I found that playing on epic speed helps the military game. You actually have time to move your units before they become outdated.
I’m sure Walt can chime in here, but he wins via culture pretty consistently. A key part of this is getting every religion working with cathedrals in your four “big cities”. Interestingly, he says the score for culture wins are less than the domination ones.
Yeah, I tend to have a ‘culture war’ going with a friendly civ in most every game. Which means that a culture victory is possible in most every game. It develops as such.
I get an early religion - Buddhism or Judaism, and spread it to my neighbors during the initial ‘open borders’’ period. Typically speaking, at least one of my neighbors will have no other religions and will happily remain my chosen religion. This becomes my ‘friendly’ border, and I focus on culture improvements all along that border. The other borders are pegged for military expansion/defense.
In the middle game, I make the choice to go for culture victory or other victories. I need at least 4 religions (more is better), Organized religion or monastaries so that I can spread them to my chosen culture cities plus my capital (which, due to the palace and wonders is the almost always the designated 3rd culture city).
The middle game is typically right after Riflemen. Just too hard to defend against tanks without them.
I then devote those 3 cities to nothing but culture, swap out specialists to be as many artists as possible, and find a ‘sweet spot’ for how much of my overall revenue to devote to culture - depending on the tech race, anywhere from 100% culture to 70% culture. I will buy 50% culture wonders such as Rock and Roll, Hollywood and Broadway, and wait it out for the culture victory.
I might also destroy lumbermills for farms or windmills to increase the population on those cities. I tend to have at least 500 culture per turn when I make the switch to culture and more often than not, upwards of 900 culture per turn in the last few turns.
Great Artists - sometimes I drop them as 4000 point culture bombs, and sometimes I place them as great artists. One great artist in a culture city can swing the culture per turn as much as 60-70 points per turn, so I look at how far away I am from winning before placing them.
Latest game was a 1974 culture victory on Noble. I suspect I can improve on that. So far, I’ve never lost a culture race to a space race.
-Walt
I found in all the previous games of the series that a game would pass too fast. The first 4000 years would go before I knew it and then the other 2000 also very quickly (unless there are a lot of wars later on). I have heard there is an option to make the game longer in the custom game settings. Can anyone say a bit more about that?
If you play on Epic there are either 1.5x or 2x as many turns (I forget offhand), but resource and research costs are raise commeasurately. One of the Patches added an even slower pace.
Choosing game speed is one of the choices you make even with the least ‘customising’ game selection mode. The very last screen (‘Game Snapshot’) has the speed selector in the lower left. The most recent patch added ‘Marathon’ to 1.0’s ‘Epic’, ‘Normal’, and ‘Quick’.
I’m playing a miiltarily-aggressive game on Epic for the first time, and I’m finding it actually possible to dispatch more than one opponent before the game finishes! Which is nice.
I’ve got a question about expanding and building new cities. Everything I’ve read so far says Civ4 isn’t infinite city sprawl friendly like the previous civs and that you can get by with maybe 4 or 5 cities. But when I play on Noble it seems like the AI can expand all it likes and not incurr any significant penalties and by mid to late game I get screwed because the AI has a much larger industrial/science output that I can no longer keep up in the tech race :{
I’ve read that you need to make sure your present cities are self sufficient (so you’re not running a defecit) but how do you know they’re self sufficient? Do they have to grow to a certain size? Do you have to have certain buildings constructed to make them self sufficient?
Each new city can hurt if it’s maintenance + resulting increased maintenance in your other cities is higher than the new cities income, and once you reach the point of negative returns each new city digs you a deeper hole than the last. You can check this in the city screen, and the financial summary screen.
In my experience it’s still typically worth it to stake out nice spots that won’t be available later on, and overboard maintenance cost only come into play during reckless conquest. It’s best to consider ahead of time if you’ll be able to afford what you intend to conquer.
Oh, and the AI does expand aggresively, but it doesn’t over expand and certainly doesn’t spam out an “infinite sprawl”. If you’re having trouble keeping up with the AIs settling pace, try researching bronze working and building a worker right off the bat, then chop trees while you build settlers.
I vaguely remember seeing somewhere that the AI only has to pay partial maintenance and upgrade costs, giving them an edge when it comes to money.
Also, be careful not to confuse ICS (large numbers of underdeveloped cities) with normal expansion.
- Alan
Oh another question, is it worth saving up great people for golden ages?
Basically you need to make sure your income is just about equal to your maintenance costs without lowering your science rate too much (i.e. less than 50%). Defecit spending is OK for a short period, particularly if you’ve just come into a large sum of money from, say, losing the race for a wonder and being reimbursed in cash, but overall you should try to balance your budget. Checking the city screen to see whether a city is losing a lot of money will help see where problems are and micromanaging to maximise income in those that are problematic can help in balancing the books.
4 or 5 cities is probably too low to realistically win, 6 is doable for a culture win, but you will have to stave off the AI with diplomacy and bribes. 10-12 built cities is a fair number to keep up with AI in the tech race at Noble and if you can destroy an AI rival and keep 5 or 6 of his/her cities you’ll have a certain space race victory up to Noble level and possibly higher. Conquest/domination victories obviously require you to conquer more cities.
Edit to add:
Oh another question, is it worth saving up great people for golden ages?
No. Golden ages aren’t as useful as in Civ 3 and GPs can be better used for their other functions.
Do be careful. It is possible to run into a situation where you are the largest Civ on the block, but spend all your money on maintenance and have nothing left over for research.
You should not expand too widely until you can build Courthouses (Code of Law). At that point you can not only cut maintenance costs in half with Courthouses, you can also build the Forbidden Palace further cutting costs. At that point, you can probably expand as widely as you want without too much danger.
I had a game where I conquered several neighboring empires. As Jasper says “reckless conquest”. That left me as by far the largest empire with a large number of cities, but massive maintenance costs. I didn’t have Code of Law yet and couldn’t get it in any reasonable time because I didn’t have any money left over for research. Ugh. Time to restart the game.
Try this approach getting a good feel for when to expand on Noble:
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Build your first city
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When your city reaches population 3, build a settler
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Settle your 2nd city
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Set your commerce rates to 30% Gold / 70% Science
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As long as there is land to settle…
----* If the gold per turn you are earning is equal to the number of cities in your empire build a settler and expand -
Once there is no longer land to settle…
----* If the gold per turn you are earning is equal to the number of cities in your empire, take an AI city via war
OR
----* If the gold per turn you are earning is equal to the number of cities in your empire, increase the science rate by 10%
This system will approximate an ideal growth rate fairly effeciently and is very easy to use. After you have played with it a few games you will find yourself adjusting everything on the fly and still expanding at a rate the AI can’t keep up with.
Chris Woods
Yikes, 50%? That’s way too low for my tastes. I endeavor to keep it at 80-90%, and only dip below that if I get bogged down in a lengthy war (e.g. 2 AIs attack at once), and need to put funds into culture to offset mounting war weariness. Or perhaps if I’ve built the Kremlin and want to pay gold to push build some important production.
I do everything I can to keep my research percentage high, even trading resources away for gold when I know it helps my opponent more than it helps me (provided they’re behind me in the rankings!).
Courthouses are nice, but I find what helps more is to have the various things that increase the number of trade routes each city gets, and one city that makes a bunch of gold. Ideally you can found a religion, spread it well, and then put a Bank, Shrine, and Wallstreet in it’s Holy City. Grocer and Market too.
I had a game where I conquered several neighboring empires. As Jasper says “reckless conquest”. That left me as by far the largest empire with a large number of cities, but massive maintenance costs. I didn’t have Code of Law yet and couldn’t get it in any reasonable time because I didn’t have any money left over for research. Ugh. Time to restart the game.
Actually, I just won a game as China where I came back from such a reckless conquest. I started off hemmed in, with jungle where I wanted to put my cities. This forced me to settle far away, taking too much time. The Indians shot ahead of me, culturally converted one of my frontier cities, and I had no recourse but to go to war with them. I couldn’t afford to conquer them completely, but had to take more than I could afford to pay. I got over the hump by spreading religion, build my gold infrastructure, trading resources for gold per turn, and tech for gold. This allowed me to run a big deficit to continue researching economic tech, and to grow my cities enough to get substantial money from their trade routes.
Well I consider 50% to be an absolute lowest limit only to be used to grab a good city site and like you I prefer to have it higher for most of the game. Remember though that you can get too hung about percentages, 50% of 100 gold is better than 80% of 50 gold. As a British union leader once said ‘100% of nothing is bugger all.’
Well, except that if you’re getting more income you can run higher percentages, so the two are tightly coupled. I don’t think it’s possible to get too tightly wrapped up in your research percentage, unless perhaps you do so at the expense of sufficient military forces and get savaged by a sudden invasion.
A founded religion is definitely a great cash cow. I’m pretty sure Bank, Grocer, and Market only contribute if you’ve got a set percent of income going to generating money. I like to keep my research at the 90%+ level, so having a Grocer or Market adding 25% or even 50% of the few gold pieces not going to research doesn’t add up to much.
The holy shrine for a religion generates gold, regardless of what your research slider is set to, and so do Merchants and Priests. So even with high research you can still get good mileage out of Banks, etc. in a Holy City. Enough so that’s it’s worth building banks in other cities just so you can get Wall Street. Grocers and Markets are pretty good in general as well, but more for their health and happiness bonuses.
Indeed, you saw that on the second page of this very thread…