Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[tomart]

What if you had a lot of grasslands and food resources but no good production squares other than the forests? What if all those forests are on top of tundra?

Just a mention that if i built cottages everywhere the game recommends, i'd have no forests left, and very little production. When lumbermills become available, you can get two food AND two shields (ah, showing my civ3 roots - now it's hammers) but only if you resisted chopping them all to make cottages (which only yield a trickle of gold at first, stifle production, and a lot of which won't be used anyway.) The poor forests only grow back very slowly, (and only next to existing forests, i think.)

Yes, Towns are great later on when they finally get good bonuses, but i find boosting Production is harder in the early and mid-game, and i LOVE building more stuff (meaning combat units) than the ai ...which can be expensive, but is a great deterrent to them invading me, and looting all my cottages/hamlets/villages/Towns.

 

[Roland Johansen]

I saw someone use the term "GP farm," which i assume means a city that makes more and/or sooner Great Persons (by increasing Specialists, and thus GP points, right?) But I'm not clear on how/when to start 'Specializing.'

In the early and mid-game, i would think you'd want city growth over GPs (who eat but don't farm.) I thought that once my cities reach their maximum/optimal size (limited by food, health, happiness) there would naturally come a point at which excess people become Specialists and start to generate more GP points. As Civ4 encourages fewer/better cities, i've been working hard at maximizing my cities' growth potential (by "acquiring" every health/happiness bonus I can, and trading for the rest) and i'm reaching the late game with cities approaching size 20, wonderfully happy and healthy, but with precious few Specialists - MAYBE one Engineer...

It seems like the ai is creating GPs faster than i do (usually an indicator that there's some trade-off i haven't learned yet) so, I guess my question is, what's a GP farm? When do i cut into a city's growth to make parasites, I mean Specialists, or is there a type of city that is ideal for them?

Thanks again to Roland and Parkin and the other 'Specialists' who help us noobs!

An ideal site for a great person farm is a city which has a very high natural food output and its food output has been further enhanced by adding farms (and windmills). All of the excess food will let it grow at speeds of 10+ food per turn even early in the game. Usually these are cities with multiple food resources and a grassland/floodplains terrain.

Because these cities grow ridiculously fast, they will reach the health/happiness cap very fast. At that point you can change some of the people working on the land into specialists manually (enter city, click the plus sign next to the specialist that you want). This will reduce the food output of the city, but the city was only producing so much food in order to sustain a number of specialists. Note that to add specialists, you often need certain buildings such as a library for scientists and a forge for engineers. This will limit the amount of specialists that can be assigned in the city. You can look in the civilopedia to find which buildings allow specialists. The caste system civic allows you to acquire as much scientists, merchants and artists as your city can sustain with food. I don't like that civic a lot, so I usually try to get the buildings that allow a certain number of a certain type of specialist in the city.

Because such a city is making use of farmed land, its production will be fairly low. The slavery civic (a favourite civic of mine) however allows you to 'sacrifice' a number of population points to finish the construction of a building. Since such a city grows extremely fast, this is the ideal construction method in such a city. Build a granary in this city fast so that it grows even faster allowing you to use the pop-rush method even more often. This way, you'll get the necessary buildings in the city to allow certain specialists.

When you have created such a city, it is best to add the national epic in order to double the production of great person points in this city.

A great person farm is usually not the best production/commerce city in your empire. Most cities can be improved in a better way to increase their hammer and commerce output. But it is very useful to have one such city in your empire to sustain your empire with great persons which can be used in various ways. The abilities of great persons are so usuful that it is worth it to sacrifice (at least) one of your cities and change it into a great person farm. However, it is not so useful to have 5 great person farms in your empire. The reason is that after each 'birth' of a great person the costs go up for the next one. This will result in one or two of your great person farms creating great persons while the other lesser great person farms are trying to reach the level where they would create a great person while that level keeps increasing and tends to be just out of reach.

This last symptom is explained perfectly in this War Academy article.

This War Academy article is also very useful to understand how the chances that you get a certain great person are calculated.

Oh, and I agree with ggganz's post about newbies and noobs. You might be a newbie, but not a noob.

 

[HulaLoula]

If someone could explain how to properly download,unzip and eventually play a mod I would really appreciate it.I download the mod to Civ 4 but it never shows up in custom scenarios.Please help!I'm eager to play "Rhye's".

 

[Ginger_Ale]

Hi HulaLoula,

The first thing you want to do is download the .zip file. Just save it to your desktop or some other folder. To open it, you will need either WinZip or WinRAR (if you don't have one of them - Google will help you find them). Inside, you will find a folder named "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" or some other similar name. Drag that folder to your ../My Documents/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 4/MODS/ folder.

Then, load Civ4 as normal. Select Advanced and Load a Mod from the main menu, and open Rhye's mod. Then, after the game restarts, select Single Player, Play a Scenario, and then Rhye's of Civ. (These instructions are copied right from the Rhye's of Civ FAQ).

 

[Lord Parkin]

I saw someone use the term "GP farm," which i assume means a city that makes more and/or sooner Great Persons (by increasing Specialists, and thus GP points, right?) But I'm not clear on how/when to start 'Specializing.'

In the early and mid-game, i would think you'd want city growth over GPs (who eat but don't farm.) I thought that once my cities reach their maximum/optimal size (limited by food, health, happiness) there would naturally come a point at which excess people become Specialists and start to generate more GP points. As Civ4 encourages fewer/better cities, i've been working hard at maximizing my cities' growth potential (by "acquiring" every health/happiness bonus I can, and trading for the rest) and i'm reaching the late game with cities approaching size 20, wonderfully happy and healthy, but with precious few Specialists - MAYBE one Engineer...

It seems like the ai is creating GPs faster than i do (usually an indicator that there's some trade-off i haven't learned yet) so, I guess my question is, what's a GP farm? When do i cut into a city's growth to make parasites, I mean Specialists, or is there a type of city that is ideal for them?

Thanks again to Roland and Parkin and the other 'Specialists' who help us 'newbs'!
[And thanks to ggganz for the terminology clarification. ]

The AI has a tendency (at least in my experience) to prefer to build a lot of farms instead of cottages all over the place. This generally results in them naturally having a higher food content coming into each of their cities, and thus probably contributes somewhat towards them having a larger amount of specialists per city. But that's probably only a slight part of the reason (and in any event, in case you're wondering, in almost every case it's better to spam cottages than farms anyway, so don't bother trying to mimic that strategy).

I find that the best GP farm cities I get are usually the ones where I just happen to "get lucky" with resource placement. Having two (or more!) high food resources such as Pigs or Fish near a city will almost guarantee it will become an excellent Great Person farm. One of the best GP farms I've ever had was a city that had four crabs and a sheep in its radius - once I got the work boats out there along with a Lighthouse, that city was pumping out the Great People like there was no tomorrow!

So yeah, the #1 necessity for a GP farm city is a high food content from the resources in its city radius. Thus, you have to make careful decisions about where you found your cities in the early-mid game. There are also some other considerations that I can think of off the top of my head. #2 is that grabbing lots of wonders (particularly early ones) will help a heap in getting those Great People. #3 is civ traits - Philosophical is a huge boost of course, as you might imagine. Industrious is also good since you have a better chance at getting your GPP-generating wonders. #4 is civics - Pacifism is massive, if you're serious about Great Person farming (and aren't too much of a warmonger to stick with Organised Religion or Theocracy), then head for Philosophy as soon as you can and switch to Pacifism.

There's probably some other things that I've missed as well, and Roland might pick them up... but I think those are the four major considerations. Hope that helps you out somewhat.

EDIT: Oops, I see I missed a few posts.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Just a mention that if i built cottages everywhere the game recommends, i'd have no forests left, and very little production. When lumbermills become available, you can get two food AND two shields (ah, showing my civ3 roots - now it's hammers) but only if you resisted chopping them all to make cottages (which only yield a trickle of gold at first, stifle production, and a lot of which won't be used anyway.) The poor forests only grow back very slowly, (and only next to existing forests, i think.)

Yes, Towns are great later on when they finally get good bonuses, but i find boosting Production is harder in the early and mid-game, and i LOVE building more stuff (meaning combat units) than the ai ...which can be expensive, but is a great deterrent to them invading me, and looting all my cottages/hamlets/villages/Towns.

True. But those cottages will help you to research faster, which will get you access to the better units sooner. Personally, I much prefer spamming cottages, and ridding myself of unnecessary forests (which means basically all of them ). Lumbermills come a LONG way into the game, so for most of the time you're only ever going to be getting 2 food and 1 hammer from those squares. You're MUCH better off to just mine a hill and get 3 or 4 hammers at once, while working a cottage each with the rest of your citizens.

I understand the tendency to prefer production over commerce - I was that way myself when I first switched over from Civ3. But I quickly realised that keeping forests around is counter-productive, and indeed even foolish from a military point of view (especially against human opponents). Cottages are far, far more useful in general.

 

[tomart]

An ideal site for a great person farm is a city which has a very high natural food output and its food output has been further enhanced by adding farms (and windmills). All of the excess food will let it grow at speeds of 10+ food per turn even early in the game. Usually these are cities with multiple food resources and a grassland/floodplains terrain.

...you often need certain buildings such as a library for scientists and a forge for engineers...

Because such a city is making use of farmed land, its production will be fairly low. The slavery civic (a favourite civic of mine) however allows you to 'sacrifice' a number of population points to finish the construction of a building. ...Build a granary in this city fast so that it grows even faster allowing you to use the pop-rush method even more often. This way, you'll get the necessary buildings in the city to allow certain specialists.

When you have created such a city, it is best to add the national epic in order to double the production of great person points in this city.

...it is very useful to have one such city in your empire to sustain your empire with great persons which can be used in various ways. The abilities of great persons are so useful that it is worth it to sacrifice (at least) one of your cities and change it into a great person farm...

"10+ food per turn"?? That's after feeding all the inhabitants??? I don't think i've ever seen over 5+ per turn, and i do have cities with both cow and a grain. Ok, i'll look for places like that next game.

So, let's see:
1. A city with two (or more) food resources, crank up food, chop and slave to get the right buildings for a GP farm...
2. A city with several plantations, enhance with cottages to maximize gold, and thus Science; chop and slave to get all the Science buildings...
3. And maximize a third (even more essential city) to pump out military units (at least i won't have to chop and slave much here... )
Great answer; thanks again.

 

[a4phantom]

My problem with GP farms is the fact that until late game you can only have one Engineer per city. I try to put Pyramids, Great Wall and National . . . the one that doubles GP growth . . . in one city with an engineer, and let the other cities produce GP as they like. Not efficient I know but I'm newb enough still to suffer from Wonderlust.

"1. A city with two (or more) food resources, crank up food, chop and slave to get the right buildings for a GP farm..."

Yeah. Along with those food resources you'll want rivers with grasslands or flood plains.



"2. A city with several plantations, enhance with cottages to maximize gold, and thus Science; chop and slave to get all the Science buildings..."

Plantations are things you build to harvest certain resources, like bananas and dye (I think). You'll want several high commerce cities (those cottages), commerce produces science or gold depending on your science slider %. You'll also wnat to dedicate a specific Science city, where you'll put the Great Library if you build it, Oxford University, and any Great Scientists you want to settle down as Super Specialists (you may or may not want to use one to build Academy in that city). You may want to build Wall Street in the same city if it's also your best gold producer, otherwise put Wall Street in your best gold producer (cities with shrines tend to stand out for that, because the income from a shrine is pure gold, not commerce, so it never becomes science). You'll want to park any Great Merchant Super Specialists there, and maybe Great Priests too if you don't need them to build Shrines.

"3. And maximize a third (even more essential city) to pump out military units (at least i won't have to chop and slave much here... ) "

Right. You'll want to build Heroic Epic in a good production city, hopefully close to the borders you expect to fight on a lot. Later on you'll build West Point here if you can, and before that you'll park a Great General here as a Great Military Instructor. This city should almost always be building military units, but don't be afraid to build them elsewhere when you need them. I suggest putting your first Instructor in your Heroic epic city to pump out half priced units with 5 experience (two promotions), but then spreading out future Instructors because starting with 7 or 9 xp will not get you any automatic promos and every city with a barracks and Instructor will produce two promo units. Heroic Epic (doubles military production speed), barracks (+3xp), West Point (+4 xp), and two Instructors (+2xp each) means that the city will produce military units twice as fast and they will all start with three promos. If you're Charismatic, you only need 8xp for that third promo so only dedicate one Instructor. Sorry if that's confusing, I'm tired, but it works very well for me.

 

[tomart]

True. But those cottages will help you to research faster...
Lumbermills come a LONG way into the game, so for most of the time you're only ever going to be getting 2 food and 1 hammer from those squares.

(Or one food & two hammers w forest/plain.)
Well, in my current game I'm now enjoying the lumbermill benefits, so i guess i could have a myopia about the dim & distant past...

You're MUCH better off to just mine a hill and get 3 or 4 hammers at once, while working a cottage each with the rest of your citizens.

Um, you do mean an occasional farm, right?

I understand the tendency to prefer production over commerce - I was that way myself when I first switched over from Civ3. But I quickly realised that keeping forests around is counter-productive, and indeed even foolish from a military point of view (especially against human opponents). Cottages are far, far more useful in general.

Well, i just play solitaire, and (come to think of it, i don't think i've been invaded yet in civ4; maybe it's time to go up a level. ) but maybe you're right; Towns are certainly great, the more the better. I just resent the advisor almost always blinking "More Cottages" at me, and a lot of bare land with endless suburbs (like New Jersey is becoming!)

 

[Sisiutil]

My problem with GP farms is the fact that until late game you can only have one Engineer per city. I try to put Pyramids, Great Wall and National . . . the one that doubles GP growth . . . in one city with an engineer, and let the other cities produce GP as they like. Not efficient I know but I'm newb enough still to suffer from Wonderlust.

I also don't use GP farms that much. As you mention, it's nearly impossible to get one to produce a Great Engineer.

For most of the game, the easiest and best type of great person to produce is a Great Scientist, and I find I can get more of those by building the National Epic in my science city, where it can multiply the GP points of the Great Library, the University of Sankor, Oxford, and so on.

The only time I've really purposely built a GP farm is when I'm going for a cultural victory, in order to produce Great Artists--whom I normally consider the lowliest of great people.

 

[Roland Johansen]

"10+ food per turn"?? That's after feeding all the inhabitants??? I don't think i've ever seen over 5+ per turn, and i do have cities with both cow and a grain. Ok, i'll look for places like that next game.

My guess is that you have such locations in your present game but just aren't aware of it. If you are a starting civ4 player (which you seem to be), then you probably haven't entered the cities and managed the citizens working the land yourself. You probably let the city governor take care of that. You can imagine that a computer controlled governor isn't as smart as you are. You can do it better yourself. The standard governor tries to balance food, production and commerce in each city and thus will try to avoid a surpluss of 10 food so the best way to get that is to do it yourself. Alternatively, you can make use of the emphasize buttons inside the city and choose emphasize food. It really shouldn't be hard to get 10+ food (in some cities) while your citizens are working the farmed land and the food resources.

 

[Zophos]

"10+ food per turn"?? That's after feeding all the inhabitants??? I don't think i've ever seen over 5+ per turn, and i do have cities with both cow and a grain. Ok, i'll look for places like that next game.

My guess is that you have such locations in your present game but just aren't aware of it. If you are a starting civ4 player (which you seem to be), then you probably haven't entered the cities and managed the citizens working the land yourself. You probably let the city governor take care of that. You can imagine that a computer controlled governor isn't as smart as you are. You can do it better yourself. The standard governor tries to balance food, production and commerce in each city and thus will try to avoid a surpluss of 10 food so the best way to get that is to do it yourself. Alternatively, you can make use of the emphasize buttons inside the city and choose emphasize food. It really shouldn't be hard to get 10+ food (in some cities) while your citizens are working the farmed land and the food resources.

To expand on RJ's points, I'll give a concrete example: Imagine that you have a coastal city site with the following in the BFC: Fish, Corn, 2 floodplains, 3 hills, and miscellanous other tiles. Imagine also that you've had time to improve stuff.

At size three, the governor (without specific instructions) is likely to have you working, say, the fish, a mined hill, and a cottage, which leaves you with about +5 food, plus some (4-5) hammers and some commerce. Not bad, right?

However, if you work the fish, the corn, and a farmed floodplain, you'll have, well, no production to speak of, but +12 food. With a granary in place, that lets you rebuild pop points in ONE TO TWO TURNS, so becomes a far better way to generate hammers than working the mine. And you can run up to five specialists and generate a bunch of GPP between builds or while you wait for the whip-anger to fade.

This is obviously a very nice site for such endeavors, but (a) I run into such sites frequently enough that this example is not TOO contrived, and (b) even with less optimal resources, you can make a good food city hit +8 to +10 food below size 5 without much trouble - if you improve your tiles and allocate your citizens properly.

 

[Ben E Gas]

The world size affects the game speed as such Huge is almost unplayable even with animations and options turned low.

Not true for everyone. I play on the Huge maps all the time. Graphics maxed. It is playable for me. I have no problems. I even played one of the SevoMod games with 18 civs. There was one day I did load up my game and it was very choppy and like you said, unplayable. But I stopped playing and rebooted. It was fine again. I have 2 gigs ram. Maybe that helped. helped.

Ok, so I jynxed myself by writing this. Because I had a great game going on a huge map and when I got home after writing the above message, I couldn't get past 1585AD in my game. My compo locked up after ending my turn. I even tried doing different things and then hitting return to end my turn. I even entered world builder and deleted a few entire civs. Like they just vanished from the earth. But It still locked up after that turn.

Any suggestions of how I can get past that turn?
Or should I call it a day and never play the huge maps again?
Do other people have similar problems besides 'woe2thyenemy' & I?

 

[HulaLoula]

Thanks alot Ginger.I didnt think anyone would respond.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Ok, so I jynxed myself by writing this. Because I had a great game going on a huge map and when I got home after writing the above message, I couldn't get past 1585AD in my game. My compo locked up after ending my turn. I even tried doing different things and then hitting return to end my turn. I even entered world builder and deleted a few entire civs. Like they just vanished from the earth. But It still locked up after that turn.

Any suggestions of how I can get past that turn?
Or should I call it a day and never play the huge maps again?
Do other people have similar problems besides 'woe2thyenemy' & I?

Maybe an error in the savegame? You could try loading a savegame from a few turns earlier (maybe an autosavegame).

I've read about an error saving the game where the saveprocess goes wrong. The game then crashes to the desktop. It is something that hits people playing at huge maps or huge modpacks. Firaxis is aware of the problem but there is a shortage on savegames that show the problem. Your problem is maybe a bit different since it might not be linked to the savegame (you can save the game), but it might also be connected.

Firaxis might be able to solve your problem and other problems connected to huge maps if they have your savegame. You would do the civ-community a service by uploading your savegame in the Bug Reports forum together with a short description of how the error occurs and what actions have to be taken to reproduce the error. It will be especially interesting if you aren't running a mod (if you're running a mod it might be a mod-related error which makes it far more difficult to trace). If you're running a mod, then you should mention that, you should also mention the version of civ4 that you're using.

Good luck with your game. I can imagine that it is really frustrating to be unable to finish a huge map game that has evolved so far.

 

[a4phantom]

Wasn't there supposed to be a Warlords patch last month?

 

[Zenon_pt]

So, what do they mean?
It's called World Builder. You have to start a game. Then enter world builder thru the in game menu. If you don't like the map the game started with, just delete everything and start fresh. Then before exiting world builder, save the map in world builder. You can then load that map up whenever you want to play a game.

So it isn't a individual software, like in previous civ (Civ3)?
It's pratical to do it?

 

[Roland Johansen]

Wasn't there supposed to be a Warlords patch last month?

You've gotta be kidding me. How could you have missed that. Many threads in the Warlords forum are about the patch. You can download it with the ingame uploading system or from this site.

 

[a4phantom]

You've gotta be kidding me. How could you have missed that. Many threads in the Warlords forum are about the patch. You can download it with the ingame uploading system or from this site.

Yes! I was absolutely kidding you, of course Like Stephen Colbert or Sacha Baron whazzisname, I am not an idiot, I only play one on TV. Yes.

Note: the above quotation of RJ is not perfectly accurate. I had to remove one of his symbols to put mine in. In reality he laughed at me 15 times, not 14.

 

[A. Ninny]

New question. And sorry, I didn't search through 200 pages of posts to see if this is a duplicate question. I may yet take some time to read through the excellent responses in this thread, though.

Question:
Many of the buildings and wonders get an increased production speed "with marble" (for example). Does that mean that marble has to be one of the resources available anywhere in your civilization (or can you trade with other civs for marble) - or does it have to be actually available within the borders of the city that the wonder will be built?

Edit: Never mind. RTFM! Sorry.