Dissect My Save: Overall Advice

[ecuwins]

This is my first game of CivIV.

Leader - Huayna Capac
Settings - noble, all default except: conts, no events, no huts.

Here is my cont -

Spoiler :

Situation - I had no iron, so I decided to make good with the Ottomans and go after Carthage with War Elephants and Horse Archers. It looks like I'm about to get my iron.

Basically, I'm just looking for some general, overall advice about my game and how I could improve.

Save attached(this is from steam so I don't know if that's an issue or not, let me know).

TIA

 

[ecuwins]

So I fired up a new game, just to get some variety going and concentrate on the beginning stages.

This time I rolled Cathrine.
Settings - noble, all default except: conts, no events, no huts, no espionage, and no vassals.

Here is my map -

Spoiler :

I feel that I got my cities out quicker this time. I had to stretch for copper early on but Iron ended up right on my doorstep. I had no luxes early on, just silk, incense and wine. There were some furs down in the tundra, so I made a little "fur shanty" so I could make use of the lux. It's just working a lake and the furs, max pop 2, so I just set it to research. It's taken awhile to get my cities past pop 5(6 for the capital). But now with the silk, incense, and wines finally coming on-line, coupled with Hereditary Rule, they should be good to go. I'm also starting to understand the whole cottage thing a bit better now. I tried to make better use of them this go around. I still have a little work to do planning wise. I think that I went a little overboard and shorted myself farm wise.

Should have I bee-lined Hereditary Rule sooner in this kind of situation? Also, should have I built more farms?

 

[s.bernbaum]

Although hereditary rule is useful, I don't ever beeline it. There are almost aways more useful techs early on. If the pop in a city becomes unhappy, you can convert a couple of them into buildings or military (depending on current need), using the slavery civic to allow you to whip out the new construction. Just be sure that you "spend" more than one pop unit, since whipping generates one unhappiness and it does little good to replace one unhappy due to pop size with one unhappy due to whipping.

BTW, turning off espionage messes up culture. Espionage points get converted to culture points one to one but the culture levels needed for city culture influence growth go up to a much larger ratio.

 

[ecuwins]

Thanks for the advice. Interesting point about espionage.

 

[PreLynMax]

Just off topic... OP, your avatar is a bit distracting.

 

[s.bernbaum]

Just off topic... OP, your avatar is a bit distracting.

I kind of noticed that too.

 

[ecuwins]

Well, I tanked that last one big time. I didn't expect a big stack to show up on this level

Anyway, next I rolled Ottomans and...

Yay, my first win!

Spoiler :

It was a pretty late space victory. Mostly peaceful, but Shaka was to my north so I had to raze a few of his cities to get him to calm down.

Next game I guess I'll try to do an early rush just to see how it goes.

 

[Pluton]

you did not use slavery and chopping to get out out your settlers/workers more earlier.
There are still forests standing around your capital. Use them at the start to speed up settler production.
I also recommend that you look into "irrigation" und how to build irrigation farm channels to your corn/wheat resources.

 

[Ataxerxes]

Just off topic... OP, your avatar is a bit distracting.

You're dedicated to the game! I'm willing to be slightly distracted by her.