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

[RefSteel]

Yup, DaveV is right. Farms stop spreading irrigation when they fall under the control of someone who lacks the tech, but as long as their owner has CS, they will spread irrigation even to the enemy when actively at war. (I believe neutral farms never spread irrigation, but my recollection is that even barb cities' farms will spread it once the barbs reach Civil Service!)

[naufragar]

Thanks, Dave and Ref, for the mechanics insight! There's always another system to learn.

I played an evening turn rather than my normal morning one and ran into Scooter in game.

Scooter has just been attack by Superdeath, so here's a bunch of diplo I received this turn:

Scooter is telling me to read a f-ing map and see that it's in my interest to not let Superdeath eat him.

Scooter lets me know that he's willing to put up a fight himself.

Superdeath, for his part, wants to thaw our relations. Open borders will let us start building trust by seeing the troops hidden on our respective borders.

And once we know we can demilitarize our borders, we can work on the goal of hindering Mjmd who now looks to be in excellent position, with amazing tech, a now dominant Rifle & Cannon army, and weak neighbors.

Since Scooter was in the turn, my own diplo responses were kind of weird. I tried to send Scooter Iron & Horse and he, in real time, try to respond by offering my iron/horse for iron/horse. I didn't have a way to say "I'm not going to be attacking Superdeath but both of your essential Knight resources are on the front lines so have some of my spares so you can keep producing units." Oh well. If SD disconnects Scooter's horse or iron, I'll re-offer. This AI diplo stuff is silly, sometimes.

As for me, I just unlocked Banks. I'm building a few more universities and Oxford. Not counting the soon-to-be-murdered players (Greenline and Scooter), I'm in last place. I very much want Superdeath and Ljubljana to ignore me to focus on their scarier neighbors. Ljubljana for his part seems exhausted. He has whipped and drafted up a storm but at what must be an unsustainable rate. Ginger got badly bruised by Ljubljana. That leaves Mjmd as the new top dog. How strong his lead is remains to be seen. He will eventually neighbor Ljubljana, whom he should overpower, and Superdeath.

Nowadays, I boot up the turn, queue more infrastructure builds, and log off. It seems so moribund, but my fortunes could change any moment if all the other players do exactly what I need them to do.

[Tarkeel]

Nowadays, I boot up the turn, queue more infrastructure builds, and log off. It seems so moribund, but my fortunes could change any moment if all the other players do exactly what I need them to do.

It's almost as if this had been on the lesson plan earlier:

Premise: Wars are expensive
Using your hammers for units means they aren't going into infrastructure like commerce multipliers, and even worse, you're likely using the whip like sensei taught to convert your tiles into ephemeral units. This means that most wars are not profitable even when considered in a medium-term perspective (50-ish turns).

Always find time to do infrastructure week every now and then to catch up on the latest offerings.

[xist10]

And then there is the opposite problem:
Buildings are expensive too.

[naufragar]

Guess it’s time to do a lesson on

Lesson Twenty-Two: Infrastructure and Rate of Return

In past lessons, I’ve mentioned my old friend Opportunity Cost (Hello, Opportunity Cost ). Imagine you have an abstract “10 units of investment” to spend. You might be thrilled to spend your 10 investment units to get 20 back, but if you’re missing the opportunity to get 100 back, that original return on investment is terrible. Throughout your Civ4 game, you’re planting seeds. Your job is to get the most return on your investment.

So, for example, we always start a worker on turn 0 because he’ll get us the greatest return on investment. These calculations get super complicated as the game goes on, especially when it comes to building infrastructure.

There are some no-brainers, such as the granary. Always build granaries. But what about libraries? What about forges?

We’ve already had a lesson on why libraries suck, but I’ll rehash. Imagine you have a size 5 city. In fact, have a screenshot from my t100 report:



This city is actually a great candidate for a library. It’s a so-called commerce city, so infrastructure that increases its money or research is appropriate. But how much research would does the library here generate? Currently 0, because all our money is going into gold via the slider. But at full research, this would give us 25% of our 16 commerce per turn as research points, so +4 beakers.

Imagine instead of a library, this city had produced a settler. The new city square gives +1 commerce. Let’s imagine we remembered to tie it into our trade network for another +1 commerce. And let’s say that at pop 1 it works a single riverside cottage for +2 commerce. That settler (100 foodhammers) already produced as much commerce as the library (90 hammers). And the new city will grow faster than the size 5 one. Sure there’s maintenance costs, but hopefully we can outscale them.

I’ve made the point before, but it bears repeating: new 2food tiles are far better than new buildings.

But what if there are no more good city spots or your settler production is solved by another city? At this stage of Pitboss 75, for example, I don’t have any new city spots I’m slavering over. Nevertheless, you need to be in a constant growth mindset. Your opponents are still growing, after all. Now, therefore, should I build infrastructure? Maybe.



Take a look at this city. It doesn’t even have a granary. (It recently whipped a theater for culture points because it’s about to lose the westernmost gold tile.) When it grows onto its two gold tiles, it’ll make 20 commerce per turn. Let’s imagine a multiplier building, like a market for +25% gold. After the 150 hammer built cost, the city will make an additional +5 gold. If instead I built wealth (possible after researching Currency), I would turn those 150 hammers into gold. It would take the market 30 turns (5 gold *30=150) to catch up to the gold gain from building wealth. And that gold is available later, which makes it less valuable. (And I have to trust that I’ll still be in possession of the city 30 turns from now. )

This brings us to the concept of “payback period.” Not in the usual sense that opponents who have wronged me are subject to a game-long payback period, no sir. This is how long it takes for an investment to turn a profit. This is most easily explained via a hammer multiplier building like the forge.



The forge costs 120 hammers and gives you a +25% hammer multiplier. You need to produce 480 hammers of something else with the forge for it to pay back its cost. Imagine a city making +12 hammers per turn. A forge would give you another +3. To pay back its 120 hammer cost, you’ll need to enjoy that +3 hammer bonus for 40 turns. Why not just skip the forge and build whatever it was that you wanted in those intervening 40 turns?

But here’s the rub: imagine you and an opponent both have a city producing 12 hammers per turn. You opponent builds a forge, while you build other stuff. In 40 turns, your opponent will have produced all the stuff you built and now also gets +3 hammers, while you’re stuck at the original 12. I hope you leveraged your 40 turn advantage into something lasting.

The art of Civ4 is less about choosing the “what” as choosing the “when.”

The 120 hammer cost of the forge could have been one knight and a half a catapult. If your opponent builds 10 forges and you build 10+ knights, perhaps you can leverage that advantage before you get outscaled. Perhaps not.

There’s no uniform answer to the question of what to build. Here are my rules of thumb.

• Everywhere gets a granary.
  
• From Pottery tech until Guilds tech, don’t build any buildings unless you have a very specific reason.
  
• Cities with a handful of cottages that aren’t needed to produce workers, settlers, or immediate military can build libraries. But seriously, hold off longer than you think.
  
• Your best production cities should get forges as soon as possible. Every city making 12 hammers per turn should get them when convenient. Every city making 8 hammers per turn should get them if you think the game is going to go on for a long while.
  
• Never build Colosseums, Aqueducts, Grocers. You can build a tiny handful of Markets if you must.
  
• Once you hit Guilds tech, your job is to produce Knights, not infrastructure.
  
• Once you are out of land to peacefully settle and you’ve exhausted the possibility of Knight conquest, you may now build infrastructure as you’d like. Just keep making a few units, so you’re not building all those lovely Banks for your conqueror.
  
• Edit: As with any rules of thumb, hyper-specific scenarios may invalidate any of the above.
  

So to get back to Tarkeel’s implicit question about why I’m building infrastructure now, it’s because I think infrastructure’s rate of return is currently better than building an army. That’s a fundamentally geopolitical rather than managerial estimation.

This combined just about every topic we’ve covered. Likely our final lesson unless something else jumps out at me.

[Commodore]

Good post, but let me tell you, as a man in the Industrial era right now...

• Never build Colosseums, Aqueducts, Grocers. You can build a tiny handful of Markets if you must
  

Whew boy do you need aqueducts and grocers eventually.

[Miguelito]

Missinf barracks. And lighthouses. Also forges long enough before guilds let you get more knights when it's time.

[Krill]

There is one final lesson.

If you come up against a great player, forget everything written here because predictability gets you killed.

[El Grillo]

The organized religion modifier also helps, since it only applies to buildings and not Settlers. Also, it is one of the ways for established cities to contribute production via Missionary production to accelerate the growth of newly founded cities.

[Tarkeel]

[*]Never build Colosseums, Aqueducts, Grocers. You can build a tiny handful of Markets if you must.

[*]Edit: As with any rules of thumb, hyper-specific scenarios may invalidate any of the above.

Two scenarios that comes to mind:
In game with war-weariness on, colosseums can be worth building in your larger cities. In all other games, avoid them.
Once games start reaching the industrial era, aqueducts and even grocers become worth building. Don't assume the game will last that long and pre-build them though.