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ducki
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quote:
Most of the time I start very well with creating a lot of early wonders (like the the Great Library but don't need it) but somewhere during the second era I start loosing my advantage. |
One good way to improve your entire game is to improve your Ancient game, and a great way to do this is to purposely not build any Ancient Wonders. This forces you to concentrate on other, (more) important matters, such as infrastructure, military, diplomacy, etc.
If that's too extreme, try picking any one Ancient Wonder except the Great Library. Just one. This will free up the towns you are using to build wonders forcing you to learn to play without the wonders.
Just a suggestion.
And definitely, post a sav and a screenshot.
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nbarclay
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Huntsville, Alabama
Dec 1999
time: 23:34
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The most obvious problem I see is that the military has huge numbers of obsolete units instead of smaller numbers of more modern ones. That can be okay, at least up to a point, for governments that have plenty of free unit support and can use obsolete units as military police to keep people happy. But it's a disaster in Republic and Democracy. If, instead of building wealth, you would build some modern units and disband the obsolete ones, you could have a military that is both much stronger and much smaller and cheaper to maintain.
I also agree with vmxa1 that your cities are too far apart. Emperor-level and higher players tend to overlap cities a lot, deliberately creating a situation where most can't grow much if any past size 12 because the game is half over before cities can grow past size 12 anyhow. (A variation is to set up a city pattern where the cities are spaced tight initially but some will be disbanded later to let others grow.) But whether you want to go with quite that tight a spacing or not, leaving tiles that none of your cities can work is a bad thing.
Another problem is your lack of luxuries, because marketplaces plus luxuries can provide the biggest happiness boost of anything in the game. When I get a tech lead, I generally try to trade techs for luxuries plus as much gold (both up front and per turn) as I can squeeze out of the AIs. The bigger, happier cities that luxuries make possible and the extra gold to finance research combine to help me keep and extend my tech lead in spite of the fact that I'm trading a tech or two away every twenty turns. I don't know how Accelerated Production might affect that since I never use it, but selling techs to AIs is a pretty standard strategy.
And there are also very serious problems with what your workers have been doing. You have cities at their current maximum size with big food surpluses that they have absolutely no use for because too many grasslands are irrigated instead of mined. Desert tiles are mined even though the cities in range to use them cannot possibly come up with the food to work them all. And in the meantime, there is jungle up north that has been left uncleared while workers spent all that time building useless mines. There are very definite advantages to managing workers yourself instead of using the automation mechanisms if you can stand to do it.
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Arrian
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Kneel before Grog!
Jul 2001
time: 00:34
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Regarding overlap...
The upper level players (Emp, Demi, Deity, Sid) often use 3-tile spacing, like so: City-tile-tile-City.
I, a Monarch/Emperor player, typically use 4-tile spacing:
City-tile-tile-tile-City. That is a compromise between early game advantage and late-game super cities. It will work just fine on Regent or Monarch.
Regarding worker actions: if you allow the AI to control your workers, it will do stupid things with them. Period, end of story. Taking direct control of your workers, and learning what to do with them, is a crucial element of the game. City governors are also pretty dumb. Emphasize production, but manually check on where your citizens are allocated. Set it up yourself - you will learn more and you will do better.
Basics: roads everywhere. Mines on grassland in despotism, try to avoid developing hills or mountains in despotism if you can (despotism "eats" some bonuses like the 3rd shield from a mined hill, and since hills take twice as long to develop as grassland it makes sense to wait a bit).
Growth is very powerful. Granaries (or the Pyramids) will really boost your population, which is a good thing. It will allow more settlers and more workers, the two most important units in the game.
This is without looking at your game, btw, but I get the sense of things from Nathan's post.
Welcome to Apolyton, and good luck!
-Arrian
p.s. Note that republic provides some unit support. 1 free unit per town (size 1-6), 3 per city (7-12) and 4 per metro (12+). True, the units above your "allowed" number will cost you 2gpt in upkeep, so keep that in mind. The corruption difference is fairly small. The main advantage is the worker speed boost, but unless you're a religious civ that will only suffer 1 turn of anarchy, I don't see that Demo is worthwhile.
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mkqest
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I started a new game too and have had good results so far though I am not very far into it yet. But the first civ I met had comparable techs and gold in the bank.
I came to the same conclusion about city governors too. Managing moods is OK until you want to add a specialist then its manual control time.
One thing I found myself doing early on is over building city improvements because I wasn't sure what to build. This added extra upkeep expenses before I had the extra cash around. You really don't need a barracks in every city early on and even granaries in some cities.
I will try to focus on granaries in the big food cities and barracks in the shield cities in the early going. But here is where the question comes in.
What to build when you don't know what to build? Early on when you have barracks in some cities, granaries or harbors in your other cities and you don't want to add upkeep costs until your workers catch up connecting and improving?
Wealth? Military units for future use?
What is average position of science slider? I feel like I am not doing enough if it hits 50% or less and yet I see it also as a fast way to raise cash if needed. Should it be adjusted/evaluated each turn?
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ErikM
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quote:
Originally posted by mkqest
What to build when you don't know what to build? Early on when you have barracks in some cities, granaries or harbors in your other cities and you don't want to add upkeep costs until your workers catch up connecting and improving?
Wealth? Military units for future use?
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If you don't know what to build and there is still room for expansion, build a settler. Otherwise, build a worker. There is no such thing as too many workers. You can always add them to your better cities after terrain is improved, so think of them not just as workers, but also as a way to store population points. A rule of thumb is that if any of your citizens works an unimproved tile, build a worker.
Also, regarding your earlier question, a very good tutorial on the early game is Cracker's "Improving your opening game skills" (or something like that) on CFC. There is a link to it in the "Must read..." thread.
quote:
What is average position of science slider? I feel like I am not doing enough if it hits 50% or less and yet I see it also as a fast way to raise cash if needed. Should it be adjusted/evaluated each turn? |
This depends on too many things, especially
(i) difficulty level
(ii) time period
(iii) whether you have a GreatLib.
Very early in the game (first 20-30 turns) min science research may be a good idea, since you may be able to trade your starting techs with other civs. Later on, on Emperor you should be able to reach parity with the AIs by the end of the Ancient Era (or early Medieval) and stay ahead technologically afterwards. In Republic, after building Universities in your core cities, you should be able to research at 4turns/tech (max speed) at ~70-80% science until Modern Era. Finance your research by selling some techs for AIs.
On higher difficulties it is a bit more complicated, but if you play a couple of games on Monarch/Emperor, you will get a feel for the general speed of tech advancement, "tradeable" techs, and so such.
Important thing to remember is to adjust your tech slider once you are one or two turns away from discovery. Oftentimes, you will be able to lower your science expenditures and still get a tech next turn.
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mkqest
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Thats the great thing about this game. Everything is dependent on so many factors so that the rule of thumb trumps the ironclad rules.
Thanks for the advice. It does sound like I don't have enough workers if they are playing catchup and I have completed the initial round of city improvements.
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The Hack
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When I moved to Regent I was able to dominate by setting the governers to manage mood and emphasize production. I mined everything. I had the setting set so I had to ok all things built. When I moved to Monarch I still kept the governer to manage mood but assigned all workers and usually won also. I hadn't learned about the power of food production. Moved up to Emperor and could only win with lot's of rivers! So I had to learn to manage the cities took a few games but well worth it. I played with A.P. on but think it is unbailancing in favor of the human. Especially in the modern age when you hit peak production. So I went down to monarch to get a feel for the game without A.P. Much better game it makes your choices more important. Now I play Emperor and do ok usually. But the key to Emperor seems to be using your tribes traits, research choices, oportunistic trading, giving in to extortion, and wise wars with limited goals. So in short I think the key is to learn how to play without the governers even though it is tedious, especially when RR come along. I can't compare to all the expert players here but was able to have fun games at Monarch in about 6 months of playing by reading all the threads and trying the strategies with catastropic results sometimes. The game I learned the most from was a loss but it was my first game at Monarch that I lasted to the end. It was a Space race loss but I played through and learned the mechanics of not ruining your reputation. I saved it and went back much later and won a U.N. victory but didn't blow my reputation when I played it through the second time so when playing and you are at a criticle junction replay it with the different decisions and you can learn alot!
The game is for fun and as long as you have fun play on what ever level you enjoy! With whatever settings you like. And always try to learn from your losses.
I play C3C 115 beta. Can't wait for the official patch!
Good gaming to all!
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The Hack
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By the way I never looked at your game and think that the specific game advice was all covered very well and tried to be generic on how I evolved my game. LOL!
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15-03-2004 15:49
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