[BTS] Phoenix Master's question thread

[Phoenix Master]

First question is when you go to war with another civ what is the best way to push back its cultural borders when you capture its cities? Should you try to capture like three of its cities that are close together or raze the cities and build new cities in their place? The second question is about corporations. Can someone explain to me how you actually get gold from spreading them to your cities?

 

[soundjata]

Hello @Phoenix Master

First question: you can't. The way culture works in civ makes it extremely costly, and terribly inefficient to try to push back cultural borders after conquest.
What works though is conquering more or vassalizing the target. You should start wars with that goal in mind.

Second question: you need a very strong economy in order to be able to spread corporations. (hammer, cottage, specialists, what have you)
Ideally when spreading CORPS, you want to follow a pattern like:
- turn 1: create the first executive from city 1 and immediately spread to city 2
- turn 2: create 2 executives from city 1 and city 2 and immediately spread to city 3 and 4
...
So yeah you need huge piles of gold to finance those exec travel expenses and fancy downtown restaurants but
There are a few tricks you can use.
Banks + Wall Street in a key city (with a religious shrine and the corporation HQ ideally)
A Great Merchant mission, building wealth, chopping failgold, trading tech for gold and pillaging are among the possibilities

 

[Thrasybulos]

About culture post-conquest... to me, one of the most annoying aspects is third-party culture.
If cities captured from your target get swamped in your target's culture, then push on... but cities bordering another civ will also get swamped in that other civ's culture, which you are not at war with.
Yet.
So when I start a war, I'm getting ready to fight and conquer the whole continent.

... which might be one of the reasons I'm not playing on Deity.

 

[nmindos]

My understanding on the second question is:

• Domestic spread is basically a money-loser. All you can do is mitigate the financial impact, using techniques like soundjata listed above.
• Foreign spread, on the other hand, can be a huge money-earner, and I would add it to soundjata's list. There's the sunk cost of building the exec and spreading the corporation, but this will eventually be recouped and then you're just talking pure profit. You can increase the speed at which it's recouped by having the right modifiers in the HQ city.

This article in the War Academy helped me a lot.

 

[soundjata]

About culture post-conquest... to me, one of the most annoying aspects is third-party culture.
If cities captured from your target get swamped in your target's culture, then push on... but cities bordering another civ will also get swamped in that other civ's culture, which you are not at war with.
Yet.
So when I start a war, I'm getting ready to fight and conquer the whole continent.

... which might be one of the reasons I'm not playing on Deity.

In you example, a city should not be conquered unless it's going to provides a strategic or tactical advantage very soon.
It can be just a couple of tiles (gems?) or a wonder (Pyramids?) or the city is just a bridge to somewhere else...
Otherwise you may have overlooked the optimal attack angle. As @BornInCantaloup puts it: Chop the head first.

 

[Gumbolt]

Key thing with culture and capturing AI cities is to take out the cities with the biggest culture. Especially the capital. If bordering cities culture covers your cities then your cities will be at risk of revolt and you won't be able to use most of the land unless you took the ai as a vassal. If you are only taking 3 cities perhaps you needed a bigger army in the first place and needed to keep pumping units so you could capture more cities?

Capturing cities around a capital and failing to take a capital would leave the captured cities swamped in AI culture. Forcing you to start a further war. Same with just capturing the capital and leaving 2-3 cities around it that have 500-5000 culture..

Taking partly conquered ai as vassals has same issue as AI culture will cause revolts unless you leave many units in the cities. Ideally you want those units on the front line capturing more cities.

I generally try to push from one direction clearing land of their culture. It's less of an issue in the BC era. However come 1000ad-1400ad some AI cities have had 3-4 border pops. Meaning their culture expands beyond their other cities.

A further side issue is the 'we wish to join our motherland' unhappiness in captured cities.

If you can wipe out the Ai completely sometimes it really does helps. If you take an AI as a vassal the land value of their remaining land is discounted by 50% in terms of land area you need to reach domination. So wiping out 2-3 AI may mean you don't need to take out the last 1-2 AI on the map. Personally just having more cities earlier on just speeds up the conquest process too.

 

[Phoenix Master]

I would really like some advice on waging war successfully. Is it wise to go to war before catapults come along? In my current game, I am playing as Holy Rome. I always seem to use the same stupid strategy and gather a bunch of troops near an enemy city's border. I will wait until I research construction to get catapults (and sometimes war elephants). Then sometimes I declare war and sometimes I don't. My economy in this current game is at best average. I am playing on noble difficulty and on a large continents map. Zululand has declared war on me twice. I survived the first onslaught by giving them three techs to make peace and now in another war. Any tips and suggestions would be much appreciated.

 

[Henrik75]

Holy roman empire isn't a particularly strong one but i would suggest either fully commit to attacks or don't attack at all and just develop your civ. if there is land to grab then there's no need to attack. if your neighbor starts stacking troops in their border city near you that should be a red flag and mean you might be getting attacked. Check if they have enough on their hands right now if you try to bribe them into a war, thats the warning queue. You should be able to easily out-research the AI on noble difficulty with a few good cottages and not settling complete junk cities, because they waste their research on dumb stuff and spy points to poison people's water.

Shaka is notorious for being aggressive, keep your eyes on him if he's near you. Sometimes he will even come across the map for you. Doesn't mean he won't do the same to other AI, just watch where he goes. His tech is terrible, you should have longbowmen or macemen by the time he has catapults. He won't build a cottage for 100 turns.

I play a lot of immortal and deity on video, you can learn some basic strategies on my channel.

 

[chinemol]

I'd like to add. Increase the difficulty level from time to time and keep the actual timeframe limited. Noble dificulty builds up vices in your play. Soon as you reach monarch you'll notice what those where. Soon as you keep increasing difficulty, some things become unimportant, some things become unviable. Time constraints prevent you from loosing focus on what you are doing in the game

 

[Gumbolt]

You really need to upload saves as any advice here is guessing at where your game is at. Year? How many cities? How well you placed them? Did you build cottages? What year did Shaka attack?

If Noble Ai are beating you down you are missing key elements to your game. The AI won't get a second city till 2000bc or so. They lack most of the starting techs too and start with no worker. Just 2 warriors.

 

[sampsa]

Starting a new thread every two months with a vague description of your game, some random question and zero interaction from you will get you absolutely nowhere. There are no tips or suggestions that you can benefit from. You need to learn how to learn, otherwise you are stuck at noble forever.

 

[Gumbolt]

Noble can be easy if you just use basic game ideas.

Slavery and learning how to build economies and expand at the same time. Won't win wars without slavery in some shape or form. Whipping granaries and other builds.

On larger maps AI can get to 10+ cities so you need to grab the land or even Noble Ai will take it eventually.

 

[Phoenix Master]

I was wondering if the medic I and II promotions are cumulative? For instance, if there are three units with the medic I and II promotions in a stack of units with a stack next to them, do the units in the stack and adjacent to them get healed an extra 30% damage/turn?

 

[Nick723]

Sadly not, they only get the effect of the best medic out there.

There is a medic 3 promotion also available, but requires a great general. It is a common tactic to use an early great general to produce a ‘super medic’.

 

[Phoenix Master]

Can someone give me some basic tips on how to use slavery? I think one of the main reasons I suck so badly at this game is because I either don't use it or I use it incorrectly.

 

[Gumbolt]

You really need to start replying thread you start as this is going nowhere. Your not going to learn the game by posting questions and then not replying.

There is a quick question thread for these kind of questions. There are plenty of guides on slavery if you google it.

You won't improve your game unless you listen and respond to those trying to help you.

@lymond I wonder if these threads should be merged?

 

[Gumbolt]

Thread 'Vocum Sineratio: The Whip'

Nov 21, 2006

[size=-2]
CR18 - Discussion of archer whips
CR17 - Updated Bibliography
CR16 - Updated Bibliography
CR15 - Updated Bibliography
CR14 - Updated Bibliography
CR13 - Updated Bibliography
CR12 - Correction for nerf of Expansive in BTS
CR11 - Example of Granary optimization
CR10 - Presentation changes
CR9 - Updated Bibliography
CR8 - Minor correction on overflow
CR7 - Unit Obsolescence
CR6 - Images added
CR5 - Notes on traits
CR4 - First rewrite of 1.61 exploit
CR3 - Hammer banking
CR2 - Added some...

• VoiceOfUnreason
• Replies: 74
• Forum: Civ4 Strategy Articles

 

[AcaMetis]

For the record, the same is true for the healing effect of the Woodsman III promotion - it does stack with the Medic promotions, but only if it is present on the same unit. If multiple units have medic promotions only the highest of them will apply.

People usually don't bother with trying to get Woodsman III on a Medic III great medic, the increase in healing speed isn't worth the opportunity cost of other promotions such as Morale (another Great General exclusive promotion that gives a unit +1, probably goes without saying how fantastic that is on a medic unit), but the combination does exist.

 

[pmarc]

Can someone give me some basic tips on how to use slavery? I think one of the main reasons I suck so badly at this game is because I either don't use it or I use it incorrectly.

The really basics (see the detailed guide posted by Gumbolt above, for more advanced tips):

(1) Slavery sacrifices population for 30 hammers by population, as many as needed to at least complete the item, producing overflow production if necessary (e.g. if you have 40 hammers left on the item, it will produce 60 at the cost of 2 population, and your city gets 20 overflow production. BUT it cannot use more than half the population (the option will not be offered if you don't have enough population to complete the item).

(2) You shouldn't generally use slavery before you have put at least some hammers into the item, otherwise you get a big penalty (only 20 hammers by population). You also shouldn't use slavery on wonders due to similar penalty (but the overflow from completing another build with slavery can go into the wonder).

(3) You should try to use slavery when it uses at least 2+ population (so there are over 30 hammers left to complete the item). The reason is that in addition to losing the population, you get 10 turns of unhappiness when using it, and there is not more unhappiness from using more population. Because each point of population adds 1 unhappy face from crowding, as long as you use more than 1 population, the city will be less unhappy after using slavery than before.

(4) If you use slavery again before the 10 turns is up, you get another 10 turns added, and another unhappy face (that 2nd unhappy face disappears once the counter is down to 10 turns again). It's not wrong to have multiple unhappy faces this way if you need the production and your cities can handle the unhappiness. It's very common to do so when you switch from gaining techs mode (where you want all your cottages worked) to war mode (when you want to produce units quickly and will take a temporary hit to your economy to do so).

(5) The granary makes slavery a better food-to-hammer conversion because cities grow back up almost twice as fast. Therefore the granary is usually a priority to build in your cities if you plan to use slavery, at least past the initial phase of the game when building new settlers / workers to claim your land is more important than buildings.

(6) Because of how efficient the food-to-hammer conversion is, It's always good to settle cities that have plenty of food. If you have plenty of food and your city grows so much the citizens are unhappy and/or are working weak (unimproved) tiles, it's a good time to use slavery.

(7) The flipside of that is that you are using slavery too much if you don't have enough population to work the good tiles in your city and/or you have too many unhappy citizens to work the good tiles.

(8) Recommended mod: play with the BUG/BULL mod (or BUFFY, which includes BUG/BULL) so you can see more information on how many populations are needed to rush the item and how much overflow production you get, right in the city screen's production bar.

 

[nmindos]

The really basics (see the detailed guide posted by Gumbolt above, for more advanced tips):

(1) Slavery sacrifices population for 30 hammers by population, as many as needed to at least complete the item, producing overflow production if necessary (e.g. if you have 40 hammers left on the item, it will produce 60 at the cost of 2 population, and your city gets 20 overflow production. BUT it cannot use more than half the population (the option will not be offered if you don't have enough population to complete the item).

(2) You shouldn't generally use slavery before you have put at least some hammers into the item, otherwise you get a big penalty (only 20 hammers by population). You also shouldn't use slavery on wonders due to similar penalty (but the overflow from completing another build with slavery can go into the wonder).

(3) You should try to use slavery when it uses at least 2+ population (so there are over 30 hammers left to complete the item). The reason is that in addition to losing the population, you get 10 turns of unhappiness when using it, and there is not more unhappiness from using more population. Because each point of population adds 1 unhappy face from crowding, as long as you use more than 1 population, the city will be less unhappy after using slavery than before.

(4) If you use slavery again before the 10 turns is up, you get another 10 turns added, and another unhappy face (that 2nd unhappy face disappears once the counter is down to 10 turns again). It's not wrong to have multiple unhappy faces this way if you need the production and your cities can handle the unhappiness. It's very common to do so when you switch from gaining techs mode (where you want all your cottages worked) to war mode (when you want to produce units quickly and will take a temporary hit to your economy to do so).

(5) The granary makes slavery a better food-to-hammer conversion because cities grow back up almost twice as fast. Therefore the granary is usually a priority to build in your cities if you plan to use slavery, at least past the initial phase of the game when building new settlers / workers to claim your land is more important than buildings.

(6) Because of how efficient the food-to-hammer conversion is, It's always good to settle cities that have plenty of food. If you have plenty of food and your city grows so much the citizens are unhappy and/or are working weak (unimproved) tiles, it's a good time to use slavery.

(7) The flipside of that is that you are using slavery too much if you don't have enough population to work the good tiles in your city and/or you have too many unhappy citizens to work the good tiles.

(8) Recommended mod: play with the BUG/BULL mod (or BUFFY, which includes BUG/BULL) so you can see more information on how many populations are needed to rush the item and how much overflow production you get, right in the city screen's production bar.

you could ride this post all the way thru Prince difficulty.