Question about "scoring" and farms... (new player here)

[catchshime]

Hello everyone,

I just started playing Civ IV recently and I've logged about 25 hours on the game on Prince difficulty. I figured since it's in the middle it'd be equal to "normal" and I like challenges. Without a doubt, Civ IV is the most addicting game I've played so far. It has ruined my sleep cycle completely.

Here are the primary issues I am having. I've skimmed some basic guides and read about "dot-mapping" for planning your cities and determining which farms to build. I'm still not sure if I understand it clearly and the game always tells me to build more farms (more on that later)

1. I start the game OK and my score is usually at the top of the list; however as the game progresses my score fails to keep up with the other AIs. For some reason, they keep going up exponentially when my 6 or 7 cities are established and growing, but I can't seem to get any score. So I try building wonders but they take so damned long. Should I take the score on the right to heart or should I just keep focusing on research and doing what the game advises me to do with my workers?

2. This leads me to those damned "blue circles" that always come up with my workers. The game ALWAYS tells me to build farms and windmills and destroy all my cottages, and I hate seeing those blue circles (I figure the game is trying to help me with something) but what happens is my score never goes up and the only thing that helps it is population and technology (which usually takes a while anyway.)

3. When I press F9 I notice that my approval rate, soldiers, life expectancy, and land are always near the bottom of the list and everything else is in the middle of the pack. Mind you this is towards the later stages of my game when I am also in the middle of the pack score-wise. So I pump up my population with farms and soldiers and try invading stuff, but this takes away from my tech and still, that damned score refuses to rise. What is my primary problem here?

4. City specialization: I tried dot-mapping just recently and building a limited amount of farms in the beginning and it worked well at first, but the game will ALWAYS tell me to build more farms as the cities grow bigger. Should I just ignore these and focus on specialization?

5. How is the "score" determined anyhow? I tried looking in the Civilopedia but I couldn't find anything...

6. The tech path advice I've read for the beginning stages has helped a lot, but as the game goes on I feel overwhelmed and the constant analysis of what I should do next really is taxing. I try to get Liberalism, the Oracle and Stonehenge asap, but are there any other techs I should beeline?

7. Wonders. I've read that they're not all that important (only a few) and I should generally avoid building them if I lack the bonus resource. I always go for the Oracle and Stonehenge like I said, and I've read the list of other great ones. Should I just ignore the ones that suck? (and the constant messages pressuring me telling me "so and so has been born in a far way land!" and "The Taj Mahal has been built in skhgkjdf!") I don't like those messages.

I know these are a lot of words and are actually pretty general, but any help you guys can offer is great. Luckily, I'm not getting owned in my games, but I definitely am not winning either.

Thank you in advance!

 

[Nkot]

1. Score is not really THAT important. You can find a lot of screenshots here of people having scores in the middle-late game, and they end up winning.

2. The blue circles basically represent what the AI would do. While I guess they are good guidelines for a beginner, don't feel bad if you don't follow the computer's suggestion (such as not farming over a town).

3.Approval Rate and Life Expectancy are pretty much useless. If you run a cottage economy which you should be doing as a beginner, then your population won't be as high as the AI's who seem to love farming over everything. As for land, just expand earlier. It's not uncommon to fall behind in tech's because of early wars, but since you can rebuild your captured cities, you should be able to catch-up and outpace the AI.

4. As stated before, size isn't really that important as long as you can work all the useful tiles (not ocean) without unhappiness, then your fine.

5. My guess is it involves military might (inacurately judges this), # of cities/population, # of techs (with more expensive tech's giving more points), and wonders (again with more expensive ones giving more points). Still, a low score isn't necessarily and indication that you are performing poorly.

6. Usually, these are pretty important: Early Religion/Wonder Tech's (if you want one), Bronze/Iron Working, Alphabet, Code of Laws, Monarchy, Currency, Civil Service/Machinery (if you want maceman), Guilds/Banking, Education, Liberalism, Cav/Rifleman Paths, Infantry Path. After that, you just have to kind of figure out what you want and go for it. (Computers for Labs for Space Win, Media for UN for Diplo Win).

7. Yes. Also, don't feel you need to build wonders to win. My personal philosophy is why build it when you can take it? (Of course, this depends on someone near you building and doesn't apply to something like the Oracle, but you get the idea.)

 

[Jet]

I won't try to answer all your questions directly, but what I think will help most --

Score is primarily population. Also land. Don't worry about it too much. There might be an article in the strategy articles section.

Are there any other techs you should beeline? No. It really is situational. (Hopefully you can enjoy the variety ). Try to map out a medium-term strategy based around techs which seem like they have a high value, whether that's a new powerful unit, building, Civic, or whatever.
"I want Genghis Khan's land and he's backward in tech, so I want Grenadiers". [Or, maybe you just want to build more units now].
"My research slider is high, so I want Universities".
"After I get Genghis Khan's land my research slider is going to be low, so I want Banks".
"I have a lot of cottages but they're only hamlets and villages and I'd get +2 commerce with Free Speech if they were towns, so I want Emancipation".
"I have a lot of farms but I still don't have enough food, so I want Biology".

For tile improvements, the best approach is to have a foundation in understanding the basic mechanisms. Each pop point works 1 tile or 1 specialist. You can only usefully grow pop to your "happy cap" because you automatically get 1 unhappy per population point ("too crowded!"). Each tile yields food/hammers/commerce *if* worked, shown by the white circles on the city screen, which you can click on to change. Play with Ctrl-Y on to make things much clearer. Surplus food grows population. Give each city enough food to grow to its happy cap, do that, then specialize each city to hammers, commerce, or specialists. If you understand those basics, then definitely ignore what the computer suggests. (The advice the computer gives you in the Beyond the Sword expansion should be much better, but still not as good as your own judgment.)

Oh, and one fundamental dynamic is that the most straightforward way to beat the AI handicap bonuses is simply to acquire more land than they have, provided you also grow a large population and use it efficiently. Everything else can help, but for a beginning player size has the biggest payoff, as long as you can match the computer's (not very smart) economic management.

Various things are expected to be subtly different in the BTS expansion, but most people (including me) don't have a good sense yet.

 

[Carnage04]

As far as wonders go, build them if they fall into the plan for what you are doing with your civilization. You may have seen the buzz on here about "Specialist Economies"...if you aren't sure what they are you can read an article but using that strategy you usually want to grab wonders like the Pyramids, the Great Library, The Statue of Liberty....

Just think about what your civ is trying to accomplish before building a wonder. Stonehenge can be great sometimes, but if you are using a "Creative" leader that is going to allow your city borders to expand easily you probably do not need it (Unless you are trying to get a cultural victory or something). If you don't really have any Temples or Monasteries you can forget about trying to grab the University of Sankore or any of the other wonders that grant you good stuff for being very religious. Maybe you are stuck on an island with a bunch of coastal cities. Colossus may be beneficial to you, but if you are mostly landlocked with a single costal city it will be virtually useless. Etc.

Just make sure you don't "Over Wonder" and you should be ok.

 

[MrCynical]

1)Score in the mid game can be very misleading. It's based largely on population and land area, whereas a small efficient empire may have a better shot at things like space race.

2)Sometimes the blue circles are right, sometimes they're wrong. You're a lot smarter than the AI, so your judgement will always be better than theirs. Farming over a fully matured town is plan stupid, even if the AI does it.

3)I wouldn't worry about scores that much, they aren't that informative. By the sounds of it you run a fairly small but efficient empire most of the time rather than a large sprawling one, so you're not going to top land area and soldier numbers. Life expectancy and approval rating mean practially nothing in game terms.

4)Decide whether you're running cottages or specialists. If you're running cottages only build as many farms as you need to use all the tiles, whatever the AI says, except at your GP farm, and maybe for an early grwoth spurt. If you go specialists, then obviously farm everything in sight.

5)Mainly population and land area, but also tech and wonder factors. When you win there's also difficulty level and finishing date factors.

6)Too many variables here for me to give much advice, it'll vary too much depending on what's going on in game.

7)No wonder is essential, and you can do a lot of damage wasting your production on useless wonders. That's not to say you shouldn't build any, but wonder addiction is one of the hardest habits to get out of. Try running a game where you build no wonders, and see what happens. It's a good way to see what they're really worth.

The Oracle and Stonehenge are good ones. There are others like the Great Library and Statue of Liberty that I always go for as well. Most of the others depend on the circumstances. There are a few (e.g. Chichen Itza, Hagia Sophia, Three Gorges Dam), which are always a waste of time and production. Let the Ai do the wasting instead of you.

 

[catchshime]

Thank you to all who replied; your input is appreciated. I tried playing on Prince again on a Large map on Normal speed with random temperature and land and shuffled landscape. My leader was random too. I always do this.

So I was more aggressive this time around and tried to do the specialization with the cities, but what I noticed was that eventually I needed science buildings in every city to keep up with the AI. So this game I actually came close to finishing the space shuttle, but unfortunately the AI won a Time victory... but I had nuclear factories up and running and had fission already for some reason (I could trade it to other countries!) I was Roosevelt and had uranium if that helps any.

At the end of my game though, it said my leadership ability was just one notch above Dan Quayle. In other words, the game was telling me to find another PC game to play (or go to a lower difficulty.) Funny thing is I survived multiple wars, took out my neighbor, and had my space shuttle well on the way (the eventual winner and other civs kept trying to swindle me to give up fission.) I had research pumping and everything and my military was just fine... but still, I was only one notch above Dan Quayle.

Given the addictive nature of Civ IV and the ridiculous number of hours I've played the past week, I've uninstalled the game and the expansion from my PC. I know this is a very challenging and cerebral game and I know I'm not a dumb guy... all the time anyway. I think my problem is I am expecting to play like an expert when I have NO clue about the ins and outs of the game i.e. math equations, acronyms, dot-mapping, "chopping" and all these Civ terms. I just play by ear and don't have a lot of insight into how the Civ engine works (which the game clearly recognizes)

I already feel the itch to come back to it but I know I shouldn't... I am leaving to go overseas in a week and a half and I don't think I will have time to play Civ. It is an AWESOME game and I can understand why it has such a large following, but it is also ruining my life in some ways. I almost want to say it is an actual addiction!

Thank you again for your tips, and if any of you know why the game mercilessly places me at the bottom of the list after a long, grueling ordeal where I was right up at the top with competing for the space shuttle, please let me know. And who knows? Maybe I'll give in and reinstall it in a few days... or even tomorrow. Good God this game is addicting.

 

[catchshime]

Oops... one of the above sentences is supp. to read "I know I'm not a dumb guy... NOT all the time (not added) anyway." My mistake.

 

[Grotius]

Prince is not the "normal" difficulty; it's a step up from the most "even" level, which is Noble. The AI gets some advantages on Prince. I've been playing Civ 4 for years, and while I can beat Noble and sometimes Prince, I have trouble going any higher than that -- perhaps because I prefer to play a "builder's" game, not a warmonger's.