Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Sisiutil]

Coastal cities also have better trade routes than inland cities, so by founding 1 tile from the coast you are forgoing a significant amount of revenue. Many highly favoured gambits, such as building the Great Lighthouse and/or acquiring Astronomy early, are enhanced by having more coastal cities with their lucrative trade routes. On some maps there's also the potential to combine cities with forts and even lakes to provide canals to speed naval movement.

Inevitably, though, sometimes the map will dictate that the best location for a city is inland with a few water tiles you can't improve--because a coastal location will put a valuable resource out of the fat cross, or in a spot where an existing city or culture prevents the city from being founded there, etc. When this happens, just try to minimize the water tiles as much as possible.

 

[Roland Johansen]

In a number of threads, people talk about cities one tile away from the coast as a thing that should not be done. I don't really get it though - of course, if it'll have the same tiles as an inland one, might as well put it on the coast, but frequently putting a city inland gives you 3-5 additional improvable tiles to work, which is a lot if you don't have an abundance of useful land, while only losing the ability to build Lighthouses and Harbors (and ships, but I only need one or two cities to build those anyway). What other great disadvantages of inland cities am I missing?

There is nothing wrong with inland cities. Land tiles are usually superior to coastal and sea tiles. However, coastal tiles still have some value when they're improved by a lighthouse. They offer enough food to sustain the citizen working the tile and 2 extra commerce. Nothing wrong with such a tile. A cottage only surpasses it at the village level and that takes a while. Coastal and sea tiles which don't benefit from the presence of a lighthouse are however absolutely horrible tiles. Their output is on the level or below the level of a specialist without the great person points or other bonuses to specialists. If a city has a non-resource coastal or sea tile without the benefit of a lighthouse, then it's effectively a lost tile within the city radius. You could almost always let a citizen do something better than working that tile.

So you want to minimise these useless tiles by making sure that almost every coastal tile in your empire is used by a city that can build a lighthouse.

Next to this, coastal cities can build harbours and custom houses and ships and form a connection hub with the sea lanes. The harbours and custom houses can make the trade routes of a coastal city produce some 10-20 extra in the late game. That's not a minor benefit.

 

[Lord Parkin]

One other benefit I just remembered is that being able to build a Lighthouse in some locations that are coastal but have lakes nearby as well allows you to turn ordinary lakes into 3 food, 2 commerce tiles which are very good for working.

 

[6K Man]

One occasionally significant additional merit for coastal cities is that if you have finite land, you can squeeze more cities into a given landmass if you settle them on the coast, as opposed to settling them all inland.

I'd rather have 4-5 coastal cities sharing land tiles than 2-3 wholly inland ones, or 2 inland and one coastal, for example.

Food, Health, Trade (via Harbours, Custom Houses, GLH), ability to build ships, and potential additional city sites add up to putting cities on the coast unless the site is drastically worse than the 1-off-the-coast site.

 

[kcd_swede]

One occasionally significant additional merit for coastal cities is that if you have finite land, you can squeeze more cities into a given landmass if you settle them on the coast, as opposed to settling them all inland.

I'd rather have 4-5 coastal cities sharing land tiles than 2-3 wholly inland ones, or 2 inland and one coastal, for example.

Food, Health, Trade (via Harbours, Custom Houses, GLH), ability to build ships, and potential additional city sites add up to putting cities on the coast unless the site is drastically worse than the 1-off-the-coast site.

In the same vein.... one should not be too concerned about having a few unworkable tiles in the BFC. Few cities will ever work all of their tiles anyhow. When choosing location, coastal gives trade routes and opportunity to build sea infrastructure and naval units. That benefit must be weighed against whatever you must give up to make it coastal. Generally --without seafood on them-- coastal/ocean tiles are pretty weak and you won't want to be working them much even if you do choose to settle coastal.

 

[georgjorge]

Thanks for the responses!

Coastal cities also have better trade routes than inland cities, so by founding 1 tile from the coast you are forgoing a significant amount of revenue. Many highly favoured gambits, such as building the Great Lighthouse and/or acquiring Astronomy early, are enhanced by having more coastal cities with their lucrative trade routes.

How exactly does that work out? I thought they'd get equal trade routes as coastal cities as long as they were connected to cities on the coast (without having the Great Lighthouse), what's the formula for determining which routes they get then?

 

[Zink]

I am the only Civ with Astronomy, the island i just settled is too far to reach for anyone else and no Civ spawned here. How the heck did those barb macemen get CR2 promotions? They didnt attack me yet either, they just appeared.
Does the barb Civilization have civics (ie. Vassalage)?

The city (which i might lose this turn )

Spoiler :

 

[_alphaBeta_]

What are the requirements in order for you to liberate a city?

Bismark is next door, and getting beat up pretty bad by Peter. I take Bismark on as a vassal and turn the tide. I capture Dusseldorf, which I confirmed as belonging to Bismark in the log before Peter captured it. I was not presented with an option to liberate it back to Bismark's control. Why?

 

[Roland Johansen]

Coastal cities also have better trade routes than inland cities, so by founding 1 tile from the coast you are forgoing a significant amount of revenue. Many highly favoured gambits, such as building the Great Lighthouse and/or acquiring Astronomy early, are enhanced by having more coastal cities with their lucrative trade routes.

How exactly does that work out? I thought they'd get equal trade routes as coastal cities as long as they were connected to cities on the coast (without having the Great Lighthouse), what's the formula for determining which routes they get then?

It's not the fact that they're coastal which gives them better trade routes. It's the availability of the harbor and custom house which enhances their trade route output. Furthermore, the algorithm which assigns foreign trade routes to your cities, picks the cities with harbors and custom houses for the best trade routes. So coastal cities with harbors (and custom houses) get the best foreign trade routes which are then enhanced by the bonuses of the harbor and custom house.

As said in my previous post, in the late game this can easily increase the output of commerce from trade routes in such cities by 10-20 .

 

[IAM]

What are the requirements in order for you to liberate a city?

Bismark is next door, and getting beat up pretty bad by Peter. I take Bismark on as a vassal and turn the tide. I capture Dusseldorf, which I confirmed as belonging to Bismark in the log before Peter captured it. I was not presented with an option to liberate it back to Bismark's control. Why?

Some of that has to do with cultural influence, i think. Is the city still in anarchy? and have you tried to contact Bismark directly and offer him the city through the trade screen?

 

[_alphaBeta_]

Some of that has to do with cultural influence, i think. Is the city still in anarchy? and have you tried to contact Bismark directly and offer him the city through the trade screen?

The plot had 99% German culture and it was still in anarchy from when Peter captured it. Since I thought I couldn't give it back to Bismarck I destroyed the city originally. To get to the bottom of this, I reloaded the save and tried some things:

1. I too figured the city needed to come out of anarchy first, but waiting a turn for this to happen and then attacking had the same result: still no option to return the city to the German empire. Turns out anarchy is not relevant, but thanks IAM for the suggestion.

2. I discovered that I could liberate the city back to Bismarck a couple turns later via diplomacy or the liberate screen, but why not when I first captured the city?

3. It turns out the answer to #2 was that Peter had some units adjacent to the city. I confirmed that removing those units before attacking the city allowed for the "return the city to the German empire" to be an option upon city capture. The same thing happened if I attacked the city first - originally no liberate option. But that same turn if I removed the adjacent threat, I could liberate.

So it looks like you can't liberate a city if it's threatened. Who knew?

 

[Roland Johansen]

So it looks like you can't liberate a city if it's threatened. Who knew?

I didn't know that, but it does make sense. It could be very exploitable otherwise. A human player could repeatedly liberate the same city for high diplomacy bonuses.

 

[BrantleyL1]

All of the talk about coastal vs inland got me to thinking...

Game opens and you have a settler & a warrior. The tile you are on w/the settler looks pretty good, but it looks like you are three tiles from the coast (or at least a large body of water). So, you move your warrior and check. Sure enough, it looks like it's costal (you can never be 100% certain until you've explored some more). So, do you settle inland with a pretty good spot and start your research OR, do you move to the coast - maybe costing two or three turns and settle there?

I know "it depends", but anyone have some "rules of thumb" for this situation??

 

[Lord Parkin]

Depends on the layout of the resources. If they're not that strong around the starting location, or many of them are located such that they could be used by either city (coastal or founded in place), I might consider moving. But usually, I'd just settle in place, unless I'm 1 tile off the coast - in which case I'll almost always move to be on the coast.

 

[Silu]

Three tiles of coast, basically never worth moving. Your capital is usually going to be very big, so land tiles are good. Don't get dazzled by all this talk about coastal trade routes, working coastal tiles often sucks and working ocean tiles always sucks - avoiding them altogether is often a good idea. Now, starting one tile off coast is another issue but even then it's often not worth moving. I've been in situations where I've moved the starting settler from the coast 1 tile inland and settled there.

 

[Roland Johansen]

All of the talk about coastal vs inland got me to thinking...

Game opens and you have a settler & a warrior. The tile you are on w/the settler looks pretty good, but it looks like you are three tiles from the coast (or at least a large body of water). So, you move your warrior and check. Sure enough, it looks like it's costal (you can never be 100% certain until you've explored some more). So, do you settle inland with a pretty good spot and start your research OR, do you move to the coast - maybe costing two or three turns and settle there?

I know "it depends", but anyone have some "rules of thumb" for this situation??

In this game, the output of your civilization (gold, science, production) grows almost exponentially with the number of turns. This makes it extremely important to start this exponential growth with a good starting city and far less important to think about the position of your 3-rd or 4-th city and whether they will be nicely positioned with respect to the coast lines. And at this point the distribution of tiles among your various cities is also not of prime importance.

With the first city, you grab the best possible position for early growth and expansion of your civilization. You worry later about the positioning of the cities in your empire.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

Small gameplay question,

If I have : Conquest, Space Race and Diplomatic Victory checked,
and I play Single or HotSeat, can I :
* Win the Diplomatic Victory, and then go onto the Space Race?
And by can you achieve all 3 victories in 1 game? (let's say Diplomatic, Space Race, then Conquest?)

 

[Arakhor]

You can only score one victory per game, even if you conquer everyone, get 3 cities of 50,000+ culture and send a ship to Alpha Centauri.

 

[DMOC]

If I'm hosting a pitboss game ...

1. Does the computer have to be modern/capable of running huge maps of civ? Or can it be just an old computer but with stable internet connection?
2. What happens when I reboot/restart the computer? When the internet gets back, is the game automatically back up?

 

[Lord Parkin]

If I'm hosting a pitboss game ...

1. Does the computer have to be modern/capable of running huge maps of civ? Or can it be just an old computer but with stable internet connection?
2. What happens when I reboot/restart the computer? When the internet gets back, is the game automatically back up?

1. I'm pretty sure your hosting computer doesn't need to be capable of running huge maps in the modern era. This is because it's the computers that join the pitboss game that do the majority of the donkey work. The server is pretty much just a central point for them all to connect to. Of course, you might find that load times are quicker if you have a more modern server.

2. I'm pretty sure you have to manually restart the pitboss after a reboot, unless you set up an application that automatically restarts it for you.

All in all though, you might be better off directly PMing someone who has experience hosting pitboss games (e.g. DaveShack), since they'll know much more about it).