Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[BTSFanRandy]

Sorry, I'm making this up as I progress through the game.

Is it better to activate Golden Age or to assist/discover a new technology with a Great Prophet?

 

[Roland Johansen]

Is it better to implement Slavery early in the game to "whip" things, or will the unhappiness unbalance the benefit?

There are several reasons to use slavery early game:

- There are few ways to efficiently generate production in cities with few hills, the most efficient way to do it upto halfway in the game is by employing slavery.

- Your cities are small and thus they'll regrow the lost population quickly since the cost of a point of population increases with city size. The production advantage is unrelated to the city size, only related to the number of citizens used in the population-rushing. So slaverly is relatively efficient in small cities.

- The happiness cap is low early game since you do not have access to many happiness resources and many happiness buildings yet. The healthiness cap isn't much better. So at some point if you allow your cities to grow, they will grow unhappy (and unhealthy). These unhappy citizens are worse than useless: they eat food and cost gold upkeep while they produce nothing. So it's a lot better to use them for whipping which decreases city size and diminishes the unhappiness and unhealthiness problems. Just don't whip them too often as that will cause more unhappiness problems than it solves.

Is it better to activate Golden Age or to assist/discover a new technology with a Great Prophet?

If you have a huge empire of big cities, then you'll be using a lot of city tiles and a lot of these tiles will get an increase in production or commerce during a number of turns. In this case, a golden age can be enormously profitable. You can calculate the advantage by summing the commerce and production gain during these turns. Don't forget the gold/science and production multipliers in the various cities.

If your empire isn't that large, then the direct science advantage can be a lot larger than the gold/production advantage provided by the golden age. You can see the science advantage by looking at the amount of science points provided by the rushing of a technology (some technologies later in the game are not fully researched with one specialist but the research points provided are shown when you mouse over the Great Prophet option).

Golden ages provide hammers, which cannot (directly) be provided by the rushing of a technology. Rushing a technology gives you a technology now which can be used in trading now and used for all kinds of technology related issues now, a golden age gives advantages over a certain period.

Don't forget that a Great Prophet also has a special ability, namely creating a holy city. Over the length of a game, the advantage of such a city can be a lot larger than either a golden age or a rushed technology.

 

[BTSFanRandy]

What does rexxing mean/what is it?

Edit: Is there a leader with Phi/Imp?
Edit2: What does the # Free Units mean for the Vassalage civic?

 

[Perplexity]

Edit: Is there a leader with Phi/Imp?

Suleiman is Phi/Imp.

Check out this tool: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/reference/leader_picker_bts.html

 

[CCRunner]

What does rexxing mean/what is it?

Edit: Is there a leader with Phi/Imp?
Edit2: What does the # Free Units mean for the Vassalage civic?

Rex stands for Rapid Early eXpansion or Rapid EXpansion.

# Free units is the amount of units you don't need to pay maintenance on. This can help your economy a fair bit.

 

[dirtyparrot]

I've read a lot of people selecting aggressive AIs in the custom game menu. I've never played with aggressive AIs and was wandering the reasoning to this. Is it because the diplomatic penalties that other civs give to you are either less or go decrease more quickly? Because I find it strange that people would want to increase the likelihood of going to war not on our terms but the civs.

 

[BTSFanRandy]

Does having a fast worker of India provide more benefit than a good soldier UB?

 

[CCRunner]

I wasn't aware there were soldier UB's

The fast worker is a decent UU, not the worst but certainly not the best. It all depends on how you play. It can save you a good amount of turns because after moving into a forest hill or something like that it can still start to build the improvement. Not to mention it can more easily switch between cities as needed. I'd take a praetorian or immortal over it any day but it's ranked before some.

Basically the answer is that it depends

 

[tbirde56]

A question: My cat laid on the left side of my keyboard while I was playing a single player game. Somehow it switched me to playing as the AI! How do I switch back??

 

[henrebotha]

Why do so many people recommend against making your capital a GP Farm?

 

[Gwynnja]

Why do so many people recommend against making your capital a GP Farm?

Because bureaucracy is a extremely powerful civic. It adds 50% to your capital's commerce and production output. GP farms are set up to feed specialists.

 

[Mantic0re]

I've read that you can take advantage of whip overflow by queuing up several items in the city build order and switching between them. I can't seem to control the order of items on the queue. Shift-click adds to the bottom, Ctrl-click adds to the top, Left-click removes the item from the queue (and I assume you loose the invested hammers).

Here's an example:

Base Hammers/turn: 5
Build Order:
1. Axeman (15/35)
2. Settler (5/100)
3. Pyramids (5/500?)
4. Granary (5/60?)

I can whip the axeman and generate 15 hammer overflow which as it is set now will go toward the settler. I recently learned Pottery and want to get the granary ASAP, so I'd like to move the Granary to get the overflow from the axeman. I'd also like to preserve the hammer investment to the settler.

1. How can I move that overflow to the granary?
2. In attempting to move things around I loose hammers from the settler, how can I prevent this?

Thanks

 

[henrebotha]

(and I assume you loose the invested hammers).

You don't lose the hammers. If you remove the thing from the queue and you re-add it in that same turn, it keeps the hammers. So basically, to manipulate the queue, you can just take everything down then re-add it in the order you want.

 

[Roland Johansen]

I've read a lot of people selecting aggressive AIs in the custom game menu. I've never played with aggressive AIs and was wandering the reasoning to this. Is it because the diplomatic penalties that other civs give to you are either less or go decrease more quickly? Because I find it strange that people would want to increase the likelihood of going to war not on our terms but the civs.

I personally use the aggressive AI special game startup option. It makes all the AI's more aggressive, more aggressive towards the human player but also more aggressive towards eachother.

The main reason why I do this is because I want more competition and not just more competition on the economic side of the game but mainly more competition on the military side of the game. The normal AI setting makes the AI rather docile, in most cases the player can decide when wars start and there will be few to no surprise attacks. Thus the game can become a bit predictable and controllable. I however like to be surprised by the opposition, I don't like a predictable path to victory. (So your remark about "Because I find it strange that people would want to increase the likelihood of going to war not on our terms but the civs." actually applies to me, I like the challenge.)

Note also that with the aggressive AI setting, the AI is not only more aggressive, but it also creates more units. Thus the military way to control and win the game will typically become less attractive and more costly. Since most people agree that a few controlled successful military conflicts can be very beneficial to your odds of winning the game, making this path to victory more costly is in my opinion a good thing.

The main negative element of the aggressive AI setting is that the AI can relatively overspend on military slowing down their economic development. This is mainly an issue on the lower difficulty levels. On the higher difficulty levels where the AI gets economic bonuses and military upkeep is less costly, the AI can both develop its economy and create a powerful military making its opposition to human victory impressive.

The aggressive AI setting is not exactly the same as hand picking aggressive leaders as opposition. The setting not only causes more aggressive opposition but also more military spending which is of course needed to be successful with aggression. But I guess that the reason for picking such leaders would be similar to my reasons for selecting the aggressive AI option.

A question: My cat laid on the left side of my keyboard while I was playing a single player game. Somehow it switched me to playing as the AI! How do I switch back??

Ask your cat!

Sorry, I can't help you.

Why do so many people recommend against making your capital a GP Farm?

One of the main reasons would be the strong bureaucracy civic which immensely increases the commerce output of your capital. Thus it can be very beneficial to develop your capital as a cottage city especially since the cottages have a lot of time to develop since it's your first city.

Of course, you don't have to develop your first city into a cottage city. The city can be a prime GP farm location and you can move your palace to another city which you can then develop into a cottage city. With a bit of planning that can work out just fine.

The bureaucracy civic is of course also more powerful on smaller maps where the commerce output of a single city (the capital) can be more influential.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

A question: My cat laid on the left side of my keyboard while I was playing a single player game. Somehow it switched me to playing as the AI! How do I switch back??

Literally a brilliant picture

I don't know how this is possible, unless you are using a mod including the "Civ changer". If so, you just click the little icon at the top left, which asks which nation you want to change to.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

I've read that you can take advantage of whip overflow by queuing up several items in the city build order and switching between them. I can't seem to control the order of items on the queue. Shift-click adds to the bottom, Ctrl-click adds to the top, Left-click removes the item from the queue (and I assume you loose the invested hammers).

Here's an example:

Base Hammers/turn: 5
Build Order:
1. Axeman (15/35)
2. Settler (5/100)
3. Pyramids (5/500?)
4. Granary (5/60?)

I can whip the axeman and generate 15 hammer overflow which as it is set now will go toward the settler. I recently learned Pottery and want to get the granary ASAP, so I'd like to move the Granary to get the overflow from the axeman. I'd also like to preserve the hammer investment to the settler.

1. How can I move that overflow to the granary?
2. In attempting to move things around I loose hammers from the settler, how can I prevent this?

Thanks

Simply answered, you don't lose the invested when you remove something from the queue. The game remembers what has already had put towards it, even if its no longer in the queue.

So in your example, remove all except the axe, and put the granary second. When you whip, the overflow goes to the granary. Now put the settler back where you wanted, and you'll see the are still there, so none wasted.

Important note:- hammers invested will eventually start to disappear if you wait too long and leave something partially built waiting. It depends upon game speed, but after about 20 turns (I think) on normal speed, they will start to degenerate, so don't let them go to waste.

 

[Supr49er]

Wow. Welcome to posting tbirde56.

 

[OscarWildebeest]

What determines whether partisans will appear (and fight my exhausted troops) when I raze a city? In some games it happens, in others it doesn't.

 

[alexanders_dad]

Two questions from a total newbie:

(1) Is the number of turns limited? There is no mention of this in the documentation, but there seems to be a setting in the .ini file and I read something concerning this elsewhere on this helpful site.
(2) I also read somewhere that you could start a game at any era. Did I misunderstand as I do not see any way of doing this when you start a game.

Thanks to anyone who takes the trouble to read/reply to this!

 

[Supr49er]

1) Yes. The #turns scale depending on game speed. (Quick game turns < Marathon)
2) You need to select the "Custom Game" option.

Welcome to the Forums alexanders_dad.