Looking to take the next step

[pschulam]

Hi All,

I've been lurking around these forums for a while trying to pick up tips but I'm looking to start actively improving my game.

I've attached a save to this post and would really appreciate any general or specific advice that anyone can offer.

I would ask specific questions but right now I'm just wondering if any of you more experienced players see anything obvious that I'm doing wrong. I've been playing civ IV for a while but never seem to get any better, so I feel like I must be making some fundamental mistakes.

In particular, I could use feedback on:
- Am I improving tiles in the best possible way?
- Am I specializing cities effectively?
- What are some possible victory conditions that I should be considering at this stage in the game?
- Am I not utilizing aspects of the game that could help me to increase wealth, science, or production?

Thank you very much for any help.

--
Peter

 

[JBossch]

You might try posting some screen shots. The east coast is still at work. I will try to take a look tonight.

 

[pschulam]

Thanks JBossch.

I'm at work too, but I'll post some screenshots later tonight.

--
Peter

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I'm at work too, but I'll post some screenshots later tonight.

That will improve your audience quite a bit. You might also look in the Everyone's Guide for other suggestions (see link in my signature).

 

[peppe1]

Took some quick shots of the game for others to see:
http://img216.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=civ4screenshot0007.jpg

Not sure the difficulty is, but if you want to move up your tech path looks a little odd.

I'd probably say you are short on workers (7) for the distances between cities in your empire. You are very short on cities (a lot of space/unworked tiles all around). Most of your cities hadn't whipped in a while, and a very major problem is you have most of your cities running with 1-2 unhappy citizens. These guys eat 2 food and add nothing, so should be avoided/whipped at all cost.

Tile improvements don't look great, but would need to know what your plan is for each city. I saw a riverside plains farm with a second one being build, which is not great and double bad for a financial leader (a cottage riverside gets an instant +1 commerce). If you have to you might make one of those farms to spread irrigation when you get civil service, but don't think you are doing that.

Not related to your game, but for some reason my game didn't show any score section? I tried toggling it and it wouldn't show. I normally play with the BAT mod anyone know why the unmodded game would not show the score? (Have blue marble installed if that is related).

 

[pschulam]

Thanks for the feedback and screenshots peppe1.

What in particular do you think is odd about the tech path? If it helps make any sense of whatever strange decisions I made I was trying to get to calendar as soon as possible given the three silks next to my capital and the two dyes to the southwest of the capital. I've been doing some reading though and it seems like it's generally not a good idea to beeline towards calendar. Is this the case? If so, why?

I'll try to up the worker count as soon as possible. In regards to the city spacing, is it best to try and have all of your cities' BFC interlock or "bump" together? I always did this in Civ III but from reading up in the forums it's best to stay away from building cities close together just for the sake of minimizing unworked space in between. I understand the concept of expanding outwards quickly to seal off pieces off the continent but backfilling isn't entirely clear to me. Should I be filling in as much of my land as possible with cities in order to work everything possible? Wouldn't this result in a few cities that could be relatively weak?

For the cities:

C Nidaros: I wanted to make this city into a heavy commerce city given the abundance of food and riverside tiles along with 2 sources of silk in the BFC. I tried counting the food in order to improve the minimal number of tiles with farms and my plan is to fill the rest with cottages. Is this a sound plan?

Uppsala: My plan was to make this primary production city since it has the hills along with some plains that I could place workshops on. The workshops would be supported by farmed flood plains. I can see how the farmed floodplains are a waste though and on second thought this seems like it could be a decent commerce/science city.

Nidaros (coastal): This was also going to be a production city given the hills and copper. The food would be supplied by crabs and improved riverside grassland. Ideally I would have placed it closer to the river for the health benefits to counteract the effects of a forge but I thought I needed the crabs to supply enough food to grow to a decent size. Was the right move? Or should I have prioritized the river?

Malibu: My initial intentions were to make this yet another production city but after looking at it again I'm not quite sure what I would do with this city. Do you guys have any suggestions?

Haithabu: Finally, I was going to develop this city into my GP farm given the abundance of grassland and 4 food resources. This city was one of the primary reasons that I wanted to make it to calendar so quickly. I wanted to tap the 2 sugars and bananas. I was planning on focusing on GS.

Thanks again for all of the help so far everyone. I really appreciate it.

 

[peppe1]

There will be a lot of opinions on city placement/overlap. It will depend a lot on how you plan to win. I like to improve every tile in my cultural boundaries and overlap enough so they all get worked assuming around size 10 cities.

There are 20 tiles in your cross that you can work, but in order get 20 citizens in a city you often need lots of health and food bonuses that aren't unlocked until late in the game. So realistically a large early city isn't going to work even half its land, so lots of overlap is fine.

You have a large stack of units in your capital. You could stop settling your land and start taking 'theirs'. Or back fill ie: settle the land you stretched over when blocking in your early expansion. Usually I prioritize overlap on grassland tiles, which make a good home for a cottages that give more commerce the longer they are worked. I try to settle on the city itself on the poorer food tiles if possible (the city center becomes +2 food no matter what).

C Nidaros: As with most capitals is going to be a good bureaucratic capital (take advantage of the +50% base commerce). I would drop a city in just south of it and have that city work the cottages and slowly give back the tiles as the capital gains pop and can work them itself. The earlier you can grow cottages into towns the better. I didn't count the food, but i think with the corn and a couple farms it will eventually have enough to grow to 20 and work every tile.

Instead of calendar b-line your capital will benefit greatly from getting civil service to run bureaucracy early. I usually unlock the calendar/monarchy resources after civil service. With that and all the food/mine resources online you should be in good shape.

Uppsala: Is good city. Flood plains usually go to cottages/commerce, but the map gets a little food poor up there. I'd probably just make it a hybrid city and use cottages since it has gold as well. The 4 flood plain farms would let you work 4 mines, but 4 flood plains cottages will let you work two mines or 4 plains tiles. I'd probably go for working plains cottages most of the time and switch to mines when something needs to get built. Workshops could eventually fill in some spare squares, but they require a few techs to really be good. This is where it might be good to have an overlap city to the west to share the mines when they aren't needed.

Nidaros (coastal): Placement is good. I'd probably go one to the east, so it works less ocean. Unless it will be your Moiri statues city as well. Also notice for financial all sea tiles give you +3 commerce, so they can do a lot of commerce (so you might cram the coast line a little denser than normal). River health bonus is not a big deal since the city is coastal and will get the harbor health bonus.

Malibu: Its a good spot. Pigs and grassland means it can do anything you need. More cottages or can work a lot of workshops + hills + grassland hills. I'd probably settle a commerce city to the west of it and let that city take the gold mine and go full production here.

Haithabu: Good GP farm. I'd chain in farms from the river just northwest (another reason to get civil service early) and farm away (you may need to farm a plains to get that wheat irrigated). I love to run caste system and in that civic this city should do exactly what you planned easily.

If this is a standard size map 5 cities is short of the 6 needed for the national wonders.

The goal is to maximize the output of the land you have, and have each city working only improved tiles or specialists.

 

[Nials]

I had a look at your save. I'm a Prince level player, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

The biggest problem I see is the number of cities. 5 by 775 AD is far too little. You should probably have at least twice as many by this point. As a result, your tech rate is very low. 72 at 60% slider, running a surplus.

The amount of workers seems okay, perhaps consider adding a few. You're building one in Haithabu, so that's good.

You have unconnected resources in your territory, which is a big no-no. Malibu's gold mine is unimproved, which means it's missing out on a lot of commerce. Similarly, the silk near Nidaros needs an improvement, but you're working on that. There's also an unimproved/unconnected sheep, but that's less of an issue.

With a few trades, you can eliminate your happiness problems. I traded Kublai sugar for gems. After the second silk is hooked up, you can trade him that for dye and you won't have unhappiness any longer. Also consider trading techs. Monty and Kublai are both willing to trade and you could easily snatch Monarchy, Archery, Monotheism and some gold.

C Nidaros is indeed a fine commerce center. It can run a lot of cottages, some riverside to boot. You don't need any extra farms here save the corn one.

Haithabu looks like a nice GP farm indeed. Run two scientists here immediately and use the GS to build an Academy in Nidaros. Once you have Civil Service, chaining irrigation to it will be easy thanks to the nearby river.

I'd consider adding another city 1SE of the copper. It can share the corn with C Nidaros and that will also give you access to dye. Possibly also one 1S of the sheep to work that and the fish. It will have a lot of overlap with C Nidaros but will be able to work a few cottages and should pay for itself.

I think I would rather have settled Nidaros 1E of its current position. By doing so, you lose nothing but ocean tiles which are junk and generally not worth working anyway. In return, you gain 1 grassland, 1 plains and a bit of overlap with Uppsala which shouldn't be a problem.

Napoleon is your nearest neighbour and he doesn't like you because of your close borders. You have a decently sized army but you're missing catapults. I'd consider teching construction next, bringing some siege online and taking him out. You really need more land.

Be sure to let us know how the game works out for you

EDIT: peppe1 posted while I was typing. Quite a bit of overlapping advice

 

[pschulam]

Great! Thanks a lot for the help guys.

I'll play through a few more turns taking all of this into consideration.

I'll post back tomorrow to update.

Thanks again.

 

[pschulam]

So I've played enough turns to settle 4 more cities and start a war with Napoleon.

Settling those cities to utilize some of that untouched land within my cultural borders was absolutely key. I was making a huge mistake by building my cities so far apart (or at least not backfilling once I defined my borders).

So, the lesson of the game so far is to maximize the land within your borders by settling enough cities so that most of the land is worked by citizens. I'm not sure why I wasn't doing this earlier. It makes perfect sense in retrospect... the more tiles being worked the more commerce, food, and hammers you will make. I think I was too focused on creating a smaller amount of cities that were guaranteed to be powerhouses and neglecting the fact that smaller cities can and should be founded to work some of those stretches of land in between the major cities.

More to come later.

 

[peppe1]

When you start a new game you may look at playing with the BUG mod (Unaltered gameplay, just interface changes) can also be useful when you start looking more at details of the game and planning city spots (it has a built in dot mapping layer/tool). http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=268.

It adds a ton of useful interface, tweaks my favorites: dot mapping, great general/person detail bars (what kind, when, where), specialist assignment, whip countdown and overflow hints, happy/health warnings a turn ahead of time, trades available, replaces the trade section of the city screen with an additional filter for Food (helps plan what improvements you make), a whole new scoreboard that gives most of the information you have to dig for in demographics/foreign adviser and on and on....

It saves me a ton of time when playing, so i can get more games in.

 

[Adria]

When you start a new game you may look at playing with the BUG mod (Unaltered gameplay, just interface changes) can also be useful when you start looking more at details of the game and planning city spots (it has a built in dot mapping layer/tool). http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=268.

It adds a ton of useful interface, tweaks my favorites: dot mapping, great general/person detail bars (what kind, when, where), specialist assignment, whip countdown and overflow hints, happy/health warnings a turn ahead of time, trades available, replaces the trade section of the city screen with an additional filter for Food (helps plan what improvements you make), a whole new scoreboard that gives most of the information you have to dig for in demographics/foreign adviser and on and on....

It saves me a ton of time when playing, so i can get more games in.

Sold.

I've been thinking about downloading the BUG model for a while, if only for the dot maps (I hate having to mentally redraw my city maps every time a settler pops). I've seen some of the other features in screenshots too, and some look quite useful. I hadn't noticed the food bit in the city screen though, and that could be really helpful. I can definitely see the mod reducing play time as it would make the "what was I doingwith this tile/city/unit again?" thought process shorter.

I think I know what I'm doing when I get home from work tonight. Then I just have to get everyone else I play with to download it so their turns quicken up too...