Beginner, kinda

[Halofon]

Hi all,

I bought civ 4 BTS like 4 months ago. I really like the game and went trough some basic guides etc. Of course, game is pretty challenging but I have things that bother me.
1. I cannot manage war. In any cases when I start war with large enough army - I think it is large enough, I get to steal 1 or cities, but never the whole civ. And I wouldm like to win by conquest at least once. Is conquest win really so hard?
2. I often fail to specialize the cities. E.g. I start with my first city and tend to place everything there, so it makes lot of science, production and culture also. I understand that specialisation is the key, but I somehow edeveloped the habit. How do you cope with this? I tried to mark the names of the cities like military city 1 etc.
3. I still play on chieftain, and got a culture wins, few time wins and space race wins. Is it time to move on harder diff?

Thanks

 

[Strijder21]

Hi all,

I bought civ 4 BTS like 4 months ago. I really like the game and went trough some basic guides etc. Of course, game is pretty challenging but I have things that bother me.
1. I cannot manage war. In any cases when I start war with large enough army - I think it is large enough, I get to steal 1 or cities, but never the whole civ. And I wouldm like to win by conquest at least once. Is conquest win really so hard?
2. I often fail to specialize the cities. E.g. I start with my first city and tend to place everything there, so it makes lot of science, production and culture also. I understand that specialisation is the key, but I somehow edeveloped the habit. How do you cope with this? I tried to mark the names of the cities like military city 1 etc.
3. I still play on chieftain, and got a culture wins, few time wins and space race wins. Is it time to move on harder diff?

Thanks

1. Make sure to bring siege, when you're fighting an infantry war. You're not really supposed to lose any unit assaulting a city besides siege engines. Another option is exclusively using mounted units, but those have well-defined windows - you're not supposed to suicide knights into pikemen on a castled hill city. Also, focus - you're not supposed to be building universities while fighting an even opponent. Switch to slavery or nationhood to allow your production-poor cities to contribute to building units.
2. There's two kind of cities:

• Commerce cities, which build a Granary and a Library. It stops there! Banks, Grocers, Universities and Grocers are all superfluous except in some situations
• Production cities, which build a Granary and a Forge. It stops there! Build Wealth once you're done with that (or settlers/workers/military units when needed), NOT commercial buildings. In later ages levees, factories and power plants are fine too.

3. Time victories are something you won't be able to pull off on higher difficulties; nor are (unfocused) culture victories. That said, you aren't going to improve if you stay on Chieftain, as your mistakes won't have consequences there. I'd recommend going on, indeed.

 

[Halofon]

1. sounds reasonable, even tho I dint like the siege weapons at first.
2. so you suggest that cities like research focused city, great person farms etc. are nonsense? If yes, it makes more sense for me. I think I am able to put up commerce or production city quite well right now. What to do with commerce made i those cities? Rush buy units?

anyway thanks for the answer

 

[Strijder21]

1. sounds reasonable, even tho I dint like the siege weapons at first.

They're irreplacable in lowering a city's defence to zero and their collateral damage more than makes up for their lower base strength. They also can receive City Raider promotions (unlike Gunpowder units).

That said, you need enough of an escort to be able to defend yourself against enemy attacks and to actually kill the defenders. 40/60 is more or less the ratio you're looking for.

2. so you suggest that cities like research focused city, great person farms etc. are nonsense? If yes, it makes more sense for me. I think I am able to put up commerce or production city quite well right now.
anyway thanks for the answer

Ah, sorry, I was a bit too blunt, but yes, a great people farm also exists. Just get a Granary up there, make food improvements and the buildings which allow you to hire the specialists you want. Caste System also really helps in that aspect (unlimited merchants and scientists).

A 'research focused city' really is a commerce city. (There are some rare exceptions, but ignore them for now). What you definitely shouldn't be doing is diversify your commerce cities into research and gold producing cities - you only have one slider!

Say, for example, that you have +50% in half of your cities and +50% in the other half. Whatever percentage you're running the slider at, you'll only receive an average boost to your commerce of 25%. Now if you had built the +50% multiplier in all your commerce cities, and if you were building wealth to allow you to run the science slider at 100%, you'd get a 50% boost to your commerce, instead of 25%

What to do with commerce made i those cities? Rush buy units?

Generally you would be teching.


For more detailed advice, an uploaded save game would be great. Preferably from the early game (medieval or earlier).

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Probably the best way to learn how others play it to search for civilization iv lets play on youtube.
Anyway:

1. In general you want to make war wenever you have a technological advantage such as you have cannons before the enemy have riflemen or so. In general one easy way to play the game is after getting the very basic techs is to always tech so you are getting to the next military advantage. Siege units are very important. They can bombard cities to reduce the enemy defence bonus and after that they can attack the city and deal contralateral damage to many enemies and damaged enemies are much easier to kill than healthy ones. Other than siege it is a good idea to have atleast two non siege attackers for each defender so you can kill all defenders after you have attacked with siege because otherwise the enemy will start to heal. By having 2 attackers for each defender mean even if you get some unlucky defeats you should still be able to kill all defenders.
2. My current way to play is to build cottages in the capital (due to bureaucracy civic) and farm all other cities. I use specialist and great people to develop my technology. This also work well with slavery so these farm cities actually do both give good production and good technology.
3. Safest way to win is to target a domination victory because that victory is pretty much what you should be doing if you want to be as strong as possible.

I think you should develop your infrastructure (buildings). With slavery and farm cities that is really easy to do and once built it will pretty much stay in your city for the rest of the game.

 

[Archon_Wing]

The most important thing is to work good tiles and grow so you may work good tiles. So cities should be settled based on food. You really want to get those workers out to improve the best tiles, and chopping/whipping to build settlers/workers/infrastructure for your city. The faster you get set up, the easier it is to do anything else. Crappy cities that have a little food but nothing else are the best targets for whipping since they will grow back easily and stay small so unhappiness isn't too big of an issue, nor do you lose citizens working quality tiles.

If you have a lot of food concentrated in an area, sometimes it is possible to make 2 or even 3 cities to share the food resources. As you are constrained by happiness limits early on, it makes little sense to grow an individual city so big and not be able to use it. So overlapping cities early on can be very useful, especially when it comes to growing cottages (they must be actively worked to grow). A common beginner mistake is to space cities out and get wrecked by maintenance costs.

 

[elmurcis]

Food is king, diplo is queen, bulbing is key and Curraisers says "hey"

 

[civvver]

Yes food is extremely important, after that build a lot of cottages. Build a lot of workers too, new players always build too few. Just a granary and library is too simplistic. Many times you need a monument prior to that library to pop borders, many times happiness is an issue so a temple or luxury enhancing building like a market or forge is needed. Same with health, harbors are awesome for that. You don't want to get too building happy as just building wealth or research is often better. Like banks, theaters, custom houses, even universities, all generally not worth it except you need x number of many of those to unlock powerful national wonders. So that makes banks, theaters and universities needed if you want wall street, globe theater and oxford.

Don't worry too much about specific great person farm and science city etc at your level. All you really need to do is build in good locations, recognize if a city will never have production or never have commerce don't build those types of buildings, and go from there. Don't build barracks in a city that will never have hammers for example.

With siege they have two functions. One is bombard which reduces a cities cultural defenses. You see how cities have little percentages next to their names? That's how much defense they get from culture. It makes well established cities hard to attack. So bring a bunch of catapults, trebuchets or cannons and artillery later to eliminate that percentage. Then siege can also attack and they do collateral damage. What that means is every hit they score during the attack gets spread along the entire stack of units, not just the defender. So even though your catapult may die, he can still do like 20% dmg to every unit defending which is a ton and just allow your melee units to mop up. That's why siege is so powerful in civ4, some say broken even cus the AI loves to use giant stacks of units so you can abuse this. It works outside of cities too. I think generally you just need to bring enough siege to knock out defenses in 1-2 turns, then 2-3 to sacrifice per city depending on their tech level. Like if they have archers and you have catapults bring 3. If they have longbows, oh man, bring 4. If you have trebuchets though you're probably ok with 2.

 

[lymond]

Think of siege has disposable but vital for most melee (non-mounted) warfare. Siege allows your offensive units to survive and prosper. Most attack forces should be at least half siege with more to reinforce.

I would note that "Bombardment" is a decision you need to make after assessing the city defenders. You don't always need to bombard, especially early on when culture defense is low or if there are no walls/castles.

 

[Halofon]

Ok, I get it. Siege is important tbh I really neglected the siege until now. I think I got the points abotu specialisation, but I read in few manuals about specific GP farms etc. and I found it really difficult to manage and I did only production cities, commerce cities and science ones. Never had the patience to specialise more, as it would require studying civopedia a lot.

 

[Macksideshow]

1. Lymond's answer + Know that once you DOW an AI they will start whipping defenders if they can (and they probably can) So bombard is often counterproductive, you save 2 or 3 units on your city assault but give the AI time to build 4 or 5 defenders in other cities which will cost you 6 or 12 units to destroy later unless you have solid tech advantage, which you don't because you are asking this question. Also this means you don't wanna declare war and start attacking weaker cities, try locate and destroy the cities producing defenders asap then mop up the rest.

2. Play the map, focus on your objectives, know what it is you need to achieve them, work out the most efficient way of getting it.

3. Start on Noble.