Why do I suck so badly? I'm not a stranger to Civ series, but every time I try to play Vox Populi on Prince difficulty, I'm quickly reduced to third world country no matter what I do. I've tried to play tall, but other civs quickly outgrew me (like, over four times more population). I've tried to play wide, but cultural and science lag was terrible. Any general advice for Vox Populi newbie who likes playing on big maps with few enemy civs and a lot of CS?
Ask Me Anything
- Thread starter Funak
- Start date
I'd step down to Chief or Settler until you get your bearings. No really, those difficulties are more of an 'even match' than they were in vanilla civ.
Magean
Prince
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2009
- Messages
- 474
Pieces of advice that I was given or found out about myself:
-science is not quite as important as in Vanilla, as long as you're not really behind behind you should be ok, you don't necessarily need to bee-line science techs and buildings.
-growth is very important; unless you're hard building a wonder, avoid having cities that grow too slowly. The definition of "too slowly" is arbitrary, as a rule of thumb you should avoid citizen allocations resulting in more than 10 turns to the next citizen, maybe 15 turns maximum. Great Merchants not only give you gold when you send them to a CS, they also trigger We Love the King in all of your cities, ushering in an era of rapid population growth.
-when your growth rate is satisfactory, you should fill in specialist slots instead of working the land, especially in the mid-game and later.
-culture is extremely important. Most wonders have policy requirements ("need X policies to build", so science lead isn't enough to win the wonder race), and unlike science, there's no catching up mechanics, no decreased policy cost or writers-in-residence for culturally backward nations. Filling up your guilds is probably the only excuse for having too slow a growth rate. Don't neglect the amphitheater line of upgrade (even though they may seem underwhelming at first), unless you have a strong source of culture such as cultural allied CS or culture-focused religion. In most circumstances, at least one of your religious beliefs should give you culture.
-the game doesn't punish wide expansion as much as Vanilla, however going tall can still be extremely efficient. You shouldn't be afraid of planting cities in spots that have good turf but no luxury resource. Luxuries only account for a limited portion of your happiness. As long as a city can efficiently grow and develop, you shouldn't refrain from settling the area (aside from geopolitical considerations of course).
-faith is important, you should try and get a religion. Even if you can't found one, you can conquer and "steal" a religion, replacing the founding civ. And even if you don't have your own religion, a solid faith generation does help. It is thus generally a good idea to first build a shrine, then a monument in your capital (the scout can normally wait a little, you want a pantheon and policies ASAP) and subsequent cities.
-to avoid unhappiness, monitor your cities' local happiness to check what is missing and where. Sometimes, you can get back to positive happiness just by building a couple of outdated buildings you had neglected. For example, constabularies reduce crime, one of the main sources of unhappiness. You may not need the defense against spies but you need law & order in your cities. Another example : boredom is a frequent source of unhappiness as culture is typically very unevenly spread among your cities (there's the wonder factory, there are the places with guilds, and there's the bored rest). The arena line of upgrade helps with that. That being said, unhappiness isn't as crippling as in Vanilla, so don't panic and completely change your priorities if you're stuck at -5 unhappiness.
-a large part of your tourism comes from historical events, which trigger chiefly when a great person are born.
-a lot can change in the late game, and games may be decided much later than in Vanilla, don't lose hope if you think you had a bad start, comebacks are usually feasible.
-there are really a lot of instant yields in the mod (for example, "gain X every time is citizen is born", Progress is full of such perks), remember which ones you have and play accordingly
-gold can be extremely powerful if you're committed to a gold-focused strategy, but such a strategy is but one of the many paths to victory. You don't need to be filthy rich to succeed, all you really need is enough cash to keep your military up-to-date.
-bottom line: in the early game, focus on faith, culture, growth. Later on, focus on culture, growth, and science, in that order.
-I forgot : in this mod, most civs really excel at one area of the game, and you need to play by your strengths. Build your UB everywhere and extract as much value as you can from your UA. This is also of course true in Vanilla, but to a lesser extent.
There are many other things to say, but these ones I can thing of right away. I personally play on King and easily dominate the game following this guideline, provided I play mostly peacefully. That is, only fighting defensive or necessary wars. I have little experience with aggressive playstyles in VP, that's the thing refraining me from moving up to Emperor. However, I think I know the mod well enough now to handle the snowballing part; in other words, the ideas behind long-term growth and development, so I'm sharing what experience I've gathered
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heinous_hat
Prince
Do Writers still get an increase in one-time culture delivery for Political Treatise when they're born during a golden age? The average seems to be about 10 turns of culture otherwise. It's difficult to time GP birth, but I used to try to employ this strategy when dipping into side policies.
Magean
Prince
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2009
- Messages
- 474
Hmm... I'm not sure. I've always thought they gave culture based on the last 8 turns or so, meaning that a Golden Age would indeed increase their instant yield by increasing culture output at the empire level. But we need to check if Great Writers take that boost into account. Beside, from my experience, they certainly don't give 10 turns worth of culture. 5 to 8 at most.
tu_79
Deity
They give a % of the culture gained in last 10 turns, I think. A writer born just after a golden age is the most optimal.
DoctorDuke
Chieftain
Settling Songhai Cities:
I am confused by City Connections via river. If city A is on one river, and city B is on a different river (on the same landmass), will they only form a connection if they are joined by a common lake, or the ocean?
If that is true, then is there a tile/distance threshold for this?
Must you have researched Trade?
I have tried to find this in the help screen but have not been successful.
Thank you.
I am confused by City Connections via river. If city A is on one river, and city B is on a different river (on the same landmass), will they only form a connection if they are joined by a common lake, or the ocean?
If that is true, then is there a tile/distance threshold for this?
Must you have researched Trade?
I have tried to find this in the help screen but have not been successful.
Thank you.
River tiles = roads (like forests), so even if you don't have the rivers 'linked,' they'll count as a common connection if you link the rivers via road.
DoctorDuke
Chieftain
Okay. And what about lakes and ocean - I mean if we're using the forest analogy they should provide a connection, no?
tu_79
Deity
No. For Songhai is just rivers. They are the river people, after all.
DoctorDuke
Chieftain
Got it, and thank you, and thank you (again) Prof Gazebo for your fine work.
thunderbird_14
Prince
Funak, have you ever been defeated and if so, how did it happened?
In CPP in its current state, I've never actually gotten destroyed militarily. I have lost greedily placed satellites and ragequit the game because of that, I have lost a few games culturally and I have lost a few games diplomatically. I have also left a few games because a faraway AI rolled over too many other AI and got out of control.
In short the games that I have actually gotten to the loss-screen in are pretty rare, but I have given up halfway quite a few times, either because I didn't find the game interesting or because I knew I was going to lose. Most of these have been deity games, I have lost or given up on far more deity-games than I have actually beaten. On immortal or below I really rarely feel like I'm in a situation where I can't win, and if I do it is probably because I've backed myself into a corner by clowning it up a bit too much.
How do you keep up with social policies in the early game with Progress? Tradition gets +2 culture right from adopting it, while Progress gets none. Would you recommend working tiles that yield culture over standard 2+ food 1+ production tiles in the early game?
Part of the playstyle with progress is falling behind on culture. That is just how it works. Your best bet for trying to keep up on culture is going for the +10 culture/food from finishing buildings right after the opener. This is clearly worse short-term than picking up the free worker and the extra production in all cities on the right side of the tree but it mitigates some of the culture-loss.
And yes if you have access to half-decent culture-tiles to work I would definitely work them, Progress is made to snowball, the faster you unlock more policies the more culture you get from researching technologies.
I have a question about workers. I think the number I heard being thrown around is something like at least 1 worker per city. What are some factors that I should take into consideration for making more? Also, I am not sure what my workers should be doing in mid game and beyond when my workers finish improving all the resource tiles and finish making city connections where I need them. I generally end up automating them at that point, but that doesn't seem optimal.
on a somewhat related note, are forests worth keeping around? It seems like many strategies seem to suggest spamming farms everywhere for more specialists, but I wasn't sure whether that was the only choice.
on a somewhat related note, are forests worth keeping around? It seems like many strategies seem to suggest spamming farms everywhere for more specialists, but I wasn't sure whether that was the only choice.
I'm probably alone in this, but I love spamming out a lot of workers early on and if expansion slow down and they don't have anything to do I tend to delete them.
As for whether to keep forests around, people seems kinda split on it. In my opinion the only time forests are worth keeping around is when you can't get any decent adjacency bonus from farming the tile (like if it is surrounded by hills without freshwater), or if the city is completely lacking the hills to build mines and rely on the forests for production. The exception to this is of course civs that benefit from keeping forests around like the Iroquois.
Other people seems to like forests more, and I can definitely not claim to have done enough research into the subject to say which style is definite better, but I guess I can at least explain my reasoning. The idea behind running mines and Farms instead of lumbermills is that it gives you better control over the yields you collect, you can for example pretty much turn off all production and focus on growth if you want to, or you can kill growth to focus on production; this imo gives a way better flexibility as sometimes you just want to push that one building out, and sometimes you just don't have anything useful to build and just need to catch up on growth.
As for worker management, with me not having the time to run that many games as of late, I usually just automate my workers so I can give feedback on their actions. It is definitely not optimal, but it doesn't stop me from running immortal at all.
The AI improves resources/luxuries using GPs a lot.
Is this a better strategy instead of building mines, plantations und getting additional bonus for these improvements?
Is the reason behind this strategy to get a few "power"-yield fields around the city and populate more specialist-slots?
Is this a better strategy instead of building mines, plantations und getting additional bonus for these improvements?
Is the reason behind this strategy to get a few "power"-yield fields around the city and populate more specialist-slots?
I don't know about 'better' but I generally settle my great people on top of resources as well.
There are two main reasonings behind this, first being that the tile is powerful and you definitely want to work it, so why not make it more powerful? That gives you fewer tiles that you definitely want to work, leaving you more room to specialize using the rest of the citizens.
The second reason is just that the alternatives are so bad,
I mean you don't want to place it on a hill or a desert/snow tile, then you're stuck working a 0 food tile for no good reason.
You don't want to place it on a flat tile, because blocking placement of a farm usually means loss of food, not only on that tile itself, but on all surrounding tiles.
Eventually you're going to run out of good tiles to place GTI on, especially if you want to fit all GTI within one city, and at that point I usually throw them at deserts, tundra and isolated flatlands, tiles that you're not really going to work anyways. Hills could work, but generally in late-game you want as many mines as possible for possible switch into full production.
Lifariz
Chieftain
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2016
- Messages
- 49
Assuming that you have full Tradition and Aesthetics, and then some other policies that give specialist buildings... on a very Late game, how high must your population be, assuming a fully built and very impressive capital on Info era, to fill in all those specialist slots and then work some tiles?
On my Japan Trad/Auth/Aesth game (yes, abuse of GP) I never have enough population on my Capital and satellite Culture cities to work all the slots. The cities have nice food and no AI dares to pick a fight with me for long since it's a small continents map(I have a small continent for myself) due to my nice navy and coastal defenses. Problem is, I have vast swathes of unworked tiles cuz most of my cities don't have the population to support both my specialists buildings and my nice desert farm land... How should I balance specialists and population growth? I'm planning to restart that game and I'd really love some advice... Should I settle cities at the minimum range this time?
P.S. I said desert farmland cuz the lower half of my continent had vast deserts with a river, 2 oasis, and lake Victoria nicely spaced on it. Then I plopped down a city in the sweet spot and built Petra on it. Any desert tiles w/o fresh water were mined/manufactory/academy'ied
Also, should I give up Town chaining for farm chaining? there were a few coastal tiles where I placed my roads and they had freshwater on it...
On my Japan Trad/Auth/Aesth game (yes, abuse of GP) I never have enough population on my Capital and satellite Culture cities to work all the slots. The cities have nice food and no AI dares to pick a fight with me for long since it's a small continents map(I have a small continent for myself) due to my nice navy and coastal defenses. Problem is, I have vast swathes of unworked tiles cuz most of my cities don't have the population to support both my specialists buildings and my nice desert farm land... How should I balance specialists and population growth? I'm planning to restart that game and I'd really love some advice... Should I settle cities at the minimum range this time?
P.S. I said desert farmland cuz the lower half of my continent had vast deserts with a river, 2 oasis, and lake Victoria nicely spaced on it. Then I plopped down a city in the sweet spot and built Petra on it. Any desert tiles w/o fresh water were mined/manufactory/academy'ied
Also, should I give up Town chaining for farm chaining? there were a few coastal tiles where I placed my roads and they had freshwater on it...
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