Civ 4 questions here. This is my first Civ game and I am an ULTRA noob so these are very basic questions.
This thread was created for questions like these.
1) How do you start getting +gold per turn? Does building cottages/hamlets/towns do that?
Your commerce (
) is divided into gold (
) and science (
) by the so called science slider at the top left of the main screen (it's actually not a slider but a percentage that can be lowered and increased). If you lower the percentage of your commerce that is spent on science, then more will go to gold and your gold per turn (gpt) will go up (and the rate at which you research new technologies will go down). Since there are several costs like unit upkeep, city upkeep and civic upkeep, it is typically needed to divert part of your commerce production into gold to pay for these costs. If you divert more commerce into gold, then you will get a positive gpt rate.
Note that there are several other things that can give you gpt independent from the science slider. At the start of the game, the most common ones are merchant specialists inside your cities and a holy city with a shrine.
At high difficulty levels, it is harder to get a high science rate combined with a positive gold per turn rate as the costs are higher.
If you earn more commerce, then a lower percentage of this commerce will pay for all of your costs and you can even get a positive gpt with a fairly high science rate. Buildings that enhance the output of gold (banks, markets, grocers) also help, but they are available later in the game.
2) What makes your gold start to drain? Building military units? Workers? Both?
Every single city has a gold upkeep (city upkeep). Then there is civic upkeep. Some civics have a higher upkeep and some a lower one. The bigger your empire, the higher your city and civic upkeep, but you'll also have a bigger commerce production.
All of your units also have upkeep cost, but you also have a limited free unit upkeep. So only after building several units will you have to pay for the extra units. The bigger your empire, the higher your free unit upkeep, so a big empire can have quite some units without having to pay any upkeep. But you typically also need a larger army to defend all of those big cities.
Check the financial advisor (F2) for all things related to cost.
3) What's the fastest way to expand your borders early in the game?
Produce culture.
If you happen to be creative, then all of your cities automatically 2 culture per turn and this will make your borders expand. If you aren't creative, then a monument is the cheapest and earliest building that produces culture. Later, the theatre produces far more culture for a fairly low building cost. Other buildings like a library, university, monastery and temple also produce culture.
If you're using the caste system civic, then you can employ an artist specialist without any building requirements and can get the first border expansion quickly. Later after developing music, you can convert production (
) into culture to get that first border expansion.
If you get a religion in a city, then the city will also produce a low amount of culture.
Later in the game:
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4) Is there a way to reduce overcrowding in cities? I frequently have a good number of angry citizens because of this and I don't know how to fix the problem.
No, you can't really reduce overcrowding in cities. Each citizen in your city increases unhappiness by 1 and this unhappiness is named overcrowding. The way to combat this unhappiness is by increasing your happiness by getting luxury resources, certain buildings and a state religion. As long as your happiness is larger than your unhappiness, all of your citizens will be working.
It's key to manage the size of your cities so that you don't have unhappy citizens. Unhappy citizens contribute nothing and they do eat 2 food (
). You want to avoid getting unhappy citizens in your cities. This can be achieved by using low food (and high hammer or commerce) tiles when your cities are close to the happy cap. You can also use an early civic named slavery which allows you to hurry production by using population (named pop rushing on this forum). This lowers the population and thus avoids some of the overcrowding. But it does add temporary unhappiness and you don't have the population that could produce other things. But if the population is unhappy anyway, then it's better to use pop rushing to at least get some production.
Once you have adopted this civic, then the option is available in each city close to the governor buttons.
I know I have more questions but I'm at work so I can't think of any more right now! Thanks!
Then come back later and someone will surely answer them.
And welcome to civfanatics!
Hi again..
more than your health limit, essentially meaning each population takes three food.
