Lategame SlogBog Effect

[mortcalavin]

So I've run through a couple of Civ V games now, playing as the Arabs, the Romans, the Indians, the Germans, the Egyptians, the French, the Japanese. I typically play on prince or king difficulty for the following reason: EVERY time I start out great, dominating the early game, getting some (or all, in Egypt's case) of the wonders, generally holding on to all my cities, etc.

Then, in the late Renaissance to Early Industrial age, it all comes to a SCREECHING halt. It's like my people just decide they don't want to build or research anymore. In the Rome game (ten cities or so), things lasted til the late Industrial/early Modern age before I was forced to build so many production enhancers just to keep my cities running that my economy collapsed. In the Egypt game (five cities), as soon as I hit the Renaissance I couldn't build wonders anymore; it was like my wonder modifiers just disappeared (I had the wonder SP and marble bonus too). German game (14 cities) my sprawling empire did fine until the early Industrial, when my economy got to be such a drain that I had to disband my entire army.

My point is, I don't think I'm making the same mistake every time. I specialize my cities, I make sure the cities use all the specialists they can. What am I doing wrong? Cuz every game so far has ended with my people sinking into a lazy stupor, slowly losing technological and cultural leads, or collapsing financially and militarily and being conquered, usually by the Chinese.

PS I'm running on a mac. Dunno if that's pertinent.

 

[majorkong]

I make sure the cities use all the specialists they can.

Well, there's one problem. Specialists are, well, specialized. It's often preferable to work a tile instead.

Here's a general plan for you:

1. Get Tradition and farm up your capital for massive growth rates. Get library and build the National College in your cap. Then prioritize university, observatory (if poss), etc. in the cap. Run all the science specialists you can, but only science specialists. By modern age you can have 200+ beakers from your cap alone.

2. Make one or two production cities. Make sure there's enough food to get a decent pop (8-10) and then work as many hammer tiles as you can. Sometimes engie specialists will be better than working a tile.

3. All the rest of the cities are gold focused. Trading posts on every tile with maybe a farm or two depending on how many maritime CS you have. Build market+bank.

4. Build 4 warriors (upgraded to swords) and 2 catapults early in the game and then go to war and puppet as many cities as you can. Trading posts everywhere for the puppets. As the warring goes on, build/buy two more siege and two more melee units. If you don't lose any, 6 melee and 4 siege is enough for the entire game (though allying a militaristic CS for extra units is generally a good idea once you hit mid-game).

For social policies there are a number of ways to go, but some easy ones are: Tradition+Wonder policy+Piety=>Theocracy. Instead of (or in addition to if you get enough policies) you can run Patronage through the policy that gives you 33% science. That one is huge for your beakers. Hard to go wrong with either the Piety or the Patronage trees.

 

[dubrown]

I would guess that one reason is that you don't use the cities to their full capacity. In CiV specialist isn't that great compared to what they where in CivIV. Try in one game to just let the governor handle the citizen management, just control the focus yourself. In most cases you want production focus early on, even in capital, after I get university built in capital I switch it to a growth focus (default usually works) to get the city really growing, switching to production when needed.

In other cities it's all about the cities focus, production is never wrong but some cities just don't have enough production and then gold focus might be viable, or growth if it has a growth potential and you can buy the needed buildings to get it to a science stronghold.

So citizen management might be one problem, another might be tile improvements but without a screenshot or save it's hard to tell.

Social policies can affect the game quite alot as well, if you're struggling with happiness or economy, the right policy choice can switch things over to the better in just one turn.

 

[stryfe]

Building all the culture buildings can be a real drain on your funds if you aren't going for a culture victory.

 

[timtofly]

I would say do not puppet, but spend money on all the CS's you can. Then annex or build a couple cities for each new CS you "aquire". A puppet seems to give false hope to me. I suppose people are successful with puppets, and think that CS are overbalanced, but the patches have evened things out a little.

I look at CS as my trading partners and like to race the AI. Some people interact more with the AI and enjoy it. I never played III or IV, so never really got used to being "friendly" with the AI.

 

[CivMcNut]

I usually do pretty good on Prince level without building many wonders. If you start wonderspamming it doesn't leave a lot of time to build things like banks, universities and watermills that are quick to build, but help your game out a bunch. Some of the wonders in Civ 5 are pretty weak, and if you're not going for a certain type of win can actually hurt you because you could have built a lot of other more useful stuff in its place. One example would be building the Pyramids when you already have plenty of workers that can get stuff done.

 

[ChuckVader]

I've experienced running into financial problems later in the game as you describe. As you add more buildings to your cities and field more advanced units, your maintenance costs can eventually overtake your income. Some ways to mitigate this:

-Most of your cities should be gold-focused, ideally these are puppet cities (so won't add to your SP cost). These cities should be spammed with trading posts. The only limitation is that too many puppet cities will cause happiness issues.

-Delete any unnecessary units, particularly workers. I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but their maintenance costs increase in the later eras.

-Keep roads/railroads to the bare minimum needed to keep your cities connected. Use your workers to delete unnecessary roads. Build harbors in coastal cities for trade routes if the nearest city is more than 4 hexes away.

-Make sure you have trade routes established in all your cities, when possible.

-For happiness issues, Theocracy is the best SP overall, especially for large empires.

-trade resources whenever possible for additional income.

 

[metatheory]

So I've run through a couple of Civ V games now, playing as the Arabs, the Romans, the Indians, the Germans, the Egyptians, the French, the Japanese. I typically play on prince or king difficulty for the following reason: EVERY time I start out great, dominating the early game, getting some (or all, in Egypt's case) of the wonders, generally holding on to all my cities, etc.

Then, in the late Renaissance to Early Industrial age, it all comes to a SCREECHING halt. It's like my people just decide they don't want to build or research anymore. In the Rome game (ten cities or so), things lasted til the late Industrial/early Modern age before I was forced to build so many production enhancers just to keep my cities running that my economy collapsed. In the Egypt game (five cities), as soon as I hit the Renaissance I couldn't build wonders anymore; it was like my wonder modifiers just disappeared (I had the wonder SP and marble bonus too). German game (14 cities) my sprawling empire did fine until the early Industrial, when my economy got to be such a drain that I had to disband my entire army.

My point is, I don't think I'm making the same mistake every time. I specialize my cities, I make sure the cities use all the specialists they can. What am I doing wrong? Cuz every game so far has ended with my people sinking into a lazy stupor, slowly losing technological and cultural leads, or collapsing financially and militarily and being conquered, usually by the Chinese.

PS I'm running on a mac. Dunno if that's pertinent.

The comment about specialists is a good one. Only run the specialists you need.

Something I recently discovered (as obvious as it is..) was that I was a production junkie. I would throw my cities on production focus and forget about it. Bad idea. This means you will have less population to work tiles and eventually it led to slowing down my overall growth and ability to keep up with adding buildings/upkeep to my cities

After the initial production focus of the early game, say Medieval or Renassaince (sp) era, switch your major cities that you want to grow to Food focus and let them grow until happiness becomes a problem or they reach their ideal size (sometimes defined by you, sometimes by city location). What this does is give extra population to work gold tiles, in addition to extra hammers. Take a river location with a trading post for instance - 2 food, 2 gold. Put a citizen in there and he's self-sustaining while giving +2 gold per turn. And because you grew your population, you have more ability to assign citizens to net-profit tiles.

Hope this helps.

 

[mortcalavin]

I'm on a Mac so I don't know how to post saves but I'm playing a game as the Iroquois now. I have two workers, forests on 90% of my land and cottages on all of them, zero roads, six cities with markets in all of them, three focused on wealth (including the capital), the others unfocused.

And then we have the vast and powerful Egyptian empire with 19 cities (I'm not kidding), three of which are puppets. It doesn't even look like their cities are connected by roads for the most part, they have almost every wonder in the game, and they're about 5 techs ahead of me.

The only way I can hold off their legions of musketmen is by building 8 mohawk warriors who circle my countryside responding to threats (I'm pretty much surrounded on three sides by Egypt). 8 soldiers is by no means extravagant no? I mean Egypt can afford over 9000 of them.

What the hell is going on???

 

[dubrown]

It seems to me you might be overdoing the gold focus a bit. Gold focus in core cities shouldn't be needed most of the time. For these 6 cities and all those TPs you should be fairly wealthy. But how is your city growth? The thing is to find a balance that works. If you aim at a small empire, 6 cities is fairly small in my opinion, most of these cities needs to be able to grow large, else you'll most likely fall behind in tech very fast compared to a large empire.

For Iroquois forests are good and forests are almost always worth keeping for any civ so I will not argue with you for keeping alot of forest around, it's a good choice, but TPs on every one of them is to overdo it, you need production as well and lumber mills is one of the best improvements.

To find a way around your current situation you need to boost tech to atleast not fall more behind egypt, probably you need to grow your capital and a few more of your cities larger, make sure you have the available sciencebuilding in most/all of your six cities, only goldfocus if you need it, else focus growth as much as your happiness allows.

To swing the tide you'll likely need to take down egypt a bit, despite it's being larger and more technical advanced it should be possible to beat an AI in war. Declare and let it exhaust it's troops on your defenses, then strike at a few strategical positions, taking or razing the cities, if the initial strike is successful, chances are you'll be able to completely run over egypt (the AI isn't that bright at warfare.)

However, if your aim is culture or diplo you might be able to pull of a win without going after egypt so it's up to your goal for the game. Science might be hard without a war as you're already behind and if you can't swing that to your favour, egypt will be too far ahead of you.

 

[metatheory]

Post a screenshot of your empire if you can