Share your Civ Fanaticism

[setonfire]

Hello all
I am a complete noob at Civilization and I really want to learn the game. I have tried doing so by starting out with Civ 3 first but couldn't get the hang of it. Then I heard that Civ 4 is easier to pick up. So now I am trying to learn the game by playing Civ 4.

I came upon this forum today. I must confess that I am really making no headway in my attempts to learn and enjoy the game. I have played strategy games like AOE and RON before. (By the way I beat the computer at Tougher in Rise of Nations Now playing on Toughest).

I am coming to the point where I am thinking of giving up. I love planning and strategy games. Civilization is the best strategy game there is and I can't get it. Every game site has lavished praise on Civ. What am I missing?

This is a request to all Civ fans here to help this noob break in. What should I do?

Thanking you in anticipation

 

[kossin]

It depends on what you like to do...

If you are having difficulty learning the game mechanics, head to the War Academy and the Strategy&Tips section. There are some good reads over there, in the form of articles and walkthroughs.
Or you could have a look at TMIT's video walkthroughs.

~~~

I used to play Civ exclusively for the Earth map to 'rewrite' history.

Now I'm banging my head against Deity AIs because anything easier feels unfun.

 

[Ghpstage]

First of all welcome to the forums


Civ 4 is a very complicated game
I would suggest posting a game in a new thread on the forums, first put your start save and a pic of your starting location with the game setting info (difficulty, game speed etc) and posting updated saves and pics as your game progresses or you hit problems. Being able to load your specific game or at least see pictures of it makes it much easier for poepl on the forums to offer specific advice tailored to you

 

[setonfire]

Civ 4 is a very complicated game

Ghpstage, I would really love the complexity! I would love to break my head over the difficult decisions in the game that you guys talk about. I would love chalking out strategies and plans.

But in order to get there I need a little help. Suggest me a direction. What difficulty? What techs to research and why? What units? What should be the general goal? Expansion? Spread religion? War? Culture? Economy?

What I need is an overview of the game and its objectives.

Just help me begin playing please.

Kossin, you are playing on deity? Wow! You must love the game to continue playing till the very toughest level.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

The best thing is just to play through a game or two, on the easiest difficulty level, just to learn what everything is and how everything works. You need to get the basics of all that before you bother thinking about strategy etc. Once you know how things work, you'll automatically start coming up with your own strategies anyway, even if they turn out to not be very good ones it's still better to have an idea of why something might work, even if it fails, than to do something that definitely does work, but without having a clue why. And play through the tutorial game too, and finish it even after the tutorial messages stop. Oh and don't learn with BtS - Vanilla is quite complicated enough for a total newcomer, without all the extra units and buildings and espionage and everything else.

 

[setonfire]

Thank you Manfred. I have played through the Tutorial and continued the game. But I found myself creating random units/buildings and researching different techs without a plan.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Well, in the tutorial you only have one other Civ to worry about, and he is very peaceful and very slow at building and progressing, so you won't learn very much against him. The tutorial will just teach you the basics of the interface, and what units and buildings there actually are, how the map works, what sort of tiles there are etc. It won't teach you much about competing with other civs though, because pretty much anything will win against Ghandhi in the tutorial.

When I was learning, the next game I played was the Earth map. I again played on the lowest difficulty, and I played as Rome again because that was familiar from the tutorial. And the fact that it was an Earth map meant I was familiar with the geography so didn't have to worry about that either. But with 10 other civs nearby, I got to learn more about diplomacy and relations between everyone, and also dealing with having people near your borders all over. And also it reinforced all the stuff I'd forgotten from the tutorial as well, which is kind of inevitable.

After that I probably played a Terra map, because it was Earth-like, but gave me an opportunity to actually explore too. And I upped the difficulty a bit too because I found Settler too easy.

Once you start playing higher difficulties against more civs, you will definitely start to learn what DOESN'T work, and from that you'll start to learn what does. For example, I have never been a warmonger, but I learnt that I still need to pay attention to my armies for protection. I got through my first few games eagerly building every new building I could to up my research and productivity etc, and it would do me quite well. But once I got up to Noble level, and the AI got a bit more aggressive, I learnt from having my country trampled into the ground by an aggressive AI, to spend more time on my military. I STILL tend to build less military than my opponents, but I always try to keep it at least reasonably sized and up to date. But I only learnt that from playing.

The best way to learn really is to just keep playing games and let it wash over you and you will learn most of it by osmosis. If you're anything like me, then you're probably the sort of person who likes to read a manual cover to cover and understand everything before even starting to play a game (I suppose the kinds of people who generally like strategy games are like that), and so it doesn't feel right to just dive in and play it. But it is so complex and with so many little details that you can only really learn it by immersing yourself in it I think. Having said that, it should only take 3 or 4 games before you have a good general grasp of most of the basics, and by then you will have quite a few more specific questions you want to ask.

 

[setonfire]

Thank you Manfred. That was very useful. I guess its only natural that a complex game would have a steeper learning curve.
The Civ manual has a plethora of details and I was hoping to get into the game and learn by playing. But I guess it is time for 'back to the basics'

 

[Gary King]

Learn by playing. Start at whatever difficulty level you feel comfortable with (i.e. Chieftain, Settler, etc.) then move on up until you find one you're comfortable with. Learn by trial and error. Go to the manual when you are still unsure of how a certain mechanic works even after playing several games.

 

[setonfire]

Thanks Gary!

 

[CHEESE!]

You started at just the right place. You'll learn a lot from us.

 

[huh?]

Here are a couple of tips that should help you in the game developement...

Suicide Cats - this has nothing to do with depressed felines, but is the prevailing war strategy in Civ4. Your army should be made up of three components (1) defense lowering, (2) collateral damage, and (3) unit killers.

1. To lower the defenses of unit in a city, you need seige weapons like Catapults, Trebucets, Cannons, Artillery. There is a bombard action available when you are next to the city. Later in the game, some ships and aircraft can bombard as well.

2. To cause collateral damage, you attack with the seige weapons. After the bombard is complete, you send in the seige weapons. These will hit more than one unit. Send in enough of them, and every defender will eventually suffer some damage. They are referred to as suicide cats because the catapults often don't survive the attack. Later in the game, aircraft can "strike" units to damage them (fighters damage one unit, bombers damage multiple units).

3. A seige weapon will never kill a unit when you attack with it. The result is that the seige unit withdrawls from combat (ie "wins) or it is killed. Since these don't ever kill anything, you need to bring some units to actaully knock off the defenders. Units with the promotion of "City Raider I, II, III" are excellent attackers of cities.

Based on the above information, if you want to successfully take a city, you can see that seige units will make up a large part of your attack force. Most new players don't build enough units to begin with, and they definitely don't build enough seige units either. By the way, seige units are great for defense also. When the enemy is marching to your city, you can attack with seige units and weaken them. Either they will fail the attack, or you can start picking them off with other units.

Don't be a Builder - New players love to build buildings. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it usually means that you are neglecting your military. Once you proceed a bit in the game, you will learn to specialize your cities to gain the maximum output from them. Right now, if you have a city that is building stuff (like granaries, market, narracks) in 6-7 turns, build 1 seige weapon and 1 attacker after each building.

It really sucks to want to go to war and realize that you are lacking the units to accomplish your goals.

 

[setonfire]

Huh,
Thanks for the help. I am currently playing on settler. There's no action happening and I am easily ahead. Should I up the difficulty or continue playing on Settler till I am familiar with the game some more?

 

[huh?]

Settler is great for giving you a chance to expand your empire without much of a worry from the other civ. Also, you will quickly outpace (in terms of techs) the other civ so once you go to war, you should dominate with more modern units.

I would honestly make the jump to "Warlord". At this level, the AI starts to pick up a little steam. In the early eras, the AI won't be that far behind you in terms of tech; therefore, you should learn how to effectively wage a war. Later in the game, you should start pulling well ahead of the AI. Also, the AI is a bit more aggressive. It will declare war on your if you are weak. That is how I learned to build more units. I would consistently get attacked at the same stage in each game.

 

[Sisiutil]

Welcome to CFC and your new obsession, setonfire!

For starters, you can have a look at my beginners' guide (link in my sig). You might also have a look at some of the posted game series in the strategy forum, including my own ALCs. TheMeInTeam also has a series of very instructional games he's played and posted on YouTube. As recommended above, posting one of your own games here in the forum is also a very good idea. You'll get lots of advice.

In addition, what I recommend doing is setting a series of "mini-goals" for yourself within the game. Overall, yes, you are trying to win the game, but the road to victory in CivIV is long and twisty, with several forks. So you set one goal, achieve it, then set the next one, and so on. Ideally, the goals should link to one another. The best way to achieve this is to set a larger, long-term goal (though more specific and shorter-term than just saying "I wanna win the game!") and then determine and set a number of smaller goals that will lead to it.

For example, say you have a long-term goal of winning the Liberalism race to give you one of the relatively-expensive mid-game techs for free--this is a worthwhile goal that many players set for themselves. Well, Great Scientists will "lightbulb" some of the pre-requisite techs for Liberalism (Philosophy, Paper, and part of Education), so a subsidiary goal would be having one city function as a Great Person farm to generate Great Scientists; you'll want a city with lots of food resources for this. Now, one of the best ways to generate GS is to build the Great Library. And the best way to build the Great Library is to have a source of marble.

So you do some early map exploration and discover a nearby civilization. Their capital has several food resources (which is typical) and let's just say it has a source of marble, too. Huh. So now you set some short-term goals: maybe you'll research Bronze Working and even Iron Working so you can build an army of Axemen and Swordsmen to go an capture that capital. With its extra food and marble, this becomes your GP Farm. Meanwhile, once you finish researching your military and worker techs, you set off in pursuit of Aesthetics and Literature so you can be ready to build the Great Library.

And so on and so forth.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

3. A seige weapon will never kill a unit when you attack with it. The result is that the seige unit withdrawls from combat (ie "wins) or it is killed. Since these don't ever kill anything, you need to bring some units to actaully knock off the defenders. Units with the promotion of "City Raider I, II, III" are excellent attackers of cities.

Just to point out, setonfire, that this isn't actually true for the Vanilla version of the game (which you are presumably learning on judging by the thread title, which is probably wise). With the original version of the game, and with the Warlords expansion I think also, siege weapons can kill other units. With the Beyond the Sword expansion they changed this so they can only do a maximum amount of damage.

 

[setonfire]

Thank you Huh. Now moved up to 'Warlord'.

Sisiutil, may I say I am honoured? The 'mini-goal' suggestion is fantastic. I was wondering what to work towards when playing a game. All techs look useful. If I simply go after all of them where's the planning. I have understood the game a little better thanks to you. Sisutil, this may sound sacrilegious but I need to ask - Is the game worth the steep learning curve? How do you feel about Civ? How would you compare it with games like Rise of Nations and Age of Empires or Chess?

Manfred, thanks for the clarification. I'll be sticking with Vanilla for some time. It's already quite complex, thank you Whew!

 

[CHEESE!]

Well, if we thought Chess was better (in fact cheese is better) than we would probably be 'Chess Fanatics Forums'. It is very very much worth the curve. Not only a very fun but also an enriching (ever since Civ I have been known as a fountain of (often useless) historical knowledge- I have a clue who the Songhai are) game.

 

[Sisiutil]

Sisutil, this may sound sacrilegious but I need to ask - Is the game worth the steep learning curve? How do you feel about Civ? How would you compare it with games like Rise of Nations and Age of Empires or Chess?

Well, if we thought Chess was better (in fact cheese is better) than we would probably be 'Chess Fanatics Forums'. It is very very much worth the curve. Not only a very fun but also an enriching (ever since Civ I have been known as a fountain of (often useless) historical knowledge- I have a clue who the Songhai are) game.

This.

In addition, I would add that the joy of Civ for me tends to be the sense of newness and discovery in every game. The mod community only opens that up further. Unlike several other games out there, this one feels a little different every time I play it. Every map is unique, with its own benefits and challenges. No wonder I play it for years on end.

 

[Challs]

I am new to Civ IV myself, and to all Civ games in general. I am currently just playing on the low difficulty levels, to try and get the hang of it. Started out on settler and have advanced to Noble so far. If you want to learn to get better, there are lot of great beginners guides here on Civ Fanatics in the "War Academy" under Civ4. Also there are some great tutorials on youtube, which also helps new players pick up the game. You should also check "Sulla´s Civ 4 page" There are some great walkthroughs there, explained in an easy and fun way.