Civ 4: The Curse of Dan Quayle

Games
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Heh in other words I don’t know WTH I’m doing :D

Yeah I stuipidly switched over to Judiasm because my good buddy Napoleon asked me to. He even gave me a tech for free when I asked for it and willfully went to war with my enemies when I needed help so that’s why I switched religions.

I think my biggest problem is losing site of the big picture while managing my cities and military units. I easily fall into click click click mode clicking on everything without a thought of where that’s going to take my empire in the future and eventually I end up screwing myself =\

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I think my biggest problem is losing site of the big picture while managing my cities and military units. I easily fall into click click click mode clicking on everything without a thought of where that’s going to take my empire in the future and eventually I end up screwing myself =\

That about sums up my difficulty sometimes with the game too. I sometimes focus to much on one thing or lose sight of other goals and forget to multitask. Obviously, thats more a problem with me than the game but that last victory has really encouraged me.

Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that I built cottages almost exclusively (I just built farms, mines, plantations, etc. when needed for resources) and I think it really did help a lot by the later parts of the game.

Another question though, when is it useful (or is it useful at all) to build lumbermill/watermills/windmills? From what I can tell, they give you a little extra production and don’t cause unhealthiness (compared to a forge) so that seems alright. I tend to build a few here and there, but I’m wondering if I should even bother.

23

Honestly I think that you can get by with just keeping control of maybe 1-2 workers and setting the rest on automated…with the additional option of “Automated works not re-working previously worked tiles”.

They tend to default to cottages anyway…you just need to take control whenever they build stuff like that on potential mines and such :)

…I mean, you might want to change this tactic once you’re near the top difficulty brackets, but I win pretty consistantly on Prince by doing this.

24

Lumbermills always go on forests with underlying tundra. They are also good if you’re keeping forests around in anticipation of switching to the economic civic that gives a bonus to cities with forest squares (but I personally would only do that on difficulty levels above Emperor). Otherwise, just chop and replace with a mine or farm. Windmills are good for green hills. Water mills are good for cities that you want to max out on production.

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lumbermills go on forest tiles in tundra, since you can´t do any worthwile improvements there after chopping the forest, windmills and watermills only really start to shine after inventing electricity. watermills are the best improvement near rivers with stateproperty giving 1food 2hammers and 2 commerce(compared to 2 food with a farm) , windmills are good in your great people generating cities for the extra food or near commerce oriented cities.

I usually leave my workers on auto and they seem to never build watermills, always going for the clearly inferior farms or cottages. They do build tons of windmills and lumbermills though, which I like.

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I refuse to use the auto-workers, as they seem to be pretty stupid. For example tearing up all my farmland to replace it with cottages, when it is nearly the end of the game.

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you can set it up so that they can’t tear up existing improvements…but yeah, they’ll usually build cottages when it’s not always the best choice.

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Yeah, I don’t use the auto function either. In my last game I had 3-4 active workers working non stop and I basically worked every single square in my territory, whether that was useful or not, I don’t know, but I did it anyway. I may set 1 (maybe 2) workers to set up auto trade networks and have them build roads everywhere, especially when I want to set up railroad everywhere.

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Ah, I didn’t know that, woo. Thanks.

30

Do the computer opponents want to eat my blood more and more as I go up in difficulty, or is that simply the Warlord difficulty specifically?

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Maybe not more specifically, but the computer opponents definitely try harder to get other civs to attack you by bribing them.

You can find yourself in wars with nations that are friendly to you because they got paid off by a civ that hates you…so more wars, more frequently, that lasts longer :)

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Like I needed any more wars! Gah! :mad:

I mean, I may be saying ‘please, put me out of my misery’ in rl, but does a game have to try its best to do it, too? I’m developing a severe persecution complex. :eek:

33

I was browsing the apolyton.net and the official civ4 forums and got a few ideas - one way is to concentrate, daniel-san!

In general you have to learn to be flexible and take the best possible advantage of each situation. For example, if you start with flood plains and a financial civ, you will be very well rewarded dropping cottages on those plains - or you could find yourself in an empty continent and want to farm it into a settler farm.

However, in my training I’ve been trying several gambits - for example you can practice with settler first (before anything else!), or try Roman rush to iron and rollover civs asap.

Try Keshiks with genghis khan, they are amazing. I found a game where I rolled over four civs with keshiks, before they built more than two cities. Pillage, raze, keep the capital city. It’s a difference since I normally play as a builder-civ.

Or try aztecs, incas, and do an early rush. it’s interesting. You learn how much military you need to cripple/kill a civ. Then when you play a builder you know exactly how much military you need.

One of my favorite gambits i’ve been practicing: (usually with Chinese first emperor Qin, but works with others)

The key is oracle rush to Bureaucracy - research up to code of laws and use oracle to get civil service. Also get a great scientist. I usually end up with it around 2000-1000 BC. With the Chinese you get an insane amount of research (specially if coastal city). You’ll end up a bit behind in number of cities, but that one city you have is worth three other cities. You can conquer, or found more cities, etc. Sometimes I also end up with Pyramids, so I can get Representative/Bureaucracy/Organized religion. Amazing city, gets up to size 12-13 with no unhappiness, and tons of gold + science beakers.

This is on Noble btw.

I’ll summarize it as best I can:

  1. Start with warrior or worker assuming a land civ (no fishing resources, those are different). Scout around. Get a few techs to develop the resources in your area. You’ll want around 2 food resources and hopefully you have nice hills to mine.

  2. Go for writing asap - grabbing pottery/wheels along the way if you don’t have mines say, and want to drop cots on flood plains. You’ll want to play along with the order of techs - sometimes it’s worth delaying production for a settler. Once you get writing, get library built.

Once you have library, create 2 scientist specialists. on normal speed that will take 100 / 6 turns = 17 turns.

Research code of laws. Start working on the oracle. Try to time it so you build it after the scientists. This is because you don’t want the oracles’ GP points. You don’t want a great profit, at least yet. This period gives you the most flexibility in tech research choices. You may want to say bronze working before code of laws, and chop the oracle up fast. Depends on how fast your production is compared to your tech research.

Repeat, rinse, and enjoy. If you want to war, you can now hook up some iron and mass macemen with their 8 attack and city raider promotions. Or you can go for metal casting for the forges, 25% production. Fun fun!

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Flexibility is very important - there’s starts where this gambit doesn’t work very well. For example, start next to montezuma or izzy, you’ll probably have Beijing sacked two turns before oracle is completed.

However, I think it’s good to practice different approaches so you have the experience to know which one to approach given a specific start.