Noble => Prince

Some small mistakes:

- you forgot to road the cow. Luckily the river will connect your cities
- food bar in capital indicates that you forgot to work forested plains hill for that one turn
- your warriors are not well placed and your worker could be attacked from two different locations

Spoiler :



Better locations to fogbust would be for example the ones marked x. A panther or a wolf could capture your worker from tiles labeled "panther?"

No worries, these mistakes are rather small and won't prevent you from winning this game. ;)




I suppose you are going to settle on that jungle as I suggested earlier.

Research: Pottery. You want to lay down some cottages on those floodplains.

Capital: Worker. Since we went for early Bronze working, we should chop some forests to speed up early development. You want many cities as fast as possible.

2nd city: Warrior. You want to grow to size 2 asap since there are 2 decent tiles (rice+horse).

Warriors: Keep one exploring the south (don't go too far though!) and send another one to check what is on the coast north of capital. You want to settle there to share the clams.

Worker 1: Improve rice first (no need to road), then horse, then road horse.

I think you should switch to slavery and whip in capital as soon as it is available (should be in 3 turns). This gets worker out 3 turns earlier which is great.

Worker 2: Move to a forest and chop. Then you should start building a warrior to grow. But when the chop is done, you must switch to a settler! Otherwise the chop is more or less wasted. Next turn switch back to warrior to resume growth. Move worker to another forest and chop.

Oh and one more thing you should be getting used to: your slider should nearly always be set either to 0% or 100%. After you settle your 2nd city, you start losing gold at 100%, so you should set it to 0% for one turn.

There is a lot to handle so don't worry if you forget something. I suggest that in that case you re-load and play it again, since this is a training game after all. It's your game though so do as you please.

Post when pottery is done.
 
Post when pottery is done.
Here it is..I think i missed something in my capital :(
No thoughts about the game with Russia?
 

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  • Saladin BC-2160.CivBeyondSwordSave
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A few notes on your Cathy game. I think some of these issues Sampsa will help you with in your Sal game, but take note:

1) You are expanding far to slowly. Your first city should be up around 3000BC or not long after. Your first city was settled in 1800BC.

By this point in your game, you should have more cities one way or another. Look for opportunities to fight early.

2) You still expand to far away. Your 3rd city settled in 800BC (again, far too late) is way way to the West. Instead get a nice compact empire up quickly and then go capture cities.

3) The area around St. Pete could be at least 2 cities. Gold is a very valuable thing to work early. My first priority would be to get a city next to that gold W of Moscow asap. Gold/Pigs would have been a great first city, with Gold providing early commerce to boost tech immensely. A city to the North with rice could be settled later.

4) You still find yourself in the rut of just building buildings. Read volron_mi's thread in this forum which is next to your thread for some insight

5) Why a Buddhist Stupa in St. Pete? What are you trying to do

6) That sheep/iron city is building a Courthouse? Why? Where's your granary? Why not improve the sheep?

7) I ask again, are you automating workers

8) Some of your cities are not growing when they can grow

9) You are running Spies in many of your cities. Granted the game tends to do that automatically. HOwever, what this tells me is that you are not analyzing your cities frequently and make sure they are working the best tiles, or the best specialists

10) You are settling your great people. This is not always bad if you know how to play a that type of economy, but I'd rather you focus more now on how to best use great people. Bulbing strategies for Great Scientists. Trade missions for Great Merchants. Golden Ages.

11) Pacifism not doing you much good right now as you are not really using specialists

12) Moscow has an unimproved seafood tile

13) Note places in the area that could spawn barbs. Barbs are not a huge problem on Pangaea as land fills up quickly. Early on you need to spawnbust as Sampsa has shown you but eventually they become irrelevant. However, you have a bit of fogged area just E of Moscow that is producing barbs. That area should have been scouted anyway for potential seafood and city placements, but don't just leave that are open to barb spawn - both units and galleys. A warrior could have been stationed over there if not a city.

14) You have some islands down SW that are likely producing the occasional barb galley that likely is eating your seafood. You can produce a trireme at some point to help protect seafood, or send a unit to sit on the island down there. Maybe it is even worth settling that island at some point anyway, especially with Great Lighthouse (which, by the way, is not usually a very strong wonder on Pangaea maps and can probably be ignored)

15) Mids is the only good wonder here. Great Wall is really not necessary and messes up your Great People gene pool - you really don't want Great Spies. With stone though, you use the Great Wall for fail gold, putting a turn into it now and then after completing a build so some OF hammers go into - do this only after stone is hooked up to get boosted hammers. AIs tend to build Great Wall fairly quickly even on lower levels, so it makes a good wonder for fail gold if you have stone.

16) The Great Library is a good wonder, but I don't think you had marble so that was quite an investment. All those hammers into wonders and useless buildings could have been used to build a good army to go stomping, or building wealth to tech up to a good military tech..again, to go stomping.

17) I don't believe you are using the whip much at all. Try to focus on that in your Sal game with Sampsa's help. It's a very important concept

18) Lastly, I see no focus in this game. What is your plan here?

Otherwise, you have teched ok compared to the AIs, but you are not using any advantages in that regard. Also, your timings on tech are still rather slow in the bigger scheme of things
 
Allright.
I read volron_mi's thread and i will not build useless buildings.
I will try to expand faster.
I will try to use Slavery more.
I will think twice before ending a turn.
I will have a fixed plan from the start of the game.
I will do my best to finish a game on Prince ( I did one with Asoka/Conquest,but it was on Duel...=>useless.) in parallel with the one with Saladin.

I started ANOTHER game with Catherine and i settled how fast and compact i could.(I know Rostov it's too far :()
I plan a conquest victory with the Cossacks.
It's ok now or it's a fail again?


I am waiting for advice about the next turns with Saladin :)
 

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StefanCelMare said:
I will have a fixed plan from the start of the game.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but your plan needs to be flexible according to what the map gives you. Your plan should take shape as soon as you've explored the immediate area around your capital.

If you do want to have a fixed plan from the time when you load the game initially you'll probably have to regenerate the map until you find a suitable start (which isn't bad, I almost always regenerate the map to get a decent, as opposed to horrible, start.
 
Update for Cathy game :
I am ahead in technology..
I researched Civil Service.
I researched Metal Casting after I built the Oracle.
After that,i bulbed Machinery with my Great Engineer.
I stopped building useless buildings and started building wealth.
I run the slider at 100% after the whole game i had it 0% or 100%.
I have 240 hammers from chopping in Moscow...What should i do with them?
The only problem is that 2 cities don't have enough food..
Should I prepare an army of Macemans or wait until Cossacks?
Thanks ! Still waiting for Saladin tips :)
 

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Here it is..I think i missed something in my capital :(

I would suggest that you re-play it from an earlier save. Maybe my instructions were not clear enough. You can see that your capital is size 1 slow-building a settler but you have two improved tiles that you want to work. This indicates that it could be done better.

After the worker is done, put 1 turn into settler to insure that overflow hammers go into that. Next turn, switch to warrior to be able to grow. When the chop comes in, switch to settler so that the chop goes into that. Next turn switch to warrior again. If warrior is done start another warrior. Don't fortify that warrior to the capital, but scout north by the coast.

2nd city is well managed. You are moving your warriors too far away. Remember that the idea is to find your next city spot, not scout beyond the enemy borders.
 
I repaired my mistakes.
I built the road on cows and I put the overflow and two chops in the settler.+now the capital is size two.
 

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  • Saladin BC-2080.CivBeyondSwordSave
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Good job! Fishing is a fine choice for tech, too.

You see that we are close to turn 50. This is what your empire should look like by that, 3rd city already settled or settled very soon. I haven't looked closely at your other games, but from comments of lymond I gather that you don't expand fast enough. The early game is all about expansion. Settlers, workers, some warriors for protection.

I suggest that you settle here:
Spoiler :


The reason for this is that you have so much food in the capital that you can't use it all. Another reason to settle very close to the capital is to work cottages and give them to the capital later. You do know how to switch tiles between cities, right?




Keep scouting with the warriors, and protect your settler. Try to locate 4th city spot.

Worker in capital: Chop a forest and put it into a work boat. Then start cottaging floodplain.

Worker in Medina: Road horse. Head back to capital help cottaging the floodplain. Not the one that is farmed. :)

Capital: After settler, start a work boat. Take warrior off the queue. After work boat a 2nd work boat.

Medina: After warrior, start a settler.

3rd city: start warrior. Work floodplain.

Tech: After fishing, start writing. Set slider to 0% until you can finish writing with 100% slider.

Post in 10 turns or earlier if you don't know what to do. :)
 
Here is the save.
I didn't really find a good city spot...The Cows+Corn one is too far.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I started a game on Pangaea,Prince,with Pericles.
This time I am sure that I'll win.
I am good at technology.
I have about 9 cities ( 5 settled by myself,4 captured from Joao II)
I have Joao as vassal (2 cities)after he capitulated.(I burned about 2-3 cities).
What do you think ?
 

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I'll let Sampsa take care of your Sal game, although I would comment that you probably should have those warriors place in spawnbust position. City 2's warrior would does not need to be in the city but rather out in the wilds spawnbusting..maybe directly west.

Pericles:

It's nice that you did some fighting and took some of Portugual. Vassalizing him at this point seems pointless. He's not of much count now. I might have kept the Dyes city simply for the resources, and although slow growing would be a decent commerce city.

1) The main issue I still see here is that you are not playing to win. You are teching Drama - pointless. There are no goals here. I see no effort to win this game by your actions, builds and tech.

2) Ask yourself when you should be trading for gold. Plenty of gold out there are techs like Currency that are more than worth trading. Currency is a definitely a reasonable thing to trade when the time is right as it gives AIs more trade routes, which gives you more trade routes.

3) Speaking of which, you have no foreign trade routes. Foreign trade routes are more valuable than domestic and should be setup one way or another (land/sea) as soon as you can. You have no land routes do to no roads to the AIs and coastal trade routes seem to be blocked due to fog and barb cities. A scout wb early is a good way to open these paths via sea, you can just set it to auto-explore.

4) You are still not managing your cities, tiles and specialists. You have spies running in cities..bad. You are not focusing certain cities on running scientists to produce Great Scientists for bulbing. With great artist you can run a golden age and pump out great people.

5) Again, not sure Great Library is worth it at this point without marble unless you can chop it out fast, which should have happened long ago. To give perspective, this game is rather late. It's only due to being Prince level that the AIs are behind.

6) Worker management: We need to get you to break the habit of building useless cottages all over the place. Start to make decisions about what cities are good commerce cities for cottages and what are not. Start asking yourself what your workers should be doing, what are the best improvements, could they be chopping forest in some cities and getting them in better shape. It is too early to create stacks of workers focused on one areas. All your cities need worker and the workers should be dispersed appropriately, and you probably need more workers. Workers are an easy 2 pop whip especially in some of your large cities working unimproved tiles.

7) You appeared to ignore my advice on Great Generals. Again, consider a super medic and holding onto additional GGs for healing armies while at war via promotions.

8) Start to think about city specialization

9) At this point, and really much earlier than now, you should be thinking about the war machine - unless you were considering some other specific victory type. Teching, building and everything toward conquest and getting more land.

10) Lisbon's first priority should have been work boats, and protection for those work boats

11) You are still leaving swaths of land that can generate barbs near your borders
 
Currency is a definitely a reasonable thing to trade when the time is right as it gives AIs more trade routes, which gives you more trade routes.

You want to have Currency and no AI to have it actually (in perfect game)- you get 2 trade routes/city, Ai gets just 1. You get chance to trade for gold, Ai can't trade with other AI for gold :)
 
You want to have Currency and no AI to have it actually (in perfect game)- you get 2 trade routes/city, Ai gets just 1. You get chance to trade for gold, Ai can't trade with other AI for gold :)

Not true actually...it's all about opportunity cost. On lower levels maybe there is an argument in your case, but it depends on what you are trying to do. If I'm playing a Space game on lower levels, I do anything I can to boost the overall tech pace. More trade routes for AI means better teching and same with more gold.

Having more trade routes is nice if you are actually getting foreign trade routes. AI's might not have enough trade routes to give you those foreign trade routes, or more specifically - more foreign trade routes.

Now, you might hold on to a Currency monopoly for a while if you have one. On higher levels it's doubtful you will have it for long, so get the most out of it as you can. Same for other techs. Acute analysis of AI teching/gold on a turn by turn basis will help make the right decisions.

Probably one of the biggest fallacies in the game, held by a lot players, is that it is important to keep AIs' backward
 
Stefan, game is going well. Let's look at where you could place your next cities. The purpose of this game is not me telling you what to do, but you should try to learn how to think in this game.



South:

Spoiler :




I'm going through all marked sites and weighing pros and cons. "+" means a good thing and "-" means bad. Eventually such thinking will become automatic for you too.

Site 1:

  • + close to capital
  • + has a strong food resource
  • + placed on a plains hill for extra :hammers:
  • - can't work food before border pop (a very bad thing)
  • - food is seafood, thus need to spend 30:hammers: on a boat
  • - no other good tiles

All in all, rather marginal spot at this point. Still, you should learn to settle all food resources eventually! These cities will pay themselves back much faster than you probably realize. I think this is due to the "slider trap" that we all fall into when learning the game. More cities is good and the position of the slider is unimportant.



Site 2:

  • + has a good food resource (5:food: because it's wet rice)
  • + has strong commerce tiles and claims a happiness resource
  • + has many decent tiles (grassland river)
  • - requires iron working to be worth anything
  • - requires a ton of worker turns

At this point, simply not a good spot. Will be very good in the future. I don't think that it's necessary to rush to settle this spot. It's not a disaster if Genghis settles there, as he will likely be our first war target.



Site 3:

very similar to site 1, just further away and not on a plains hill. Has eventually more decent tiles (grass hills). Not a good spot at this point.




North:

Spoiler :






Site 4:

  • + food on 1st ring
  • + access to two other good tiles (flood plains) without border pop
  • - requires a work boat
  • - close to tundra where a lot of barbs spawn

It's a good spot and probably where you should place your next city.



Site 5:

  • + food on 1st ring
  • + on a plains hill
  • + forests to chop into :hammers:
  • - food is dry rice, weakest possible food resource giving only 4:food:
  • - only two tiles worth working even after border pop.

You could also make a case for settling for example 1N or 1NE to put cow on the 1st ring. A decent city, but nothing great.

These sites are a bit far like you note, but I think they are better than the ones in the south. Your 2nd and 3rd cities should very rarely be this far from capital though.

You probably realize now that every coastal tile within a reasonable distance should be uncovered so that you know best where to settle.




I hope that wasn't too heavy, but it goes to show how much there is to this game. Your empire is in fine shape, but as lymond pointed out, we are not fogbusting adjacent areas since we have only 3 warriors. We have only 3 warriors since we put so many :hammers: into work boats. Did I already mention how I dislike starts with seafood? :) Lets try to fix the safety issues asap.


Tech: put slider to the minimum amount that will finish writing. I think it will be 10%. Next tech alphabet, but switch to 0% until the end of the turn set. We want to gather some :gold: before turning back to 100%. This is almost always a good idea right after writing and you should wait until you've built a library before turning tech back "on".


Capital:

Spoiler :





Right now, governor is working a 3:hammers: tile instead of flood plains cottage. Change that by clicking the tiles. You are also soon growing to size 5, which means unhappiness, since you have no military unit in the city. There is a warrior fortified to the 2nd city. Send him to capital. When you grow to size 5, I think working that 3:hammers: tile is OK to get the boat out asap. This boat should be sent north to the crabs in 4th city! Capital area has lots of food so clams can wait. After boat build warrior, then start another warrior. Growing to size 6 means unhappiness, but that is ok. We will whip either a settler or a madrassa(=library) soon.


Medina: finish settler, start chariot.

Workers: Don't keep them stacked together. The reason for this is that you might lose a worker turn. Use both to cottage floodplain for Damascus. Start roading towards crab-city from Damascus.

Warriors: Heal first. Move towards crab area to unfog tiles and guard from barbs. We would also be interested in claiming some happiness resources, so the furs area is of interest.

You can notice that the game gets more and more complex after 50 turns. Do not despair if you forget something, there is a LOT of things to take care of each turn. Think about your every move. Check every city before ending turn. Post when Medina grows to size 3, which should be in 7 turns.
 
but you should try to learn how to think in this game..

three cheers for sampsa! ..and it is not the Finnish vodka talkin'
 
6) Worker management: We need to get you to break the habit of building useless cottages all over the place. Start to make decisions about what cities are good commerce cities for cottages and what are not. Start asking yourself what your workers should be doing, what are the best improvements, could they be chopping forest in some cities and getting them in better shape. It is too early to create stacks of workers focused on one areas. All your cities need worker and the workers should be dispersed appropriately, and you probably need more workers. Workers are an easy 2 pop whip especially in some of your large cities working unimproved tiles.

I think this is such an important subject that I'll contribute a bit, too. When you learn to manage your workers better, everything will feel much easier.

The following pic is from your Pericles-game.

Spoiler :



I marked every tile that either has no improvement when it should and every tile that has one when it shouldn't. Mostly you are over-improving plains tiles, putting cottages on them. One of the best advice I've heard is "ignore plains tiles until biology".

The bad thing about plains tiles is that working them actually costs you food. Pop working it eats 2:food: per turn, so a river plains cottage is actually -1:food:1:hammers:2:commerce:. It's not a good tile. Non-river is even worse of course. At the point of the game where whipping with granaries is available, even a tile (seemingly) as strong as plains hill copper/iron (0:food:6:hammers:) is nothing special.

You have built plenty of improvements (cottage/farm) outside any city's reach, but you have also some unimproved resource tiles. This should not be so. You are working some non-improved grassland (2:food:) when whip is available.

I believe you will soon be able to jump to the next level... :)
 
I'm not sure if you guys covered this, but one of the things you should do StefanCelMare is turn citizen automation off. The button for that is just beneath the rush-buy button in the city screen (in turn this is just below the DRAFT button). I notice in the most recent screen of Mecca posted by lymond that citizen automation is on. This will help you somewhat. The more you allow the computer to help manage your empire the more difficult it will be to get an advantage over the AIs.

This will make it a bit less of a headache to make sure your cities are doing what you want them to do and not what the AI wants them to do. I'm not sure exactly how it works but with automation off I generally only have to check on what my cities are doing after growth, as opposed to what seems like every turn when automation is on.
 
I had some problems with my internet,so I will post tommorow the game with Saladin.

Lexicus,you are right.Actually,I was surprised that I have spies working because i had not put them in the city,so I looked closely and I observed that the citizen automation button was on.

Anyway,today I won my first serious game(Domination) on Prince/Pangaea/Standard with Augustus Caesar,after I destroyed the Etiophians,the Americans and the Celts + captured some cities from the Dutch & made Hannibal and Mao Zedong to capitulate in 1500-1600 AD.After I captured the Chinese cities i was not so carefully with the micro-management.I will post it tommorow too.
 
I'm not sure if you guys covered this, but one of the things you should do StefanCelMare is turn citizen automation off. This will make it a bit less of a headache to make sure your cities are doing what you want them to do and not what the AI wants them to do. I'm not sure exactly how it works but with automation off I generally only have to check on what my cities are doing after growth, as opposed to what seems like every turn when automation is on.

Lexicus,you are right.Actually,I was surprised that I have spies working because i had not put them in the city,so I looked closely and I observed that the citizen automation button was on.

For me, it doesn't matter much if the governor is on. I usually keep it on with "emphasize food" checked and +90% of the time it works the correct tiles. Of course I check every city after growth and sometimes alter tiles (and especially specialists) manually.

In the bottom right above the mini-map there is a button "toggle yield display <ctrl+Y>". I keep it always on (only take it off when taking a screenshot). It allows you to see what tiles are worked (yields in worked tiles appear bigger). This allows you to see with a glance that all important tiles are always worked.
 
Here are the saves :)
I hope I didn't miss anything in the game with Saladin.
 

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