How to survive?

[OldSchool2]

As a returning Civ player, I just bought Civ IV at a discount after the release of Civ V, but I find it difficult to defend against aggressive AI rulers who ransack and demolish all my city improvements before ganging-up to destroy me.

Perhaps I should build fewer cities and have them closer together, but are there any more tips to help fend-off marauding cavalry and the like?

Is there a particular earth set-up that would benefit a returning or even newbie Civ player?

And yes, I've done the tutorial -- Ghandi isn't much of a threat -- and read the manual on both hard copy and disk.

 

[Dave Hartwick]

What difficulty level are you playing at? Are you keeping up in tech? Do you manage to form any alliances? Have you tried drafting troops under the Nationalism civic? Do you have the BUG mod installed to make it easy to monitor your relative military power? Are you playing vanilla, Warlords, or Beyond the Sword?

As for particular set-ups that might make it easier to learn the ropes, I find the financial trait made learning how to build up an economy easier. If you're having a lot of trouble particularly with getting attacked, the protective trait could help, although it's not considered to be a strong trait.

 

[Ringo Kid]

If everyone is ganging up on you --you are probably not building enough units. They tend to go after the weakest civ that way.

Try playing a continents map; that way there are fewer civs to deal with pre astronomy. By the time you reach cavalry you should have been able to conquer all the civs on your own continent without too much difficulty. Once you have your own continent to yourself you should be okay.

Maybe try a lower difficulty level.

 

[Agramon]

Build worker first, don't work unimproved tiles rather whip them. Let your capital grow a bit. ICS is (almost) dead. Concerning your references you should definitely read some articles from the strategy section, that were written after game was extensively played, rather then the handbook, that was written before the game was released. ;-)

Earth18 should be easy. Just start in Europe subjugate your neighbours and float to victory ;-)

 

[Sian]

posting screenshots and/or savegame helps loads as well ... if nothing else then because people can look at them and see if theres any glaring mistakes (such as poisonous hate of overlap)

 

[OldSchool2]

What difficulty level are you playing at? Are you keeping up in tech? Do you manage to form any alliances? Have you tried drafting troops under the Nationalism civic? Do you have the BUG mod installed to make it easy to monitor your relative military power? Are you playing vanilla, Warlords, or Beyond the Sword? ...

By "vanilla" I assume you mean the latest build sans mod, 1.6 something I think ...

The hardest level I've played is "Noble," no alliances -- are they now listed under "trade"? -- and I've been able to draft troops in some cities, but Montezuma kept hitting me with inferior forces until he succeeded in taking my towns.

 

[OldSchool2]

If everyone is ganging up on you --you are probably not building enough units. They tend to go after the weakest civ that way.

Try playing a continents map ...

I was playing on "pangea" with open borders for some international relations practice, but I suspected there were too many cooks stewing.

I usu. had only one strong unit per city, which I updated, but apparently that wasn't nearly enough to do the job.

I was also thinking about forts to protect the outskirts of my territory, but they didn't appear very sturdy or effective in open terrain.

 

[jwez11007]

By "vanilla" I assume you mean the latest build sans mod, 1.6 something I think ...

The hardest level I've played is "Noble," no alliances -- are they now listed under "trade"? -- and I've been able to draft troops in some cities, but Montezuma kept hitting me with inferior forces until he succeeded in taking my towns.

Alliances in general means picking a few AIs to play nice with by trading with them, giving into their demands, and hopefully adopting their religion or favorite civic. This will boost their 'opinion' of you and help prevent Declarations of War among other things. Montezuma is a particular pain because he has a very high probability to spam units resulting in his ability overrun technologically superior opponents by weight of numbers. He is also not the easiest to get along with unless you're lucky enough to share a religion.

I was playing on "pangea" with open borders for some international relations practice, but I suspected there were too many cooks stewing.

I usu. had only one strong unit per city, which I updated, but apparently that wasn't nearly enough to do the job.

I was also thinking about forts to protect the outskirts of my territory, but they didn't appear very sturdy or effective in open terrain.

One-two units per city is usually fine because warfare in CIV heavily benefits an attacking Stack of Doom (i.e. massed siege weapons with plenty of foot soldiers). The key is to be the attacker so you can leverage collateral damage from siege weapons against enemy cities before they attack your cities. If you are surprised by an enemy attack don't be afraid to use your siege weapons in the open field to cause as much damage to their stack as possible before it reaches your cities.

I'ld definitely recommend the war academy articles and you might check out the Noble's Club series which is a series of games posted on the forums for Noble level players to learn and improve their gameplay by posting for advice and seeing how others approach similar scenarios.

 

[Paw]

One-two units per city is usually fine because warfare in CIV heavily benefits an attacking Stack of Doom (i.e. massed siege weapons with plenty of foot soldiers). The key is to be the attacker so you can leverage collateral damage from siege weapons against enemy cities before they attack your cities. If you are surprised by an enemy attack don't be afraid to use your siege weapons in the open field to cause as much damage to their stack as possible before it reaches your cities.

One-Two units per city is usually fine for cities that are inside your empire.

Cities on the outskirts generally need several more defenders, especially if they're bordering an aggressive AI (monty, shaka, ragnar, etc).

You also need to keep your power rating up. The easiest and most obvious way to do this is by building troops. However, building things like barracks, walls, castles, stables, etc can all help boast your power rating. This can be important in the early game when your economy may not be able to support a large standing army.

Towards the middle-later game, you want to work on your own large SoD (stack of doom), even if you don't intend to attack anyone soon. It helps keep the peace by maintaining your power levels (relative to the AI) and gives you troops to defend/attack with should you be invaded.

 

[lasombra1984]

I'm playing Prince. Usually I have 3 units per city - axeman, spearman & 1-2 archers, 1 guerilla archer on available forested or clear hills near strategy resources.
Also 5 swordsmen to raze or capture barbarian cities or 0% culture enemy cities.
Most militaristic leaders seize to capture cities, not to pillage.

1. Your power rating has to be top 3.
2. Watch AIs reaction on DoW. If AI tells "We have enough on our hands right now" build units until leader DoWs someone else).

 

[gilmore606]

The best thing I ever did for my Civ play was install BUG mod -- for lots of reasons, but primarily because it puts diplo information right on the main screen at all times. In the lower right corner you can always see the yellow/green/gray/red smiley/frowny face for each leader, so you know where you stand with everyone. Keep that information foremost in your mind when making decisions -- who am I about to piss off? Who do I need to placate? From whom am I safe?

I really feel that managing diplo is the #1 key to improving your game.

 

[Dave Hartwick]

http://civ4bug.sourceforge.net/BUGMod.html

If you're enjoying the vanilla version, I'd suggest getting the Beyond the Sword expansion.

Sounds like you might be having a problem getting an alliance going and having a low power rating (not enough units and barracks).

 

[jwez11007]

@Paw
Unless in HR only 1 defender is really necessary for inner empire cities and even border cities should never require more than a couple to deal with wandering pillage units. The AI makes significant use of SoDs and a couple extra units isn't going to make a difference most of the time against them in border cities and if you have long borders like on pangea maps it becomes financially impractical to split up a potential SoD of your own to defend dozens of border cities. When dealing with those pesky warmongers, its better to have a good understanding of the DoW mechanics and plan ahead by either befriending or DoWing first.

@lasombra
3 units/city usually doesnt hurt and is not unusual when under HR, but otherwise you might try going with less and focusing more on diplo and aggressive wars rather than stocking cities with ideal defenders just in case. You'll be surprised how much extra freedom you have to pursue other things when all those hammers spent on defensive what ifs? are turned towards driving your civ towards a game winning position. Also when an AI goes WHEOOHRN, you should only worry if you are a highly probable war target (i.e. shared borders, poor diplomacy, AI personality-can they backstab/are there other AIs they'ld target first) and if they are pleased with you in BtS you can beg one gold for a guaranteed 10 turns of peace.

Im surprised that people are suggesting power rating is the way to go to prevent DoWs. Check out this link to see the specifics or just read the synopses (i suggest dirk1302s for the most succinct one) after all the charts to see why power is rarely useful especially as you climb the difficulty ladder. There are literally dozens of more effective ways to prevent DoWs from gifting bad cities for diplo boosts to engineering wars against other AIs to make them priority war targets.

 

[Dave Hartwick]

Im surprised that people are suggesting power rating is the way to go to prevent DoWs. Check out this link to see the specifics or just read the synopses (i suggest dirk1302s for the most succinct one) after all the charts to see why power is rarely useful especially as you climb the difficulty ladder. There are literally dozens of more effective ways to prevent DoWs from gifting bad cities for diplo boosts to engineering wars against other AIs to make them priority war targets.

Depends on if you're making suggestions to prevent declarations of war or to be prepared for when it happens. Unless the player is the sort who's interested enough to memorize which leaders will declare at pleased-- in which case they probably don't need advise-- IMO it's better to provide general tips. Tips like the one Snaaty gives in his guide, if I recall, where he or she advised keeping a power rating of at least 0.5. It may not have a direct impact on determining if an AI declares war, but it should make it easier to cope with a declaration and could help make another target more appealing.

That said, I've seen the AI declare on me often enough when I was at 1.0 or higher (why, hello there, Montezuma) that I believe the gurus when they say that power rating alone will not prevent a declaration. It's an important point, but if a newbie complains they're getting beat up a lot, it's not the first one I'd make.

 

[gilmore606]

Unless the player is the sort who's interested enough to memorize which leaders will declare at pleased--

But even those leaders can be managed with general principles, like making sure they have another enemy. Diplo isn't really that hard on the Prince-and-below levels.

 

[zeolite]

Also 5 swordsmen to raze or capture barbarian cities or 0% culture enemy cities.

I didn't realise culture had an effect on your abaility to attack an enemy city. I was aware that barbarians wouldn't come inside your borders if they wouldn't be able to reach a city/unit to attack within two turns.

 

[jwez11007]

@Dave Hartwick

Increasing power rating simply to cope better with surprise DoWs is a fair point, but it really is in any 'newbie' player's best interest to learn to use at least some diplomacy to develop allies. Good diplomacy helps in two major ways. 1. It adds a significant modifier to the AIs probable war target number (I believe its something like 1,2,4,8,16 for friendly, pleased, cautious, annoyed, furious) which makes it a primary determinant in AI war targets. 2. Even on the low levels dogpiling AIs can spell doom for a civilization and war allies (especially with DPs) provide support when its most needed. Not to mention its usually easy to placate at least half the AIs on any standard map, which means half the number of potential dogpiling AIs.

One final note unless your power reaches the threshold value (I believe its slightly different for each leader but something greater than 1-1.5 depending on the type of war strat they're in) it is of no use in preventing DoWs.