I'm stuck playing civ at a fairly low difficulty setting cause it seems like I kinda suck, lol. I think it's also possible there's a few concepts I'm missing out on by not exploiting them well enough, or at all. So, any general advice on levelling up your civ-skills?
Early game - my usual strategy is to build warriors to start exploring the map quickly, locate important resources, see where nearby civs are and what I'm going to be competing with them for, hoovering up as many bonus huts as I can while being on the lookout for the inevitable hordes of barbarians. I normally make sure I'm the first one to discover philosophy and gain the precious bonus advancement which I'll immediately use on iron working and start building swordsman. I'll normally build a temple in each city before using it to pump out another settler but wondering if that's been slowing down my initial expansion. My current game is as Germany so I've been building libraries rather than temples to start expanding my cultural borders and I think that's helped a bit. So tailoring my game based on my civ's advantages is probably something that I could improve in. Tech-wise, I'll then advance as quickly as possible towards monarchy so I can switch my government type to that. Usually I'll ignore great wonders at this point unless I think there's one that would genuinly help and I have the possibility of getting. Otherwise it's so frustrating to waste dozens of turns on something that another civ snaps up, doesn't seem worth it. I'll trade tech advances with other civs as much as I can (as long as it benefits) but obviously won't help rivals gain stuff they might threaten me with.
I almost never build granaries as it usually seems like something else is more important, and by the time a city has some free production, its population is at maximum anyway. But maybe I'm missing something useful there. I never build city walls either, again seems like a waste, I try to fight wars in my opponent's territory rather than my own. Also I've never really utilised armies but browsing the minor wonders available in the game, a lot of them seem to rely on use of armies so that's probably another trick I'm missing out on - from what I can tell they're primarily used in attacking rather than defending? I'd never really worked them out and I'm a lazy man so I just ignored them! Also I rarely get to the late game stage where they become more important, I think.
A couple of other things I've only just noticed/remembered I can do is keeping my civ happy by increasing funding to luxuries (genuinely I only used the taxation slider to put scientific funding up and down - it completely passed me by there was another slider underneath for increasing population happiness! I feel dumb, lol) and the fact you can use workers and settlers to resettle cities and immediately increase their pop. I mean I was aware it was a feature but I never actually considered how using it would help.
In wars I tend to rely on outclassing enemies rather than outnumbering them as I rarely seem to be able to match AI civ's production levels somehow, but I'm usually advancing the tech tree faster than they are. I'll move heaven and earth to find their strategic resources and preventing them exploiting them by occupying the territory or straight-up destroying the improvements. Then it's just a slow city-by-city grind.
So if anyone has general advice/tactics/strategies, or comments on what I'm doing, it's all appreciated! Cheers!
Chris
Early game - my usual strategy is to build warriors to start exploring the map quickly, locate important resources, see where nearby civs are and what I'm going to be competing with them for, hoovering up as many bonus huts as I can while being on the lookout for the inevitable hordes of barbarians. I normally make sure I'm the first one to discover philosophy and gain the precious bonus advancement which I'll immediately use on iron working and start building swordsman. I'll normally build a temple in each city before using it to pump out another settler but wondering if that's been slowing down my initial expansion. My current game is as Germany so I've been building libraries rather than temples to start expanding my cultural borders and I think that's helped a bit. So tailoring my game based on my civ's advantages is probably something that I could improve in. Tech-wise, I'll then advance as quickly as possible towards monarchy so I can switch my government type to that. Usually I'll ignore great wonders at this point unless I think there's one that would genuinly help and I have the possibility of getting. Otherwise it's so frustrating to waste dozens of turns on something that another civ snaps up, doesn't seem worth it. I'll trade tech advances with other civs as much as I can (as long as it benefits) but obviously won't help rivals gain stuff they might threaten me with.
I almost never build granaries as it usually seems like something else is more important, and by the time a city has some free production, its population is at maximum anyway. But maybe I'm missing something useful there. I never build city walls either, again seems like a waste, I try to fight wars in my opponent's territory rather than my own. Also I've never really utilised armies but browsing the minor wonders available in the game, a lot of them seem to rely on use of armies so that's probably another trick I'm missing out on - from what I can tell they're primarily used in attacking rather than defending? I'd never really worked them out and I'm a lazy man so I just ignored them! Also I rarely get to the late game stage where they become more important, I think.
A couple of other things I've only just noticed/remembered I can do is keeping my civ happy by increasing funding to luxuries (genuinely I only used the taxation slider to put scientific funding up and down - it completely passed me by there was another slider underneath for increasing population happiness! I feel dumb, lol) and the fact you can use workers and settlers to resettle cities and immediately increase their pop. I mean I was aware it was a feature but I never actually considered how using it would help.
In wars I tend to rely on outclassing enemies rather than outnumbering them as I rarely seem to be able to match AI civ's production levels somehow, but I'm usually advancing the tech tree faster than they are. I'll move heaven and earth to find their strategic resources and preventing them exploiting them by occupying the territory or straight-up destroying the improvements. Then it's just a slow city-by-city grind.
So if anyone has general advice/tactics/strategies, or comments on what I'm doing, it's all appreciated! Cheers!
Chris