Dodgy Early Game

salty mud

Deity
Joined
Feb 21, 2006
Messages
4,949
Location
die Schweiz
I feel my early game needs some drastic improvement. I'm playing Civ V straight from Civ IV so naturally many of my tricks and hints don't work in Civ V. What's apparent is that cities must now be more specialised than they were in Civ IV: either for happiness, growth or production. I made the bad mistake in my first game of making every city as big as it could possibly be and then suffered with unhappiness for many turns. But I digress...

I always start the game building a worker. Is this the most optimal thing to do? I can't see much else being helpful; and my decision to build a worker first was cemented by the fact cities continue to grow while building them now. Should I be prioritising farms, mines or hooking up strategic/luxury resources first?

I always try to get the worker techs first, particularly mining so I can get chopping some forests for bonus production. Should I be chopping out settlers to get some early cities placed?
 
Always start with a scout. It will enable you to scout (duh), get more ruins and discover more wonders to get happiness from. I go worker next unless I'm getting liberty. Chopping settlers is not a bad idea, unless you're Iroquois..
 
City specialisation is actually less important than in Civ4.

The main thing you want to decide on is empire specialisation. Do you want to have a tall (a few big cities) or wide (many smaller cities). This is the first and most important decision you make, it will judge whether you take tradition or liberty (respectively) and everything else.
 
I made the bad mistake in my first game of making every city as big as it could possibly be and then suffered with unhappiness for many turns. But I digress...

It's extremely difficult to balance happiness and commerce in the early game if you're expanding, but it shouldn't discourage you. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing something wrong. You're bound to struggle with one or the other unless you're building tall. Once you get access to markets/banks and colosseums/theatres, however, you'll be swimming in both.
 
Yeah, you definitely don't need the level of specialization that you did in CivIV. Also, you don't need to "hook up" resources - you just need to place the camp / mine / pasture / etc. No road. Roads in CivV are freaking expensive so ONLY build them to connect cities (and maybe if you need fast strategic access to an area for army movement.

I always build a scout first. Usually there's not much for my worker to do in the early game anyway and I'd rather have a scout than a worker sitting around doing nothing. I usually don't get my worker until I've expanded depending on my game goals.

The sweet spot for most victory conditions is 4 cities (science, culture, diplomacy). 5 is ok, 6 is pushing it. If you're going expansive then you've got a lot of planning to do because things are going to hit happiness hard and quick. Same goes for small civs of 4 cities as your cities get huge, but you don't get hit as hard. If you're going expansive sometimes you may want to clamp down on a city or two and prevent growth to limit unhappiness, until you can a) buy or build some happiness buildings or b) you get enough luxuries and trades to cover it.
 
The biggest thing I'm still struggling with is early happiness and city growth. I tend to let my capital grow far too big too soon, which eats up all my spare happiness. That means I can't found new cities to grab new luxuries and/or strategic resources, which means I can't get more happiness, etc.

The hardest thing for me to do as a long-time Civ player is check the 'avoid growth' box, but it is absolutely necessary. Make sure each new pop is useful before you allow the city to grow. Also, don't be afraid to go negative in happiness - just don't get into the -10 levels, or you start having real consequences.
 
I feel my early game needs some drastic improvement. I'm playing Civ V straight from Civ IV so naturally many of my tricks and hints don't work in Civ V. What's apparent is that cities must now be more specialised than they were in Civ IV: either for happiness, growth or production. I made the bad mistake in my first game of making every city as big as it could possibly be and then suffered with unhappiness for many turns. But I digress...

I always start the game building a worker. Is this the most optimal thing to do? I can't see much else being helpful; and my decision to build a worker first was cemented by the fact cities continue to grow while building them now. Should I be prioritising farms, mines or hooking up strategic/luxury resources first?

It takes two or three techs to get the improvements you need for luxuries, so once you've improved your farms your worker will be sitting around wasting time until you get decent tech - also, why rush to develop tiles at a point when you only have one or two pop?

As mentioned, scouts are the optimal first choice. You're spoilt for choice from then on - monument is very important early on (unlike Civ IV, it's actually good) since it's critical to getting early border expansion and so luxury access. Shrine is a somewhat viable option; it works slowly, and if you can you're better off getting a friendly religious CS, but you have no way of gaining faith early in the game without it. You'll want at least one more early military unit to deter very early attacks. And by that time you'll usually have Writing so will need a Library...

The upshot is that I generally buy my first worker rather than build him, or even take him as a Liberty social policy.

City specialisation is actually less important than in Civ4.

Depends on the difficulty level. In Civ IV tile yields were high and you could get enough of everything to play at least up to Prince without any kind of specialisation. You also had no maintenance costs for buildings so nothing to lose other than time by building any and all buildings you desired (and you could speed up that process with slavery). You only needed to specialise once the game became difficult at higher levels.

Civ V scales differently, and arguably not as well - the strategies you need to master at high levels of play are basically the same as the ones you need to master to learn the game in the first place, which is probably the source of complaints that the game is ultimately less challenging. You need to specialise to get anything done in Civ V, but it doesn't become any more critical on Emperor than it is on Prince - you don't specialise, you'll lose the game on either difficulty.
 
The old cookie cutter from vanilla civ 5 was Scout > Monument > Worker. If you were playing pangaea or continents then double scout was usually advisable as well. Then you would rush great library and slingshot yourself into medieval.

Now however this is changed up a bit, I don't think Liberty is necessarily the best starter tree anymore; Tradition also seems quite viable, and given you ideally want legalism as your second policy then building a monument is a waste if you plan to go this route. The power of great library is still very high but less of a game breaker - you'll now basically get philosophy with it every time instead of theo or civil service. This still allows you to build the national college relatively fast before founding other cities; a tactic very much better suited for a tradition opening for obvious reasons.

But as for first builds, the one thing that hasn't changed is either one or two scouts. Once they're done, decide on what policy tree to follow. Tradition = worker, Liberty = monument, Honour = monument or troops if you're intending to bumrush a close neighbour right off the bat.
 
Legalism has actually been change so that it's not wasted even if you build a monument. As it now will wait untill you unlock a tech containing a culture building to give you free if it can't build one straight off.

So example, if I have 2 cities 1 with a monument and one without and I pop legalism but don't have drama tech I get a monument free in city number 2 but city number 1 will wait untill I get drama then it will give me a free ampetheatre in city number 1.
So you can pop down that monument for early culture even if you plan on tradition.

Similar with the finisher for tradition all though not quite the same, if you already built an aqueduct you don't fully miss out on the freebie because the ones you built become maintainence free.
 
I've never really specialized my cities that much in Civ V. I keep them all pretty much similar except if I'm playing a tall game, then I stuff almost all wonders in my capital.
 
I only use 2 types of specializations and I don't change a city default until it has grown enough and those are production or wealth generation. Everything else just sort of comes with the territory. My production cities are generally my largest and I may only have 2-3 of these. Everything else is either on growth or wealth generation since a strong economy seems to get you everything in this game and unit upgrading is important since those experienced troops can last you the whole game.

There is a particular order I tend to follow on when I'm selecting buildings obviously. I tend to favor production buildings for all my cities since once you have those up and running everything else takes much less time to build so I can end up with a lot of cities with all the buildings allowing even my wealth generating cities to become strong production cities if need be.
 
Some useful info here guys, I've just started a new game and I'm following your advice to see if I can start off any better.

So is it not possible to build the massive empires that you could in Civ IV now? It seems that happiness has such an impact on your game that it really restricts when and where you can place cities. I think it should still be city specific like in Civ IV.
 
Some useful info here guys, I've just started a new game and I'm following your advice to see if I can start off any better.

So is it not possible to build the massive empires that you could in Civ IV now? It seems that happiness has such an impact on your game that it really restricts when and where you can place cities. I think it should still be city specific like in Civ IV.

Yes it's possible, it's just very difficult to manage happiness as other posters have already mentioned (especially on harder difficulty levels).

The fact that in CiV you can puppet cities means it's generally much better to conquer your large empire rather than build it.
 
Don't forget about order. That plus 1 happiness per city takes your sputtering mid game broad empire and turns it, if you've placed your cities well, into a runaway engine. Then when that starts to lag you rush stadiums and never worry about happiness again. It requires restraint and building up a huge (25k+ marathon gold) bank account but will enable sweeping empires even on huge maps at king difficulty without having to go warmonger (although all everybody will get pissy because they "covet your land").
 
Top Bottom