this is different from the population number (rural + urban).
Next time you play, pay attention to how often your capital gets a new pop. If you are not playing with large growth bonuses (like Confucius+Khmer) then you will definitely see a massive drop off after the 7th and 8th growth event. Around 2/3 through antiquity when you get your town feeding going to the capital maybe you will be happy to get +100food in the capital with 2 or 3 towns. Sounds great ! Well... if you are already at 8 it would take 14, 20, and 27 turns for the next 3 pops. That's approx 3 pops for the whole rest of the age. It's pretty clear the value of food quickly drops down. In the next age, since the curve shifts down (and you get more food anyway) it will get back up.
Food can also be transfered from towns to cities at a 1:1 ratio with no loss. This isn't the case for production !
Another important aspect of tiles is that contrary to past games you do not have the freedom to switch everything all the time. There is a little bit of room when replacing a rural with a urban tile but that's it. Therefore for the most part you have to commit to the type of yield a settlement will produce. On the other hand, this technique is actually important when conquering cities. The AI often builds very bad city. When acquiring one, build or buy building on rural tiles to shift what it does to the specialization you want to give to that settlement (convert farms in cities and woodcutter/mines in towns).
From this here is my recommendation for antiquity regarding your food strategy:
* A good capital (and other cities) works production tiles (and therefore a bad capital is one in flat terrain with farms) and will get its food from a town. Trying to put more than 1 or 2 food tile in a capital will lead to low production and a difficult start. You can work some food early to reach 5 pop quicker but you should be ready to replace those tiles to reallocate to prod. For example: this not sexy snowy Tundra start is actually a superb start with many potential mines, 2 +2 prod tiles and a sheep:
* Having a capital work production is a capital that will really struggle growing by itself. Find a high food yield location (coastal, grassland) for a dedicated town to keep it growing past 5-6.
* Get additional cities early rather than late and try to have town food split between your cities. It's better to have 3 cities receive +33 each than a single one receiving +100 (assuming no bonuses). The value of food drops hard the more you have AND antiquity has very few mechanics that scale well with pop. On the other hand finishing the age with 3 or 4 well developed cities will make the rest of the game a walk in the park.
* It is probably a better investment for the future to keep a town growing than to stubbornly make it feed a city that needs 20-30 turns for the next pop. In the later quarter of the age I often put my towns back to growth to improve their yield for the next age.
Note: It is impacted by growth bonuses (like Confucius +25% growth) and food bonuses (like the Oligarchy Celebration +20% food). Growth bonuses decrease the food required to get a new pop and accumulating multiple of it (Khmer + Confucius for example) will allow you to bend the above rules and bring back up the value of food. For example if you have Confucius + Hanging gardens + the +10% expansionist (+45% growth which would ) then your food required is divided by 1.45. This means your food has 45% more value and you can probably aim for higher pop counts like 13/14. If you go even further like Khmer + Confucius + Hanging Garden + something else then just ignore this section and grow your capital even higher.
Gold:
Gold has 3 main purposes in civ7. Buying buildings/units, converting cities and promoting units. Buying units and buildings appear to be at a 1:4 ratio to production in Antiquity (and I don't think it changes in other ages since nothing in the files suggests it). This buying ratio can be improved through buying bonuses like Augustus or the Gold resource. The benefit is not as strong as it is for growth as it seems the reductions are multiplied on the denominator rather than being added (20% and 15% will be cost/(1.35)) but you will nonetheless get a much better trade off with a few of these bonuses than without. For example, the gold resource which reduces building costs by 20% decreases the ratio to 3.3. Again, if your civilization specifically benefits gold, the value we can put on it would shift up.
There aren't a ton of ways to get gold in antiquity. Typically it will come from town production and policies. While you wouldn't expect a 1:1 ratio (gold allows you to get something immediately anywhere) usually purposefully trying to get gold at the expense of something else is a bad deal. Town production conversion to gold is essentially a bonus rather than what you really desire.
However, do not turn your back on it and get just enough for what it is mandatory. It is mandatory to improve your towns and convert your high production towns to cities. Do look for good deals like Priesthood (+2 per settlement) early game, setting a town temporarily to mining focus until you can buy it as a city etc. But when I am to build something, usually the market is one of the last thing I'd build. The value just isn't really there.
Note: I see gold often be praised on the forum for how easy it makes buying stuff especially in Exploration and Modern. And it's true ! But even if you don't focus for it you will get a lot of it from towns anyway. Also, I think the production requirement of these ages is too low to begin with so this also de facto mean that they are too cheap. My own opinion is that costs are not balanced properly in Exploration and Modern. There are too many ways to get a ton of yields and everything is much cheaper than it should (techs, prod etc.)
Production:
It's the king maker of the early game. A good prod in the capital will bring in wonders, settlers and whatever your heart desires. Hammers in antiquity will be the main driver of success. Find ways to increase them in your cities. Prioritize resources that give hammers (sheep, cotton etc.).
Culture/Science:
These yields are used to unlock things for production to be used for. They are tricky to get right in Civ7. In previous iterations you could pretty much get a ton of these and then you'd be fine because as you race through the trees you would unlock better and better things until your chosen victory. Civ7 has a different approach. Because of ages you can plateau if you get too much. Additionally, you have objectives (milestones) to fulfill during the age and 3 of them require you to build stuff (with production). The trick with these is therefore to increase them steadily neither too fast nor too slow.
Specialists and adjacency bonuses are an important component of success here. Try to identify spots for the following districts:
* Science (and prod) buildings have adjacency and wonder bonuses
* Culture buildings have mountains and wonder bonuses
Every specialist will give you 2science 2culture and an extra 50% of the adjacency bonuses and will be an essential step to increase the science and culture output of your cities even in Antiquity. Speaking of which, Currency is a very important milestone tech in antiquity as it will unlock specialists. There is a trick here, as you remember above when we discussed food you should be aware of the future cost of a citizen. Therefore, you should aim for a growth event to come soon after Currency to be able to use a specialist. To control that you can put your food towns on and off to delay an incoming growth just enough to fill a specialist.
My recommended path for raising science is therefore: Libraries > Specialist > Academy. And for culture you would go Monument > Specialist > Amphiteather.
Endeavours if supported are a superb source of early game science and culture especially very early. Later you should consider befriending city states instead. Cultural and Science city states will boost everything. Each have a bonus that boosts the science or culture buildings scaling by the number of suzerain or give you free tech/civics. You should aim for these bonuses (which imo are just stupidly OP and should be flat). This makes a civ like Greece top tier in my opinion with their 50% bonus policy to befriending.
Finally, the tiles have often science and culture yields that you can use. Get them when they align with your settlement objective yield.
Happiness:
Happiness is not a simple yield to rate. Much like food, it has strong diminishing returns on celebrations but it also enables things like over-expansion and helps against some crisis. The more celebrations you have the more policies you can fill. But the thing about Antiquity is that it will take you time to unlock the good policies making getting them early typically not worth it in my experience. Additionally you are usually not getting that much from the early celebrations bonuses. Typically, I never care much for happiness until the last third of an age and only will get it as extra like trying to settle on fresh water when I can (+5).
Influence:
One of the best yield you can get as long as you have some friends and/or city states to use it on. If you have enemies you can also use it for war support. A very versatile yield that you should increase. There's not much to say here though. The thing is that you often don't have that much choice to get this so take it when it's available (monument, villa) and that's it. And note that to increase it you once again have to build it !
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