[PB75] Newbfragar and Rusty's Beginner's Guide to Civ4

[naufragar]

We get to witness the birth of Superdeath's first new city 


Ours is still a couple turns out.

[naufragar]

Last time we chatted, we knew where copper was (nowhere good). Upon discovering Animal Husbandry, we found horses:


Neat. Right in our capital.

We've also uncovered more of Superdeath's land. In the screenshot above, you can see that, before worker turns, we have 6 land tiles in that entire area that give 3 food. Now compare Superdeath:


He has 13!! (9 flood plains; 3 oases.)Just one one side of his empire! Boo hoo desert, who cares! He has more than double our 3+ food tiles in less than half of his expected land area. We're dead. He'll be able to use that desert to grow incredibly wealthy. Take a look at what a late game desert economy can look like:



Oh well. Nothing for it. Have to keep developing the empire. Someone landed Stonehenge. A nickel says that's Mjmd. He's got a good plan for this map.

[naufragar]

Lesson Five: Trade Routes

Ok, I shouldn't tease if I'm trying to be educational. Deserts are terrible. The Superdeathian desert isn't as bad as it appears at first glance, but it's still nothing great. It doesn't beat our land by that big a margin.

Meanwhile, we've been increasing our economy nicely. On turn 0, we were making 10 beakers (science points) per turn. Remember that 1 beaker is roughly equal to 1 gold. Now we're making 16 gold per turn. Partly this is from working tiles that have a gold component. That lake near the capital produces 2 food and 2 gold, for example. Each non-forest tile on a river also produces +1 gold, which is one of the reasons Rusten and I were so keen to settle cities on the river:



Rivers also have another benefit that is not well-advertised. Cities that can follow a river to another city are connected by a "trade route." At this early stage of the game, each city can have 1 trade route. Each of our cities are getting +1 gold from being connected to this trade network. Because of this trade network, it has been a net positive for our economy to found these new cities. Very soon, baby cities will reduce our GDP as they cost more in maintenance gold than they bring in. This was one benefit of Imperialistic (faster settlers trait) that Rusten has eluded to: it's currently a commerce boost.

After we research the Wheels technology, we'll unlock the ability to build roads. When cities are connected by roads, they are hooked into the trade network without need for a river. Again, think of the flavor: earliest settlements traded most efficiently on waterways rather than roads.

Get your cities connected to your trade network as soon as possible. You leave free money on the table otherwise.

[Miguelito]

Do you have a dotmap, and will there be a lesson on what a dotmap is?

[Commodore]

How was that Dune mod?

[naufragar]

How was that Dune mod?

Ya know, I only played through a full game once, way back before I was anything like a careful Civver. Just romping through the big mods: Fall from Heaven, Dune Wars, Planetfall, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (anybody play that?!) before meeting Realms Beyond. I remember I got through the entire tech tree way before the game was over, which was weird. Production values were high. Honestly, I should replay it. There was a successor mod called Dune Wars Revival, which was last updated in 2022, but it seems to suffer the feature bloat that FfH’s child-mods suffer from (our beautiful Erebus in the Balance excepted).

Do you have a dotmap,  and will there be a lesson on what a dotmap is?

Your wish, my command.

Lesson Six: The Dotmap

The dotmap (or dot map) (or dot-map, I guess, if you can spare the ink) is the term used for a settlement plan. You take the map and put dots where you’d like to one day settle your cities. Some Civ4 mods even added a dotmapping feature, but I just write an X with the normal in-game signs:


If you press Alt+s, you can leave notes for yourself on the map. Before we look at any particular dots, a few rules. In Civ4, cities cannot be placed within two tiles of each other. Each city can work what’s called a “fat cross,” which I’ve outline in black for the capital.

Those were the game rules. Here are some rules of thumb. You already know that each city must have a food resource in its big fat cross (BFC). Let’s make it even more restricted: you need to found your cities directly next to a food resource. It takes effort to expand a city’s borders to its full BFC. If your city isn’t directly next to food, you retard your city’s growth and make it a drag on your snowball of development.

Second rule of thumb: you want every tile in your empire to be within the BFC of one of your cities. Think of it this way: if your dotmap leaves out some tiles, it’s like you’ve chosen to shrink your empire by that amount.

The tentative dotmap above breaks both of these rules of thumb. Poor earnest naufragar has trouble following directions.

If you’re a beginner or easily intimidated, you can stop there. If you want to know why you sometimes break those rules, read on.

Take a look at the potential city site marked with the orange circle. It isn’t next to a food resource. Heck, it’ll have to steal rice from the city to its northwest. But remember rule of thumb number 2? Without this city spot, I wouldn’t have those spices (the resource icons that look like spice grinders) in any city’s BFC. So the orange circle is what’s called a “filler” city. It’s not good. It doesn’t accelerate our snowball, but it is value positive. Do settle these filler cities, but settle them after your better ones, so you don’t get a visit from our old friend Opportunity Cost. (Hello, Opportunity Cost. )

Orange Circle also strands a tile. If you go from Orange Circle two tiles northeast, you’ll see a riverside plains that isn’t within any city’s BFC. So Orange Circle also violates our second rule of thumb. If we move Orange Circle one square right to include the stranded plains, it has no food. To include that plains would require an entirely new dotmap that would, overall, violate our rules of thumb worse. (Although lurkers are encouraged to critique the tentative dotmap. It is after all one of their joys. )

Lastly, a note on Green Circle. We want to include that fish in our empire, but the only land tile next to it is the hill 1SW. Aquatic resources require not workers but work boats. A fledgling empire has trouble building work boats. By putting Green Circle where it is, it can borrow the capital’s deer and get off to a strong start while it builds the work boat for the fish.

(Final aside: and now you see why I called our Copper locations bitchy. No good food close by and what little food there is requires the expensive Animal Husbandry tech.)

[Tarkeel]

The dotmap (or dot map) (or dot-map, I guess, if you can spare the ink) is the term used for a settlement plan. You take the map and put dots where you’d like to one day settle your cities. Some Civ4 mods even added a dotmapping feature, but I just write an X with the normal in-game signs:


If you press Alt+s, you can leave notes for yourself on the map. Before we look at any particular dots, a few rules. In Civ4, cities cannot be placed within two tiles of each other. Each city can work what’s called a “fat cross,” which I’ve outline in black for the capital.

Personally I like to use a combination of the two: I use the ingame tool (alt-x) to clearly see which tiles are worked, and then mark the sites with a name. Using codenames for the planned cities makes them easier to talk about; you could also use colours.

There's one exception to the minimum distance, and that is cities on different landmasses.

Let’s make it even more restricted: you need to found your cities directly next to a food resource. It takes effort to expand a city’s borders to its full BFC. If your city isn’t directly next to food, you retard your city’s growth and make it a drag on your snowball of development.
[...]
The tentative dotmap above breaks both of these rules of thumb. Poor earnest naufragar has trouble following directions.

The only exception to this rule is if the city can borrow or steal a foodtile from another city to get started, which is what your green (see how useful named cityspots are) is doing.

It's also worth saying that creating a good dotmap is one of the harder parts of playing Civ well.

[naufragar]

It's also worth saying that creating a good dotmap is one of the harder parts of playing Civ well.

The mercy is that before you have a feel for the game, a bad dotmap won't feel particularly bad.

We met another friend!


I don’t know much about GT. He is Boudica of the Ethiopians. Our other neighbor, Superdeath, is Kublai Khan, so we’re next to two Aggressive leaders. Let’s hope the leaders and players don’t coincide!

Lesson Seven: Civics

In the last post, you can see that on turn 42 I needed 10 turns to build a settler in my size 4 capital. In the above screen, you see that I’ve finished the settler on t44 in my size 2 capital. What explains the discrepancy?

As you research various technologies, you unlock various systems of government, called Civics. These roughly follow history: earliest governments are slave-holding monarchies, but by the end of the game you can have more enlightened types like theocratic police states.

The already-important Bronze Working technology unlocks the Slavery Civic. Click the button in the top right of the screen that looks like a crown to bring up this screen:


In the middle, we see the Slavery civic. It says it has “Medium Upkeep,” which means it costs money to run. (The default, no-effect tribal civics cost Low Upkeep.) Slavery’s effect reads “Sacrifice population to finish production in a city.” We’ll get to that.

Underneath the Slavery card, we read “1 Turn for Revolution” and “Upkeep: 0.” But wait, naufragar! I thought you said Slavery had a Medium Upkeep! Indeed. Upkeep scales based on empire size, so it’s easy to have complicated government types in small empires. If you’re a massive empire, however, maybe try to simplify the bureaucracy. (Looking at you, Ancient Rome in the 3rd Century.)

When you change government types, your nation undergoes a revolution for the number of turns listed. During the revolution, everything in your cities stops. You can’t research; you can’t build; you can’t grow. El Presidente retains control of the armies, so you can still move units. After the anarchy, the game will tell you that “your government has been reestablished.”

Civics can give you powerful bonuses, but the massive downside is that every time you change into one or more, you essentially skip a turn due to revolutionary anarchy. New players might not feel how bad losing a turn is, but think of it this way: if the point of Civ4 is to expand your empire’s economic, scientific, and industrial capacity, a turn of anarchy is like suffering a -100% modifier to everything your civ does. Ouch, ouch, ouch. You’ll often have to rip off the revolutionary bandaid, but don’t just start ripping off bandaids for fun.

[naufragar]

Lesson Eight: Slavery

The earliest Civic available is Slavery. As the in-game description says, this enables you to sacrifice population points to finish production. Look in the lower right of the city screen:


To “hurry” the Settler along to completion, I can spend a certain amount of pop points. Each pop point spent gives me 30 hammers. (Since I’ve already pressed the hurry/whip button this turn, I don’t need to sacrifice any more population.)

A few rules about Slavery and “whipping”:

• Each time you press the whip button, you give yourself 1 point of unhappiness (the frowny face). When your unhappy points outweigh your happy points (smiley faces in the top right), one of your citizens will refuse to work their tile.
  
• Each instance of unhappiness caused by pressing the whip button will last for 10 turns.
  
• Your whipped population must be able to finish what you’re building. You can’t just throw 30 odd hammers into a project in the middle.
  
• You can whip multiple population with one button press, so long as you won’t whip away over half of a city’s inhabitants. (So to build a 60 hammer thing, you can press the whip and the game will subtract the appropriate number of pop if legal.)
  
• “Dry whipping,” which is whipping a project that doesn’t have any normal hammers already invested is more expensive: the game won’t give you the full 30 hammers per pop. This is to make it harder to instantly sprout an army.
  

Phew. Lots of rules. But why do we care? If the entire point of the game is to get bigger and to control more tiles, why are we killing off our own citizens? (Hello, Opportunity Cost. )

Remember the snowball. Think about compound interest. If someone offers you a marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, you want to take the earlier marshmallow, so you can start experiencing the benefits. I sacrificed two of the citizens at my capital to build a settler faster. I judged that I wanted my next city 4 turns faster more than I wanted those 2 pop points. Rule of thumb: whip out workers and settlers. Your cities pour in their hammer but also their food points into making settlers and workers, which means they aren’t growing themselves. The sooner you can get these “foodhammer” units out of your build queue, the sooner your cities can get back to growing.

Slavery and whip hammers aren’t really beginner topics. But they need to be covered in a beginner guide because 1) it’s not at all intuitive how strong “Sacrifice pop to finish production” is and 2) the difference between players who know how to use Slavery and those that don’t is night and day. The single biggest thing you can do to get better at Civ4 is figure out how to make use of the Slavery Civic.

In a few turns, we’ll return to Slavery with a math-heavy post to peak at the numbers. Prime yourself.

[Commodore]

What's the newbie-friendly explanation for working a lake and a riverside grass farm over deer and cow?