Help RFS-81 learn Civ 4

[RFS-81]

I'm at turn 50 now, with two workers and one settler out. Here's my capital:

   

EDIT: Looks like I've forgotten to actually assign workers to the right tiles...

And here the rest of the world:

   

EDIT2: Oh by the way, I got another warrior from a goody hut in the North.

Germany has planted a city nearby. Copper is far away, I'm researching Iron Working to see if the iron situation looks any better. Otherwise, can I also get by with horsemen? I've also researched Masonry, so I can build the pyramids.

For my next techs, I think I'll make a beeline to Calendar. For my next city, I think I'd rather claim the horses north of Amsterdam than the stone to claim more land towards the center of the map.

I noticed that chopping forests next to the city decreases health. But there's no reason to want higher health than happy anyway, right?

[The Black Sword]

So you whip cities once they reach the happy cap? That'd cause even more unhappiness, but I guess it can work if you don't do it so often that this effect stacks multiple times.

The aim is to whip it for 2 or 3 pop at the happy cap and then spend the next 10t regrowing that pop to do it again. The conversion rate is so efficient that you really want to be doing it as often as possible.

[Fluffball]

On the topic of food:

Early game you need to work as many tiles (especially improved resources) as possible, so prioritize food pretty heavily. Growing your capital to size 3 is a pretty standard play. When you look for new city sites, look for food bonuses more than anything else. No food bonuses means you can't work good tiles like gold.

Each population point takes 2 food to support, so if you have 2 flood plain cottages (3 food each) they can support 1 more 0 food tile for "free". (Although if you don't have any other food that will be the end of your city growth.) Try to do some rough (or exact if you want) math before planting every city to make sure you know what tiles it will be able to work and if it can grow in a reasonable amount of time. Nothing but plains hills tiles will not make a viable city for the most part.

Final note on food, as has been mentioned you can use the slavery civic to "whip" away population in exchange for large amounts of production. So extremely high food sites with low hammers can actually be some of your most productive cities.


Cottages are usually what start you on the way to winning easily via out-teching the AI, so you're right to get those up as soon as possible. Just not at the expense of food or improving resources.

Edit: Also looking at your second city; it's not bad to keep your cities a little close together. It makes them easier to defend and they can help each other grow cottages or share things like mines for a production boost, etc. You don't NEED to, just don't be afraid of a little overlap. Distance from the capital also increases maintenance costs.

[haphazard1]

TheBlackSword has already mentioned a key idea on whipping: it is better to whip more than one pop at a time, as it is more efficient in terms of stacking unhappiness. You get the same whip anger for each whip no matter how many pop are whipped. So whipping at least two pop at a time works better.

Also important is using the overflow from a whip; you can use multiple whips and put all the overflow into something, allowing cities with decent food but few hammers to build expensive things.

Another useful thing is whipping workers or settlers, so your city does not spend long stretches of time not growing.

Hmmm, Germany settling right up close to you is not good. You are Creative so your borders should be OK, but the border tension will hurt relations. And of course that land is no longer available for your own expansion.

Watch your maintenance costs as you found new cities. Every city costs money to support, and they tend to take a while to mature and generate enough commerce to pay for themselves. This is very different from MoO where every new world is an economic benefit.

[Zalson]

Thanks for posting this RFS-81! Can you give us your reasoning behind teching iron working? You said so in your thread: no copper!

And it's really cool that you've already identified that your workers are on the wrong tiles. That's excellent progress and it took me a long time to figure out how to get them to improve tiles correctly.

Finally, where is your second city going to go?

Keep it up! We'll be happy to chime in here.

[Mardoc]

Copper is far away, I'm researching Iron Working to see if the iron situation looks any better. Otherwise, can I also get by with horsemen?

No one seems to have answered this.  Answer is: sort-of, not really a good idea, but it can work as a stop gap.

There's two angles to this.  The first is that ancient era warfare is very much a rock-paper-scissors situation, where spears trump horses.  Anyone with metal can build spears, at which point you're in trouble.  A human with metal can count on killing 2-3 enemy horses per unit he loses, which quickly turns into a lost war.

On the other hand...the AI might very well *not* build spears.  Also, many of the AI's decisions on whether to prosecute war or accept peace are based on your 'power' score, which doesn't account for much of anything except number and era of units.  So you might be able to deter or win against an AI by building lots of chariots, just because the AI might not recognize and press its advantage.  Against anything that's not a spear, chariots are better than warriors, so it's still worth hooking up horses, for sure!

I would still push to expand toward the copper, metal gives you a lot more options and security, but it's not game over if you fail.  I wouldn't leapfrog directly there, I'd expand in a blob, just focus that blob toward the copper.  It's only 2-3 cities away.  You want to claim that much land anyway.

I've also researched Masonry, so I can build the pyramids.

I recommend against building the pyramids in your situation.  The benefit of unlocking Representation and/or Police State early scales with the size of your civilization.  Right now, your civ is small, so the Mids wouldn't pay for themselves, let alone give you an advantage.  Much better to invest that huge amount of production into more cities.  Although it's possible to have too many cities, you're far from that point.

For my next techs, I think I'll make a beeline to Calendar. For my next city, I think I'd rather claim the horses north of Amsterdam than the stone to claim more land towards the center of the map.

Seems reasonable, you have the tech you need to improve the majority of the tiles you can claim, so there's nothing particularly higher priority.  You will want Currency soonish...but you don't need it desperately because you haven't expanded enough to crash your economy.

I noticed that chopping forests next to the city decreases health. But there's no reason to want higher health than happy anyway, right?

Right!  In fact, health is a much softer cap than happiness.  Running out of happiness means each additional citizen is an almost pure waste.  Great micromanagers occasionally find a situation where it's worth growing unhappy citizens, but as a rule of thumb, don't.

Running out of health means each additional citizen costs one extra food/turn.  It's much easier to find situations where that's just a little painful but it's still worth growing the extra citizens; more likely than not, actually.  You'd still prefer to have everyone healthy, but it's not worth nearly as many resources to avoid.

The conversion rate is so efficient that you really want to be doing it as often as possible.

One caveat: this is only true after you build a granary.  Before a granary, the conversion rate is still quite good, but maybe not in 'as often as possible' territory.

This is also the main advantage to building granaries, in fact.  If you just want to grow the city up to the ancient era happiness cap, or produce a little bit of extra health for a city, a granary wouldn't be worthwhile.  When you want to regrow population for another round of slavery, on the other hand, a granary pays for itself extremely quickly.

[RFS-81]

And it's really cool that you've already identified that your workers are on the wrong tiles. That's excellent progress and it took me a long time to figure out how to get them to improve tiles correctly.

Don't overestimate me, I was actually referring to tiles being worked by my city. I think about it like: I click on the city screen and assign a worker from the city to that tile. Regarding the movement of my worker units, I don't really plan them much in advance at the moment.

I planted my second city and got my third settler out. I decided to pause here because I could use some help with choosing the next city location.

   

It's grown up to size 3 in the meantime, and I just realized that floodplains give a health penalty, so its health cap is actually lower than its happy cap. I can connect wheat and rice soon-ish, that should deal with it.

Iron working reveals iron right at my capital! As planned, I start on a beeline towards calendar. Besides improving the bananas, I'll also be able to connect my first luxury resource, incense.

   

I've built a third worker, a granary, and another settler at the capital. Up next is an axeman. This seemed a good choice to me because it has a combat bonus against units, and swordsmen are more effective against cities. As my capital is bumping into the happy cap, I'm going to whip this one. Also: My culture is already starting to eat up Hamburg's territory. Do you think I can get it to flip if I add a library and monument?

   

Here's the location that the game recommends for me. If I'm going to blob, I'll have to settle in this general area, but I'm going to have to chop a lot of jungles to get food production going. I'm thinking that the hill closer to Amsterdam is a better location. It could snatch the rice tile to get its growth kickstarted.

   

Other than that, I've done some barb-fighting and exploration, here's a map overview:

   

Also: My treasury is dwindling. Is it a good idea to keep some money in the bank?

[haphazard1]

Your second city looks good -- horses, a bunch of flood plains, and a very nice wet corn. It is going to have huge amounts of food, so you should get plenty of opportunity to learn to manage happiness and whipping there.

Iron at the capital is a nice break. As Mardoc described, horse units are a lot better than having nothing but warriors and archers in the early game, but lacking metal for spears and axes is a major handicap. Axes counter melee units (spears and swords, and warriors), spears counter mounted units, mounted units have speed and chariots counter axes (although only when attacking). Archers are general purpose units that do not require resources, and are good on defense. Swords are special purpose units for attacking cities.

Also, be aware that ivory is required to build war elephants, which are very powerful units for their era and get a bonus against other mounted units. The Germans have an ivory resource at that city they planted in your face (probably why they planted there, in fact), so you could face elephants in the future. They require a couple expensive (for this part of the game) techs (Horseback Riding and Construction), so you should not see any for a while. But once they appear, they are a big factor to watch out for.

On health cap vs. happy cap, the happy cap is vastly more important since it is a hard limit on useful citizens. Beyond the happy cap additional population just eats food and raises costs while contributing nothing. The health cap is a soft cap, as exceeding it just costs you extra food.

For your third city, the site recommended by the game is not terrible. The plains hill gives the city center an extra hammer, which can be useful for boosting the early development of the city. And the site does get the iron to the west, which is a useful production tile and would keep it away from your neighbor. The hill tile also gives extra defense to the city, which could be helpful since that looks likely to become a border/conflict zone.

But locating a little closer to your capital, with some overlap so the new city can share the rice tile for quick growth, would also be a solid choice. The new city could work some cottages on the shared tiles, developing them for the capital, and being closer means lower maintenance and easier defense. Really, either choice would be decent.

The jungle tiles will be a pain and essentially useless until you chop them down; plan for having an extra worker or even two to help develop the new city. Jungle tiles also cause a health penalty in nearby cities. With the forests also being nearby you should be OK, and once you chop the jungle down the penalty will go away. But if you ever settle an area that is all or nearly all jungle, a new city can have health problems that prevent it from growing until the jungle gets chopped.

You already have Iron Working tech, so you can chop the jungle tiles right now. Settling near jungle is a bad idea for the very early game since you can not do anything about them for a while, but you have IW so this is no longer a worry. And also, be aware that jungle can spread to nearby tiles. It is not a very high probability, but it can be annoying. If a tile has been improved jungle will not spread to it.

On money in the treasury, it does not provide immediate benefit but can be useful for emergencies. If you have events on, sometimes you can avoid or reduce negative effects by paying gold; having a reserve fund is very useful if you play with events. Another option if you have funds is upgrading units; it can be helpful to be able to turn a warrior into an axeman if a barb shows up in a bad spot and you don't have a good defender available. But generally spending your gold on unit upgrades is not a good deal. Most of the time it is better to fund more research.

What else? Flipping the German city...possible but likely to be a long term project. If you could get some culture on the city center tile before the Germans get any culture of their own in the city, then it might flip. But the AI is fairly good about getting at least enough culture in a threatened city to expand the borders once, and after that happens it takes a lot more cultural pressure to have any chance of flipping it.

[Mardoc]

I planted my second city and got my third settler out. I decided to pause here because I could use some help with choosing the next city location.

Looks good!  I like your second city location and your general focus; the worker/settler/garrison trifecta is generally what you want in the early days.

It's grown up to size 3 in the meantime, and I just realized that floodplains give a health penalty, so its health cap is actually lower than its happy cap. I can connect wheat and rice soon-ish, that should deal with it.

Yep, plus as Haphazard mentioned you can power through the health cap for a bit, especially once you have the corn tile farmed and inside your borders.

Iron working reveals iron right at my capital! As planned, I start on a beeline towards calendar. Besides improving the bananas, I'll also be able to connect my first luxury resource, incense.

Looks good.  That definitely takes some of the pressure off of grabbing copper.  You'll still probably want the copper eventually, but it's down to a nice-to-have instead of a must have.  If for no other reason than copper is a strong tile to work, and it doubles the Statue of Liberty .

Up next is an axeman. This seemed a good choice to me because it has a combat bonus against units, and swordsmen are more effective against cities.

Agree with your reasoning.  Generally you want a mixture of axes, spears, and chariots, so that you can pick the right unit for the right battle.  Swords only if you're planning an invasion in the brief period where they're relevant, but you have enough empty land to claim that you'll probably tech something better by the time you want to invade someone.

As my capital is bumping into the happy cap, I'm going to whip this one.

Works, but I would try to whip something that costs two population - that is, something with more than 30 hammers left to build.  An axe qualifies if you keep your first turn's production under 5 hammers; otherwise you might do better to whip a worker and build the axe while regrowing.

Also: My culture is already starting to eat up Hamburg's territory. Do you think I can get it to flip if I add a library and monument?

It's unlikely with just your capital.  To flip a city you need to get more culture on the city tile than the owner has; right now you have zero culture on that tile, and I think you have to get to 5000 culture to start putting culture into the next ring of tiles.  That's far enough in the future that Hamburg may be able to defend itself.  There's an annoyingly undocumented mechanic here: for the question of tile control only, cities get bonus culture for their inner rings, which means that if Hamburg gets any culture source at all before you've got pressure building on the city tile, it's probably safe.  A monument or religion spread or library all could probably keep the city German, against only the capital pressure, even if the capital has Holy City + Palace + Creative + Monument + Library.  You'll still be culturally dominant and likely to keep the floodplains, but even the cow is likely to revert to German control at some point.

On the other hand, you've now claimed enough land that you may be able to settle some cities close to the border to flip Hamburg, close enough that they don't have relevant distance penalties.  If you were to settle a pair of cities along the border, one north and one south of Hamburg, with Hamburg at minimum distance (must have at least 3 tiles between cities per game rules), they would put pressure on Hamburg soon enough that they'd have a chance.  Creative + religion + 1-2 additional culture buildings per city might be enough.

That's...probably a stylistic choice, though.  Pushing borders that close to Germany will raise tensions enough that you'll need a substantial army; if you added two settler's worth of production to your army, you could likely take Hamburg by force of arms rather than waiting for culture.  Culture can be fun, though.

Here's the location that the game recommends for me. If I'm going to blob, I'll have to settle in this general area, but I'm going to have to chop a lot of jungles to get food production going. I'm thinking that the hill closer to Amsterdam is a better location. It could snatch the rice tile to get its growth kickstarted.

It's arguable, but I think I agree with you.  The game-recommended city wouldn't have any food at all other than blank grassland tiles, which you can't even farm until Civil Service.  That's a really slow-started city.  Meanwhile, your capital is going to have both floodplains and banana; it can definitely spare the rice.

That said, I might make this city 4 or maybe push it even lower in the queue. It allows you to work more tiles, but it doesn't claim much in the way of land or tiles that you won't already have, and it's not something another civ can invalidate. You've already got the cultural control of the tile you would need to plant on. Jungle-covered grassland is long-term profitable, but not short-term, and they will consume a lot of worker labor to become valuable.

Meanwhile, to the north you can grab floodplains, silks, and copper, all tiles that can be profitable in the very near term - you're even researching Calendar soon to make the silks an empire-wide bonus. You've got the river to help with trade connections and to give you income. It's true that half of the cities territory is desert and long-term useless, but it will be a while before you can have the happiness for that to matter. Strong tiles now will help your snowball. In addition, this would block Egypt from expanding eastward, which is more of a long term bonus. I would plant somewhere around the silks tile, myself, probably on the plains hill north of the silks.

It's more of a stretch logistically, harder to defend with the same army and will cost more in maintenance, but I think the stronger tiles and currently unclaimed land will make up for those disadvantages. You'll still want the jungle dyes city while you're in the initial landgrab phase, but probably not this instant.

Also: My treasury is dwindling. Is it a good idea to keep some money in the bank?

It depends.  At the moment you don't have much that you can use money for except technology and maybe a random event or two.  Later, you will be able to use it for emergency upgrades of units, and eventually even for rushing production.  On the other hand, getting technology sooner is usually valuable too.  Personally, I would spend your treasury, as that should get you Mathematics a turn earlier than if you kept it in the bank.  About the Medieval era I would consider putting some money aside for emergencies.  

Another strategy that works is what's called 'binary research'.   It's probably too early for you to bother, but you may want it later.  The basic idea is to always be researching at 100% or at 0%, instead of at your treasury breakeven percentage.  First you save gold, then you spend it.  Usually gets you tech in the same amount of time as breakeven research, but for half the time you have money in the bank for emergencies, if something comes up that is more important than research.  It also means that the date you're committed to a tech is later, which gives you a chance to switch research targets if changing circumstances dictate a change in focus.

[Zalson]

And it's really cool that you've already identified that your workers are on the wrong tiles. That's excellent progress and it took me a long time to figure out how to get them to improve tiles correctly.

Don't overestimate me, I was actually referring to tiles being worked by my city. I think about it like: I click on the city screen and assign a worker from the city to that tile. Regarding the movement of my worker units, I don't really plan them much in advance at the moment.

In Civ4 those tend to be called citizens rather than workers -- so I was confused! Then let me offer the critique I thought you had noticed.

On turn 50, you had a worker on a plains hill and one chopping the riversides plains. Your city was working ... it looks like the banana and both floodplains. This isn't bad as these are all above average tiles that yield a total of 9 food and 5 commerce. It was also really nice that one was already cottaged.

However, you should have been working the Rice tile (5 food), the cottaged floodplains, and the unimproved flood plains or the unimproved cow. That would give you 11 food and 4 commerce which is much better (food is more valuable than commerce, especially in the early game). In this case, and I think it's been mentioned before, but an improved resource is very nearly always more valuable than an unimproved resource.

Look a little bit ahead for what my workers will be doing once they finish their current improvement and planning that way. So, the one chopping the plains forest should then move to the floodplains and cottage it. The worker on the plains hill will build a mine and then move to chop.

My initial recommendation would have been to farm the rice, then the banana, then move to chop or road the forest south, then drop cottages on the floodplains, all while growing to size 5. If that's too much, sorry. Like everyone else I'm just so excited that someone else is playing this great game!

I planted my second city and got my third settler out. I decided to pause here because I could use some help with choosing the next city location.

Looks good!  I like your second city location and your general focus; the worker/settler/garrison trifecta is generally what you want in the early days.

Ditto. Your second city is very strong.

It's grown up to size 3 in the meantime, and I just realized that floodplains give a health penalty, so its health cap is actually lower than its happy cap. I can connect wheat and rice soon-ish, that should deal with it.

Yep, plus as Haphazard mentioned you can power through the health cap for a bit, especially once you have the corn tile farmed and inside your borders.

Don't forget to try and improve food resources first! Based on the screenshot you provided, I would recommend starting a worker after the granary -- and concentrating your workers on improving the corn first.

As my capital is bumping into the happy cap, I'm going to whip this one.

Works, but I would try to whip something that costs two population - that is, something with more than 30 hammers left to build.  An axe qualifies if you keep your first turn's production under 5 hammers; otherwise you might do better to whip a worker and build the axe while regrowing.

Quoted for emphasis. Slavery overflow is a very powerful mechanic that takes some time to learn (for instance, I just learned it last year!). A two pop whip is, in the early game, anything that has more than 31 hammers left in construction. You can hover over the slavery icon to see how many pop the whip will take.

Mardoc's suggestion is a pretty good way to generate military quickly while also pushing expansion: you whip settlers and workers and regrow on infrastructure or military units.

Also: My culture is already starting to eat up Hamburg's territory. Do you think I can get it to flip if I add a library and monument?

It's unlikely with just your capital.  To flip a city you need to get more culture on the city tile than the owner has; right now you have zero culture on that tile, and I think you have to get to 5000 culture to start putting culture into the next ring of tiles.  That's far enough in the future that Hamburg may be able to defend itself.  There's an annoyingly undocumented mechanic here: for the question of tile control only, cities get bonus culture for their inner rings, which means that if Hamburg gets any culture source at all before you've got pressure building on the city tile, it's probably safe.  A monument or religion spread or library all could probably keep the city German, against only the capital pressure, even if the capital has Holy City + Palace + Creative + Monument + Library.  You'll still be culturally dominant and likely to keep the floodplains, but even the cow is likely to revert to German control at some point.

On the other hand, you've now claimed enough land that you may be able to settle some cities close to the border to flip Hamburg, close enough that they don't have relevant distance penalties.  If you were to settle a pair of cities along the border, one north and one south of Hamburg, with Hamburg at minimum distance (must have at least 3 tiles between cities per game rules), they would put pressure on Hamburg soon enough that they'd have a chance.  Creative + religion + 1-2 additional culture buildings per city might be enough.

That's...probably a stylistic choice, though.  Pushing borders that close to Germany will raise tensions enough that you'll need a substantial army; if you added two settler's worth of production to your army, you could likely take Hamburg by force of arms rather than waiting for culture.  Culture can be fun, though.

I'd say don't worry about flipping hamburg yet: just take advantage of it when you can snipe the city.

Here's the location that the game recommends for me. If I'm going to blob, I'll have to settle in this general area, but I'm going to have to chop a lot of jungles to get food production going. I'm thinking that the hill closer to Amsterdam is a better location. It could snatch the rice tile to get its growth kickstarted.

It's arguable, but I think I agree with you.  The game-recommended city wouldn't have any food at all other than blank grassland tiles, which you can't even farm until Civil Service.  That's a really slow-started city.  Meanwhile, your capital is going to have both floodplains and banana; it can definitely spare the rice.

That said, I might make this city 4 or maybe push it even lower in the queue.  It allows you to work more tiles, but it doesn't claim much in the way of land or tiles that you won't already have, and it's not something another civ can invalidate.  You've already got the cultural control of the tile you would need to plant on.  Jungle-covered grassland is long-term profitable, but not short-term, and they will consume a lot of worker labor to become valuable.  

Meanwhile, to the north you can grab floodplains, silks, and copper, all tiles that can be profitable in the very near term - you're even researching Calendar soon to make the silks an empire-wide bonus.  You've got the river to help with trade connections and to give you income.  It's true that half of the cities territory is desert and long-term useless, but it will be a while before you can have the happiness for that to matter.  Strong tiles now will help your snowball.  In addition, this would block Egypt from expanding eastward, which is more of a long term bonus.  I would plant somewhere around the silks tile, myself, probably on the plains hill north of the silks.  

It's more of a stretch logistically, harder to defend with the same army and will cost more in maintenance, but I think the stronger tiles and currently unclaimed land will make up for those disadvantages.  You'll still want the jungle dyes city while you're in the initial landgrab phase, but probably not this instant.

Rice city with food sharing is a really good idea. I agree with Mardoc that you should probably push north and backfill this spot close to your capital a little later. I'd recommend the grassland that is 1 west, 2 North West of Utrecht. It gets 6 floodplains (3 are shared for cottages) a bunch of hills, and all riverside. It grabs the silks when calendar comes around and is close to be defensible. Then city #4 goes 1NW, 2N of that to grab the first ring copper and be a production powerhouse.

Is there any seafood off the stone or the little penninsula due west of your capital? Fishing cities are very powerful.

I'd say add another settler or a worker instead of the axe and whip overflow into the axe. What does your F5 screen look like?