Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[AspiringScholar]

How much does having a spy unit (not specialist) in your city square reduce the odds of a successful espionage mission being carried out against you there?

 

[Leyrann]

I didn't think about food before founding this city. Is there any way to improve it so that I can work more than one of the hills tiles, or am I just stuck with this?

Playing without any mods.

(and yeah - in hindsight I should've settled on the hill one tile south, so that I could've cannibalized the wheat)

 

[Samson]

I didn't think about food before founding this city. Is there any way to improve it so that I can work more than one of the hills tiles, or am I just stuck with this?

Playing without any mods.

(and yeah - in hindsight I should've settled on the hill one tile south, so that I could've cannibalized the wheat)

View attachment 659229

You are pretty much stuck. You can windmill the hills and use 2, but that does not give you the silver bonus yield. I probably would have put the city 1 S 2 W to get the deer.

 

[Leyrann]

You are pretty much stuck. You can windmill the hills and use 2, but that does not give you the silver bonus yield. I probably would have put the city 1 S 2 W to get the deer.

Yeah, that's also a pretty good spot now that you mention it.

I think my solution will be to put a city 1 S 3 W, next to the deer, and then grab the second silver resource (and the iron resource) from there, while this city slowly grows to cover all water tiles plus eventually the silver tile). It's still a decent return on commerce, which I'm focusing on anyway this game while I try to get a better understanding of how various strategies feel (e.g. last game I went all-in on food and specialists).

EDIT: Also, I actually have a second question. My state religion buildings show that they give +2 production, and I'm not sure where this comes from? I don't have the Holy City, is it influenced by something another civ did? (note: I don't have any religions other than my state religion anywhere, so I can't check whether it's actually unique to my state religion)

 

[Samson]

Yeah, that's also a pretty good spot now that you mention it.

I think my solution will be to put a city 1 S 3 W, next to the deer, and then grab the second silver resource (and the iron resource) from there, while this city slowly grows to cover all water tiles plus eventually the silver tile). It's still a decent return on commerce, which I'm focusing on anyway this game while I try to get a better understanding of how various strategies feel (e.g. last game I went all-in on food and specialists).

Offering a little unasked advice, if you are focussing on commerce you need to understand how the per city cost goes up with city number. There is an article about it somewhere here, but it is quite possible that if you have a few cities another city here to get one silver and a few sea tiles will cost much more in maintenance than it will bring in in commerce.

 

[Leyrann]

Offering a little unasked advice, if you are focussing on commerce you need to understand how the per city cost goes up with city number. There is an article about it somewhere here, but it is quite possible that if you have a few cities another city here to get one silver and a few sea tiles will cost much more in maintenance than it will bring in in commerce.

Yeah, that's fair enough. I do know how maintenance works. It's close to my capital though, so with a Courthouse I think I should be able to get the maintenance down to at most 4 gold or so even in the late game, and at that point I'd get 34 commerce from tiles, which probably rounds up to 50 or so with trade routes, so that should get me 10 gold per turn even at 20% gold rate, not counting modifiers such as the Market.

Also, I actually edited in a question, but you were too quick to reply, based on the post and edit timing, so I'm assuming you missed it.

 

[Samson]

Yeah, that's fair enough. I do know how maintenance works. It's close to my capital though, so with a Courthouse I think I should be able to get the maintenance down to at most 4 gold or so even in the late game, and at that point I'd get 34 commerce from tiles, which probably rounds up to 50 or so with trade routes, so that should get me 10 gold per turn even at 20% gold rate, not counting modifiers such as the Market.

Also, I actually edited in a question, but you were too quick to reply, based on the post and edit timing, so I'm assuming you missed it.

The critical number is not the maintenance reported in the city screen, it is the cost of having that city. Because the maintenance of all cities depends on the city number, the actual cost of a city may be much more that what is reported. As a learning tool you can save the game, go into world builder and delete the city. You can see how this affects your total maintenance bill. You may be surprised how much that is for a city close to your capital in a big empire, or you may not as you understand it fully, I don't know. The post this is based on is here, and has the below graph. This is based on small cities (size 1 IIRC?) so will be larger for larger cities, but if you can get 50 commerce from it you are probably winning.

EDIT: Also, I actually have a second question. My state religion buildings show that they give +2 production, and I'm not sure where this comes from? I don't have the Holy City, is it influenced by something another civ did? (note: I don't have any religions other than my state religion anywhere, so I can't check whether it's actually unique to my state religion)

Someone built the Apostolic palace. It gives everyone hammers for those religious buildings.

 

[Leyrann]

The critical number is not the maintenance reported in the city screen, it is the cost of having that city. Because the maintenance of all cities depends on the city number, the actual cost of a city may be much more that what is reported. As a learning tool you can save the game, go into world builder and delete the city. You can see how this affects your total maintenance bill. You may be surprised how much that is for a city close to your capital in a big empire, or you may not as you understand it fully, I don't know. The post this is based on is here, and has the below graph. This is based on small cities (size 1 IIRC?) so will be larger for larger cities, but if you can get 50 commerce from it you are probably winning.

Ah, that's a good point. I knew that, but I hadn't considered it. I'll take a look at the post you linked.

Someone built the Apostolic palace. It gives everyone hammers for those religious buildings.

Thank you, that explains it! I had noticed the Apostolic Palace had been built recently, but the civilopedia doesn't mention it, so I thought it had to be something else.

 

[AspiringScholar]

One thing I never quite understood about city maintenance (having read that article a couple times, albeit not quite recently), is how to understand (and whether there really is) an actual, concrete formula for it which is usable by the player when deciding when and where to settle another city.

Having played this game so much and understanding the rules of thumb about the ICN and the factors involved generally, I usually can gauge pretty well how much of a total maintenance hit each marginal city will inflict, but it would be cool to know the literal way that that's calculated, since IIRC the author of that guide just inductively plotted a somewhat irregular looking data pattern without actually discovering the inner workings of the mechanic itself. My first thought is that it is spaghetti code which only a few people who worked on the original development were privy to and have now long since forgotten.

For all practical purposes at my level of play, having an intuitive feel for the general factors involved is good enough, but I'd imagine at a certain level, being able to actually calculate a specific number for the impact of each new city (especially when we do know this for things like trade route yield, cottage development time, etc., and the counterracting factors) would make a pretty significant difference in the quality of one's game.

 

[Darkator]

I have a question why vanilla ai uses planes and Beyond sword doesn't use anymore (or at least doesn't produce)

 

[civac]

@Aspiring Scholar: Since the Civ4 dll is public these formulas are indeed known. The only full reference I know is in German though. I have made a spreadsheet to calculate settling costs. Could link it here but that would probably require adding some explanation and sanitizing the metadata.

 

[AspiringScholar]

@Aspiring Scholar: Since the Civ4 dll is public these formulas are indeed known. The only full reference I know is in German though. I have made a spreadsheet to calculate settling costs. Could link it here but that would probably require adding some explanation and sanitizing the metadata.

Zum Glück habe ich Deutsch als Student bei Uni gestudiert und kann es einfach ohne Übersetzung verstehen! Bitte kopieren Sie das hier!

 

[civac]

City maintenance: https://www.civforum.de/showthread....adtunterhalt-nach-Anzahl-der-Staedte-BTS-3-19
Civic maintenance: https://www.civforum.de/showthread.php?108489-Berechnung-Staatsformunterhalt-(bei-5-und-6-Spalten)

Note that the second link references a civfanatics thread which is no longer correct. The values for civic and city maintenance get added, you also add the unit maintenance and supply. From turn 90 forward (standard settings) the total will also be multiplied by inflation. But that's not important for settling purposes.

Will post spreadsheet when I'm home.

 

[Leyrann]

I've noticed that it's possible on Grassland Hills (but not other Hills) to build Cottages, however the visuals look weird, with the buildings clipping into the ground. Is it a bug that this is allowed, or intended behavior?

(or is there disagreement on that in the community?)

EDIT: Huh, I'm not actually seeing the clipping issues right now. Might be because I have Industrial models for the buildings at the moment. I guess it's intended then?

 

[Lennier]

The AI builds cottages all the time on grassland hills. I don't think it's a bug, just a quirk in the game. But I never build cottages on hills and generally pillage cottages the AI has put on hills of cities I'm about to/have just conquered.

 

[civac]

@AspiringScholar Spreadsheet is attached. Most numbers should be self-explanatory. You can find the numbers to be plugged in at the top in a table on the right side spearated by difficulty and map size. "ORG" constant is either 0 or 1 depending on whether you have the trait or not. Only tricky number is the "MaxPlotDistance". This is the largest plot distance between tiles on the map. So for a m x n cylindrical map this would be the plot distance of (m/2,n-1) which is equal to max(m/2, n-1) + min(m/2, n-1)/2 rounded down.

 

[AspiringScholar]

@AspiringScholar Spreadsheet is attached. Most numbers should be self-explanatory. You can find the numbers to be plugged in at the top in a table on the right side spearated by difficulty and map size. "ORG" constant is either 0 or 1 depending on whether you have the trait or not. Only tricky number is the "MaxPlotDistance". This is the largest plot distance between tiles on the map. So for a m x n cylindrical map this would be the plot distance of (m/2,n-1) which is equal to max(m/2, n-1) + min(m/2, n-1)/2 rounded down.

Awesome! Thank you for this resource.

 

[AcaMetis]

For strong tiles, I know food resources obviously qualify, other than that, which ones do?

Again, very broadly speaking, early on food is king, and there's significant overlap between how strong a tile is and how much food the tile (or the city working the tile) has. Some people - including myself - would call a literal goldmine a weak tile in the wrong circumstances, and most of those circumstances have to do with food. Of course that's not to say that food yield is everything. A goldmine can be one of the most powerful tiles in the game if circumstances are right for it (gem mines are better, and surprise, that's because they spawn on 2 grassland tiles rather than 2 plains hill tiles), and mining a grassland hill pig is a tried and true way to boost production in a city that has enough food to support itself otherwise (or if Animal Husbandry is going to be delayed) without hurting growth speed.

One key trick to optimize your early game a lot more than you'd think is to learn how to share tiles between cities effectively. For strong food tiles this is especially important early game, not just to help new cities start growing faster but also to use those food tiles to keep growing even when one of those cities isn't growing due to building a worker/settler.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Am I the only one who thinks worshops are worthless? Like the -1 food is just too much of a penalty which newer ever makes them worth using.

 

[Samson]

Am I the only one who thinks worshops are worthless? Like the -1 food is just too much of a penalty which newer ever makes them worth using.

I rarely build them until they get the extra hammer, but after this they are as powerful as the other flatland improvements. Generally food is power early, so they are not as common early as others, but later when food is more plentiful they can be the most powerful improvement.