Can someone explain strategy more clearly

[LlamaCat]

Calling any and all Civ IV experts -- been playing this game for some time and I just can't figure out how to win with a high score on anything above Warlord.

I've read all the strategies on here, and they basically come down to common sense but not a lot of real precise explanation on how to actually micromanage city tiles, which seems to be the key.

Anyone have some more precise advice besides obvious general strategy statements. For example, when I start a city and I make some farms and a mine and cottage or two, should I have a worker go back later and change one of those farm tiles to a mine or vice versa? But wouldn't that cause starvation? It just seems, especially at the higher levels, that there is only so much a player can do with the given land, situation -- it's almost like there is a "secret" thing these ridiculously good players are doing, but I don't get what it is.

This game just comes down to basic math calculations and I can do that -- if my city only has X number of food/hammers/coins, how can the expert with the same situation do any better?

thanks!

 

[LlamaCat]

I would love to start a discussion on my topic, plus some other issues that might help beginners or sucky player like me:

- how do you achieve higher/highest promotions for units? seems like the best I can do is get to 2nd or maybe 3rd level of a promotion before the unit gets killed. seems like sacrificing more than one unit is a must if you want to capture cities and fight back to survive in most scenarios. Does anyone ever have a group of several highly promoted units survive long enough to have any fun with?

- if you are a higher level player, do you actually use the city manager for coins and/or automatic choosing of production of units/buildings? I don't see how that ever can work better than the player managing the city

- is there any web site or video that someone has done showing exactly what they are doing on each move (including city manager) for a series of moves? I've seen some of the game beta testers who have sites where they do walkthroughs, but they very cleverly leave out the details. The description will be things like: "and they I started cranking out factories in most of my cities and prepared for war witih the Incas..."

 

[sigmakan]

1.) Best suggestion I have is to use units with collateral damage(trebuchets and catapults) to weaken the defending stack. Both of those units are fairly cheap and easy to replace. By sacrificing those units, you can almost gurantee that your macemen or whatever will be victorious

2.) I'm a middle level player and the only time I really use the govenor is when I select all the cities via Domestic Advisor and tell the govenors to maximize growth to help with UN victory.

3.) I suggest reading the ALC threads and Empeorer's Challenge thread. In the most recent Emperor challenge Aelf shows some detailed micromanaging in the early game.

 

[voek]

Not much of a article huh?

 

[raymondieee]

sigmakan - could you help by either saying where those threads are or putting up a link to them please?

 

[LlamaCat]

I've found the ALC threads and those are actually very helpful and more along the lines of the kind of help I needed. Thanks! They do give a more detailed explanation of what is built when, and how the city tiles are managed.

A few notions I'm starting to pick up on recently:

- you usually want to create a worker as one of the first units (if not the very first) to quickly work the city tiles. Before, I avoided building workers early because it stops city growth for many turns.

- I was almost always building a barracks early on in nearly every city, thinking unpromoted units would be worthless. It was like the one must-have building for me. Now I'm thinking that I've been wasting too much time building barracks and that was holding me back somewhat?? I need to specialize even more than I thought, eh?

 

[Sisiutil]

LlamaCat, welcome to CFC!

One thing you'll learn as you play is that what you do depends very much on circumstances. What leader did you choose (or draw, if you played random), what are his/her traits, opening techs, and UU, what resources did the map give you in the capital's fat cross, who are your neighbours, and so on. These will dictate your decisions in each game, negating a "recipe" approach.

As for barracks--I quite like them, but no, they're not absolutely necessary. You may need units--especially to fight off barbs--sooner than you'll need promoted units. In Civ as in life, experience is often as good as training, so fighting barbs can also provide XPs towards a promotion. In fact, since a barracks unit comes out of the gate 1 XP shy of Level 3, I usually send that unit after a barb for an easy win and their next promotion.

 

[Pantastic]

- how do you achieve higher/highest promotions for units? seems like the best I can do is get to 2nd or maybe 3rd level of a promotion before the unit gets killed. seems like sacrificing more than one unit is a must if you want to capture cities and fight back to survive in most scenarios. Does anyone ever have a group of several highly promoted units survive long enough to have any fun with?

Don't use stack attack; it always attacks with the unit with the best chance (or sometimes a cat/etc.) first. Let your wimpy new units soften the way for your vets. In the early game, attacking with chariots with flanking promotion (so they can withdraw) or just the weaker city attackers does the job. Later on, you generally don't need to risk a single real unit attacking a city - build cats (and the later units when you get them) to soften things up first. They get a 25% chance to withdraw, damage everything in the stack, and are far cheaper than good units.