Intermediate Player with Questions:

[Sandman130]

Hello Civ5 community!

Been playing Civ5 for a long time, but mostly at a beginner/roleplay kind of play at price difficulty. Recently however, I've had more interest in climbing the difficulty ladder and playing more competitively. I've been reading the forums, and I have a few questions about the more competitive decisions.
1) I understand the difference between going tall and going wide, and I understand the map conditions that would inform that decision; however, can someone provide a benchmark for recommended range for number of cities for the two types? Currently, I feel as though Tall is 3-5, but wide I have no idea the preferred number of cities.

2) Being a previous roleplay player, I can without doubt tell you I am a "bob the builder" player (great name for it btw). Now, I can completely understand the virtue of specialization when going wide (and will focus my wide empires in the future), but with going tall wouldn't it make more sense to follow a bob builder strategy for the cities? I mean, if you only have a few of them it seems like a strategic misstep to not maximize them.

3) Can someone link a discussion of map types and settings for the maps? I have questions about the resource settings, and the forum search wasn't helpful.

4) last question, I see lots of threads about advice for new players, but very little for intermediate players making the leap to advanced gameplay. So- What do you feel is the most important thing to consider and keep in mind when playing above price?

Thanks all! Before I started to follow these forums I was getting smoked on King.. Haven't tried it since learning all this, but I feel as though things will go more smoothly.

 

[joncnunn]

Answering in reverse order:

#4: Managing Happiness in usually the challenge moving up from Prince to King.
Those having trouble moving up from King to Emperor often have the money challenge.
Those having trouble moving up from Emperor to Immortal often have issues dealing with early AI DOWs on them and sometimes the runaway AI on another landmass.

#3 Resource settings:
Abundant: Instead of 2 Iron there is 3; Instead of 4 Horses there are 6.
Legendary: More bonus & luxury tiles near the starting locations
Balance: There will be Iron & Horses near all starting locations

#2 Tall & Specialization: Often best to have one city specialize on military units. Yes, going tall and peaceful a lot of structures tend to be built everywhere.

#1 Wide: A lot of wide empires have two parts: The self built part as a few cites that are tall, with the wide part having been captured.

 

[budweiser]

Hello Civ5 community!

4) last question, I see lots of threads about advice for new players, but very little for intermediate players making the leap to advanced gameplay. So- What do you feel is the most important thing to consider and keep in mind when playing above price?

Thanks all! Before I started to follow these forums I was getting smoked on King.. Haven't tried it since learning all this, but I feel as though things will go more smoothly.

Most important is focussing on city growth and AI relations. Trade with them regularly and find out the one bad guy that noone likes. Focus your aggression on that one.

 

[Unresolved]

I found that the biggest difference in jumping difficulty levels is how aggressive you need to play. On Prince, you can get by without building many archers in the beginning of the game while in King, you need to have a few units to deter an early rush. Then in Emperor, you need another couple of units to push back the early rushes, even taking another city around turn 100. On Immortal(which I'm currently on), you need 6-7 archers early on to defend against the inevitable turn 60 double DoW.

 

[RedRover57]

The things that helped me to improve my game the most are:

1. Learn to tailor your strategy to the map/situation. You can go into the game thinking you will go for a small/tall cultural VC as Persia, for example, but if the map and neighbors don't cooperate then you may need to switch up.

2. Micromanage your cities. You probably don't need to go overboard on this like some of us, but relying only on the AI default city manager is a bad idea. At the least you need to switch between food or production focus depending on the situation, and manually select appropriate specialist slots to work.

3. Never automate workers. The AI doesn't know that you are about to go on a conquering spree and will happily continue to build farms and eat up all of your happiness as long as your empire is happy. The AI will also build unnecessary roads and railroads that will eat up your cash. Also, automating scouts is generally not a good idea.

4. When warmongering, build more units than you think you will need. Also, learn to use coordinated attacks on cities (set up your units properly before attacking) to minimize losses.

5. Don't neglect science for too long as the AI will out-tech you on high difficulties and your army will become obsolete quickly. Education will generally be an early goal to achieve.

6. Focus on early exploration. Send out scouts before they get blocked in by AI city spam. Send out caravels on a continents map as soon as you reach Astronomy. Meeting all of the AI civs and CS as early as possible is key.

 

[Sandman130]

Thank you all for the great advice!

Clarification questions-
1) Is there a guide on micromanagement of cities? Currently, I use the different focus buttons depending on what I need that city to do, but I never lock tiles, and I never manual control specialists. Is this going to be a limiting factor going forward?
2) I know this is probably hard to answer, but I'm still looking for some rough numbers on # of cities for a wide style of play...
I instinctively play tall, so I'm more comfortable with the rough guidelines of tall (which my rule of thumb for tall is: only as many cities as is needed for your starting location, with at least 3, no more than 5)
But for wide, I'm not sure. Part of me thinks when playing wide I should completely abandon culture and all the other bonuses that cost more per city, and therefore should found a city in any location that can support a medium sized population and has some type of resource. Therefore, you could be looking at 6-10 cities but obviously its hard to say cause it's so map dependent. Is this the correct way to think and play wide? Is it correct to abandon culture? I can't imagine generating enough to make up for the massive costs I'm sure a bunch of cities cause. If this is correct, how should you manage your policy selection?

Thanks you all again!

 

[LuCypher73]

I don't go wide very often, but when you do you probably want to look for 'per city' kind of bonuses to maximize what your getting out of it. Also some cheaper and earlier unique buildings can be helpful for that too.

Like for instance France with liberty is getting 3 culture per city from the start which helps you still get some policies, you will just have to decide which one you will absolutely want since you wont have the luxury of making poor policy decisions as much because it will take longer to get each policy and all of that.

Also note in liberty they have a policy to reduce that cost increase a lil bit to help out with that particular drawback a lil.

 

[CaptainFake]

I'm also an intermediate player who's been following this forum for a while. I'll answer question 1 the best I can based on what I've read from many posts here.

Micromanaging your cities is really very useful, and not nearly as difficult or time-consuming as it can seem at first. The prevailing wisdom here at CFC seems to be that it's best to set all your cities to production focus* and then manually choose tiles for your citizens based on how much food you want to produce, with gold production being a secondary concern. This way, when your cities grow, the city will automatically work tiles that produce more hammers until you decide you want to increase population.

If you have happiness to spare, obviously you'll want to zoom to the city screen as soon as a city grows and reassign citizens to maximize growth, since population is the base for science and you'll always want to be growing as quickly as your happiness allows. Leaving your cities on production focus, however, will help if you get distracted while your happiness is near zero, and your cities won't grow faster than your plans to manage happiness allow.

If you end up with a pantheon that provides faith or culture from specific tiles, it becomes even more important to micromanage your citizens. The city doesn't really know how to value faith or culture the way it does food and hammers, and you'll need to make sure your citizens are providing the exact resources you want.


*There's a little trick about the way cities grow that makes production focus the way to go in all cities. The population increases, the city automatically assigns a citizen to a new tile to work, and THEN it calculates the number of hammers produced that turn. It happens specifically in this order, so using production focus means you'll get an extra hammer or two each time a city grows that you wouldn't get with default or food focus. This seems trivial, but if it happens every single time a city increases population, it can add up to dozens of extra hammers over the first hundred turns. That's the equivalent of a couple extra units or buildings!

 

[budweiser]

OP - Yes, you should mind your specialists. Lock your good tiles, like academies or manufacturing plants or nice food tiles before you switch out of food/hammer focus etc.

 

[chazzycat]

*There's a little trick about the way cities grow that makes production focus the way to go in all cities. The population increases, the city automatically assigns a citizen to a new tile to work, and THEN it calculates the number of hammers produced that turn. It happens specifically in this order, so using production focus means you'll get an extra hammer or two each time a city grows that you wouldn't get with default or food focus. This seems trivial, but if it happens every single time a city increases population, it can add up to dozens of extra hammers over the first hundred turns. That's the equivalent of a couple extra units or buildings!

good trick, but remember to lock down good food tiles so you keep growing, and re-evaluate after growth whether the best tiles are being worked. "setting & forgetting" on production focus is just as bad as default focus.

since no one has mentioned it yet, selling resources is also a huge part of playing on higher levels. Be aggressive with shopping any surpluses you have, right away. That extra 90 gold for selling horses that buys you a settler 5 turns faster could be the difference between a good game and bad one.

 

[P-Zombie]

good trick, but remember to lock down good food tiles so you keep growing, and re-evaluate after growth whether the best tiles are being worked. "setting & forgetting" on production focus is just as bad as default focus.

since no one has mentioned it yet, selling resources is also a huge part of playing on higher levels. Be aggressive with shopping any surpluses you have, right away. That extra 90 gold for selling horses that buys you a settler 5 turns faster could be the difference between a good game and bad one.

I'm currently playing on emperor, and also consider myself an intermediate player.

I just want to second this point, about selling resources. The AI will be generating more money as you go up in difficulty, and you should absolutely be extracting as much of it from them as you can. Be ready to go deal-hunting as soon as the resource is connected - not only do you get to buy stuff sooner, you also get to sell the resource again sooner.

Also, "what" is important, but so is "when". Two games with tall empires can go very differently according to your build order choices. Watch out for reflex decisions that don't actually square with the victory condition you're pursuing.

And specialist management is absolutely necessary. Getting the right great people to fit your strategy is very important.

 

[Matthew.]

Two focuses which I think would help immensely towards moving up difficulty:

1. Always focus on 2-4 strong cities from the start. Whether you are going tall, wide, peaceful, domination, whatever. A strong capital supported by a couple of strong cities goes a long way. Indeed, this is exactly why OCC is a viable strategy: The capital is generating so much science, gold, and culture alone that additional cities are not essential.

2. Science first. Besides increased money and production speed, the only "difficulty" at higher levels is the AI's tech rate. As long as you can match their tech rate, the rest of their bonuses become much more manageable.

I'd say get comfortable winning the game at the low 300's on lower difficulties. Once you are able to do that, move up while trying to keep the same pace. The AI--while terrible at actually getting around to finishing the game--can pull out wins in the 300 range on Immortal/Deity, so if you can't pull out a win by then on lower difficulties there is no point in trying to move up.

 

[crazymarco]

Nice thread. Currently playing on emperor level. Feeling tough at beginning but can always fight back at the end for me.

City managing is vital. Don't believe in AI default foucus. As mentioned before, they just do the maths. You need to think what sort of city you are building. Focus on food for GP farm? Focus on hammers for production? Or building all sort of commercial buildings on a city with 3 tiles of resource gold? Letting AI decide is easy but when coming to higher level, you need to manage it for more purpose.

Assigning GP is another important. AI will assign tons of unless GP. Focus on 1 type of GP (mostly GS for me to bulb tech) let you become more purpose oriented.

 

[Sandman130]

Thank you all for the advice!

I've been playing around with the suggested introduction to intermediate city management scheme as described in the posts.
I have had luck in setting production, locking my major food sources, then assigning specialties. So far so good, I'll have to keep playing around with it, but I can see how this will work out- I'm losing only slight production, while gaining population control and specials that I choose.

I'm still looking for a veteran sprawl player to comment on some wide strategies. My current game is wide (which is new for me, I was forced into it by poor food in my starting locations), and I'm up to around 6 cities. I feel it should be more. Also, if said veteran can comment on the relationship between culture and going wide it would be much appreciated.

Winning by ~turn 300?! No wonder I am struggling at the higher difficulties, I've never come close to this, and have always been shocked when I read about sub 300 wins. I guess that will be by next goal. Should I attempt this goal on prince or king?

Thanks again.

 

[Biologist]

Am currently playing Emperor as well. Something I find extremely helpful is to be aggressive early. For example, if a civ I know will be an early game powerhouse and/or warmonger (Persia, Huns, Aztecs) are close by, I will build up about 6 archers and attack (with a warrior to capture cities).

In games where I go on the offensive early, I often end up in a powerful position by the midgame, but in games where I play defensively from the start, I typically get kicked around by AI backstabs or war declarations and have to play from behind. Even if you're going for a science or diplomatic victory, attacking early can help a lot with building momentum.

As for the appropriate number of cities for a wide game, the only absolute upper limit on how many cities you can have is whether your empire's happiness can support additional cities. The rest is up to determining where and when to build new cities or conquer existing ones. 6-8 cities is not a bad starting point for a wide empire, varying with what the terrain and local AIs will allow.

 

[chazzycat]

wide empires are my personal favorite, I'll try to help if I can (I play on immortal)

for starters there are two types of "wide" empires. First is the kind where you start tall and just conquer a lot of cities, which is very popular and generally a pretty good strategy. Good strategy, but you can find advice for that elsewhere.

The second type of wide empire, and this is the the one that interests me, is where the map actually allows you to expand a lot, ie the AI is far away.. This is rare, but when it does happen it makes for a very successful, albeit completely different type of game.

When this opportunity comes knocking, you have to recognize it and make decisions that otherwise would be stupid. For example, if you have enough room for 10+ cities, you shouldn't stop expanding to build the national college. I can remember several very successful immortal-level games where I didn't build the national college until the modern era. This is of course the opposite of 99% of the advice you will find in "newbie" threads.

The idea behind a start like this is to get your capital up to decent production, then just crank settlers, alternating with military units to defend your settlers, and don't stop until all the space if filled. The liberty tree is pretty key to this approach, with a massive 50% discount on settlers in the capital. I like to settle my cities on top of luxes if possible - this means you don't need to build/buy a worker to hook up a lux to keep expanding. It can make a big difference.

This used to be called REX, meaning "rapid expansion" and it was popular in Civ 4, but upon arrival of CIV 5, was proclaimed dead. However, with G&K, in my opinion it is back. The reason for that is religion. Religion is perfect for a REX strategy, for two reasons.

The first is that there is a LOT of happiness available by way of religion. Happiness tends to be the biggest challenge in making this work. Ceremonial burial, asceticism and pagodas gives you +4 happy per city, completely erasing the per-city unhappiness penalty. You just need strong faith to rapidly purchase pagodas.

The second reason has to do with the way religion spreads. Basically, every city spreads religion at the same rate. It just needs to be the dominant religion - the size of the city doesn't matter. Natural religion spread works incrementally, converting individual citizens over time. So, a new, small city will convert to your religion very quickly, and that small city will add to the pressure right away the same way a large city does. This tends to create a snowball effect of increasingly rapid religious expansion. Basically, if you time your religion spread with your city spamming efforts, this tends to result in a dominating religion that has a a good chance of spreading over the whole landmass. That can have a huge impact on gold and/or happiness, depending on which founder belief you went for.

Religion is so important to a wide empire that sometimes I will even take the first 1-2 policies in the piety tree before completing liberty. This allows for massive increase in faith output, so you can buy those pagodas quickly and stockpile tons of faith (very useful later for buying GP). You can even switch to rationalism later without much harm, since those policies will have already served their purpose by then.

This is all doable at immortal difficulty on the right map, so I'm sure it would work on lower levels.

For an extreme case, aka ICS (Infinite city sprawl), check out the Mayan game in this thread, where I had room to expand to 20 cities: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=482769

That was a fun one. Never went to war the entire game and just sailed to victory around turn 260. all by the power of having 20 cities just building infrastructure & building up the economy all game. Religion was crucial, as described above.

Obviously thats not possible on most maps. A more realistic target is usually 8-12 cities.

as for the relationship between going wide and culture...well it's a bit abusive. The wide empire tends to cheat on it's GF culture with her friends gold & science You definitely get less policies so you want to make them count. Finishing any of the industrial trees is not gonna happen. If you go rationalism you can finish the left side but probably not both. Culture border expansion is also slower without tradition, this is one of the reasons why I like the USA for the tile buying discount. But in general I don't find it to be too limiting, the extra cities more than make up for the extra policies. If you really want to mess around with that dynamic you can try playing as France, or building more culture buildings. But often culture takes a low priority due to the fact that you're already kind of boned when it comes to policies.

 

[chazzycat]

oh i forgot one thing...great scientists. these guys are pretty important in most games and wide empires are no different. It will likelier be later when you are building universities, but you still want to build them and work the scientists ASAP. A wide empire is disadvantaged when it comes to GP rates due to not taking freedom, slower universities, national epic, etc. But it does have one advantage, and that is due to the way the cost resets after a GP. The cost just goes up by 100 every person you get. This benefits the wide empire.

Consider for illustration's sake an OCC game (one city) and the time it will take to generate GS. Say you're at 20 scientist points per turn and your GS costs 500 right now (so the second will cost 600). That means it will take 55 turns to get 2 scientists. (25 turns for the first plus 30 turns for the second).

Now if you have two cities both generating 20 scientist points, it only takes 30 turns to get 2 GS. 25 turns for the first one just the same, but then your second city is already at 500 so it only needs 100 more to reach 600 (5 turns).

keep adding cities to the equation, and you can get to a point where you're steadily generating a GS every X turns without waiting for any long time.

generating GS is pretty key to faster victory times so it's something to keep in mind.

 

[Sandman130]

Very helpful chazzy!

I now feel like I have a better understanding of going wide, using great people to offset the lack of policies; and this dove tails so nicely into all the other discussion of proper management of specialists- it's all coming together!

I even wonder if with a smaller wide build (maybe capped out at 8 active cities), with proper great artist management if you could even keep your policies rolling in, knowing a culture isn't possible of course.

 

[beezany]

Just for reference, it's actually possible to win a cultural victory in a wide empire. I won that way when I built 33 Celtic cities for the "Longest. Name. Ever." achievement. It was too slow for higher difficulty levels (400+ turns), but fast enough for Prince. It helps that Celts can develop religion very quickly, and cathedrals are great for culture. I probably could have won domination faster with an empire that size.

To get the hang of wide empires, you might want to try the Mayan/Arabian ICS strategy. It's not hard to adapt to other civilizations; that's how I approached my Celtic game above.

 

[Knut_Are_M]

Tall is for early game, as in pre renesainse. You should never stay content with 3-5 cites. at least not online.
Thing is tall is about getting one big city fast. If you start with tradition remember to get a religion and some excess culture so you can get meritocracy and ics.

The reason to not stay tall is that it is possible to get enough happiness for ics.
It is as simple as getting religion first and picking only happy picks + the Overpowerd ceremonial burial. Also get meritocracy. it gives 1 happiness+5% reduction.

Ics will crush tall in the late mid game and onwards. The end is allways ics if you get it right, but the start to get in an ics position can wary from game to game.

If you cannot manage wide by the mid to late game it is probably GG. You will get outprodused and out teched.

Try to avoid wars as well as you can when icsing. Attack only when you have a clear edge and no more free land.

PS getting a religion before the others and some free room is usually enough to seal the game right there. without a single war.
What they should do is move some of the happy policies from reglion over to piety, because right now piety is pointless and the most reliable way to religion is to play france and pick great prophet as a free person. It has been the fastest way to get a religion in the games i have played. Assumeing no spanish natural wonder start.