Post short tips here!

[Wiseguy]

I haven't read all of these posts, so this may be a repeat.

The Forbidden Palace is a cool thing. The problem is that the city that you want to build it in is likely outside of you Palace's sphere of influence and curruption has your production in that city to one shield a turn. Here's one way to fix this problem: The Forbidden Palace can only be built once, but your Palace can be rebuilt as many times as necessary. So, build the Forbidden Palace someplace close to your Palace where the curruption is not bad and then build your Palace on the edges of the new sphere of influence (where curruption is bad but not crippling). When you get the Palace built, the sphere of its (and the Forbiddent Palace's) influence now extends much further than before. You will probably even need to rebuild the Palace again a little further away from the Forbidden Palace for maximum affect. But now the same city that would have taken 200 turns to build the Forbidden Palace will take a LOT less time to build the Palace. This whole operation should take no more than about 75-100 turns especially if you can overlap the building periods of the Forbidden Palace and the Palace.

 

[hmberanek]

Originally posted by jhigham
Make sure to build offensive units. Civs won't attack your strong city, they'll just walk right by you. You need the movement and offensive power to take them out before they pillage you.

Building in hills is the same as building in plains (1 food, 1 shield), and gives you a defensive bonus, so don't hold back (I think in CivII it was less food?)

Building a city on a forest (or jungle?) will clear it. Don't waste time by having your worker clear it first.

Prioritize production and rodes with your workers early. You want the roads for movement, but mostly for resources.

Build early cities in grasslands, and keep them at level 1 producing settlers for quite some time (4-5 cities -- stop once you need them to produce wonders).

Use despotism to rush improvements. You don't really want big cities in the early game, so killing your citizens is fine, especially to get the important buildings out there.

Clearing forests and disbanding won't help build wonders, so don't do it.

This last part is only partly true. Harvesting a few forests and disbanding a few units won't even put a dent into wonder production. To make this work, use gangs of workers around the wonder-building city. Order them to plant, plant, plant, then chop, chop, chop. This technique yields an average of 5 shields per turn per three-worker gang per square. With enough workers, you can get that pesky Forbidden Palace completed. But you need a lot of workers to make it feasable.

 

[Mud]

This last part is only partly true. Harvesting a few forests and disbanding a few units won't even put a dent into wonder production. To make this work, use gangs of workers around the wonder-building city. Order them to plant, plant, plant, then chop, chop, chop. This technique yields an average of 5 shields per turn per three-worker gang per square. With enough workers, you can get that pesky Forbidden Palace completed. But you need a lot of workers to make it feasable.


Actually you CANNOT rush wonder production in any way, either by disbanding or by cutting forest. It's not that it's a too little boost, it's a rule in the game. You just CANNOT rush a wonder in any way. So if you're cutting forest, you're wasting the forest, because the shields culled that way simply vanish into the mist...

 

[rev063]

Don't squander your opportunities for generating leaders. You can only have one leader at a time, and don't forget that promotions and leaders are generated with the same mechanism. If you attack with an elite unit while you have a leader, a promotion opportunity is wasted. So if you have a leader, focus your attacks with your regular and veteran units. Save your elite units for worker abduction and pillaging. That way, by the time you use up your leader you'll have plenty of elite units with which to generate the next one. Obviously, if you don't have a leader, use your elite units in every battle you're likely to win.

- rev

 

[Exile_Ian]

One thing I've only recently started doing is massive disbanding of obsolete units.

Here's the scenario - you've switched to Republic (perhaps prematurely) and you're struggling to keep some income in (to enable you to rush-build) and you're desperately trying to keep Science going, and you are having to spend money on happiness. I've been here so many times! Now use your F3 and have a look at how many spearment, warriors etc. you've got. In one recent game, I had somehow accrued 80+ spearmen - even though I now had a couple of riflement in each city. My original strategy was to gradually upgrade these obsolete units but without Leonardo's Workshop and a bunch of cash - it just never happens.

So just disband them! You could either go around each city and disband them, or just right click on the F3 screen (having sorted by unit) and just knock them all out.

Why? Well those units are costing you in support money. It very easy to go from a defficient to a healthy surplus just by disbanding.

Obviously you have to ensure you don't leave any of your cities undefended and in some cases, it might pay to upgrade, but I've frequently disbanded all warriors and spearmen regardless and save a lot of time and money.

 

[Strider]

I've seen alot of people complaining about how right-of-passage only has on good use and that is to get through another countries terrority. Well here's another one:

If you are preparing to go to war with someone while your getting your units into stacks close to their terrority offer them a right-of-passage agreement.(This might be hard because most of the time the AI doesn't like you very much, just offer them ALOT of gold or a useless science to get it.) The send your units through their terrority to the other side. Then once the right-of-passage clears up you can attack from to differant fronts!!!!

If anyone has any improvements to my idea just say so.

I hope it helps some bit!!

 

[Shaitan]

Originally posted by Strider
I've seen alot of people complaining about how right-of-passage only has on good use and that is to get through another countries terrority. Well here's another one:

If you are preparing to go to war with someone while your getting your units into stacks close to their terrority offer them a right-of-passage agreement.(This might be hard because most of the time the AI doesn't like you very much, just offer them ALOT of gold or a useless science to get it.) The send your units through their terrority to the other side. Then once the right-of-passage clears up you can attack from to differant fronts!!!!

If anyone has any improvements to my idea just say so.

I hope it helps some bit!!

Positioning for an attack is a fine use of ROP. Just be sure the ROP is expired and you don't have any units actually in the enemy's territory when you declare war.

ROP gets a bad rep but it's actually very useful. Having an ROP improves relation with that civ (active agreements make people like you). You can also get money for signing an ROP. Instead of just putting the ROP on the table, try putting some cash or a tech on their side as well. If your territory is comparably sized you can generally make some money.

 

[Bobby Dread]

1) Bring them to your HOME cities and add a few to slow growers. They will be 'diluted' by the other citizens, and should not cause too many problems.

2) If you have workers from an oponent you have ELIMINATED, you can use them when taking cities of OTHER civilizations. They citiznes created do NOT have their unhappiness raised by your aggression, just the normal things and war weariness. For example, I eliminated Japan, capturing about 20 workers. When I invadecd Germany, I had a city of 6 where the unhappiness was 80% "Stop this agression" and 20% "Too Crowded". Adding 3 JAPANESE workers to the mix brought it to a 50/50 mix! setting two of them to entertainers took care of the problem.

3) The calculations for a city "flipping" back to their old country is based upon the Citizens of the origonal civs. If you have 'dumped' workers of an eliminated cvi in them, it SEEMS to dilute them. (Based just on observation, the cities I do this in revert a LOT less.)

4) Trade them back for peace! Treat them descently, and when you want peace, offer up some or all of the captured workers, it brings down the price of peace.

One question: During a fight against the Babylonians, I had the Aztecs as an ally. The Babylonians took some Aztec workers, which I later captured from the Babs. Now I wanted to stay on the good side of the Aztecs, they had all three of the only iron on that continent! I thought a good way to earn some points with them would be to return their workers I had captured from the Babs. But since we were allies, I could find no way of doing this on the regular diplomacy screen. Any Ideas?

Related to that last, if you take a lousy city that civ X took from civ Y, giving it back to civ Y earns you a LOT of brownie points! You can even sell off improvements before you give it back, they don't seem to mind. Or sell it back, wait for CIV X to recapture it, then liberate and resell!

 

[Shaitan]

Originally posted by Bobby Dread
One question: During a fight against the Babylonians, I had the Aztecs as an ally. The Babylonians took some Aztec workers, which I later captured from the Babs. Now I wanted to stay on the good side of the Aztecs, they had all three of the only iron on that continent! I thought a good way to earn some points with them would be to return their workers I had captured from the Babs. But since we were allies, I could find no way of doing this on the regular diplomacy screen. Any Ideas?

Move the workers to your capital and they will be available as a tradable resource.

 

[Bobby Dread]

Thanks, that is good to know!

 

[Crunchy]

Personally I like to keep captured workers. They work at half the rate but they don't have any wages. I'm using stacks of four captured workers and they can build railroad on grassland/plains in 1 turn. A stack of 8 can clear pollution in 1 turn .

FYI I'm a non-industrial civ under Democracy.

 

[Hurricane]

* Did you use up all your unit's movement points when moving it to a city with barracks in order to upgrade it? Just select any other unit of the same type, click Shift-U, and the unit with 0 move will get uet upgraded. This way you save 1 turn of move for the unit.

* Always move your ships in big stacks instead of scattered around. If you are attacked, your other ships will get a free shot at the attacker.

 

[troilus]

>>>2) If you have workers from an oponent you have ELIMINATED, you can use them when taking cities of OTHER civilizations. They citiznes created do NOT have their unhappiness raised by your aggression, just the normal things and war weariness. For example, I eliminated Japan, capturing about 20 workers. When I invadecd Germany, I had a city of 6 where the unhappiness was 80% "Stop this agression" and 20% "Too Crowded". Adding 3 JAPANESE workers to the mix brought it to a 50/50 mix! setting two of them to entertainers took care of the problem. <<<


How do you get this information in the game?

 

[Melanic Sheep]

When you capture an enemy city full of foreign citizens couldn't you just conscript/Starve/whatever down to a size 2 city, build a settler and then found a new city with a single patriot citizen?
Making a settler with foreign citizens would have to form a patriot settler or the city you form would be an enemy city right?
Let me know what you think... I havn't play tested this one.

 

[Shaitan]

Originally posted by Melanic Sheep
When you capture an enemy city full of foreign citizens couldn't you just conscript/Starve/whatever down to a size 2 city, build a settler and then found a new city with a single patriot citizen?
Making a settler with foreign citizens would have to form a patriot settler or the city you form would be an enemy city right?
Let me know what you think... I havn't play tested this one.

Workers and settlers maintain their nationality. If you take over an enemy city and build a worker, that worker is the same as a captured worker from it's original civ. If you make a settler it will settle a new city for you but the 1st citizen will be of that other nationality, not yours.

 

[Melanic Sheep]

You can't found a city with foreign nationals, thats why you capture two workers instead of a settler from an enemy settler.
Besides, Wouldn't that city you found belong to the other civ?
Oh well, it was worth a look.

 

[Shaitan]

Originally posted by Melanic Sheep
You can't found a city with foreign nationals, thats why you capture two workers instead of a settler from an enemy settler.
Besides, Wouldn't that city you found belong to the other civ?
Oh well, it was worth a look.

Confusing, ain't it?

No, you can't found a city with a foreign settler (because you can't catch them as you noted) but you can build a settler out of foreigners. When that settler creates a new city it will have a population of 1 and that citizen will have its original nationality. It's your city but it's the same as if you conquered a pop 1 AI village. Citizens don't lose their nationality by building them into workers or settlers. In fact, if you have pissed off citizens and build workers to try to get rid of them, those pissed off workers stay pissed forever and will still be pissed off if you add them to a city 2000 years later.

 

[Bobby Dread]

troilus
>> How do you get this information in the game? <<

When in the City View, click on the unhappy citizens, you'll get a pop-up saying why they are unhappy.

 

[Lord_Vetinari]

Since patch 1.21f, build lots of armies with fast units (prefferably cavs or Chinese Riders). Those armies can now blitz!

 

[Amask]

If you are a little behind in the medieval ages, go for engineering and sell it to all the advanced civs for techs and gold. I was 5 techs behind, got engineering, sold it, and was ahead of everyone with heaps of gold.

Sorry if that's a repeat - takes a long time to read all those tips