Inego Montoya of Spain

[Whoman69]

Hello again to all from here in the flood ravaged city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I recently picked up the Gold pack for Civ IV with warlords included in it for a very good price at a used game store. I have played other versions including the vanilla Civ III. I must say that gameplay itself is very much easier than other versions. I'm not sure if this is because there are more technologies so they take less time to build or maybe I'm just used to the other games. I have beaten the chieftan level in both space race and diplomatic victory. At first I found conquest more difficult because of all the bonuses that cities get in defense. I certainly have learned my lesson on that point. I usually end my games with tanks and mech inf going against rifleman and have gone thru the whole tech tree while my opponents are still grubbing after medicine.
I will need to upgrade my computer to continue to play as my dinosaur doesn't even really meet the minimum requirements.
A couple of questions the manual doesn't really answer. In CivIII certain an aqueduct and hospital were required to build a city beyond a certain level. That does not seem to be the case anymore. Yet I don't see a way to alleviate the problem of overcrowding in cities. Does one need to simply build up more happiness than what the overcrowding costs? I would also like suggestions on the best way to go thru the tech tree. I have been shooting for an early monarchy to get the production bonuses.

 

[gdgrimm]

As a city gets larger, it generates more unhappiness and more unhealthiness (there's other things that can generate both of them also). So to keep cities growing, you need to keep coming up with more things to add health and happiness (as well as the food surplus of course). Things like Aqueducts and Hospitals are good ways to increase health. There's also different resources (like Cows and Corn), and certain buildings amplify the health benefit of certain resources (e.g. Granary cause Corn to add +2 Health, instead of just +1). So, for most of the game, you're cities will be hovering around either a health cap, or a happy cap, and much of the planning is based around how to keep that cap going up. And if you haven't figured it out yet, unhappiness is a much worse thing than unhealthiness.

As for tech tree, it depends a LOT on the type of leader, the civ, the terrain and map, as well as neighboring civs, how religions and diplomacy pan out, etc., etc., etc. There's really no one size fits all answer. Monarchy is a powerful tech, because it unlocks Hereditary Rule which can be used to lift the happy cap of your cities by using military troops. This isn't a direct production bonus (not sure why you said it was), but rather an indirect production bonus (i.e. more happy people in a city means more tiles worked and more hammers to build things).

About the only tech tree rule that tends to be true in about 95%+ of my games, is that I beeling to Bronze Working (possibly getting only one or two unrelated techs before it). That allows Slavery civic (nice for rush building things, and a great way to convert lots of food -> population greater than happy/health cap -> whipped population for production hammers), forest chopping (nice for generating lots of hammer from the forests), and let's you know where the Copper is (nice for planning your next city's location and prioritizing other techs and strategy).

 

[Whoman69]

Thanks for the prompt reply. Happiness does seem to be an issue and trying to keep your citizens happy can really put a crimp in your budget. I'll probably need to look into religion more in the early part of games or perhaps some happiness wonders.
Speaking of budget it doesn't seem to be as important as in previous incarnations of the game. Emancipation comes at a time in the game where production of cities is such that its really not necessary. To me universal sufferage doesn't bring in as many benefits as representation.

 

[gdgrimm]

The other way to deal with unhappiness is to keep whipping.

Emancipation is useful if you've been running an SE (Specialist Economy), and need to shift to a CE (Cottage Economy) during the middle of the game. SE's become less effective in the late game, but CE's are most effective with mature cottages (i.e. towns). Emancipation shows up during this tranistion time, and allows the SE to more quickly migrate to a CE.

The other big use for Emancipation is to get rid of the happiness penalty that shows up whenever some other civ shifts to it and you're not in it.

US (Universal Suffrages) is a bit weak, and I seldom use it. But it'll provide a nice production boost to commerce cities, and can allow some mines to be converted to cottages/towns (BTW, this synergizes well with Emancipation) to get a commerce boost in production cities without losing production, which can come in handy in some situations.