Official Civilization Thread

[IAceI]

I'm far from a good player, but I seem to know quite a bit despite never being arsed to do it. And bare in mind I'm only on the vanilla version, I have no expansion packs.

Early on if you don't think you're going to be attacked it's generally pretty fine to leave a few archers in your cities. Unless the enemy turns up with silly numbers then your archers can probably fend anyone off (barbarians mainly early on) to be honest, at least in the early stages of the match.

First priority is to settle your settler, in place is often a good idea as you don't want to waste too many turns moving about unless necessary. If you can move a settler once or something to get yourself a resource in your big fat cross for your city then do so, obviously different resources have a different impact on what your city will do. If you want to be a dominant force early on war wise then just beeline to Bronze Working which will reveal copper. By now you should know a bit of the map so you can probably see where there is some copper, easy enough to get a city set up (bonus if it's already in your initial cities BFC or attainable) and then that can pump out some Axemen. If you want an early war an Axe-Rush is your best best (especially if you have nearby neighbours) if you've got high production levels then you can churn them out early on and with ease. If you get over to a nearby neighbour early on then they may only have one/two cities it's easy to overwhelm them. If you have open borders then it's easy to scout out whats going on, declare war just attack with 2:1 ratio and make sure you don't attack the city across a river. If it's on a hill then you may need even 3:1 ratios because it's a fucking bitch to get.

If you can snag a worker then that's good but I know that on Warlords/BTS they've made it so the snagged worker can't move until the following turn. Whereas on vanilla version they can immediately start running back to your civ (free worker - but if they die it's not technically a loss).

Each game plays out differently, I guess a lot of it's experience as well. Get an early religion, spread your faith and you can start raking in commerce with a holy building. But then if you see Isabella is a neighbour and she founds a different religion then it's almost a guarantee she's going to come hunting your head - because Isabella hates anyone who isn't her religion. If you're nearby Mansua Musa then it's possibly worth becoming friends, Musa always seems to build up his techs early on so you can sometimes get a valuable one later on and then just give it to him for a load of catch-up techs (you both have to have a 3rd civ present for tech trades to go ahead. They won't just trade with you if there's just the two of you on the continent I believe).

Tokugawa and Montezuma means pretty much... war. Kill Monty early on because he's a prick, and gets quite strong later on I believe. Ghandi will be nice as long as you don't piss him off to early on.

Err I'm running out of random things to say. In regards to what to build in a city then it depends what you want that city to be, for a GP farm if you have one you need lots of farms built nearby to produce food. No need wasting time on a barracks really, just transfer promoted units over to help defend if needs be. Commerce cities need lots of cottage spams, on floodplain tiles is ideal. Coastal cities obviously make good commerce cities but then usually need to double up as military to help produce naval units. Hill tiles are useful in production/military tiles - mine them. I used to get put off on mining hill tiles because I didn't think they would say "small chance of producing gold etc." but then you see the hammers it makes, so as long as you can work them with enough population then its probably worth it. Need some farms to have the food upkeep too.

Also it'll prime you to expand too early, so cap your growth perhaps. Or just slavery civic and whip some unhappy people into a unit or whatever, or to complete something, whatever. Unhappiness will stay a little while but you can speed up some stuff.

I'm sure there's people on here who can expand. If not head over to civfanatics and just look around, maybe read some of the "All leader challenges" - I'll link you. The good thing about them is if you have time and patience its an interactive game, so a lot of the stuff you pick up is people giving tips on why something should happen. So read all the posts or specific members (you'll see the odd few members who seem to know what they're talking about more than anyone) but there's a lot of conflicts as well showing you there's multiple ways to make things work.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5320091

There's the link, it's worth bookmarking it. Just go through a few of the completed games and read it when you have time and you'll pick up all sorts of invaluable information.

I've helped as much as I think I can really, the people over at civfanatics know more than me though so just browse. You'll learn loads. But I'm not sure what your Civ knowledge is, so sorry if I've insulted your intelligence by telling you common sense

[Benji]

Hey it all helps, to be perfectly honest it's more later in the game I have issues with, I manage to stave off any war until around the Classical era because I'm a culture slut (always number one) so I don't tend to have the arms for it, I think the best tactic might be to stop building so many world wonders early on because they eventually become obsolete and thus any reliability dissapears

Cheers

[Benji]

("How can you sleep at night?!?" I don't, I'm playing Civilization!)

A quote from Civ Fanatics after reading someone's playing diary. Priceless.

[Lint]

Whats the game like? I kinda fell out of PC gaming for awhile, but recently upgradede some stuff on my computer and am able to actually play some now. Is everything micromanaged to an extreme degree etc or is it a bit more user friendly?

[Ruki]

It's addicting. Very addicting.

[METALMAN]

A good game in general with lots to do and plenty of cool mods to keep you going. The game is best with lots of other civilisations playing, which unfortunately means that it is slow as fuck once you get to the middle ages.

[Benji]

Whats the game like? I kinda fell out of PC gaming for awhile, but recently upgradede some stuff on my computer and am able to actually play some now. Is everything micromanaged to an extreme degree etc or is it a bit more user friendly?

Both, you can have everything automanaged for you if you like, but if you want to master the later difficulties you NEED to micromanage. Also, get the complete pack, I think it's £15 on PLAY right now and includes all the IV releases, it's a fucking wonderful set that makes a great game a shedload better than just the base game.

[stokeriño]

I'll merge this little thread with the official thread for all of Sid Meier's genius. It was a few pages back, so fair enough that you missed it.

[Lint]

sounds good. best buy had a multipack of civ 4 and some expansion so i may ppick that up. aside from civrev for my ps3 i havent played a civilization game since civ 2, so i thought i'd get some peoples opinions on it before doing so. thanks

[JStarr]

My God, Hammurabi is a prick, isn't he?

My relationship with him goes to -3, I think, and he "refuses to talk!" Next time, I will have to kiss his ass or just kill him quickly.

And is it just me, or does anyone else feel like if you drop a nuke on a city, it should be *poof* gone? CivRev does that, and it makes the point quite quickly. Nuking a city, and then still getting stiff resistance in fighting to take it just seems off to me. And no, they didn't have bomb shelters. Bah.

[stokeriño]

Forget Hammurabi. It's Shaka who's the insufferable prick. :@

[METALMAN]

You have got to be kidding me! Mansa Musu and Isabella of Castille are totally the worst. I don't think I've had a game where she hasn't nagged on at me to convert to budhism every five minutes.

[stokeriño]

For me, Shaka has a tendency to sit on my border (whether he always starts there I don't know, because his cities expand faster than if built by Jesus himself), box me in, never do business of any kind, and inevitably declare war on me with 50 billion chariots/knights/cavalry. I've lost count of how many games I've started thinking "hmm, I think I'll try for a cultural victory this time...oh fsck, hello Shaka. There that goes out the window again *turns all cities on to building spearmen*"

[METALMAN]

How essential are the Civ IV expansion packs? I am considering getting them.

[stokeriño]

They're most excellent.

[Raven52]

How essential are the Civ IV expansion packs? I am considering getting them.

Only 'Beyond the Sword' is really necessary. I'm pretty sure it includes all of the content from 'Warlords'. In fact, because of this, BTS is the only expansion pack I have.

[stokeriño]

I bought them as they came out, so I don't know what BTS is like without Warlords.

But really, it's probably cheaper to buy a CivIV+Warlords+BTS all-in-one pack than getting the add-ons separately these days.

[NotoriousGTT]

I re-bought this after i lost it when i moved flat.

This may seem good, however it has actually caused me to loose several days as i re-played it again.

Civ is basically digital crack.