C2C - Tips and Tricks

[Debellatio]

Maybe i'm wrong and revolutions just function this way (sometimes not giving you the ultimatum) whereby cities sometimes just automatically become independent

That could be right, cause I remember now it happend already long before viewports. Especially with island cities or when the own troops are surrounding the city.

 

[Yudishtira]

With Advanced Diplomacy (iirc), a lot of resource trades involve cash lump sums. Unlike gold per turn trades, at the end of the trade term this means you are giving the resource away for free. You need to catch trades where you were paid a lump sum when they expire (10 turns on normal speed, 34 on marathon I believe), so you can cancel and renegotiate them.

(It's obvious once you realize it, but it isn't before that...)

 

[Sgtslick]

With Advanced Diplomacy (iirc), a lot of resource trades involve cash lump sums. Unlike gold per turn trades, at the end of the trade term this means you are giving the resource away for free. You need to catch trades where you were paid a lump sum when they expire (10 turns on normal speed, 34 on marathon I believe), so you can cancel and renegotiate them.

(It's obvious once you realize it, but it isn't before that...)

Yeah this is a very good tip, something that is pretty much imperative to my deity strategy. I always set a reminder (control-alt-r) & set it for when it expires and just put the civs name as the reminder.

This reminds me of another tip, often civs refuse peace once you get writing especially if they are a powerful neighbour. Try and get currency so you can offer gold with the peace deal, 150-300 somewhere around there usually does the trick. Hopefully you can then establish embassy and open borders, then a couple of turns later he'll have calmed down and you can trade away some resources and get your money back with interest

 

[Whisperr]

I have started playing my single player games through the Multi-player IP connection. This cuts down on the wait time between turns if you have it set to Simultaneous turns. You just have to remember to set all other players to AI.

 

[Yudishtira]

Yeah this is a very good tip, something that is pretty much imperative to my deity strategy. I always set a reminder (control-alt-r) & set it for when it expires and just put the civs name as the reminder.

Another thing that just struck me about this. It may sound obvious, but when you buy something other than a resource for gold per turn, you will have to check on the "Active" tab of the Foreign Advisor for when to cancel it. I had only been looking at the resource and tech trade tabs, and of course there is nothing there to cancel.

 

[stachnie]

I like to have towns from possibly all culture groups, one town is enough for each group. E.g. if a Barbarian town turns into a minor Civ, I check its culture group. If it overlaps with any other town: raze, if not: keep. This way I may build a lot of the Culture wonders, gain access to new units and Heroes etc.. In my present game I own one continent and I lack only one culture group (African), but I hope it will appear in one of three unconquered Barbarian towns.

By the way: what do you do with Heroes? One may use them in combat, let them make small wonder (Achievement) or settle in a town. My favourite usage (from the most to the least favourite):

- create Achievement (8% more research, commerce, one extra trade route for each town etc. are never bad)
- settle as Noble in my Great Wonder/Great People city (usually my Capital) to increase GP pool
- settle as Great Military Instructor in my Military town (why to keep a few maybe strong but unupgradable units when you may have a lot of VERY experienced regular units?).

S.

 

[strategyonly]

OK, i need for info's sake, "What is the best way to get to the HUGE turn time, and make it waaaay smaller for turn sakes??

Another words, i want the fastest way to get the Shaman Temple without having to go THAT many turns

 

[Koshling]

OK, i need for info's sake, "What is the best way to get to the HUGE turn time, and make it waaaay smaller for turn sakes??

Another words, i want the fastest way to get the Shaman Temple without having to go THAT many turns

Build the rock gatherer and clay pit first! And hunt.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

If you have the storage pit you then build the Stone Workshop and Bark Gatherer. The hut should then b down to 10-30 turns to build.

 

[E_T]

I have found out two (or three) things that might speed this version of the game up and/or allow for larger world sizes and better late game playability. Especially if you are playing on a laptop computer.

1) If playing with Vista/Win7 (and possibly Win 8 [EDIT]Win8 removed Areo, so not an issue with it[/edit]), shut off Aero windows. The Aero look and feel of Vista/7 uses a great deal of resources and memory.

Right click on the desktop and select Personalize. Then select Windows Classic and either use a solid color desktop or a single picture that is a small file size. This will keep the system from using the Aero interface and greatly reduce resource needs.


2) For a Desktop Computer, add a second Hard Drive. If the system is PATA (old IDE), put the second drive on the second IDE Channel. This helps to increase HDD throughput. Also, on the different drives, have one with your OS (including Virtual Memory) and the second drive with your Data (game files, etc). If you have SATA drives, this isn't a problem, as each drive is on a separate channel as it is. BUT, be mindful of the SATA version, as the transfer speed is different if it's SATA version 1, 2 or 3. Or, if your system has an older SATA version, get an add-on card that supports the faster version.

No matter what, make sure that your Virtual Memory is NOT using the same drive as your game.

2a) If you have the money, get a SSD (Solid State Drive) for your second Drive. File transfer speeds are greatly increased, due to not having any mechanicals that you have to wait for to read and write.

2b) for those people who have a Laptop, you might get a slight to good improvement increase with using an external HDD, depending on the interface type and version. Currently, eSATA 3.0 is the fastest, but USB 3.0 (Super Speed USB, with the Blue Connectors) is a serious contender. IEEE 1394 (firewire) connection is still a serious speed over older USB connections. And the New Thunderbolt 1.0 (or even the newest 2.0 version) blows all of the above away. (Also depends on if the Drive is Mechanical or Solid State.


3) If using an OS that is greater then XP (Vista/7/8), you can use a flash storage media for your virtual memory. This is called ReadyBoost
quote from http://www.professormesser.com/free-a-plus-training/220-802/windows-features/

Windows Vista changed a lot of the ways the operating system uses memory. It tries to use memory in a way that will speed up the operation of your computer. Normally, a lot of information is written to the hard drive. But Microsoft realized that a lot of us are walking around with these USB flash keys, so they created a new technology called ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost allows you to improve the speed of your computer, but you have to have some type of flash memory. And this can be a USB key, it can be an SD card, a CompactFlash, anything that’s flash memory that would be much faster than using a hard drive.

This is caching information to this USB key or to this flash memory instead of caching it to the much slower disk. This allows you to have, in some cases, a significant speed increase, especially when launching certain applications and using functions within the application. However, you have to be sure that you’re using the right kind of memory. Some flash memory is relatively slow. But newer types of flash memory are fast enough to be able to use with the ReadyBoost technology. When you plug in your USB key or your flash memory, Windows will recognize this and it will ask you if you would like to be able to use ReadyBoost with the memory that you’ve just plugged into your computer.

So, you can use your thumbdrive for your virtual memory and other caching uses that the OS normally used RAM or the HDD for. And with thumb drives being cheap as all get out, it's a really quick and easy way to speed up your game play.

 

[teakbois]

I'm not sure, but I suspect that very early on, it's mostly best to use your one citizen to work a high-hammer rather than high-food tile, and to only worry about commerce if you have a specific tech you really need to get to. There's so much food-producing infrastructure that the hammer-heavy start should get even with the food-heavy start pretty fast, and then it makes sense to stay on the hammer-heavy because the extra production from a food tile would just go to waste. And as mentioned before, in the time it takes to grow one population point on a food tile you can work a hammer tile to raise an army to go grab yourself another one.

You probably should also save your free gatherer for a stone tool workshop rather than improving a food resource, just to enhance the hammer-heavy strategy. That's not something I've done yet, though, there's always just something so tasty in sight when you get the gathering tech.

My personal take:
very early on, commerce is king. One commerce in the early game can make a big difference. Typically though, if you get a tile with commerce its going to have 1 hammer or less. Caves help with this as they give you the 2 hammers with cave dwelling.

And unless you get a commerce producing fruit, you are correct to save your gather for a stone tools workshop. That lets you use a nice hammer tile and still keep at least one commerce.

 

[kapparoth]

Sorry for necro-bumping, but ReadyBoost mentioned in post #190 doesn't do much. I has been developed in the Vista days as a stopgap solution to cope with Vista's memory hogging on the average hardware of these days. It's basically pointless on Win7 (which manages memory and CPU resources far better than Vista), especially given that average hardware specs have increased in the meantime (and a typical modern sata HDD will have bigger r/w rates than a typical thumbdrive)
Long story short: your computer must be really low-specs to get any benefits from ReadyBoost, and that means C2C is technically unplayable on it.

 

[Samael]

How do I deal with early game crime at the moment? It seems I hit Mugging and the massive -8 gold when I typically produce +2 or 3 a turn and if I have an army at all (usually 4 guys), I go rapidly bankrupt. I've already build all the crime reducing buildings and yet I still see an increase in crime, when I have only one city with 3-4 people in it. I don't understand the mechanics well enough to know how else to decrease it; I don't have city guards as an option yet.

Also, out of curiosity, do Wonders against the limits stop counting once they're obsolete? Or if I build Captured Fire, am I going to be forever condemned for a small bonus?

 

[Yudishtira]

How do I deal with early game crime at the moment? It seems I hit Mugging and the massive -8 gold when I typically produce +2 or 3 a turn and if I have an army at all (usually 4 guys), I go rapidly bankrupt. I've already build all the crime reducing buildings and yet I still see an increase in crime, when I have only one city with 3-4 people in it. I don't understand the mechanics well enough to know how else to decrease it; I don't have city guards as an option yet.

Also, out of curiosity, do Wonders against the limits stop counting once they're obsolete? Or if I build Captured Fire, am I going to be forever condemned for a small bonus?

First question which may or may not help is: do you have Tribal Villages in your game?
As far as I can remember, they are the source of revenue I rely on before there's anything else.

Second question is how far along are you? Still prehistoric I take it? I don't suppose you have merchant units yet then.

Sorry if that's no help. I haven't been in the prehistoric for ages...

PS: On your other question, I don't know the answer, but I think you need Captured Fire so I would just build it and hope for the best.

 

[Samael]

Still pre-historic at the moment - around the time of Chiefdom. In my last game though, I build the Chief's Hut, opened up Crime Rate and noticed it hadn't changed at all, even though the Hut says it decreases it by 10 per turn.

 

[Jonius7]

Perhaps your enemies have Thieves or Rogues lurking around your city. I know I had a few in an AI Civ's city and their crime went up to almost 500 but there would be resistance from what I assumed were their crime-reducing buildings. Mine stayed relatively stable at around 120. This is still prehistoric era (I have yet to reach Ancient)

 

[Koshling]

How do I deal with early game crime at the moment? It seems I hit Mugging and the massive -8 gold when I typically produce +2 or 3 a turn and if I have an army at all (usually 4 guys), I go rapidly bankrupt. I've already build all the crime reducing buildings and yet I still see an increase in crime, when I have only one city with 3-4 people in it. I don't understand the mechanics well enough to know how else to decrease it; I don't have city guards as an option yet.

Also, out of curiosity, do Wonders against the limits stop counting once they're obsolete? Or if I build Captured Fire, am I going to be forever condemned for a small bonus?

Are you building the punishment buildings (stoning etc.)? Most games I can avoid having to, but not always. Also how many crime PRODUCING buildings have you built? You may need to be more selective with those (I usually build the bandit's hideout in my capital only, early on). Thirdly, bee-lining masonry is often a good idea - you won't get it early enough to avoid all issues, but you'll generally get there in time to address them before they become terminal (masonry enables town watchmen). Finally be prepared to put one of your cities (at least periodically, and not necessarily always the same city) into 'wealth' (lesser wealth anyway or even meager if that's what you have). That should tide you over. It's also good to lower the science slider before you actually hit the financial buffers, when you can see the issue looming on the horizon in most cases. As others have mentioned, how much you need to do this depends a lot on how lucky you are with goody huts during the exploration stage. Getting rafts out early to crack sea goody huts can have quite an impact in this respect.

 

[climat]

Crime can be increased by population. I usually use "stop growth" until I can cope with crime.

BTW, properties don't seem to be calculated properly or the hover is lying. The sum and actual change don't match in many cases.
For example, if your total crime is currently 100 and the sum of its increase and decrease is -5 per turn, you can assume that it will be 95 in the next turn and 90, 85, 80 etc. as turns go by. But it won't. It won't be reduced after it reach certain amount. Somtimes, especially the turn when population is increased, it will be even increased although the sum is still negative.
It is same in the exact opposite case. Properties won't be increased after some point although the sum is positive.

 

[Yudishtira]

I think the change figure is the change in between turns. It can't predict what will happen next turn - it doesn't even include any changes already made this turn.

I have noticed however that for the first turn of a session, the change figure can't be relied upon. Also, if the property value is zero, it isn't shown at all, so you don't get to see the change either.

All in all, crime varies quite chaotically/unpredictably, which is how you know it's been modelled properly!

 

[Samael]

Thanks for all the help! Trying to take it into account and watch my city maintenance - if I get hit with Mugging during my expansion, it just cripples my economy. Any information on whether obsolete wonders still count or is it safe to build Bull Leaping without ancient man's endeavours meaning I can't build a secret base millenia later?