Help Desk

[DaveShack]

Question for the help desk:
I noticed that we plan on overlapping our cities. Is this something that strong people do regularly when playing 1P, or is this because of our starting location?

I think it's a little of both. Given the geography of our starting location, we pretty much have to overlap in order to fully utilize the land. The trick is to determine exactly which overlap ends up being the best use of the available resources. Also, overlap doesn't hurt at this stage of the game because it will be a couple of millenia before our population grows enough for the overlap to matter.

In Civ3 the strong players tend to overlap a lot. High population is the key to high scores, so the more cities can fit in the same land, the better. In Civ4 this isn't quite as true because growing your empire faster than its economy can handle can result in disasterous science levels. Add to that that it's pretty hard to get rid of a city once built, and you don't see extremely tight builds as much.

 

[GeorgeOP]

That's my understanding of playing cIV, that it's not too good to overlap since we want to build several supercities than a lot of small cities. The other reason I joing the DG was to learn from the masters.

Question:
I was planning to take a look at a saved game file. I just wanted to check what I could and could not look at. Reading the forums, obviously not the World Builder. Presumably the advisors are OK? How about the Info and Victory screens?

FYI: The NIA is updated with screenshots of some Info and Victory screens.