veteran noobie says hi with?

[billygoat9]

hi all, played a lot of civ-2 back in the day, but am new to civrev and x-box so i guess this makes me a vet-noob. just retired usmc+post office, and my service time "stacked" to that magic retirement number so here i am. anyway i have 2 dominiation wins at king, but am getting waxed at empereor . this might be a stupid question but i gotta pull out all the stops here. is there anyway to use gp special abilities after their already settled in city? need to tech rush so i can get manhatten project and nuke aztecs realquick or i'm toast. i've seen them in my cities, but cannot activate them. sorry if this is covered elsewhere, but i did look and am new to forums so bear with me-thanks in advance

 

[CajNatalie]

A Great Person can only be used once. Once settled in a city they're unusable, and simply generate culture.

 

[elthrasher]

A Great Person can only be used once. Once settled in a city they're unusable, and simply generate culture.

Almost right, but a GP doesn't actually generate culture. He does whatever his specialty is. An artist will add 50% to the city's cultural output. A math wiz could point out that 0 + (0 * .5) = 0 so if you settle a great artist in a city with no culture, it will not do anything for you. Generally settling GP is the weaker choice, though there are some exceptions.

If you get a GP and don't have an immediate use for him, you can just have him hang around until you need him without settling him. You can also use spies to grab GP off the AI. The AI will typically settle GP, but will occasionally use them.

If you REALLY REALLY need that GP, you can try giving your city to the AI (meaning be at war and let the AI take it), then dig it out with a spy. This might not work because the AI can cheat and move around settled GP, despite the fact that you can't.

 

[Terrapin]

The AI can also do exactly what bg9 asked about: Unsettle a GP and then use their one-off special ability. Also, bg9, you should know that the AI can "teleport" troops onto their ships at sea. So just because a galley has been hanging around doing nothing for a bunch of turns does NOT mean that an army of attacking units cannot suddenly unload from it! That for instance, a galley which entered your waters in the ~1000bc era can suddenly disgorge knights the turn after the AI civ gets Feudalism.

Hey, since I also made the jump straight from Civ2 to CivRev, I am going to presume to give you a little bit of more general advice. Because the maps in Civ2 were so much bigger than the maps in CivRev, Civ2 tended to reward a more passive program of research/expansion in the early game. In CivRev, it almost always pays to go on the offensive early in the game. A commonplace strategy among advanced players is to put both of your capital's workers on forests, produce 1 or 2 warriors to explore and then switch both workers to sea squares in order to research Horseback riding. As soon as you finish HBR, switch both workers back to production. If you have any money, rush the horses. If you have located an enemy cap, go right for it once you have a horse army. Two horse armies is usually the most I create. after about 2000bc some of the AIs will have archer armies and capturing their capitals is all but impossible with horses, so speed is crucial. My games pretty much boil down to this:

Get no capitals early=tough game

Get one cap early=easy game

get two caps early=the game is over, the AI just doesn't know it yet.

Only about 1 in 5 maps are the closest enemy AIs so far away that I cannot get horses there in time to conquer it.

I hope that is helpful.

 

[billygoat9]

still got waxed by aztecs, but all my questions got answered! i' ll know how to use them next-again thanks