Preliminary Tips and Strategy

[RicKhan5]

1. Make city-states your friends.

Absolutely a great way to get a leg up on the AI's. Look for the Friendly ones and don't be shy spending coin on your newest City-State GF. Patronage Policy can be an extremely helpful path, if you have the gold and opportunity.

Militaristic Matilda, repays you with dogs of wars. Place them as garrisons if they are weak, or front-line troops if strong.

Maritime Marianne, helps feed your Empire allowing for a little variety of improvements.

Cultured Kathy, is the social butterfly. She Helps you attain those policies you want for the future. Maybe not as important late game. But with her help you will get there.

3. Gold
You can't go wrong if you choose to make gold.

7. Barbarians
Once your empire has scouted the land, consider a search and destroy mission to get xp, gold and promotions. Once your done, head back home, wait a few years for them to repopulate. rinse and repeat til your tired of it.

A few observations of my own.

Scouts
Wish they had an upgrade. But they don't. Try building only 2 or 3 early on. The ignore terrain ability allows for faster scouting. After the world is explored, consider disbanding, gifting or garrisons in backwater cities.

Fleets
Melee units beware when traveling along the coast. Ships are good for scouting & sniping. In fleets of 3 or more, they become deadly. The Great Lighthouse is a must for the added speed and visibility. I kinda wish ships were only allowed to fire at units adjacent to coastal hexes and not inland. Such is not the case, so be forewarned.

Great game, good topic, looking forward to many hours of fun.

 

[knug]

I have nothing to add since im new to all civ games (i've played civ IV for some months, still consider myself a newb). But the game is beautiful, and you guys are really helping me with the strategies here. I've seen so much negativity (and positivity) towards the game, whether its not the game they wanted, or whatever, i love V. Thanks for the positive posts. I thank you guys, and this game RULES!!! I won't pretend to understand it all, especially some of the underlying mechanics, my eyes tend to glaze at some points, being new to strategy games in general coming from FPS has been a huge challenge for me. But keep the tips and strategies coming pls. thanks!!

 

[yanner39]

A few observations....

1. Using Aristocracy as one of the first social policies. I haven't done this but in my current game, Haiwatha had 3 cities to my 1 and still managed to build Stonehenge and the GrLib. Unless he had massive production in his capital, I just don't see how he could have done this.

Any thoughts on the impact of Wonders in this game? Seems Stonehenge would be a game changer. As far as getting the GrLib, that free tech could come in handy at a time where you could pick an expensive tech.

2. Has anybody else had a situation where the AI seems to settle cities anywhere, even if the cities are far apart? In my current game, Alexander settled his second city about 10 or 11 tiles away from his capital. I just can't see the trade route between the cities being profitable for a long time.

 

[Trickster7135]

A few observations....

1. Using Aristocracy as one of the first social policies. I haven't done this but in my current game, Haiwatha had 3 cities to my 1 and still managed to build Stonehenge and the GrLib. Unless he had massive production in his capital, I just don't see how he could have done this.

Any thoughts on the impact of Wonders in this game? Seems Stonehenge would be a game changer. As far as getting the GrLib, that free tech could come in handy at a time where you could pick an expensive tech.

Considering the general dearth of production in this game, and the inability to gold rush wonders like you can with *everything* else, I'd say wonders are something you would have to be very considerate about building. Wonder spamming isn't an option in this game. Early wonders are especially difficult to utilize, considering the capital is the only good production city in the early game, and not building units to protect yourself from barbarians, or settlers to expand, seems like a very risky strategy.

As far as the AI wonder spamming: marble resource in a cities workable area boosts wonder building in that city by +25%. The AI *might* be programmed to rush to aristocracy and start spamming wonders if it has a start with marble. On the other hand, the AI generally doesn't bother to build units to protect its settlers or workers, which is why half of them have disappeared by the middle ages.

2. Has anybody else had a situation where the AI seems to settle cities anywhere, even if the cities are far apart? In my current game, Alexander settled his second city about 10 or 11 tiles away from his capital. I just can't see the trade route between the cities being profitable for a long time.

They usually back fill empty areas with another settler later. Considering the lack of distance maintenance in this game, there's really no reason to not build cities far from the capital, other than the negligible trade route bonus.

 

[yanner39]

Considering the general dearth of production in this game, and the inability to gold rush wonders like you can with *everything* else, I'd say wonders are something you would have to be very considerate about building. Wonder spamming isn't an option in this game. Early wonders are especially difficult to utilize, considering the capital is the only good production city in the early game, and not building units to protect yourself from barbarians, or settlers to expand, seems like a very risky strategy.

As far as the AI wonder spamming: marble resource in a cities workable area boosts wonder building in that city by +25%. The AI *might* be programmed to rush to aristocracy and start spamming wonders if it has a start with marble. On the other hand, the AI generally doesn't bother to build units to protect its settlers or workers, which is why half of them have disappeared by the middle ages.



They usually back fill empty areas with another settler later. Considering the lack of distance maintenance in this game, there's really no reason to not build cities far from the capital, other than the negligible trade route bonus.

Actually, I wasn't aware of the Marble bonus. I don't remember seeing it in the manual. That might definately make things different, especially when deciding to go the Aristocracy route.

 

[Mannu]

I'm making the gold i need to befriend them by selling all my strategic resources to AIs.
Then, the city state alliances give me resources so I get them back.

This is the secret. I'm playing a game as Siam and going for a culture victory. I know only one other Civ, and I'm basically getting enough gold from him to sustain one CS relationship.

Some other observations:

Don't clear a barbarian encampment next to a CS until they ask you to. That will get you cheap influence.

Station a unit in/near friendly CS. When barbarians enter their borders, they will offer you influence for every barb you kill. Usually though they have killed them all by the time you can get a unit to them. So keep one handy to help them out.

Patronage unlocks at the Medieval era, so consider some sort of Oracle / Great Library / Great Scientist sling shot to get you there early. Until you get to Patronage you can't really hold onto more than 2 CS.

Cities that are not on the coast can still work water tiles. So you can build inland and still get those pearls, whales, fish, etc. You still need at least one coastal city and route to the resource for your fishing boats and triremes and you lose out on the lighthouse. So this isn't a great idea in most situations, but it is possible.

Don't try to tech too far ahead down one path, that can put you behind pretty quickly. If you want to do a strategy like that you are better off focusing on generating great scientists and bulbing down that path and using your research toward cheap techs.

 

[quill18]

Fantastic thread, really learned a ton. One tip that I saw elsewhere was to try to ensure that all your tiles produce at least one hammer and one gold, so that you get maximum value out of your golden ages. (Though I think riverside farms are preferred over ensuring that a hammer is there.)

 

[Ahriman]

Don't clear a barbarian encampment next to a CS until they ask you to. That will get you cheap influence.

On higher difficulty levels, trying to do this will just result in the AI clearing all the barbs, especially if they get Honor tree.

 

[QuixotesGhost]

On the Militaristic city-states, they become a lot more useful with "Military Caste" in the Honor tree so you can just use the lower-quaility units for free happiness.

In my current game, I had just researched Replacable parts when Belgerade gifted me an Infantry. Another city-state I was allied with, Rio Di Janeiro, was under attack from Songhai, who had mainly musketmen. I gift the infantry to Rio and he kills one or two, then the infantry start heading off in what appeared to a random direction in the wild-blue yonder.

"What are you doing? You still got guys around your city! Go kill them! Jeez, stupid AI."

Luckly, he was able to hold off the invaders with city bombardment.

I'm then informed about five turns later that WLtKD has started in several cities because I now have silver. I wondered how I got silver. I didn't have any in my territories, and I didn't make any new deals with anyone. Turns out that infantry unit Rio sent off into the wild blue yonder, Rio captured a Songhai city with it, a city with silver. So in my game, Rio di Janeiro the city-state has two cities in in. I wonder if I kept gifting him units how far Rio could have taken it - if I could've made Rio di Janeiro an empire.

 

[WuphonsReach]

So in my game, Rio di Janeiro the city-state has two cities in in. I wonder if I kept gifting him units how far Rio could have taken it - if I could've made Rio di Janeiro an empire.

I saw the same in Warlord, Large, Fractal, Marathon game... England attacked a city state, and the city state took one of England's cities. I don't recall at the time whether the other AI civs were involved, but was amused that the city state managed to take a city away from an AI empire with 10-12 cities.