Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Roland Johansen]

Hi. New to the Civ world, and loving every minute. Here's my newbie question:

Occasionally, I'll see small patches of land marked by another civ's colors, but not connected to their main borders in any way. How does this happen? Is there a way I can somehow "claim" a tile outside of my main borders that I'm missing? Sorry if this has been answered 10 times before, but I didn't notice a previous post about it. Thanks!

ECD

Welcome to civfanatics!

I can't be sure, but I expect this to be a case of lack of current information in your game. This game, like many others, has a fog of war system which means that areas outside of the vision range of your units and cities will not be updated with new information like founded cities or expanding culture range of earlier founded cities. When this culture expands into your vision range, then you'll see it, but you won't see the culture area in the fog of war until you move units into that area to update the information or until you exchange maps.
So my guess is that you're seeing a few patches of culture which are in your vision range, but are missing the larger culture area outside of your vision range. So it looks like a few loose patches of culture, but it really is a larger connected culture area.

If this doesn't explain the strange occurrence, then you'll have to upload a screenshot or a save game and I (or someone else) will take a look at it.

 

[black3car]

I am curious to know the differing ideas on automating workers, work boats, scouts, and missionaries. Being new at this game, I wonder how long in real time it takes for players to make all of their moves in one turn. Do you take the time to manage each worker every time or do you use one of the automate buttons. "Normally" do you cycle through a lot of workers etc. every turn? My "newb" method is to automate workers because I don't trust myself to work on everything I should work on yet until I have more knowledge about what to do.

I cycle through everything else each turn except my workers. Just want to here some thoughts on this approach.

Thanks for your time in advance!

 

[Lord Parkin]

I am curious to know the differing ideas on automating workers, work boats, scouts, and missionaries. Being new at this game, I wonder how long in real time it takes for players to make all of their moves in one turn. Do you take the time to manage each worker every time or do you use one of the automate buttons. "Normally" do you cycle through a lot of workers etc. every turn? My "newb" method is to automate workers because I don't trust myself to work on everything I should work on yet until I have more knowledge about what to do.

I cycle through everything else each turn except my workers. Just want to here some thoughts on this approach.

Thanks for your time in advance!

It is always far better to manage Workers yourself once you have even a marginal knowledge of the game. I would bet that close to 100% of moderate-level players and above never automate their Workers, simply because automated Workers have far inferior intelligence to a human player. If you want to develop your civ-playing skills, one of the best ways is to make the switch and stop automating your Workers. There are plenty of threads around this site and in the War Academy that deal with managing Workers and infrastructure. (I'm sure other people can give you some more direct links.)

As for time spent on each turn in a game, that depends vastly on the map type and size, the game speed, and a few other things - but mostly on the player themselves. There's a huge amount of variation amongst individual players, as some like to race through the turns to play as many as possible while others like to stop, think and strategize. So there's really no answer to your question, in a sense.

However, if you're looking for a (very) rough guide... for my own games, I tend to take only 10-20 seconds on the first 100 or so turns, then perhaps a minute on the next 100, and gradually longer from there. During the final turns of a game on a huge map on a slow game speed, I might take 20 or 30 minutes, or even up to an hour or more for a turn (though a lot of that is not spent moving units but thinking about situations). So that might give you a rough idea of times. It should be noted though that I tend to play on Epic and Marathon speeds (so games progress more slowly, thus there's less to do for more of the early turns and more to do for the later turns), and that I tend to be quite a slow and thoughtful player and thus my turn times probably reside close to the longer end of the spectrum (lots of people probably play faster than me).

 

[black3car]

Thanks for you quick reply and information Lord Parkin. I will switch to managing my workers myself. It's also good to have a rough estimate of how much time you spend on a turn. This game has grabbed me and not let go. I am playing on the default settings and I like to have the computer pick everything for me so I have to adjust to that particular leader and civ. Of course I have only played one complete game so far so that statement doesn't make much sense...it is just my plan.

 

[6K Man]

When you capture a city:

World Wonders always survive
National Wonders never survive
Culture generating buildings never survive
All other buildings have a chance of surviving, but may still be destroyed.

I would only add that Academies also survive, but they no longer produce culture. The same is the case for World Wonders - if you didn't build it, no culture for you. GPPs still seem to come from them, though.

 

[rantzzz]

1) Can water tile luxury resources be extended to land based cities? How do I connect the sea resources to my land based cities?

2) What is the difference between each level of difficulty?

3) At higher difficulty levels, does teching cost increase?

4) What are trade routes? I don't seem to have noticed anything about this in the game before

 

[ggganz]

1) Use work boats, and build whatever improvement is appropriate for that resource.

2) On lower difficulties, you gain advantages over the AI, such as starting with more techs and building things faster. On Noble, you and the AI are *supposedly* even. On higher difficulty levels, the AI gains HUGE advantages over you.

3) No, it stays the same as Noble, but the AI can go WAAAAY faster on Diety than you ever could at Settler.

4) Connections between cities that generate commerce.

 

[rantzzz]

1) Use work boats, and build whatever improvement is appropriate for that resource. Does that mean that once I convert a work boat to fishing boat, the benefits of the resource, ie clams, will be applied throughout my empire without the need for me to connect a road to that sea city?

2) On lower difficulties, you gain advantages over the AI, such as starting with more techs and building things faster. On Noble, you and the AI are *supposedly* even. On higher difficulty levels, the AI gains HUGE advantages over you. Oh Boy! That probably explains why I did not get certain techs at Noble when I moved up from Warlord! That explains it! Sheesh!

3) No, it stays the same as Noble, but the AI can go WAAAAY faster on Diety than you ever could at Settler. Is it because they can build faster, or do they get +1 gold?

4) Connections between cities that generate commerce. So I will generate commerce when I build roads between cities?

5) Sorry, one more question: Do I need optics to reveal whales? So far I've only seen clams...

Thanks!

 

[Lord Parkin]

5) Sorry, one more question: Do I need optics to reveal whales? So far I've only seen clams...

Thanks!

No, you don't need Optics to reveal Whales. They are a naturally scare resource though (much more so than Clams, Fish and Crabs), so it's quite common to not find any in your immediate surroundings (or even on an entire continent).

 

[rantzzz]

1) Do the benefits of luxury resources stack up? For example if I have two ivory resources connected, do I get +2 to happiness Civ wide?

2) Can the +1 Health benefit of a pastuered Cow resource be applied Civ wide, or only to the City that it's found in its BFC?

 

[Lord Parkin]

1) Do the benefits of luxury resources stack up? For example if I have two ivory resources connected, do I get +2 to happiness Civ wide?

2) Can the +1 Health benefit of a pastuered Cow resource be applied Civ wide, or only to the City that it's found in its BFC?

1) No. You can, however, get extra happiness from resources by creating buildings such as Markets. But you still only need one source of a resource to get the extra happiness, and extra sources will give you no extra benefit (although you can trade them).

2) The benefit is applied to all cities connected to that city by road or sea; in other words, your entire empire if it is connected by a trade network.

 

[Roland Johansen]

3) At higher difficulty levels, does teching cost increase?

4) What are trade routes? I don't seem to have noticed anything about this in the game before

3) No, it stays the same as Noble, but the AI can go WAAAAY faster on Diety than you ever could at Settler.

While most of ggganz answers were completely correct, in this case he is slightly mistaken. The AI doesn't get a research bonus on higher difficulty levels and the human player does have higher teching cost at higher levels. The increase in teching cost isn't very big and so may go unnoticed when you move up a level.

The AI does get lots of small bonuses in all areas and these bonuses add up and thus the AI will advance more quickly through the tech tree at higher levels, but it's not caused by a research bonus.

The AI does start with some additional technologies on high difficulty levels which could be seen as a research bonus, but I would call it a starting bonus.

At noble difficulty level, there are no research bonuses for the AI or the human player. The two are equal in this regard.


I just wrote a short guide about trade routes, a few posts back, post number 7557.

 

[MrCynical]

While most of ggganz answers were completely correct, in this case he is slightly mistaken. The AI doesn't get a research bonus on higher difficulty levels and the human player does have higher teching cost at higher levels. The increase in teching cost isn't very big and so may go unnoticed when you move up a level.

The AI does get lots of small bonuses in all areas and these bonuses add up and thus the AI will advance more quickly through the tech tree at higher levels, but it's not caused by a research bonus.

Errr, I'm not sure where you're getting this Roland, but the AI definitely does get a bonus to research at levels above Noble (and in combination with a bonus to production that's the most significant reason it is in fact harder). It's true the base research cost (which applies to both humans and AI) increases with difficulty level - this is the researchpercent value in the Handicap XML file. However the AI also receives a bonus relative to the human player (defined by the AICreatepercent value in the XML file).

E.g at Deity level, the base research cost is set to 130, so each tech is costing 30% more to research than at Noble for all civs, AI and human. The AI however only pay 60% of that base value, and so will not only research much faster relative to the human player, but faster than they would have at noble.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Errr, I'm not sure where you're getting this Roland, but the AI definitely does get a bonus to research at levels above Noble (and in combination with a bonus to production that's the most significant reason it is in fact harder). It's true the base research cost (which applies to both humans and AI) increases with difficulty level - this is the researchpercent value in the Handicap XML file. However the AI also receives a bonus relative to the human player (defined by the AICreatepercent value in the XML file).

E.g at Deity level, the base research cost is set to 130, so each tech is costing 30% more to research than at Noble for all civs, AI and human. The AI however only pay 60% of that base value, and so will not only research much faster relative to the human player, but faster than they would have at noble.

Is the iAIcreatepercent entry used for research? I never knew that. Maybe I shouldn't have corrected ggganz if I didn't know exactly how it worked myself. I did know that there was a research penalty at higher levels for the human player though.

By the way, from what I've heard from multiple different independent sources, the AI-modifiers in the handicap file are relative to the noble level values, so the iAICreatePercent value of 60 at deity level would then mean that the AI pays 60% of the noble level value, not 60% of 130% of the noble level value. Have I heard wrong?

The AI also gets a smaller research bonus from the per-era bonus, doesn't it? (iAIPerEraModifier). It's not so significant at most difficulty levels, but it starts becoming a factor at the very highest difficulty levels.

 

[MrCynical]

Is the iAIcreatepercent entry used for research? I never knew that.

I must admit I'm only getting to this by process of elimination. Empirical tests in worldbuilder indicate the AI only pays 60% research costs relative to the human player at deity level, and that's the only 60% value I can't account for elsewhere in the XML file. I suppose I could do a quick check by dratically changing the value and seeing what happens in game.

By the way, from what I've heard from multiple different independent sources, the AI-modifiers in the handicap file are relative to the noble level values, so the iAICreatePercent value of 60 at deity level would then mean that the AI pays 60% of the noble level value, not 60% of 130% of the noble level value. Have I heard wrong?

Running a quick test was slightly hampered by the discovery of the small bug that mousing over an AI's research bar in city investigation displays your own research info rather than theirs. However:

At Noble level Meditation costs 80 beakers for both human and AI. (80 beakers is the human cost, and a quick check shows that under identical conditions the AI also needs the same amount of beakers based on reearch time and beaker output).

At Deity level Meditation costs the human player 104 beakers - exactly 130% of the Noble cost.

The AI required 7 turns at 9 beakers = 63. 63/104 = 60.5% (minor fractional overflow there).

If the AI percentage was working relative to the Noble values they'd only have needed 80*0.6 = 48 beakers, and so would only have needed 6 turns (with substantial overflow) to research the tech.

So the AI modifier is definitely applied to that level's base value, not the noble value.

 

[rantzzz]

1) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read somewhere that missionaries spread wealth as well. For example, if your missionary spreads your religion to an AI's city, you'll get some commerce from that?

And thanks for the earlier clarifications on the difficulty levels guys.

 

[MrCynical]

1) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read somewhere that missionaries spread wealth as well. For example, if your missionary spreads your religion to an AI's city, you'll get some commerce from that?

If you own a shrine of a religion then you get 1 gold (not commerce) each turn for every city with the religion. You can therefore make gold if you have a shrien by spreading religion with missionaries.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Running a quick test was slightly hampered by the discovery of the small bug that mousing over an AI's research bar in city investigation displays your own research info rather than theirs. However:

At Noble level Meditation costs 80 beakers for both human and AI. (80 beakers is the human cost, and a quick check shows that under identical conditions the AI also needs the same amount of beakers based on reearch time and beaker output).

At Deity level Meditation costs the human player 104 beakers - exactly 130% of the Noble cost.

The AI required 7 turns at 9 beakers = 63. 63/104 = 60.5% (minor fractional overflow there).

If the AI percentage was working relative to the Noble values they'd only have needed 80*0.6 = 48 beakers, and so would only have needed 6 turns (with substantial overflow) to research the tech.

So the AI modifier is definitely applied to that level's base value, not the noble value.

Ok, this seems to be crystal clear.

I do know that I've read about the iAImodifiers working on the noble level values in some discussion or article about maintenance, but I don't recall what type of maintenance (city, civic or unit maintenance). Maybe it's not working the same way for the various modifiers (research vs maintenance), but that would be a weird way to program the game.

 

[CharlieM]

Resource question:

For example, Frederick has War Elephants, but I don't see Ivory anywhere in his Civ. I assume he is trading for the Ivory, and I'm wondering if I can find out WHO is dumb enough to give him the Ivory. Is there a screen to see where he is getting his Ivory?

Captured City question:

Let's say I just captured a city that is going to be hard to hold, because it's mid-game and the tiles around it are mostly leaning towards my enemy's civ. I want to add Culture to my city, I think, to hold it (aside from troops!). Is it a good strategy to build a high-culture low-cost building like a Theater?

 

[SexyDude76]

1. Do hammers and food in excess (when city grows or finish production) pass to the next turn or get lost?

2. In the Espionage screen, although I have 75 EPs accumulated for a civ, and one visible city listed, I cannot execute passive missions costing 30... What am I missing here?