BTS – A guide for higher difficulties for standard speed and maps (emperor+)

[DanielTorrence]

Snaaty,

after reading your guide and following it, I was finally able to win on Emperor (normal game speed, pangea, selected great leaders ) three three times in a row. Awesome, thank your so much for putting REX and drafting in a well documented detailed guide. All the writing and the screenshots must have been some effort. What struck me was that I could one time even achieve a conquest victory at a for me reasonable time (1780). Quite a date, considering that I mostly finished at Prince or Monarch around 1800-1900. I never attempted to learn the early warfare (except for a rush) - too many losses and to many nice things to research and build later
However, I guess I am far from deity, even immortal seems unrealistic. Even with lightbulbing liberalism I only reach it around 1050 A.D., rifling comes home 1350-1400, and I never manage to finish Globe Theater in time, so I usually start drafting around 1450, going to war 1550. This is early for my game but aweful compared with your and other good players speed.
Some questions on how to improve and keep up in research:

1. To generate commerce, cottage at least to from the early four cities and or the capital? I have the feeling my cottages don't mature fast enough to fuel my economie, but working them doesnt let the city grow fast enough.

2. Up to what time is it better to run binary research, meaning what would be an adaequate BPT-rate to leave the research slider up?

3. I have the feeling that even on pangea, on emperor the AI just does not trade research or trade the techs (perhaps due to monopoly techs) fast enough for a fill-up, so in order to bulb lib I often have to research e.g. compass or MC myself, because the AI doesnt want to give it to me. This slows down my lib bulbing/research quite a bit, I assume?

4. Is it better to go for music for the GArtist and the trade value or save the turns researching it, hit for lib and build Taj Mahal for the Golden Age?

5. For maintance, better whip or build markets or court houses first?

6. Would you build libs in all your cities or only in the powerful ones in terms of research, just to get enough for oxford?

7. You said earlier that whipping infrastructure is better then hammering it out. Is there a minimal size a city should have left after whipping (like four farms to work) to regrow back fast enough, assuming HR allows to compensate for the whip anger.

8. After mass drafting and the capture of the first two to three cities my economy always almost collapses even with Theo, I guess thats due to the maintance costs for the army, so I had to switch some cities to produce not troops but wealth. Do you have suggestions on how to finance the war better or is it just a question on being better prepared in terms of cottages, trades etc?

Thanks for your answers, as I said, your guide brought me up to Emperor and I love the rifle drafting/spy approach quite a lot (never knew what espionage can be good for up to this point ). It worked out for me also great when I played Sitting Bull (for its amazing protective rifles) and found myself boxed on a small penisula with hardly space for 4 cities and Izzy next to me. Although I rushed her, keeping all her three cities, I was able to keep up in grow and tech and roll over the rest of the world with drafted rifles. I still find the rush slowed me down, compared with normal expansion but there was just no room to expand

 

[Snaaty]

1. To generate commerce, cottage at least to from the early four cities and or the capital? I have the feeling my cottages don't mature fast enough to fuel my economie, but working them doesnt let the city grow fast enough.

you have to specialize your cities. if you have 4 early cities, you can cottage up your capital and have the rest focus on production and growth (or, what i usually do) run a food and production heavy capital to pump out settlers/workers/units and get at least 2 helper cities cottaged up

2. Up to what time is it better to run binary research, meaning what would be an adaequate BPT-rate to leave the research slider up?

i´m usually too lazy to do binary research in the beginning, meaning feel free to ignore it (it sure helps, but isnt a must i guess). what i usually do: research worker techs + pottery (and, if your tech speed still is decent, also writing), then switch reserach off completely to bank gold. stop banking gold when you can get to the big techs at 100% research (big techs = aest, alpha monarchy and so on). tech what the ai´s are missing if you feel like aest is too late or you need something else like ironworking due to jungle or monarchy for happy cap. after that binary research is better (still no must), cause it lets you see waht the ai´s have and you can either take the research boni or get some better trading stuff

3. I have the feeling that even on pangea, on emperor the AI just does not trade research or trade the techs (perhaps due to monopoly techs) fast enough for a fill-up, so in order to bulb lib I often have to research e.g. compass or MC myself, because the AI doesnt want to give it to me. This slows down my lib bulbing/research quite a bit, I assume?

tech speed on deity is faster then on emperor cause you can trade better with the ai. on emperor its often better to selfresearch some more techs and therefore you get lib later

4. Is it better to go for music for the GArtist and the trade value or save the turns researching it, hit for lib and build Taj Mahal for the Golden Age?

on emperor i would go music cause its a quite safe bet. on deity its a gamble so i usually avoid it

5. For maintance, better whip or build markets or court houses first?
depends, meaning you have to check your city income. do whatever generates more in the end (generally, if you have a high research rate, libraries are best, if you have a low research rate markets are better, if you are somewhere around 50% research, courthouses are best cause the work on raw income)

6. Would you build libs in all your cities or only in the powerful ones in terms of research, just to get enough for oxford?
most cities dont really need that much buildings due to city specialisation (see above). cottage cities need libs, production cities only need a granary, forge and a courthouse (later a baracks). again, check the city income (beakers, money, hammers) to see if a lib is worth it my 2 cents: if it brings 5 beakers/money/ whatever, build it. if not, ignore it...

7. You said earlier that whipping infrastructure is better then hammering it out. Is there a minimal size a city should have left after whipping (like four farms to work) to regrow back fast enough, assuming HR allows to compensate for the whip anger.
every city has an optimal whipping point. it all depends on regrowth rate. if your fastest regrowth rate is from 2->4, the best whipping point is at size 4 to 2 (or from 6 to 3 if you need 3 pop). normally smaller cities have better regrowth rates.

on a side note for cottage cities:
i always would try to get them to a fast growth rate, meaning farming some high food stuff for them, then cottage the rest. faster growth means more cottages on the long run (and you can also whip some buildings in if needed)

8. After mass drafting and the capture of the first two to three cities my economy always almost collapses even with Theo, I guess thats due to the maintance costs for the army, so I had to switch some cities to produce not troops but wealth. Do you have suggestions on how to finance the war better or is it just a question on being better prepared in terms of cottages, trades etc?
you already mentioned it: it all depends on preparation. best is to have enough gold in your backs to survive some turns on neg. income (you will recover later and crashing your research is normal in a quick war due to sheer unit numbers and ww). i tend to switch off research completely at the beginning of a short war (short war = 5-max.15 turns)

hope it helps
snaaty

 

[Hardeusatazic]

Hi, I just read this great topic, and tried to practice this strat.
(I usually play at prince level, standard map size, normal speed)
It appeared I got 2 main problems:

1) The timing really troubles me, cos in most of my games wether the capital has huge amount of food but can't produce archers quickly enough, wether it has a good prod,but takes too much time to reach happy cap…

2) Between Archery and Bronze Working my worker is often useless cos he has nothing to do… and if I do BW before archery, then I won't be able to have some 4-5 archers at the same time the city will reach happy cap…

So i'm begging for advices… (or maybe am doing it the wrong way)

There is a save ofthe begining of one of my game where I think the growth was too slow…


Thanks for reading.

 

[Snaaty]

there is a big difference between playing prince and deity:

- barbs spawn later
- barbs are way weaker
- ais tech slower
- ais dont start with extra techs (no archery)
- ais dont start with extra units (no 4 archers, 2 scouts 2 workers, 1 settler)

...

this guide wont work well on anything below emperor level (as it says in the headline).

...

after a quick glance on your save, if playing on prince:

1. take the 7 archers you have stockpiled in your capital and kill the nearest neigbhour (should be enough)
2. put a scout in your backland, there is 1 hill that should be enough to scout it out great
3. expand faster

-> in general, on prince, build some cottages, build some cities, get bronze, kill at least 1 ai with axes, a stack of 6-8 axes + 1-2 spears will do (there are great guides for any playlevel. best is to pick one for the level you wish to play...)

...

and if you decide to play a game on emperor+:

1. dont stockpile your archers in your capital. put them on strat. locations to scout out the map + defend there (no wooded hills, or barbs wont attack your archers)
2. read the map better, meaning you have to decide where to fogbust, and where to let barbs spawn and defend against them
3. dont build that many archers. 2-4 for primal defence will do. then get 1-2 settlers out, then build 2-4 more archers
4. you should have placed the capital in your exemple on one of the plains hills, ideally the one near the river, direction inland. you get an extra hammer when settling on plains hills
5. if you see phants, grab them. they make cool units for later and give +1

 

[Noogai]

To me game only lets me draft TOTAL 2 rifles in one turn, and only one per city. How do you manage to draft like 30 of them?
Do you need to run something else with nationalism in order to do that?

 

[ben-jammin]

To me game only lets me draft TOTAL 2 rifles in one turn, and only one per city. How do you manage to draft like 30 of them?
Do you need to run something else with nationalism in order to do that?

You should be able to draft 3 units per turn, though only one per city. Effectiveness of drafting can be increased with the globe theatre built in a food-rich city. No unhappiness and a lot of food can draft and whip a good number of units in a short amount of time (you will draft 1 unit per turn and whip every 1-3 turns depending on how much of a hurry you're in...turning a non production city into a formidable unit pump).

 

[DanielTorrence]

...I just had a look at this great guide after playing around a while and decided to play the tutorial on Immortal (also fishing for success ). After a couple of attempts on different fractal maps I think the start here is really extraordinary. Yes, that was mentioned before, but I am wondering if the RNG had one of his better moments for Snaaty here - I literally never had such a start in countless games, meaning a plain hill, two cows, one of them riverside and riverside wheat...did you?

Besides, the timing Snaaty shows here is great and was on this map replicable even for me Thanks again for a great game...

 

[Poorly deluded]

Nice one Snaaty for this thread. I have just finished reading it all and have started applying some of the strats to my own play. I am still only on Monarch as yet and therefoe am not using the whole of your strat, but the beginning play has been invaluable. It has certainly helped me focus on building cities quicker and being able to manage my defence with archers only.

Like some of the other people who have commented on this thread I prefer the marathon game and so have had to modify the strat to fit with that. For the first time I had some success with the Dutch and was tech leading the rest of the AI's until Attila the Hun landed with 6 horse archers next to my empire. Although I was able to cope with them (lost one city but got it straight back) this had prevented me blocking all across the top of the continent and Carthage swept round behind me. Damn

More than anything though it has helped me believe I can actually play this game on the higher difficulty settings. So it is onwards and upwards now.

 

[Dirk1302]

After all this time this guide is still relevant .

 

[Poorly deluded]

Very much still relevant it has just taken me years to work my way up through the difficulty settings. Not really played the game endlessly which has prevented me learning it thoroughly, however recently I have been playing it none stop (whilst watching the rugby world cup) and have accelerated through the difficulty levels. But the jump up to Monarchy is startling at first. Especially the Barbs, which if you are unlucky can come in wave after wave remorselessly. And I would like to believe that I am good enough to take on deity eventually. What I like about this strat more than anything is that it is different to the rush method which is very prevalent in other strats without it hindering your empire.

Just started a new map and my capital is next to the coast and I can't decide which is the most effective method for growth in s situation like this. Do you go worker first still or work boat? I am guessing worker, but I could be wrong.

 

[eric1971]

This discussion seemed at first to contain the very best strategic advice for playing CIV 4 at the higher difficulties but after much experimentation through trial and error and countless games I've discovered that it's nearly impossible to keep up the same pace as Snaaty has in his example game given here. Settling the first 4 cities by 1000 BC as recommended in his guide and discovering liberalism by 500 AD with 8 decent-sized cities is quite impossible even on the Emperor level. It seems in order for this strategy to work, I have to have the absolute ideal starting situation and a map which would include an insane amount of excellent resources in close proximity of each other allowing each city access to 3-5 resources and an impossibly perfect location for my capital city with lots of forests and hills for chop-rushing settlers in time and building the Great Library quickly. In addition to that, the shape of the continent my civ is founded on has to be ideally created to make it easy for me to block off a large portion of the map with only 3 to 4 cities so I can backfill the land later and to prevent other civs from settling behind me. Furthermore, the backlands of my civ have to have enough resources and goodies to make this strategy worthwhile which is almost never the case with a randomly generated continents map. Finally, each city would have to be located on a river tile for the extra health bonus and still have access to 3-5 resources which is never the case without constant rerolling for an ideal map.

Isn't it considered bad form for high level players to constantly regenerate the map until they have the ideal starting position? It would take at least 20-30 rerolls to generate a map like the one Snaaty used for this example game to get the ideal map for this particular strategy to work. That seems like cheating the system to me. Another thing I noticed with this strategy as I've mentioned earlier is that it's nearly impossible to keep up the pace that Snaaty has demonstrated in his example game with chop-rushing 8 settlers without running out of forrest for the Great Library later. It seems like every single settler andd some workers need to be chop-rushed to keep pace for this strategy to be really effective. Even using a leader with the imperialistic trait (which allows settlers to be generated 50% quicker) and the aid of chop-rushing I've found it's almost impossible to have 8 cities built according to the recommended timeline given in Snaaty's strategy guide. How does he do it without running out of trees for the Great Library?

Believe me, I thought that this strategy was so interesting and doable at first that I even took notes so I wouldn't have to keep switching back to this forum page during an actual game to save time. But as it turns out, some aspects of this guide are a bit misleading and impossible to achieve without regenerating the map a million times. Although this guide overall is excellent and has improved my skills immensely allowing me to do well at the Emperor level, I find it difficult to pump out settlers as fast as the guide recommends and still have 8 cities in good locations with access to all the right resources for this strategy to work. Is there something I'm missing in regards to founding 8 cities fast enough or is there some trick to regenerating the perfect map without having to restart my game 20 times? I've used my settler as a scout as recommended to find the perfect location for my capital city but that just slows down my overall civ development and gives my rivals a tremendous head start on me making it hard to stay ahead in the technology race. By the time I've reached rifling the rival civs are already researching replaceable parts and are not too far behind. And during the midst of my first war my opponent sometimes manages to start producing rifleman and grenadiers to counter my advancing armies making it quite difficult to destroy him completely. I think I need to start using pangea maps to make it easier for me because I never have enough neighbors on a standard size continents map to make tech trading worthwhile. Anyhow, any suggestions as to how I can improve my game would be appreciated. I can post a sample game for someone to critique if that would help.

 

[Snaaty]

@ eric1971:

like you mentioned it, just post a sample game here, including starting save and maybe a save around 1000 AD. add some screens and description, what you did and how you did it. im sure that somebody will find the time to give you some advice on where you could do what better or different (i cant promise that i find the time, but there are a lot of great players out here in this forum and one of them surely will find time to help/critique you)

there might be only small differences, but small things in the beginning do sum up to quite a difference in mid- to lategame

welcome to this forum btw

 

[eric1971]

Thanks for the quick reply, Snaaty. That's cool, I'll do that. Shouldn't I post more than those 2 saves that you mentioned? I start to encounter slow development between 800 BC to 300 AD. I don't know what it is that I'm doing wrong but lately in my last few games nobody was willing or able to trade Alphabet with me once I had discovered Aesthetics. And so I had to self research it on my own and I was forced to research Mathematics before Literature so I could chop the GL faster. I just gave up on a game today that I was winning on points. My power level was much greater than 50% of my only rival on my civs continent and he still declared war on me! It was around 300 AD and I had 8 chariots, 2 swordsmen, and six archers and nowhere near discovering Liberalism. That clearly should have prevented Wang Ton (I think that's his name...the Korean civ) from declaring on me. I was forced to make those extra swordsmen and archer beyond the usual 8 units that you recommend because I had exhausted my city build options as a result of slow tech progress.

There's something I don't understand about Alphabet, if anyone can answer this one: I was under the impression that only one civ needed to have discovered the Alphabet to enable tech trading and both civs don't need it. Well, in a recent game I was forced to research it and when I had completed the research for it suddenly the F4 screen had revealed that all the civs had already discovered the Alphabet before me and for some reason they weren't able to trade techs with me!!! That's something I don't understand and it put me way behind in the tech race.

I'm going to start a new game now with Victoria of England and post various screenshots and a few saves until about 1000 AD with some fairly detailed commentary so it's clear how I played for everyone. You know, I swear I do everything to the letter according to your guide Snaaty and I still fall way behind before 1000 AD. Maybe jumping up to the Immortal level might make the tech trading easier for me.... I don't know. We'll see how this game goes for me.

I have one last question though... When you say you had to reroll the map, do you mean you played about 10-20 moves into your game and decided that the terrain just sucked too much and started over or did you just hit the regenerate button on the first turn because you could tell the map wasn't going to be any good? As far as I know, the "regenerate map" button is only available on the first turn of the game.

Anyways, in case I forget to mention some basics about the game I'm going to post on this thread:

I'm using Victoria of England (financial, imperialistic), continents map, large world (I find it gives me enough room to build eight cities in case the map isn't suitable for blocking out land for a second expansion wave. That's why I have to use an imperialistic leader to pump out settlers fast enough to squeeze in at least 6 cities.

Oh yeah, thanks for the welcome! This is my second post here!

 

[Snaaty]

@ eric1971:

- the more saves and explications the better
- yes, teching + techtrading is faster on higher levels with the fastes teching on deity (you need more beakers for each tech to research but thanks to trading you gain back even more), so if you are playing on emperor, you have to accept a slower techpace (rifles 1300 ad seems about right on emperor)

...

on a side note:

there are usually some high level games running in the strats section of this forum. there even exists some threads that are named: (level)-university. there players of a certain level try to find the best way to play a certain map and try to improve their play together. thats a lot of fun and it really helps.

there are also in the game of the month section the sgotm (succession games of the month). there people play as teams and try to beat the other teams for a certain goal (usually fastest victory of whatever type) on handmade maps. most teams do heavy mm (micro management) for every turn and try to squeeze out the optimal play of the given map. these games are often played on emp. diff. last game, a team managed to get astro pre 1 AD if i remember right, so you will find things and strats there you wouldnt think possible at first. im playing with the plastic ducks, if you like to drop by as a lurker, feel free to drop in there (not sure if you have to ask permission to do so from the team captain, which is kossin in our team). so best is, if you want to do that, if you send kossin a pm and ask

 

[eric1971]

@ snaaty:

That sounds about right; I usually get rifles around 1300 AD and it gives me enough of an advantage to take out 2 rival civs and win the game at least on monarch difficulty. When I finally beat monarch without any trouble at all about a month ago for the first time while following your advice Snaaty, I got inspired to take a stab at the Emperor difficulty level, but as it stands, Emperor is a huge step up from Monarch and I'm not sure I can do it on a standard continents map but I'm going to keep trying because it's fun! In fact, this is the best game I've ever played on my computer! It's probably the most complex strategy game out there and I think it's even better than CIV 5 which is all about war mongering. Yeah, CIV 5 does look prettier and it has an improved combat system but it's a dumbed-down version of CIV 4 and the AI really sucks....at least that's what I've heard from other players. I wonder if CIV 5 had a different lead designer than CIV 4--it sure looks that way. I wanted to buy it until I heard how bad it was from various articles on the internet.

I've learned so much from your guide that I've been able to play CIV 4 with total confidence that a victory is possible against the AI. I used to have difficulty playing even at the Noble setting until I found your guide. This is by far the best strategy thread in the whole Civfanatics website! I used to always pick an early religion as soon as it was offered to me because I wanted the extra happy face to make my cities more productive and I always wondered why some rival leader would pick a fight with me before I was even ready to go to war. I didn't realize that picking the wrong religion too early in the game can cause you to go to war prematurely and cause your civ to get dogpiled by the other civs! And about maintaining a military of a certain size to prevent other civs from attacking you... I had no idea that a certain army size and composition of unit types can go a long ways in holding off the inevitable until you're good and ready to go to war. All it takes is an army of 8 chariots/axemen and an archer/barracks in each city in the early game to prevent any backstabbing and that seems like a weak force to me but apparently it's enough to do the trick. And using spies instead of trebuchets to take down enemy defences never even occured to me. Now that I've played a few games with spies in my ranks, I've been able to really perfect my military tactics and I even learned a thing or two on my own with a little experimentation (especially that one about using chariot superhealers in your armies with the aid of great generals). And I didn't know anything about specializing your cities and how it really helps your empire grow fast. And the tech tree for that matter, beelining towards Liberalism was something I've never done before and upgrading a large military all at once after discovering rifling was something new as well. And I always thought high level players considered archery to be a dead-end technology not worth researching in the early game. All in all, I found it to be the most useful collection of tips and tricks to win the game at the higher levels.

Your guide never made it clear how to actually use your huge army of 40 rifles/10 trebs/10 spies so I initially just clumped them into one big stack of doom as I was advancing through enemy territory and I found it took a little longer than 20 turns to take out another civ. Reading more into this thread I realized that I needed to break up my army into smaller groups and position them on the edge of my border next to 3 enemy cities as I waited for my spies to camp out in enemy territory for about 3-5 turns. I also discovered that it's usually only necessary to place about 3 spies in each city you want to conquer because at most you'll lose about 2 of them when you attack each city and you must keep pumping out new spies from at least 3 of your cities during your war to make up for the loss of spies incurred during the invasion. And the city with the Globe Theatre should keep pumping out riflemen for the duration of the war to make up for losses along the way. With those tactics it's almost assured that you'll be able to stomp out at least 3 rival civs in about 40 turns. If you're ambitious, you can even eliminate as many as 4 civilizations during your first war. And I think having 3 dedicated production cities instead of just 2 is ideal for creating a strong military later for additional wars without having to rely too much on drafting all the time. I find it takes a long time to recover those unhappy citizens after I've drafted for a while and many of the other civs that I didn't attack will have caught up to me in technology by the time my first war is over.


On a side note about diplomacy: I have to be careful sometimes because if I vote wrong I can lose to a diplomatic victory. I haven't been able to find the screen or advisor in the game that can inform me who's about to win a diplomatic victory. Sometimes I lose a game because I voted the wrong way and when I restart the game from the autosave I can vote for the other guy and eventually win the game later. I really think diplomatic victories should be turned off when you play CIV 4 because I don't think it's a real victory and same goes for the space race or even a cultural victory. Whoever has the most military might always controls the world and it's never going to change!

Anyhow, I started a game last night after my last comment on this thread and wrote out a detailed commentary while I was playing but it was slowing me down quite a bit and I thought to myself: are people going to actually have the patience to read this stuff? It's kind of boring and dull at times. But I guess it would give someone a good idea of what I'm doing wrong and how to improve. It would probably work well to teach total novices the finer points of playing on the harder difficulty levels. So I'm going to post an example game that doesn't have a good starting position and only 2 rival civs on my continent. I think I finally decided to settle my first city on turn 9! And because of the available resources for my first city, I had to skip researching agriculture for a while until I could chop down forests after bronze working. So it's an interesting game because of the unusual starting situation and it might not be the best example of how I play because I've had to modify my strategy according to the map and deviate a little from the worker/settler build order of my capital city. But it should good starting point for me to start understanding what I might be doing wrong. Anyhow, it's almost 9pm where I live and I wanted to finish up with my example game tonight so I can post the details by midnight or so on this thread...

And I'll check out the SCGOTM section for more tips and tricks. I'll look for the Plastic Ducks and try to find Kossin. Thanks for that info.

 

[EnDoerner]

first of all, thanks for this great guide and all the details that you put in the demo play. Some time ago I started to play again CIV IV (after playing some time CIV V), but trying to play it in a more "professional" way, and this guide fits very well my style of playing, but I have some doubts:

1. This is about the production city in the second step. Supposedly I should be able to produce some defense units (4 chariots or axemen) before 1000 BC, but for me that is actually quite difficult. How do you manage to obtain such amount of units in that city?.

2. About the same city. As I understood I should use also this city to pump settlers + workers for the second expansion wave. How many turns should take the production of each unit?. Usually it is quite slow to produce S and W in this city, and I finally use the others cities to help.

3. In your demo game at 625AD I took a look on your save game and you have so many infrastructure in your cities!, do you whip them all (or almost all)?. My path of whipping is monument+barracks+granary, but after that I do not know if its better to let the cities growth or whip libraries, temples, etc.

Well, again, thanks for taking the time to develop this guide, this is one of the reasons that I like so much to play CIV, the amount of people that likes to share strategies, tips, etc of this games.

 

[eric1971]

@ snaaty:

Hey, sorry about not being true to my word by not posting that example game in this thread. My life has been pretty busy lately and I just never had the time, besides, that sample game that I was planning to send just fell apart quickly and I just wasn't motivated to post details of a game that had serious tactical issues.

With that said, I have learned quite a bit about the finer points of high-level play in the meantime, especially concerning the first 100 turns of the game which are always the most crucial in every game of Civ, and I am prepared to share with the readership of the CivFanatics Forum my humble addendum to Snaaty's excellent guide in the following post. I felt it was necessary to do this because I was getting extremely frustrated after incurring loss after loss as I followed Snaaty's guide to a tee every time and still came up empty. I kept trying to convince myself that I was leaving something out that might have been mentioned in Snaaty's guide every time I lost a game. After going over the guide in painstaking detail, I eventually became aware that important details and facts were completely left out of the guide that a new(ish) player like myself needed to know. So I'm finally going to provide an example game that covers the first 100 turns of the game with a detailed commentary to explain my thinking along the way. I would really prefer some tips and advice because I should have beaten this game on deity a long time ago.

Additionally, I wanted to mention a little something about the sample game that Snaaty provided for us in this thread. The map used in that game is by no means a normal starting situation for most civs. Having that many choice food resources with the insane amount of forests and prime 4-hammer mines nearby almost never happens in a regular game of Civ4, especially when you consider that Snaaty didn't even have to move his settler unit one tile before founding his first city! My experience with the game has proven to me that in order to get a map like that, I have to regenerate the map at least 30 times to get a starting situation that ideal.

Anyhow, I'm going to play a hundred moves or so right now and post the results in a few hours with commentary right here on this thread.

 

[eric1971]

This is about the time that I would have posted my results from the game that I just played but it was a dismal experience with only one rival civ on my continent. Snaaty's guide never discussed a specific strategy for handling isolated starts or a start with very few rivals--it makes tech trading very difficult. Also, my civ was expanding too fast and research was suffering as a result. It costs money to keep up research and with an isolated start it's almost impossible to stay ahead in the tech race.

One thing I've learned from following the specific advice in this guide is that rerolls are a must. In fact, a typical game requires up to 30 rerolls before a suitable map is available. I hate to regenerate my maps because I think that's cheating but I do it anyways. I feel like I'm cheating when I don't select the random leader option at the start of the game and, instead, go with a financial civ. Which brings me to another point--if you had to choose between the financial trait or the philosophical trait, always go for financial because it's much more appropriate for the specific strategy that Snaaty has in mind. Also, you can't take longer than 1 turn to settle your first city. Furthermore, you also have to wait until you have 4 cities settled before you whip your first library in your capital; it's very tempting to whip that library sooner, but I had to learn the hard way through countless playthroughs. Finally, you don't need to be in so much of a rush to research writing when playing on emperor difficulty level, you usually have time to backfill one tech like fishing or sailing (for your coastal cities). You should time the discovery of writing just as you settle your 4th city.

So I'm going to try again with another 100 moves and see how it goes. If it looks good with Hannibal (that's my leader I've chosen) then I'll put the savefiles up on this thread.

--Eric

 

[georgjorge]

I think this is a pretty good guide, but on Deity growing to happy cap before building Settlers seems more of an exception than something to do normally. I played plenty of Deity games where I started building Settlers at size 2 or even size 1 (after a Worker) and just about managed to get five cities before being blocked in, so I have no idea how I would have gotten six to eight by starting settling later. On the other hand, in these situations you can always pass up Archery as AI archers kill almost all barbarians for you. Maybe some addition to the guide (i.e. if you meet two AIs within the first five turns)...?

 

[Kaitzilla]

+1

I achieved my first Deity Military victory thanks to this guide long ago.