Need some advice

[reason]

Hey guys, I've started playing Civ 2 or 3 months ago. I've already passed through Prince and King and I'm starting to play Emperor. I have some doubts and I hope you guys can help me.

- I realize that many times my cities have problems with food / production in late game, ie, they don't scale well... for example, they can't grow over 22-25 pop, they don't have as much production as I wish they had... Perhaps this is due to bad placement? What do you guys look for when settling up a city? I usually choose a place with some hills, preferably mountain and / or river, luxuries and resources.

- How can I get better science? I've read here people saying they had science victories under turn 200 and that doesn't seem possible to me. My science victories were always t300+.

- I've heard MadDjinn say that Ethiopia is actually better wide than tall, and I've read here somewhere that Ghandi is better wide too. Can someone explain why?

Thanks!

 

[Deau]

I don't recall any sub T200 victories other than domination or ICS+sacred sites broken strategy.

Best SV on non crooked start, I believe, was Glory7's T219 SV as Ethiopia.

The 5% tech increase per city has killed sub T200 victories like the GnK one posted by Tommynt.

Anyway onwards to help.

Difficulty level has a big impact on your targeted optimal turn-to-victory. On deity, you can benefit from RAs to make sub T250 consistent on "good" starts. Even just Immortal doesn't provide that extra opportunity for peaceful so you need huge cities, mostly observatory cities and other good RNG measures to consistently beat T250 on immortal.

Aim to beat T275 SVs on emperor before moving up and then shoot for T250 on immortal. These are much more reasonable targets to achieve.

End game pop is mostly about early game location AND early game growth. These comes from improving tiles earlier, not locking hammer tiles or very few to keep up the fast growth. Locking tiles earlier is harder on lower difficulties where you can't steal multiple workers early. So is reach Civil Services earlier as you lack BPT from trade routes.

So anyway long story short, everything compounds. On lower difficulties where early game wonders are manageable and you can delay expansion slightly, you can always consider ToA+HG before expanding cities 2-4 to get a huge empire (ToA is extremely potent).


As for why Ethiopia is better wide than tall. This is debatable. It's simply a matter that their UB provides you with a secure religion and thus picks like pagodas+mosques or pagodas+(temples +2 happiness) to significantly help offset the happiness difficulties from going wide.

Similarly, Ghandi's UA breaks even once a city reaches pop 6 and then is significantly good as cities grow more. As wide empire doesn't mean mass puppets of size 4-8 anymore but actually means mass annexed empire with cities ranging pop 12-20 in the med-late game, Ghandi's UA is probably the most powerful happiness management available for going wide. Sadly, it is too brutal a happiness cost to actually found a wide empire. It needs to be a warmonger based wide empire. Otherwise you will just be extremely crippled in the early game.


Finally, the tools to significantly cut your turn-to-victory, are to reallocate as many specialists as possible and to "build research" 8 turns before mass-bulbing in the late game to plow through the entire tree. To ignore wonders that aren't significantly contributing to your VC and to manage great writer bulbs in early renaissance and shortly after getting first ideology to both plow through rationalism and get the +25% scince from factories asap.