Howdy.
I'm not sure if this is an appropriate question for this thread but oh well.
Right, I realise that churning out wave after wave of settlers and overexpanding in the Early game is a bad move, maintainence etc etc.
But how, then, does the AI manage to create a massive super-empire; founding about twenty cities, whilst I'm stranded in mediocrity with about 5?
Is there some trick to expansion?
D:
Halp?
There is no magical trick to expansion. It's just that an empire of 20 size 1-3 cities without infrastructure isn't viable in Civilization 4. It's an empire without an economy and it will crash under its own weight. Each city has several costs like city maintenance, civic maintenance and the empire wide unit maintenance. Thus on average, each city has to be able to pay for these costs and even provide something extra for your research otherwise such a city is dead weight.
An empire of 20 size 20 cities with lots of infrastructure (courthouses, markets, banks, libraries, observatories and cottages or specialists) and lots of trade routes (which become available with technologies, civics and buildings) can have an extremely powerful economy. Some of the civics and buildings which improve your economy aren't available at the very start of the game which further limits early game expansion.
So the idea of expansion is that it has to go three ways at the same time. You need horizontal expansion by creating more cities, claiming more resources to keep your cities happy and healthy and getting more land for production and commerce. Next to that you need vertical expansion by creating commerce enhancing buildings in your cities and creating commerce enhancing terrain improvements and creating bigger cities. And last but not least, you need technological progress to enable buildings and civics which can enhance your economy.
The main idea is to learn how to spread your focus along these three avenues of expansion. Focussing on only one of the three won't be the best way to win this game. A beginners rule which is often mentioned on the strategy and tips forum is to expand while your research rate can be maintained at 60% or higher and to stop expanding when it dips below this level. Note that this is a beginners rule to get a feeling for how quickly one should expand. It means that when you're using 40% or more of your total commerce output just to maintain your empire, then your empire is starting to become overstretched and you should become cautious when expanding further. I myself play immortal and deity level games and I regularly break this rule when I think it's opportune. But even when you at some point think you can do without this rule of thumb, you will still closely watch the amount (not the percentage) of research that you're producing while you're expanding.
The AI is fairly capable at finding a balance between these areas of expansion. At the very lowest levels, the inexperienced human player gets a handicap bonus to be able to compete with the AI which was programmed by people who knew how the economy in this game works. At the higher levels, the AI player gets a handicap bonus to be able to compete with the smart human player who has learned how the economy in this game works and is far more flexible than the preprogrammed AI opponents.
If you're having a really tough time to find a balance between horizontal, vertical and technological progress of your empire, then I would advice you to upload a savegame to the
Civ4 - Strategy & Tips forum to get some game specific advice. A savegame of around 1000 BC, 500AD and maybe 1500AD would show most experienced players where you're making less than optimal decisions. Especially an early game save seems to be important for you as it is the expansion period of the game where you're having trouble.
Good luck with your game and welcome to civfanatics!
1. How do corporations work?
2. How do colonies work?
3. How does espionage work?
4. Is there a writeup somewhere of the new civs, new leaders, and new units?
Thanks! Links to prior explanations would be fine, as long as they're not obsoleted by patches.
There is a new entry in the civilopedia specifically dedicated to the additions in BTS. It's very useful to take a look at it.
1) There can be said a lot about this, but let's keep it fairly short.
Corporations can be created when you have the corporation technology and the specific technology required to build a specific corporation (can be seen in the tech tree). To create a corporations headquarters, you need a specific type of great person (depends on which corporation you want to found).
The corporation can be spread with executives similar to the spreading of a religion with missionaries. The executives can be build in every city that has the corporation. If two corporations use (some of) the same resources, then they can't co-exist in the same city. Spreading corporations costs gold, especially in foreign cities and when you need to buy out another competing corporation.
A corporation headquarters produces a lot of gold dependant on the number of cities with that corporation similar to a holy city with a shrine, but a lot more. You should found corporations in your Wall Street city.
Cities which have a corporation will get an amount of resources (food, hammers, science, gold, culture) dependent on the number of corporation specific resources which are present in the city. The corporation Mining Inc. for instance creates hammers when there is gold, silver, iron, copper or coal in the city (not the fat cross, just connected). However, the presence of a corporation in a city also increases its city maintenance which makes a courthouse in such a city very important.
The conversion rate of gold (increased maintenance cost) into the resource produced by the corporation is very good which makes the civics which allow corporations very nice. State Property blocks corporations, Mercantalism blocks foreign corporations. Free market makes corporations cheaper to maintain, environmentalism makes them more pricey.
State Property used to be my favourite economic civic in vanilla and Warlords and even though it has been strengthened in BTS, I have switched to free market as my favourite economic civic, which shows how much I like corporations.
Ok, and that was short... (I'm not good at short).
2) You can split of a part of your oversees empire. There is now a colonial maintenance for oversees cities and this can be pretty significant for large groups of oversees cities on the same island. This can make it useful to split of a part of your empire which will then become a friendly colony of yours. If you treat it very poorly, then it could become independent. It's a special version of the vassal system. If you play without vassal states, then you can't create colonies and colonial maintenance = 0
3) There are several buildings that create espionage points and you can use part of your commerce to create espionage points (just like gold, science and culture).
Check out the espionage screen (CTRL-e).
If you have a certain number of espionage points towards a specific civilisation, then you'll get some passive bonuses against this civilisation. First, you'll be able to see their graphs (which start of hidden now), then you'll be able to see what they're researching, then you'll get line of sight from their cities (moved from the religion effect) and finally you'll be able to see inside their cities like they were your own. But the cost of getting these bonuses is also heavily dependent on the amount of espionage points that they invest in your civilisation.
Active espionage missions require a spy (available very early in the game now) and cost espionage points instead of gold. Some are useful (steal technology, 1-turn city revolt), others are not (spread culture is fairly useless).
4) Don't think so.
Links: Check the War academy. You should know how to find it.
There's a good game mechanic article about corporations by OTAKUjbski (unspeakable name) in there.
This link is useful too (spy game mechanics):
Spy detection
Note that there are more useful posts than just the OP by Bhruic. Krikkitone added some good stuff too.
) pillages the resource improvement by the way...
