Comment and Critique (save attached)

[CaptainPlatypus]

Hey folks,

I'm a pretty terrible Civ4 player coming back to the game after an age and a half where it wasn't installed. Played a game on warlord (Pacal II, Huge, Big'n'Small, Normal speed), dominated it pretty decisively, but there's about a hundred turns till my utterly inevitable cultural victory because I'd never done one before and didn't set up for it properly, so I decided to just move up to Noble now and finish the Warlord game later.

So, this is the Noble game (save below). I decided to play as Charles De Gaulle, on Huge Big'n'Small again (simply because having three size descriptors in your map is so much fun) - but Quick this time, because of how boring waiting for the cultural victory feels. I didn't really start with a plan for victory type - I'm thinking perhaps Conquest/Domination now, simply because I'm in a solid position to get started towards it.

The save is from turn 83, 290 AD - I meant to do it at 1AD, but, well, I was having fun and I lost track of turns. I've met four civs, I'm blocked on all sides (ocean above, civs to the left and right, ocean and presumably an ice cap below), I have only one wonder (Stonehenge, it seemed like a good choice for Ind/Chm), and I'm starting to lose my tech lead. That's the bad news - the good news is that I have a massive empire (11 cities), lots of resources and money, iron and horses, and a bit of my tech lead still. I picked up Alphabet and Metal Casting before my economy crashed because MC seemed like a good trade tech, and it seems to be working decently so far - that's how I got Iron Working (Polytheism into the deal, but unfortunately he didn't have any other techs I didn't have).

At this point, I'm not quite sure where to go. I see two real options - settle down, manage the economic recovery, and go into full-on builder mode, with maybe some caravels/astronomy a bit later to expand off this somewhat crowded neck of the earth - or take Construction and hit everything nearby (probably starting with Willem, because there's some civ over there spreading Buddhism and I'm trying to spread Confucianism - though I got off to a slow start in that regard) with catapults and something else (swordsmen? horse archers? both?). Maybe one or both of those is suboptimal? Maybe there are other options I haven't seen? Maybe I'm actually screwed and just don't realize it? I "feel" like I have a pretty decisive lead (and the score agrees, FWIW), but it's been so long that I'm worried that I might be missing something.

That's the big thing I'd like help with. The other thing is just critique of where I am right now and what I could have done better - particularly in terms of city builds, worker use, and city placement (I didn't have Ironvision until all current cities were placed, so frankly I'm glad I did as well as I did there). I was working under the assumption that I should prioritize forges and libraries in that order, but I really don't know much about the proper way to build a city, and I know next to nothing about city specialization.

Also, I probably should have gone with Slavery when I got the option, yeah? Usually when I bother to I rarely take advantage of it, which is probably a big hole in my play (especially since I have so many cities with tons of food and relatively limited production). Should I switch now? Is it too late? Bring forth the advicery!

 

[Turin Turumarth]

Huge on Quick speed is not smart. Your units are extremely slow and any form of military victory is almost impossible. Don't get stonehenge....

 

[CaptainPlatypus]

solution quit playing strange map conditions. Normal speed for normal maps. Epic speed or marathon on huge maps. Quick perhaps for smaller maps.

Of course if you want much in the way of help you should play normal speed. Most people are comfortable with this speed.

Ah, didn't know that this constituted "strange" map conditions. Thanks.

 

[Windsor]

1) Not enough workers. Keep the 1.5 workers/city rule
2) CHOP TREES!!!!!

You are working A LOT of unimproved (forest)tiles. Paris could have been an awesome cottage-site. It has lots of juicy riverside tiles. It's fine that you start with improving food resources and then special tiles like gold and fur, but riverside are also valuable. Especially grass riverside.

If you had chopped trees to get settlers, workers and stonehenge out you will also expand a lot faster. You also get early armies up faster that way

 

[vicawoo]

Most important critique is tile management.

The purpose of growing isn't to get bigger, but it is to have extra population to work important things like improved tiles. If you're going to end up growing but there's nothing useful to grow into, build a worker instead of growing.

The save has size 1 cities building workers. This can be reasonable if none of your other cities can build the workers for them. But in this case, if you let your size 1 cities grow while diverting workers from your bigger cities, you can grow your small cities while improving them. And your bigger cities which have nothing else to do can make the workers.

Whip or chop workboats in your coastal cities. Building them with forested tiles takes too long. Whipping away forested tiles for workboats/workers is usually better than the small contributions of a forested tile.

Finally, granaries are the most important building. Forges aren't high priority.

Also, you shouldn't try to tech everything, tech important techs (right now civil service would be the best you could get right now), and you can trade for lesser techs.

 

[CaptainPlatypus]

Thanks for all the help guys, this is great. So to summarize the main points, it looks like I should:

• build significantly more workers
• manage my builds better (granaries first, whipping, chopping)
• improve more tiles (cottages EVERYWHERE is I assume a corollary)
• pick techs based on what's most useful and trade for the rest
• dedicate a couple cities to (unit) production

Some of this is from this thread instead of your comments, but the majority of it is from the former. In retrospect, I should have read a bit more before I posted, because there's a significant amount of overlap. I'm curious now, though - the thread seems to be talking about up to Noble difficulty, but I was only vaguely aware of just a couple of the points in it, and I seem to be doing all right on Noble (at least so far). Maybe it's just better advice than the author realizes, or noble's easier than he realizes.

A couple responses - note that I'm not trying to defend my actions, just explain them. Monotheism was, amusingly enough, to potentially take better advantage of bulbing the prophet I was making. The prophet was frankly because I'm terrible at managing great people. As for Rheims, you do me too great a favor by assuming I'm a thoughtful enough civ player to alter my site based on "oh hey, I should grab that one hill over there for my BFC" if it doesn't have a resource on it - it was just early in the morning at the time and I wasn't playing too smart. I hope I would have placed it better (or in the same place for a better reason) had I been more awake, but frankly, who knows?

Thanks again for all the help - if someone could give me (or direct me to) a crash course on proper great person management, that would be fantastic. Otherwise, would it be imposing to post another of these when I feel like I've properly absorbed what I've learned here?