Help RFS-81 learn Civ 4

[RFS-81]

I've got a comfortable score lead at the moment, and caught up in the power rating. I've set up two cities as more-or-less dedicated unit pumps. I'm above my neighbors and about equal with Sitting Bull, but I have Egypt between him and me. Sitting Bull is 2nd in score, by the way. IIRC, he's usually not one of the stronger leaders. The one thing that's worrying me is that the science ranking popup has put me on a rather low rank. I think the cause is that I've been neglecting techs that boost my income.

I've selected the civics that boost cottages/villages, and Bureaucracy for more production in my capital, which I've used on building a whole bunch of wonders. I've also built the Apostolic Palace, but I'm the only Buddhist, so there's not much going on

The culture war for Hamburg isn't going to well, though I did manage to flip Hamburg's hamburgers again. (The cow tile has reverted to Germany for some time and I got it back again!) I doubt that I'll be able to flip the city itself.

   

When it comes to building new cities, I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel:

   

The Hague and Middelburg are where I'm producing more units when I need them, but not at the moment. I probably could have placed a better unit pump city, but for now it's working well enough. It seems that I rolled very peaceful opponents. Let's see if my next game will put me up against Monty!

One more question: Does the market increase the raw commerce yield, or only the part that goes to the treasury?

[Brian Shanahan]

One more question: Does the market increase the raw commerce yield, or only the part that goes to the treasury?

Raw IIRC. T-Hawk worked out the whole idea of the finance buildings over at his website, dos486.com, a few years back. Here.

Looking at your map, you don't seem to have enough commerce cities. The only one seems to be up by the Hague.

Also what's your plan for winning the game? Here I'd probably tech to rifles and kill either Germany or Egypt before coasting to culture or space.

[RFS-81]

Honestly, I'm just messing around at this point. I achieved my personal goal of flipping Hamburg, though via Apostolic Palace after it became > 50% Dutch, not via revolt. The same happened with Cologne a few turns earlier. Freddy vassaled himself to me, but I haven't checked what that does. I guess I could try to invade Egypt with Infantry...

Thanks for the link, but if I understand correctly, they boost only the portion of your income that goes to the treasury. (Which is a stealth buff for science because you can set your science slider higher.)

Having both Maoi Heads and Dike is neat, by the way:

   

[haphazard1]

You are ccorrect that markets only boost the portion of your commerce going to gold; if your science (plus culture plus espionage) sliders get all your commerce then the market has nothing to boost. This is the mirror image of the library, which only boosts the science portion of your commerce. But as you already are aware, boosting the gold multiplier allows a higher science slider so these effects interact.

On flipping Hamburg, a city which has expanded borders more than once is very difficult to flip because of the way culture gets added to tiles. For each border expansion, the tiles in the "inner rings" get significantly boosted culture in addition to the city's per turn culture output. This bonus factor operates as powers of ten, so for a city that has twice expanded borders the core tile is getting an extra 100 culture/turn -- that is very tough to overcome.

The tiles north of Hamburg are also likely getting some culture from the outermost-ring of Berlin's culture, making them even more difficult to flip. This is why for serious culture flip attempts you will see players plant multiple cities at minimum distance from the target city, even if this makes the flipper cities badly placed relative to resources. The effect of multiple cities applying pressure to the same tiles is very powerful.

Anyway, it sounds like you found a way using the AP. Since you had a majority of culture in Hamburg, the game considers it as "properly" belonging to your empire and the "return the city to the rightful owner" resolution becomes possible through the AP. Just one of the neat (or annoying, when it is used against you ) things the AP can do.

And yes, the Dutch dike is very powerful for coastal cities. It is like another Moai, but you can build it in every coastal city once you reach Steam Power. The Dutch are frighteningly powerful on water-heavy maps in the late game. Try them on an Archipelago Tiny Islands map some time for some ridiculous late game cheese.

For bottom of the barrel cities, you could plant one north of Germany to grab that copper; it would need to generate enough culture to take the deer away from Germany so it would have some food. Probably not worth it against such a developed city under normal circumstances, but in this case Frederick is your vassal. I rarely play with vassals turned on, but if I recall correctly one of the effects of vassaling him is that you win any culturally disputed tiles automatically. So you could take the deer for food, and with deer, copper, and some coast tiles you could have a halfway decent city. Especially once you built a dike for hammers on the water tiles.

Pretty much any site that has a source of food can be worthwhile for a city, even if most of the terrain is terrible. This late in the game it may not be worth it to found them; depends on how much longer you think the game will last.

Let's see, what else? Sitting Bull can be a decent leader, if he gets some land to work with; really, almost any of the AIs can be strong if they happen to get enough land. But Sitting Bull has Philosophical which is a pretty solid trait for the AI; the AI loves to run tons of specialists, so PHI actually does them a fair bit of good. I consider Sitting Bull a middle of the pack leader as an opponent in single player -- he is usually not aggressive enough for his own good in something like AI Survivor, but if he gets some land to work with he usually does pretty well.

Anyway, it looks like you are doing quite well at this point. Hopefully you have had fun, and learned some things about Civ IV. And hopefully the comments have been useful. Good luck!

[RFS-81]

And done!

I won a surprising diplomatic victory through the Palace! I was well on my way to a culture victory, but luckily I didn't research Mass Media and got my broadcast towers from the Eiffel Tower.

Your comments were a great help, this worked much better than when I stumbled around in Civ 4 last time!

[haphazard1]

Congrats on the victory! The AP victory can be abused -- building it for a minority religion and intentionally limiting the spread to allow domination of the vote can allow for victory even if you have almost no actual power or population. But when it is built for a widely followed religion, if ends up working fairly similarly to the UN victory. Sounds like that is what happened in your case.

Interesting that you were going for a culture win -- I find culture to be one of the more difficult victory types to pull off. Space ship wins or the military type victories (conquest and domination) are a lot more straight forward, although they tend to take longer in terms of playing time.

I am glad all of the commenters on the thread were able to help. Civ IV can be a very fun game, but there is a lot to learn about how everything works. Having some guidance from experienced players can help a lot with figuring things out. I have learned a ton from other players here over the years, so it is fun to be able to share some of it with someone new to the game.

[Zalson]

Congratulations, RFS-81! Now take the step to Prince

We can always organize a succession game, if you'd like?

[Brian Shanahan]

Congrats on the victory! The AP victory can be abused -- building it for a minority religion and intentionally limiting the spread to allow domination of the vote can allow for victory even if you have almost no actual power or population. But when it is built for a widely followed religion, if ends up working fairly similarly to the UN victory. Sounds like that is what happened in your case.

Interesting that you were going for a culture win -- I find culture to be one of the more difficult victory types to pull off. Space ship wins or the military type victories (conquest and domination) are a lot more straight forward, although they tend to take longer in terms of playing time.

I am glad all of the commenters on the thread were able to help. Civ IV can be a very fun game, but there is a lot to learn about how everything works. Having some guidance from experienced players can help a lot with figuring things out. I have learned a ton from other players here over the years, so it is fun to be able to share some of it with someone new to the game.

Culture in BtS is easy enough: Step one get Sid's. Step two buy rice and seafood. Step three (optional) get Civ Jewellers. Step four turn on culture. Step five win.

My first Monarch victory, back in the day was an eight city Dutch win where I used that strategy to cash out on a 1770's culture when I realised the other methods would be too hard to set up.

[Fluffball]

Step 1: Turn on culture and win. IIRC one of the SG games Sullla set up was to win a culture victory via not using the culture slider since it's so cheesey.

This is not directed at RFS-81, but rather vets that can easily set it up via cottage spam and get some culture buildings into the city. I almost always have a cathedral and several religions in my capital just for happiness purposes, even in an always war.

[Mardoc]

For each border expansion, the tiles in the "inner rings" get significantly boosted culture in addition to the city's per turn culture output. This bonus factor operates as powers of ten, so for a city that has twice expanded borders the core tile is getting an extra 100 culture/turn -- that is very tough to overcome.

I heard it as +20 per ring beyond the one you're looking at, not a factor of 10. Has a similar effect, but there's a chance to overcome it with enough dedicated effort.

And done!

I won a surprising diplomatic victory through the Palace! I was well on my way to a culture victory, but luckily I didn't research Mass Media and got my broadcast towers from the Eiffel Tower.

Your comments were a great help, this worked much better than when I stumbled around in Civ 4 last time!

Excellent! Now that you have the basic foundation in place, you should be in good shape to keep learning as you go. Still happy to answer questions if you want, or you can just go exploring the mechanics on your own . You've probably got the skill now to try some of the Epics and Adventures, if the challenges sound interesting.