Newbie questions, anyone have time?

[eobet]

Hi!

I have a few specific questions regarding my experience with this game, which I wonder if anyone has time to answer:

1. After around 100-200 turns stronger barbarians always seem to start invading. The only way I've found to counter this is to research bronze, and found a city near a bronze resource. However, that city will then always be very small and slow to produce, and that city has to feed my entire empire with army... how can I avoid this bottleneck?

2. After around 100-200 turns, my cities begin to get large enough (even though I try to control it) to accumulate unhealthy points and unhappy points. Yet, the only early building I've seen to boost health is aqueduct and worse, I've seen zero early buildings to boost happiness. What am I missing?

3. As you see, both of these events above happen at the same time, and completely cripples me forcing to start over. Is there only one strategy to survive early on? If not, what strategies are there?

 

[Nescitus]

1) You can use either bronze-bazed units or horse-based chariots - basically, until barbarians get axemen, anything, including lowly archers, will do. Beside that, You don't have to produce all the units in one city, if You conect it with the other cities (via roads and rivers).

2) Possibly You are not expanding fast enough (when You build settlers/workers, Your cities don't grow, since food is counted towards unit completion). Beside that, it might be useful to learn the noble art of whipping. It is available when You run a Slavery civic and is a great way to get rid of useless, angry citizens, turning them into something much more needed (like those missing units). Beside that, find an article about health and happiness resources.

3) The best way to survive is to build a strong empire - 6 to 8 connected cities, 10+ workers improving their tiles, possession of important resources. remember, barbarians don't appear within Your borders

 

[snepp]

1a. Fog busting - a handful of warriors fortified on hill/forests outside of your lands will significantly reduce the quantify of barbs you'll see, as barbs will not spawn in tiles that are seen.

1b. After you settle a city by the copper, you need to connect it with a road, this will give every connected city access to the copper.

1c. Farms will help the city grow to a decent size and allow it to work enough tiles to be a good producer.

2a. Happiness resources, gold, silver, ivory, etc will increase the max happy. Once you have them there are building that increases the happiness they give.

2b. Having a state religion and a temple can provide a couple of happy.

2c. There is a button in the city screen that will stop the city from growing, if you're at your maximum allowed happy don't let it grow.

2d. Slavery is great, when you get up to the happy cap sacrifice a couple of your population to build something faster.

2e. The civic hereditary rule gives you extra happy from military units in the city.

3. There are about 5 bagillion strategies. The War Academy is loaded with excellent articles.
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/

 

[snepp]

Also, following guide is highly recommended.

Sisiutil's Strategy Guide for Beginners

 

[xenex]

1)Bronze or Horse should be a priority.
You should always settle cities where they can feed the tiles your working, that means trying to settle your bronze city where bronze and food are in its area.Just because the city has bronze in its Big Fat Cross (workable area around each city) does not mean that you have to build soldiers in that city.You should build sodliers in whichever city has the hammers to build them quickly enough.It sounds like you are neglecting road network, in order for another city to be able to build units that need bronze, you have to connect that city to the bronze, you usually do that by building a road to them.

Techwise you want to go for food techs first, this mean agriculture/fishing/hunting/Animal husbandry. depending on what you have around your city your order will change, but in most cases you want agriculture and then animal husbandry.Animal husbandry is a great choice if you have any pig/cow/sheep around because it also lets you see where horses are.

After food you want hammers, that means mining/bronze working/iron working , you want mining to mine the hills around your city, BW to chop forests and mine copper and iron working to get rid of jungle for workable land under the jungle and to be able to mine iron.Usually you will only go as far as BW in the beggining of the game, depending on if you lots of jungle around (which increases unhealthiness) or neither horse or bronze has popped up, or you need/want swordman to attack.

Then you want pottery for cottages and/or writing for libraries.There isn't much to explain here.

Unhealthines isn't that big of a deal unhappiness however you want to avoid if you can.
Ways to reduce unhealthy are Granary, it gives you one unhealthy point for each of a few different food, I think wheat,corn and rice that is connected to your city.

Resources Wheat,corn and rice themself also give you one healthy point but only if they are connected to your city, here again it sounds like you are neglecting your roads, you should connect the resources to your cities.
For each different health resource you get you get one healthy point ( and also more with different buildings) so you should trade your multiple healthy resources for other healthy resources that you do not have.Life extra weath for fish or clam.

For happiness its again mostly down to resources , things like gold, fur, incense dye etc, but again they only provide the bonus if they are connected to your city.

3) the stragety early on and for troughout the game is to play the map.

Could you please post a few picture of your game, that way people can help you better.

 

[eobet]

Thank you for all your tips!

I elected start a new game and chop down forests instead of going into slavery, seems to work great!

I also managed a great wall, and related to that is a new question:

4. Stone is within my capital's cultural influence, but not within resource harvesting grasp. However, stone is within resource harvesting grasp of my neighboring city, and I also have a quarry on that stone. Both cities received the stone bonus when building their respective wonders, but only the capital, which does not harvest from the quarry, currently has a stone indicator on the right side of the city screen. Why?

5. A pasture with pigs has a text saying "Pig, +1 health, Requires Route". It is on a tile adjacent to a city. What does "requires route" mean? I see no +1 health bonus from the pigs in that city...

 

[xenex]

Be advised that slavery is the best hammer producer in the early game.Not using slavery might not be wise.Population grows back pretty quickly when cities are still new, forest dont grow back at even close a rate to population.

Are you sure the cities got the stone bonus?If they got the bonus stone should also show up on the right side of the city screen.

Any city that is connected to the resource, as in by a road,river or coast will be able to take advantage of that resource.So the capitol most likely had a road that goes from the stone to the capitol.

Requires route is exactly what I was talking about in my previous post, once you have the appropiate improvement on the pig, you will get more food from it, however to get the extra bonus, in this case 1 healthy you need to connect the pig to a city.

 

[eobet]

Here is an image where I try to clarify my questions:

 

[Norvin_Green]

The stone is connected to your capital via the 2 lakes and small river.

 

[eobet]

Ah, so it's enough that a river is within a city's cultural borders?

Why doesn't the stone resource show up in the original city which actually has the quarry, though?

 

[Sian]

thats because the two cities aren't connected with Trade Routes, which is roads, rivers and/or Lakes/Coasts (depending on if you've researched Sailing or not it includes Coasts/Rivers/Lakes outside your Culture

 

[tempuraki]

Simply connecting the cities is not gonna do it for the big. You need to build road on top of the resources, unless the resource is next to river, like the stone is in your case. having them in the radius does not mean they are hooked up.

 

[eobet]

Ok, still doesn't answer why the city with the quarry doesn't get stone itself.

Also, is there any benefit to getting two cities with the same resource, like bronze? Or is one city all connected enough?

 

[xenex]

Just being in the cities radius isnt enough, being in the city's raduis only gives you the extra yields (extra hammers) from the quarry, to get the stone itself you need to get a road going from the city to the stone.

The same thing with the pig, you need to get a road from your city to the pig.


BTW Trade Routes and normal routes or better said roads, are not the same thing, while in many cases a trade route uses a road/river etc.Trade routes are for commerce between cities in basic english its what profits the cities get for being able to trade with eachother, but not that they actually do that.

While roads linked to resources provide benefit to the city it is linked to.By being able to build certain units, getting bonus from certain resources etc.

 

[eobet]

Thanks for that! Weird that the quarry doesn't say "requires route"... is that because it's connected to a river already? (I don't have sailing researched, though.)

Also, I've read through that newbie guide posted earlier, and it doesn't seem to say if there is any immediate benefit to having more than one of, for example, bronze, other than blocking them off from other nations. It does seem that the game keeps track of the amount of resources though (for example, it says stone: 1 on my main city).

 

[xenex]

The quarry doesn't say that because it doesn't give the city any benefit, so no happiness or healthy, even though it gives wonders bonus, I assume its a bit of an oversight on the part of the creators, but then again, pigs say require route ( next to the healhy icon) because to get the healthy icon you need the road.

They would need to add require route on a new line, but maybe theyr assuming, the wonders already state that so they dont need to add it to the resource too, again oversight I think.


Oh sorry I thought I answered the other question too earlier.There is no immediate benefit to having multiple resources.However corporations do give more bonus the more of a resource you have but that is late game stuff.Having multiple resources also means you can trade your extras to the other civs for different resources, say you trade cow to civ A for pig, civ B for fish Civ C for rice, if you didn't have any of those 3 resources already, you just got 3 healthiness points for them.

More importantly is that there is no disadvantage to having more then one, so if you can settler a good city, which only gives you resources you already have you can/should still do that, land is power in this game.So as long as the city helps your empire you should settle it.

 

[Norvin_Green]

I think part of the reason the "extra" resources get listed that way to make trading easier.

 

[eobet]

Having multiple resources also means you can trade your extras to the other civs for different resources, say you trade cow to civ A for pig, civ B for fish Civ C for rice, if you didn't have any of those 3 resources already, you just got 3 healthiness points for them.

Sorry, I just want to clarify... are you talking about multiple different resources or multiples of the same? That is, if I have only one bronze, will I trade away all my bronze if I strike a deal with another nation? (ie. do I need two bronze resources in order to be able to trade one of them?)

 

[xenex]

I was talking about multiple of the same. so 1 cow for civ A, 1 cow for civ B,1 for civ C.

And no, you can decided how many you will trade away when you start the trade proposal.Its not adviced to trade more then one at the same time, not even sure if its possble.

Edit: in most cases you dont want to give the other civs strategic resources, like bronze,metal,horse, stone etc, mostly the military resources, because they could end up using it against you.

 

[eobet]

Thanks!

The civilopedia doesn't say anything about being able to use Settlers to increase the population in an already established city (perhaps this was a trick unique to Alpha Centari, though)...

...what are some other tricks to quickly increase population growth? I wanted fur, which was only enabled in an area with quite a lot of tundra, so I can't even build farms... 66 turns just to grow to size 2... if the city expands, there's deer, but it's 270 turns for a library, and only one square of forest close which I don't think yields enough production to make a difference...

I'm going to see what will happen if I connect trade routes to it, though.