Hello
Would you guys happen to know/recommend a good site or guide for people new to the Civilization games? I bought a copy of this game and the expa sions off of Direct2Drive, and didn’t get a manual. (???)
Over at Civfanatics a user by the name of Sisiutil has a beginner’s strategy guide available for download. He also has a series of threads where he plays a game from start to finish with a selected civ leader. What helped me was mimicking his strategies until I was able to stand on my own two feet.
One caveat though, he does a ridiculous amount of micromanaging each turn - a typical game can last him 24 real hours :O I just read through his threads to get the gist of what he’s doing and go from there. I simply don’t have the patience for that level of microing.
Mostly I recommend just sort of browsing the Civilopedia. You really don’t need the manual to play the game – there is a goodly amount of in-game help to be had. Also, IIRC there is a decent tutorial.
From the same site I found the following walkthrough very helpful when I started ages ago: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=132711
It’s getting to be a bit long in the tooth but not much has really changed that you won’t pick up fast once you get going.
Lots of other links on civfanatics as well in their war academy:
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/
Keep in mind none of them really cover the new expansion stuff yet (espionage, corporations, etc).
Just play the game.
Play a half dozen or so games at the first two or three difficulty levels. You’ll learn the basic systems, and honestly win a lot (the AI sucks on the low levels)
Then go to Noble, and watch as suddenly you get your ass kicked. I don’t know why, but there’s a giant jump in the difficulty curve on noble. At that point, go read civfanatics (or apolyton.net, which I prefer). Noble is IMO where you face your first “real” games of Civ4.
You can go read forums and whatnot, but you honestly won’t have a clue what’s going on and even if you follow the strategies and have success you won’t understand what’s going on because you won’t have the context of understanding the game systems.
I second jeffd’s suggestion. I love Sisiutil’s walkthroughs, and the Fanatics War Academy, but I think you would get little to nothing from them if you were completely new to the entire Civ franchise.
Play a game or two on the easiest settings to learn the mechanics and gloat as you easily conquer/research the world. Then dial up the AI, get spanked, and read strategy guides with diamond-hard motivation for vengeance and crystal-clear objectives for payback.
Struggle to a win, and wonder at your lousy Civ rating of “Dan Quayle.”
Go back to the forums, sputtering to do better, and before you know it it’s 2008 and your neglected dog has turned to a group of woodchucks for companionship.
As I’ve said here before, Civ4 is a system-of-systems. When you are first getting used to things, don’t worry too much about any subscreens, put your workers on auto-improve, and just go with the recommended choices for things (unit and building production, techs, city locations, etc.) if you are overwhelmed. This is what I did at first when starting to play Civ4, and I’d played a lot of the previous games.
As you get more comfortable with playing at this level, dig a little deeper into one of the subsystems. I’d suggest poking around in the city screen to get a handle on the basic way harvesting and production happen. Why do cities get bigger? How can I make a city produce something faster? There are lots of useful tool tips, and things fit together in a fairly straightforward manner.
Andrew’s advice is spot on. Understanding the various systems is key to success in Civ.
On the lower difficulty levels some of the bonuses you get (to happiness and health, especially) will effectively obscure those systems in all but the most extreme examples. That’s one reason I suggest ramping slowly from diff level to diff level. The game doesn’t get appreciably harder until Noble (where the AI’s shackles come off) but stuff like pollution and unhappiness become factors you have to try to deal with. Whereas on the lowest diff level you can happily build every improvement in every city with little to no drawbacks.
Actually I do that at Noble level too, for the most part, but it does require some care and considerable understanding of the systems to pull that off.
While I generally agree with slowly learning the systems and accepting some AI choices as defaults, some of the suggestions are really very bad.
I can’t support accepting the AI build choices, for example. When I have a huge civilization I’d love to just turn all the lesser and unstrategic cities over to the AI, but doing so would really ruin my civilization in many cases.
The AI has a tendency to build really dumb things sometimes. Say you are in the mid-game with a nice comfortable 8-10 cities, just barely scraping by on cash flow, and closed in on all borders by other civs. Your only real option for expansion is to first get enough technology to support more cities and then to kick some ass. Set all your cities over to automation and what do you see? Settlers everywhere!
They also often choose to build lower tech military units for some insane reason. I’m just upgrading to cavalry, have already been building musketeers for a while, going to have grenadiers and cannon soon, for heaven’s sake, why do you want me to build a maceman?
Similarly, barracks are good – I agree – I take “aggressive” types often just for fast early barracks building when turns seem to count the most. But the AI wants to build them way too fast and too early. What, you want my scouts to get a combat bonus versus wolves or something? Nice idea, but if I build a barracks now, I won’t actually have any scouts.
The AI also loves theaters over almost all other choices even when the city is very happy, there’s no war, and there are plenty of more valuable things to be building.
PS: Semi-silly thing to do, but before attacking enemy civilizations early in the game, I always give or sell them Code of Law so I can conquer cities that already have courthouses built, thus damaging my economy somewhat less…
If you’re building every building in every city I can’t imagine what your maintenance costs are like. :)
And yes, the AI recommendations suck (it builds too many farms, for one, which leaves you with overpopulation and the problems that go with it). That being said, for your first game or two ignore Miramon’s advice. You’re not looking to learn to play well, you’re looking to learn to play. There are a phenomenal amount of subsystems to worry about in Civ IV, and going with AI recommendations will let you at least skim the surface a bit.
Of course once you have a handle on things you’ll depend less and less on the AI. The first thing to go out on your own on is the tech tree. Figure out what techs you want to shoot for and go for them. Then figure out production, tile development, etc etc on your own. Then of course there’s the entire Great Persons subgame…
I believe that in Civ 4 buildings do not cost maintenance (a change from previous games in the series). The only cost is opportunity cost, in that you could have been building something else. (And of course, the occasional building that decreases health.)
Yeah, the computer selections can be dumb, but they are good enough for the first few difficulty levels when you are trying to figure out what is going on.
I’m almost certain that at least some buildings cost maintenance. Maybe I’m just tremendously high though!
Of course buildings cost maintenance, there are specific buildings (like the Courthouse) that exist just to reduce maintenance costs.
— Alan
Jeff and Alan are both wrong. One of Soren’s many awesome design choices was to never penalize you for putting buildings into your city. So Civ IV doesn’t work the way the previous Civs did. Maintenance costs come 1) from how many cities you have and 2) how far they are from your palace. Period.
You can check the treasury screen or check the tooltip in the city screen to see just how it breaks down.
BTW, the new corporate branches are an exception to this.
-Tom
I believe they don’t in general anyway, for what it’s worth. But who knows, I may not be paying proper attention sometimes either; there’s lots of simple things I don’t know about the game. Like what is that chess-rook icon that shows up next to the various religion icons beneath the city name on the map?
Anyhow, about building improvements, in addition to the question of just what to build, the big question for me is whether to build forges and factories and the like, since I tend to favor flood plains… This is why I like to play the Germans sometimes, and always rush to get the Hanging Gardens. Also, the trade off of buildings versus units is significant at times – since units obviously do have a big overhead, especially if you like being a pacifist warmonger like me.
My own usual style is to try to spend the game not on a war footing except when I specifically want to conquer people (I prefer to use a wave of cavalry and trebuchets to take over the world), and that means that I often make so few units early on and towards the end that I’m really encouraging an attack, so I have to force myself to build some extra horse archers or axemen or whatever when I’d really prefer to be building more libraries and universities.
That’s a defensive bonus afforded units in that city. I believe it’s called the cultural defensive bonus to distinguish it from bonuses from walls or castles.
-Tom
Tom: Thanks for the clarification. I knew about the maintenance just for having cities and distance from capital. It’s good to know that I was wrong about buildings costing maintenance!
These days I’m experimenting with going to war early. Looks something like this:
- Start with Russia
- Get Bronze Working in the first 2-3 techs (Russia starts with all the prereqs for bronze working)
- Get copper
- Start chop rushing a horde of axemen (a single worker chopping a forest can generally build an axer in one turn)
- Send 8+ axemen at my nearest neighbor. Destroy.
If you can do this fast (and chop rushing is crucial for that) you can usually take out one, maybe two neighboring civs in the very early part of the game. Alternatively you can simply bottle them up in their capitol and keep them weak. Destroy all but one military unit in their capitol, destroy all improvements, and in the meantime your Civ is expanding. Later on these weak civs will be nice to use as proxy researchers (periodically demand tech from them. :) )
You sir, are tremendously high. ;-)
Buildings don’t cost maintenance. Maintenance costs are spelled out in the “Gold Coin” summary screen, e.g.:
- Number of cities, and their distance from a capitol.
- Whether cities are across the ocean
- Cost of your civics
- If you have more than your limit of “free upkeep” units
- How many units you have outside your borders
- Inflation
Jasper, just to pick nits: “City Maintenance” costs are a very specific thing that doesn’t include many of the factors you’ve listed.
For instance, Civics Upkeep, Unit Cost and Supply, and Inflation are all separate costs that aren’t considered City Maintenance. Courthouses won’t affect those, for instance, because Courthouses only apply to City Maintenance.
I’m sure you know this, but being the aspiring Civ pedant that I am, I thought I’d clarify. :)
-Tom