I'm fairly inexperienced at Civ and I'm new to Demo games, and in an effort to try and improve my understanding, I thought I'd post a few notes. They are based on the save for 960BC & the latest Turnchat. If those of you who are more experienced disagree, please reply and let me know your reasons. If you agree with some of my ideas, but for different reasons, then I'd also like to hear! I've tried to keep up with the various discussion threads, but apologies if I bring up points already covered.
Units
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We only have one worker and some of our cities are working unimproved tiles. Normally at this stage in my games I'd have more workers, but fewer military units. However, my games so far have been on Warrior, Chieftan and Noble. The AI (and barbs?) gets more aggressive at higher levels and we have Genghis 'my Mongol Hordes will sweep you from the map' Khan as our next-door neighbour. So presumably this is a prudent choice?
City Placement
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I always worry about my city placement - maybe I build too many cities and too far away from my capital, but I always seem to struggle a bit with distance and number of cities maintenance. How soon should we be thinking about City #4?
On the topic of City #4, my first thought would be in the area south of City2 near the corn. Possibly 1W of the corn. It's on a river connecting us to City2, there is fresh water, corn and grassland for food and hills for hammers. However 2W of the corn would take us closer to Mongolia and possibly prevent Genghis from expanding? Is that wise? Should we be pressing him at this early stage?
Another area I was looking at was in the region of the pigs to the east of City 2. One thought I had was that our port (City3) is quite far to the north. If we place a city 1E of the pigs, we get a port that may be nearer to the other civs. However, I'm not at all sure that this is worth worrying about. We could go 1S of the pigs, but I remember reading a thread in another forum that said "never settle 1 tile from the coast". Is it worth settling on a hill (presumably a defensive bonus, but loss of mining)? If so, we could go 1S of NE lake and 1E of SW lake. This connects by river to Berlin (do foreign trade routes benfit from a river connection?) It would be near water, grassland, hills, forest and pigs.
City Specialisation
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This is something I am only just getting to grips with, though there seem to be lots of posts on the forums encouraging this. This is largely because I have limited ideas on the strategy for this, but also once I get into the ADs I tend to lose track of what I want each city to do.
BW - my capitals have tended to have more food, so I have gone for growth and GP. However, BW has more hills, so maybe production. I see we have already 3 villages/hamlets/cottages (and at -1 gold/turn we need them!), so maybe we should keep building cottages here?
City 3 - I've no real clear idea of what to do here. As we have lots of plains then maybe more cottages, or maybe build a harbour and get some food thing going.
City 2- Again I'm very unsure. Not much in the way of hills. If we expect Genghis to be a problem later, maybe we should leave the jungle 1S1W, 1S2W and 2S of City 2 as defence.
Resources
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In my latest game, I have made big efforts to get stone. I'd be interested to know how others feel about the importance of it (and marble).
We are some way from marble, but at the moment there are other civs in the way. Unfortunately, the only stone I can see is south of Germany
. Is this something we should worry about, or do we just take it into consideration when thinking about our strategy for building WW etc?
Anyhoo, that's enough for now I think
Units
-----
We only have one worker and some of our cities are working unimproved tiles. Normally at this stage in my games I'd have more workers, but fewer military units. However, my games so far have been on Warrior, Chieftan and Noble. The AI (and barbs?) gets more aggressive at higher levels and we have Genghis 'my Mongol Hordes will sweep you from the map' Khan as our next-door neighbour. So presumably this is a prudent choice?
City Placement
--------------
I always worry about my city placement - maybe I build too many cities and too far away from my capital, but I always seem to struggle a bit with distance and number of cities maintenance. How soon should we be thinking about City #4?
On the topic of City #4, my first thought would be in the area south of City2 near the corn. Possibly 1W of the corn. It's on a river connecting us to City2, there is fresh water, corn and grassland for food and hills for hammers. However 2W of the corn would take us closer to Mongolia and possibly prevent Genghis from expanding? Is that wise? Should we be pressing him at this early stage?
Another area I was looking at was in the region of the pigs to the east of City 2. One thought I had was that our port (City3) is quite far to the north. If we place a city 1E of the pigs, we get a port that may be nearer to the other civs. However, I'm not at all sure that this is worth worrying about. We could go 1S of the pigs, but I remember reading a thread in another forum that said "never settle 1 tile from the coast". Is it worth settling on a hill (presumably a defensive bonus, but loss of mining)? If so, we could go 1S of NE lake and 1E of SW lake. This connects by river to Berlin (do foreign trade routes benfit from a river connection?) It would be near water, grassland, hills, forest and pigs.
City Specialisation
-------------------
This is something I am only just getting to grips with, though there seem to be lots of posts on the forums encouraging this. This is largely because I have limited ideas on the strategy for this, but also once I get into the ADs I tend to lose track of what I want each city to do.
BW - my capitals have tended to have more food, so I have gone for growth and GP. However, BW has more hills, so maybe production. I see we have already 3 villages/hamlets/cottages (and at -1 gold/turn we need them!), so maybe we should keep building cottages here?
City 3 - I've no real clear idea of what to do here. As we have lots of plains then maybe more cottages, or maybe build a harbour and get some food thing going.
City 2- Again I'm very unsure. Not much in the way of hills. If we expect Genghis to be a problem later, maybe we should leave the jungle 1S1W, 1S2W and 2S of City 2 as defence.
Resources
---------
In my latest game, I have made big efforts to get stone. I'd be interested to know how others feel about the importance of it (and marble).
We are some way from marble, but at the moment there are other civs in the way. Unfortunately, the only stone I can see is south of Germany
. Is this something we should worry about, or do we just take it into consideration when thinking about our strategy for building WW etc?Anyhoo, that's enough for now I think
