I'm confused

[Iron59]

So as I play a couple of games in Civ 4, I notice that my opponents have a large amount of cities(usually 5-7) in the middle of the game when I usually have like 3 or 4 cities by that time. I don't get it. How do they expand so fast? Doesn't maintenance affect them or something like that?

And if you're asking, I play on Noble, which is supposed to be the most balanced game and thus my opponents develop in the same speed as I do. I still don't get how do they expand so fast.

 

[Shurdus]

Get enough workers. About 1.5 or 2 per city will do. Improve your land and then you will do much better yourself. In the beginning focus on food. This will greatly help your worker and settler production.

You will find that chopping with bronze working and whipping with slavery greatly enhances your production. Do not mind settling poor locations as long as these locations have a purpose. You will either want to block land of grab resources. For most of the game your cities will work about 10 tiles or so, so having not a great city site is no big deal.

Also do not build too many buildings. You need a granary, library, forge and courthouse pretty much everywhere, but not neccesarely right away. Building too much soaks up hammers that should have gone to settlers and workers.

 

[bestsss]

courthouse sucks on lower difficulties, and it's not so hot even on higher w/o organized.

 

[mfie]

If you build nothing else than workers\settlers\very basic military\library and granary, you can easy get more than 10 cities at 1AD.

 

[vicawoo]

So as I play a couple of games in Civ 4, I notice that my opponents have a large amount of cities(usually 5-7) in the middle of the game when I usually have like 3 or 4 cities by that time. I don't get it. How do they expand so fast? Doesn't maintenance affect them or something like that?

And if you're asking, I play on Noble, which is supposed to be the most balanced game and thus my opponents develop in the same speed as I do. I still don't get how do they expand so fast.

You're building barracks and granaries too early. Barracks are for when you want to stop expanding and build units. Granaries are for when you want to boost your empires production without increasing maintenance.

 

[Iron59]

You're building barracks and granaries too early. Barracks are for when you want to stop expanding and build units. Granaries are for when you want to boost your empires production without increasing maintenance.

How do I know when to stop expanding anyway?

 

[kossin]

You lose money at 100% gold slider

 

[vicawoo]

How do I know when to stop expanding anyway?

Pre-writing, if your average beaker per turn is much worse than 8 bpt.

 

[r_rolo1]

You lose money at 100% gold slider

You are way too conservative

 

[McThomas]

You lose money at 100% gold slider

not if you have a really heavy SE

 

[Iron59]

Can someone shed light on these abbreviations like SE or BPT?

 

[BigTime]

Can someone shed light on these abbreviations like SE or BPT?

SE is specialist economy which I do not want to begin to explain.
BPT is beakers per turn, aka, how much research you make a turn.

 

[Orzio]

So as I play a couple of games in Civ 4, I notice that my opponents have a large amount of cities(usually 5-7) in the middle of the game when I usually have like 3 or 4 cities by that time. I don't get it. How do they expand so fast? Doesn't maintenance affect them or something like that?

And if you're asking, I play on Noble, which is supposed to be the most balanced game and thus my opponents develop in the same speed as I do. I still don't get how do they expand so fast.

Noble is indeed the most balanced difficulty but the AI still get tons and tons of advantages at that level. Fact is without advantages the AI would be extremlly bad.

 

[Baldyr]

One early pitfall can always be that you build Settlers and/or Workers too early. Its wise to let a new city grow some first (a Worker helps with that, though). Getting out a Settler with a size 1 city isn't a good idea, no matter how quickly you wanna expand.

I'm not being patronizing or anything, since I know I've fallen into that very same pit myself... Stupid mistakes like that are instant restarts...

As to how fast you should expand: Keep an eye on your income. If you keep falling into dept and the percentage is ever lowering itself (to facilitate a higher percentage), this is a sure sign your maintenance cost is getting out of hand. Somewhere at the 50% line you really should take a moment to think about ways of making some more income.

The way to afford keep expanding early on is to 1. cut the city maintenance in half (Courthouse in most cities, probably not your capital though) and 2. get Currency and build marketplaces (in most cities, preferably those that make the most ). The measly +25% multiplier is actually getting useful somewhere around the same time you expansion starts to lose momentum. (Because of the percentage being in the mid ranges.)

Once you start making a surplus again you have to decide between further expansion or more allocated to .

 

[cabert]

I agree with the most basic measure about your economic state : check your bpt
As long as it's growing you're good, when it starts going down, it's time to slow down (not stop!) and grow your cities a bit more.
When you've come back to your previous "max bpt", churn more settlers out.
It's not fast expansion, but it's a way to know if you're teching faster and faster or not.
Of course, you should eat up your money stock doing this .

 

[yanner39]

So as I play a couple of games in Civ 4, I notice that my opponents have a large amount of cities(usually 5-7) in the middle of the game when I usually have like 3 or 4 cities by that time. I don't get it. How do they expand so fast? Doesn't maintenance affect them or something like that?

And if you're asking, I play on Noble, which is supposed to be the most balanced game and thus my opponents develop in the same speed as I do. I still don't get how do they expand so fast.

I am also a Noble player. Last night, I one a Diplo Victory at 1822AD, my best ever. My normalized score was 32K.

Anyways, one thing I did was to pay attention and build workers and settlers instead of buildings that I may not have needed at a particular time. I'm a builder so I would always tend to build infrastructure instead of units (apart from military). An example of building a building I didn't need was putting a Library in a new city that was hardly generating commerce. The +25% :beakers" means jack if the base is small. This took me a long time to get this. And my tech path was pretty much all the econo techs to make sure I could pay for the empire.

Anyways, what this did was 2 things I was not used to: 1) my slider was at 20%-30% , which I must admit made me nervous, but 2) I had 17 cities when I won the game.

 

[Sporknife]

Make sure youre chopping enough. As a rule of thumb, chop it if you're not using it / its on a deer or fur. It gives alot of hammers, which will help you expand quite a bit. And always go worker first. it's the best thing to do 95% of the time. Also, don't be afraid of running the slider low. If you have pottery you can crawl back up. For example, i recently had a game where i rex'd to about 20 cities and had to run the slider at 30%. I was still generating like 90bpt at 1ad, so it's pretty good all the same.

edit: that game was at monarch, too. On noble you'll have much less maintenance to pay.

 

[weimingshi]

Expanding too slow is most probably due to the timing of your settler and worker production. You probably built settler or workers too early. A good rule of thumb. before size 3, focus your capital on food rich tiles, don't build any settler or worker. Build warriors instead. After that, build worker first. But time the build time, make sure when your worker is finish, you already researched bronze working(this is the tech you should gun for at start). Then set the work to chop forest, chop another 2 or 3 workers, and only then start building settler, and use all your workers to help chopping settler. By doing this, you gonna have lots settler in a short amount of time and the military units to protect them.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Can someone shed light on these abbreviations like SE or BPT?

BPT is beakers per turn. You'll do much better if you ignore the others that aren't related to wonders.

 

[yarp72]

as a personal preference, i do not chop much unless i plan to use the tile for a cottage. i am also very conservative about building settlers. i always have fewer cities than my aponants, but i always do just as well if not better by having a lower upkeep. you do not need more than 4 cities if you have decent land. a city with 2 grass tiles, a river, and many plains tiles with no food resource is still a good city. start by farming the grass tiles and the plains tiles. when you get the population up, start to turn 4 of those farmed plains into cottages. 20 beakers right there without buildings. 30 with a market and a library and you can get around 10 production in the city with a forge. any land with a river and at least 1 grass tile is worth building i city on. but to get back to the point, i stop expanding when my science percentage gets down to 70-60 percent. if you are building a lot of cottages, you will have over 200 BPT early on. from there you can afford more cities which leads to more gold. don't worry too much about production. your empire's collective production will be enough at about 80 hammers per turn minimum and more with forges. by growing this way, you can get a tech edge and will have little need for a large amount of production given the fact that you will have a tech edge and stronger units than your opponent. It doesn't really matter if everyone else has more cities than you. the odds are, many of their cities will be founded on some lousy land and because of the number and distance of their cities, their upkeep costs will limit their science. sorry for the long an off topic reply. this is just how i post.