In beginning of game, how far tiles would you go to get a important resource?

[mwwilliams]

For let's say gold or iron or sugar?

 

[MadDjinn]

Only a few tiles. But at the beginning you won't see Iron, so you can't go for it.

If you mean after getting Iron Working + new settler, then where ever it is I'm going.

 

[mwwilliams]

Only a few tiles. But at the beginning you won't see Iron, so you can't go for it.

If you mean after getting Iron Working + new settler, then where ever it is I'm going.

I'm talking early. Move 39. Iroquois is going down early then. They will get the 3 gold mines in about a 5 tile radius.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Brave settlement is key, but it's essential that you understand diplomacy before you march ten tiles away from the capital to grab a tasty multi-luxury, multi-hill spot.

You're almost invariably going to make somebody mad with an aggressive settlement. If we're talking turn 40, you're not ready to defend yourself properly yet, but the AI is plenty ready to make your life very difficult. That AI will attack you in the very near future if you can't give it a very good reason not to. Fortunately, methods exist:

- Declaration of Friendship - this is one of the better reasons to enter into one. If you sign a DoF in advance, seize the strong location, promise not to do it again and honor the bargain, that AI will generally leave you alone.

- Existing hostilities - If that AI has another serious war underway, it will leave you alone. Unfortunately, you'd better keep it busy going forward.

Sometimes you can employ both of these strategies simultaneously. If you can isolate a neighbor, sign DoFs with everybody else, and keep bribing your friends to keep the adversary busy, you can wall in a victim with cities even on Deity while cheating one of your "friends" out of a plum city site.

 

[basta]

^Excellent response.

I'd just add that I've found aggressive settling and grabbing that plum site 8-10 tiles away with an early settler (usually #3) and provoking a DoW with it has become my preferred start strategy instead of a rush.

That offending city might be conquered for a while while you work like mad to build up your army while trying to get your empire moving, but it makes for a very busy and challenging early game and eventually you should conquer your opponent and set yourself up for dominance and then have your war of choice at longswords or rifling. I don't make any DoFs until I've finished the war and denounced the aggressor after they're reduced to a rump city.

With the massive gold influx from conquered cities you can buy several CSs and the puppeted empire will give you a solid gold cushion that won't rival the insane cash the AI generates but will allow a lot of flexibility. And you'll end up with more workers than you know what to do with, and a couple of wonders you could never build otherwise.

Unhappiness is easy to manage too, because many of the puppets are small (and get smaller by being conquered) and have luxuries you don't so at the end of the war my happiness actually rises. And if you need more production later to deal with the other continent, just annex that first conquered capital, rush-buy the courthouse, and your happiness will go up and science too since it's loaded with unfilled specialist slots while it ran for gold.

Needless to say you've got to reveal iron asap and beeline early military techs.

 

[KM]

talking from a multiplayer perspective. You will need iron and you will need it badly and no later than say turn 40 ish. So when you get that 3d or 4th settler (depending on strategy) at the same time as you get ironworking if you dont allready have iron within your borders you will walk to the closest 6 irontile even when its 10 tiles away. Because if you dont the player with swords will eat your woriors and he will do it soon.

But thers a big difference between MP and SP I guess. The not so dedicate dplayers are leaving MP because all the game issues there. Just the dedicated stays and most of them are getting good and play agressive. There will allways be at least one player going for a sword rush, often several, and If you don t have the swords at the time he gets to you, you got not much more chanse than a snowball in hell. And the other way around of course if you get to him first.

 

[SpearMan153]

- Declaration of Friendship - this is one of the better reasons to enter into one. If you sign a DoF in advance, seize the strong location, promise not to do it again and honor the bargain, that AI will generally leave you alone.

sounds ok - in theory but what tends to happens for me is that I latter build a city somewhere else that I don't think is not too close but end up getting the breaking word penalty

so how do you know what the ai considers as settling too close?

 

[SpearMan153]

walls can really help when you build really close to other civ

 

[Calouste]

walls can really help when you build really close to other civ

Would be interesting to see how it's going to work in the new patch if you have a city with a Wall up, a garrisoned unit and the Oligarchy SP. It should do fairly serious amounts of bombardment damage and you might not need Iron as much for defensive purposes.

 

[Smote]

I've gone about 25 tiles for new luxuries before. Generally, this can only be done if barbarians are turned off.

 

[Martin Alvito]

walls can really help when you build really close to other civ

This is very true, although I don't build walls with all that often. Walls are usually the "ruh roh, I screwed up" rush buy for me. They are very difficult to crack until the AI shows up with Longswords or Knights in quantity, as long as you have some fortified defenders on rough terrain to prevent the AI from conducting a six Horse blitz.

so how do you know what the ai considers as settling too close?

As a rule, if you settle backwards towards your own borders, you'll be fine. It's when you start settling the no-man's-land territory that it gets mad. This is true even when that dirt is closer to your own territory than theirs. If the prospective city site is three tiles from my nearest city, but five or six from his, he's going to get upset. About 7-9 tiles from its own borders is the radius that the AI considers its sphere of influence.

Another trick is to simultaneously settle a bunch of cities that are going to aggravate the AI.

 

[Smote]

Another trick is to simultaneously settle a bunch of cities that are going to aggravate the AI.

That's a nice trick. They only get angry once rather than 4 times!

 

[MadDjinn]

That's a nice trick. They only get angry once rather than 4 times!

pretty much. They only complain once. At which point you go 'oops sorry' and settle the rest of your cities elsewhere.

 

[Bibor]

Which reminds me, the patch ups the cost for building settlers by 25%

 

[MadDjinn]

Which reminds me, the patch ups the cost for building settlers by 25%

but then gives a policy that gives a free one + -50% production cost. So it can still be cheap to make them

 

[Calouste]

but then gives a policy that gives a free one + -50% production cost. So it can still be cheap to make them

It also moves that effect to a policy where it is more useful. One of the things that bugged me about the Liberty tree was that the effect of opening up the tree was the settler reduction, which came at a point where you typically weren't that interested yet in using it, unless you were going hard core ICS, with a Worker/Scout/Settler build queue. So you picked an SP, but you didn't get any immediate benefit. The new setup looks like it will work a lot smoother.

 

[swordspider]

I'll go as far as it takes to get a luxury that otherwise I wouldn't get. In fact, my 2nd and 3rd cities (in a game that I intend to play for a longer term) are usually way out grabbing other resources. I will even pass up closer resources to secure further ones and then settle the closer ones later.

 

[Tabarnak]

My usual rule of thumb in multi to how much i will settle cities is :

# different luxuries around + 1. This allow me to grow cities large enough in the beginning (around 4 pop) without extra happiness buildings.

Only exception is for iron.