Very complex game for beginners?

[oopsy poopsy]

I aggree with the Original Poster.

I am one of those beginners and am currently having a hard time trying not to research EVERY tech, I feel I need them all. Also, I've been playing on Warlord, and I haven't one a single game. I'm stubborn and proud, but after two weeks (and some stuff learned) I guess I'll lower the difficulty.

The game is easy to get into but has many layers to it and many subtleties.

It didn't help that I read Sulla's walkthrough and he made it sound so easy!

I think that's the most deceiving thing about this game if you read stuff in this forum. The guys that have had the game or have figured it out make it look incredibly simple, but I think if you were sitting there watching them play, you'd see how much time they spend planning. They know when to build things where and how to improve cities to maximize their utility for a specific goal they have for that city. When you read a turn report it just reads like, "worker SW to mine, warrior heals for a turn, built a granary in *, etc... If you're a beginner it's hard to get to the meatier part of the game where you really have a plan that you're following through instead of just, "oh i finished building a settler, I think I'll choose a granary now. I'm pretty sure I need that here." Spending a couple hours going through the pedia to make sure you understand what does what and also figuring out how you want your cities to grow and what you will want them to produce is key. Then figuring out a higher strategy so you know where to build cities because you want them to be good at something specific comes next. I don't claim any expertise at the higher level strategy, but that's the part of the game that I find the most enjoyable. It goes beyond just knowing how and starts worrying about the why. Also, as much as I think you can learn a lot from your losses, don't let a game piss you off. Move down to where you can win and then start moving back up as you learn stuff.

 

[Blarg]

I think it's not complex in the way some games are, but there are a lot of little things to know. You don't have to have hugely deep or insightful thinking; you need to have brute force thinking, the kind that is about finding out about a whole ton of little things, and keeping track of them too.

This is even more the case because you can't escape the build windows asking you to make choices so that you can double check what you really want to build, or foreign trade windows to double check what your alliances are like with one country before you mess it up by making deals with another -- you have to just KNOW. (Which isn't terribly likely.) It's a strange weakness of the game that makes you have to do a bit of gambling unless you have a photographic memory and are happy to check up on every bit of minutae constantly.

The game has so much going on that the in-game tutorial just barely touches on it, even in combination with Sulla's walk-through. I think it could easily be intimidating for someone. But luckily the game is interesting enough that trying to piece it all together doesn't get so completely tedious that it overwhelms the fun factor.

I do think that progressing to becoming a good player could take a while, too. From settler to warlord wasn't much tougher, but it's quite a jump from there to noble. You've got guys oin these boards who are already kicking butt at emperor level, but they're mostly people familiar and pretty accomplished with the Civ games previously. Luckily, though, this board has a good strat section, so the learning curve is cut way back from what it would be if you just puzzled things out in a hit and miss fashion completely on your own.

 

[Blarg]

I aggree with the Original Poster.

I am one of those beginners and am currently having a hard time trying not to research EVERY tech, I feel I need them all. Also, I've been playing on Warlord, and I haven't one a single game. I'm stubborn and proud, but after two weeks (and some stuff learned) I guess I'll lower the difficulty.

The game is easy to get into but has many layers to it and many subtleties.

It didn't help that I read Sulla's walkthrough and he made it sound so easy!

I was trying to copy Sulla, and I found it hard, too.

Building up huge culture and encroaching on borders, then gradually culturally stealing them, gets the AI fighting mad. I was constantly having them go to war with me, and because I put so much into culture, my miltary wasn't all that impressive. Sometimes I held my own, but it slowed me down so much that sometimes other civs got ahead. I think the cultural steal of land etc. is pretty cool and fun, but you need to be a better player than me to not get yourself into some serious trouble with it sometimes.

A guy wrote up an approach of attacking early with Romans that you should check out. I bumbled my way through it without any precision, and after having a hard time previously on Noble, I won this time by a really solid margin, and wound up with at least 18 cities, all but four of them caputed from the two AI's I wiped out. I probably could have conqured more civs, but I was tired of fighting and decided to just nurse my cities after I cleaned out my continent. Taking a few units at a time overseas for turn after turn sounded dull to me. I figured with that many cities going, I had earned my peace and could do other things. Battles themselves in Civ 4 aren't interesting, I don't think, but the process of constantly pushing back the opponent is sorta fun, and seems to work, at least at these levels.

 

[WuphonsReach]

One thing that I've noticed.

In my first game or two, I was generally just going along with the flow. Bumbling my way to a win, with no real understanding of *why* I won. I researched whatever was suggested (mostly) and built whatever was suggested (mostly). Things would happen, but I wouldn't have a real good idea of why they were happening. Everything was left as automated as possible. The game went fast because I was mostly just clicking "next turn".

In the most recent game I've really hunkered down and studied the city screen. No more automatic work assignments. Every 5-10 turns, I go through every city in my empire, A-Z and look at their city screens. (Alternately, I just build one thing at a time and audit the city screen everytime it asks me to build something new.) Now, I've got a better handle on how some things fit together. It's a much slower game because I'm checking up on situations and seeing where my domestic issues need touch-ups.

It's interesting (to me) that Civ4 lets you wade in pretty easily and you can play a few games before you start to dig deeper.