Alright boyz, here we go!! Civilization IV first impressions...

[moriarty]

In general, I have two early strategies.

If my civ has mysticism right off the bat, I make sure I get one (or more) of the early religions - Bud/Hindu/Jud. If not, I try to get code of laws which enables me to get the the 4th (I'm blanking on which one it is). If I have stone (quicker wonder build) I go for the Stonehedge which gives me a great prophet > early shrine + culture. If marble, I go for Oracle.

I also go for the Mining>Bronze>Iron Working path. If I recall correctly, iron is not visible until you uncover the iron working. And it's very important to have iron early on so I research this to be sure that my second (or third) city has access to iron (for early defense/offense).

Beyond that I don't expand nearly as fast as I did in other CIV games (I use culture as opposed to new cities) since the cities get expensive. If I have other resources like ivory, cows, pigs, etc. I research the tech to make use of those pretty early. I haven't played an industrial civ yet, but I imagine that building cottages to get the gold flowing early and often is key.

EDIT - I should note, this has worked for me, but I'm not exactly tearing things up in the game either on the Noble level.

[jeff061]

I follow the same religion strategy. Once I make the switch to the organized religion civic I spam missionaries early and often to every foreign city I can. That should get you a lot of money and good relationsips until the end of the game. In my current game 4 out of 5 of the other civs have adopted my main religion early on.

[ISiddiqui]

Originally Posted by moriarty

I try to get code of laws which enables me to get the the 4th (I'm blanking on which one it is).

Confucianism

[spleen1015]

You have to consider what terrain you have around you in the early game to determine what to research. If you're not near the coast, then Fishing isn't that important early on. If you don't have any Cows or Horses close, then Animal Husbandry can be left for later.

I try to get a worker out early. You need to get your first city up and running with a good foundation. I have found that if I don't get that first city's infrastructure well on its way, I get left behind in expansion.

Just like moriarty, I always go after one or two of the early religions if I have mysticism to start. They can make you a lot of money. I like to play the civ that start with this. Of course, the irony is, the only game I have won on Noble is with the Germans.

Once I get the techs that best suit my infrastructure, I go after Iron. If you get into an early war with someone, having Iron is going to make or break you.

With all of that being said, I have only won 1 of about 25 games on Noble. If you read my previous post, I have problems with my play that I need to fix.

[moriarty]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

Another good thing in echoing Fouts is like Civ2, this game is perfectly replayable - and even more so for me because I love to play scenarios more than the regular game.

Big, big reason to get the game IMO - the strategies and variables are deep enought to play this for a long time. As opposed to say ... Pirates!

[Barkeep49]

I think getting a worker up and working is very important early on.

[moriarty]

Originally Posted by Barkeep49

I think getting a worker up and working is very important early on.

I second that. It seems to be the biggest difference with the earlier civs. In the previous version my plan was land grap as quickly as possible (up to the other civ borders). In this version there definitely seems to be a emphasis on early city development.

[TroyF]

If you want to attack early and often, you'd better be building barracks in every city. The free promotions and the quicker unit building are musts. I usually create a new settler and a warrior escort for them and try to get a second town near some great resources set up. Then I build a couple of workers to start working the resources around.

I haven't used religion early on in games. I think with the advice of those here, I'll have to do that.

[jeff061]

And always switch to the Vasselage civic, and another religious one I forget the name for, when going to or building up for war. Both of those grant you XP on top of the barracks. You'll have two promotions for every unit out of the gate.

[Peregrine]

I'm finding Iron isn't super critical, at least you can survive without it. In my last two games there was just no iron to be had anywhere near me, and I survived through wars mostly by just cowering in my cities and using their defensive bonuses until I got Gunpowder. You can just crank out the archers and longbowmen until then.

[KWhit]

Originally Posted by jeff061

And always switch to the Vasselage civic, and another religious one I forget the name for, when going to or building up for war. Both of those grant you XP on top of the barracks. You'll have two promotions for every unit out of the gate.

I think the other one is Theocracy.

[spleen1015]

Originally Posted by Peregrine

I'm finding Iron isn't super critical, at least you can survive without it. In my last two games there was just no iron to be had anywhere near me, and I survived through wars mostly by just cowering in my cities and using their defensive bonuses until I got Gunpowder. You can just crank out the archers and longbowmen until then.

What happened to your infrastructure? In the game I described ealier, I had to go get them in order to stop them from destroying everything. If I just laid back in my cities, they destroyed all of my tile improvements before they wiped me out of my cities.

I have been playing all random. A game I just started over lunch, has me as the British, on a small map against 1 other civ. I'm at 0175BC and I already have a sizible lead in score.

No more randomness, me thinks.

I'm loving this game. It is the best Civ to date. I don't want to stop playing. It has been a while since I found a game I still wanted to play this much.

[sachmo71]

So everyone is loving this game? No gripes?

[moriarty]

Originally Posted by sachmo71

So everyone is loving this game? No gripes?

Minor gripes, but I'm definitely enjoying it. I would highly recommend it. The big if seems to be if you can get your system to display it.

Of course the danger w/ buying early is that it's sooo deep that it will take a while for everyone to play it out and really determine if there's serious bugs or if gameplay is unbalanced. As of right now though, it's in great shape IMO (other than system issues) and a must buy if you're a fan of the genre

[sachmo71]

I guess I missed the minor gripes, but this must be a first. How often do all FOFCers like the same game?

[Eaglesfan27]

Originally Posted by sachmo71

So everyone is loving this game? No gripes?

I'm loving it. One of the things that I'm realizing which is great is that unlike previous versions, I feel like I have a shot to win in whatever world is randomly generated. In previous versions, I felt like there were some starting points were you were just screwed and had no chance to win. However, this version is better balanced and I think if I'm able to adapt my strategy, I have a decent chance to win any game (at least on my current difficulty level which is the "no advantage" setting) despite whatever starting position we get.

[moriarty]

Originally Posted by sachmo71

I guess I missed the minor gripes, but this must be a first. How often do all FOFCers like the same game?

By minor gripes, I mean I've had some minor stuff with the UI - things like I have to click a couple extra times, or important things are in small print instead of a popup (which would probalby annoy me too), and little stuff like that. But nothing that seriously detracts from the game and/or I can't get used to. I honestly wish the graphic specs weren't so high, but it runs fine on my laptop so I can't complain much.

Plus I expect some of these minor stuff to be fixed by customizations/patches.

[KWhit]

And this is supposedly the most mod-friendly Civ ever. I can't wait to see what the best modders come up with.

[Katon]

Originally Posted by Peregrine

I'm finding Iron isn't super critical, at least you can survive without it. In my last two games there was just no iron to be had anywhere near me, and I survived through wars mostly by just cowering in my cities and using their defensive bonuses until I got Gunpowder. You can just crank out the archers and longbowmen until then.

Well, the nice thing there is that most of the stuff you need Iron for (at least till Gunpowder) you can also build with copper. What I've had the most trouble with around that time period is not having horses: I had to fight a whole war where all my remotely decent units were melee, with the result that I nearly got my ass kicked by axemen despite having a significant size advantage. I won in the end, but not until I'd started getting catapults mixed in to give me some decent balance.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by moriarty

I second that. It seems to be the biggest difference with the earlier civs. In the previous version my plan was land grap as quickly as possible (up to the other civ borders). In this version there definitely seems to be a emphasis on early city development.

Well, with all that extra food going to build the settler, it seems that it doesn't make sense to build them until the city is around size 4 or so. The numbers will have to be further examined, but 4 is my working theory for now.

[moriarty]

Originally Posted by SkyDog

Well, with all that extra food going to build the settler, it seems that it doesn't make sense to build them until the city is around size 4 or so. The numbers will have to be further examined, but 4 is my working theory for now.

I've been building 'em earlier than that, but I'd love to see more debate on this.

Edit - Sorry I thought you meant workers. I usually get my second city fairly fast, but I don't grow beyond that until they're at least size 4.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by SkyDog

Well, with all that extra food going to build the settler, it seems that it doesn't make sense to build them until the city is around size 4 or so. The numbers will have to be further examined, but 4 is my working theory for now.

Upon further thought, that number is likely to be when hammers+surplus food=x, then build settler. If settlers cost, as I seem to remember, 150 hammers, then maybe get that number up to 15 so that the city only stalls for 10 turns?

[mrsimperless]

Originally Posted by TroyF

Also how little mircro management you have to do overall. If I had to set up my workers to create everything, I couldn't play the game. But being able to let them work on their own and only clicking them a few times a game to give them a specific order is amazing.

How do you do this? I still find myself micromanaging my workers' every terrain improvement.

Also, in civ III it was always beneficial to build a road over each new improvement because it gave you an extra commerce (gold) from that square. But that doesn't seem to be the case in this one. Is there any reason to have roads other than for your trade routes and moving units around your empire?

[moriarty]

Originally Posted by mrsimperless

How do you do this? I still find myself micromanaging my workers' every terrain improvement.

If you click on the worker, you have the options of automating it to make any improvment, improvment to a local city, or trade routes. I've found the automation routines to be a bit hit and miss, so I tend to manually direct them early on at least.

[Galaxy]

One problem I have is building a military that is competitive in size with the rivals....Anyone got a general rule for number of units for each city?

[Godzilla Blitz]

Originally Posted by moriarty

Of course the danger w/ buying early is that it's sooo deep that it will take a while for everyone to play it out and really determine if there's serious bugs or if gameplay is unbalanced.

I'm loving the game so far but I have a hunch some things are a bit unbalanced when it gets to the endgame. I've only played one game to completion, but two things struck me:

1. Research gains seemed to be coming extremely fast in the endgame, and somewhat slowly in the beginning. I was using chariots and catapults for ever, then wham, once I got gunpowder I could barely make a new type of unit before it became obsolete from some new advance.

I realize the pace of tech advances depends on a bunch of factors, but my game was fairly vanilla (Noble level, standard pace, small world). I'm interested to see if others find the same thing happening to them.

2. Given the speed with which I was picking up tech advances, a space race victory was a piece of cake to achieve compared to the other methods. I basically stumbled onto a space race win, but it would have been much more difficult for me to achieve a cultural or diplomatic win.

Again, it's ridiculous for me to draw any conclusions from one 12-hour experience with the game, but those were two quick observations that left me wondering about the overall play balance of the endgame.

[Godzilla Blitz]

Originally Posted by moriarty

Of course the danger w/ buying early is that it's sooo deep that it will take a while for everyone to play it out and really determine if there's serious bugs or if gameplay is unbalanced.

I'm loving the game so far but I have a hunch some things are a bit unbalanced when it gets to the endgame. I've only played one game to completion, but two things struck me:

1. Research gains seemed to be coming extremely fast in the endgame, and somewhat slowly in the beginning. I was using chariots and catapults for ever, then wham, once I got gunpowder I could barely make a new type of unit before it became obsolete from some new advance.

I realize the pace of tech advances depends on a bunch of factors, but my game was fairly vanilla (Noble level, standard pace, small world). I'm interested to see if others find the same thing happening to them.

2. Given the speed with which I was picking up tech advances, a space race victory was a piece of cake to achieve compared to the other methods. I basically stumbled onto a space race win, but it would have been much more difficult for me to achieve a cultural or diplomatic win.

Again, it's ridiculous for me to draw any conclusions from one 12-hour experience with the game, but those were two quick observations that left me wondering about the overall play balance of the endgame.

[vex]

Originally Posted by Godzilla Blitz

I'm loving the game so far but I have a hunch some things are a bit unbalanced when it gets to the endgame. I've only played one game to completion, but two things struck me:

1. Research gains seemed to be coming extremely fast in the endgame, and somewhat slowly in the beginning. I was using chariots and catapults for ever, then wham, once I got gunpowder I could barely make a new type of unit before it became obsolete from some new advance.

I realize the pace of tech advances depends on a bunch of factors, but my game was fairly vanilla (Noble level, standard pace, small world). I'm interested to see if others find the same thing happening to them.

2. Given the speed with which I was picking up tech advances, a space race victory was a piece of cake to achieve compared to the other methods. I basically stumbled onto a space race win, but it would have been much more difficult for me to achieve a cultural or diplomatic win.

Again, it's ridiculous for me to draw any conclusions from one 12-hour experience with the game, but those were two quick observations that left me wondering about the overall play balance of the endgame.

My funniest thing was when I got some Tech advance. It said, "This obsoletes the Kremlin" Sure enough, one of my cities on the same turn JUST got done building the Kremlin.

[ISiddiqui]

Originally Posted by SkyDog

Well, with all that extra food going to build the settler, it seems that it doesn't make sense to build them until the city is around size 4 or so. The numbers will have to be further examined, but 4 is my working theory for now.

Don't forget that workers ALSO are built the same as settlers (all food turns into hammers for production of the worker as well).

But yes, the Settler/Worker building model as well as the nation-wide maintainance based on the number of cities you have (rather than city-wide maintainance based on the number of improvements in the city) makes the rapid city expansion of previous Civs a thing of the past.

[GrantDawg]

Ok, so Ie had my first real :this game sucks" experience. Deep into my first major game, and the program keeps crashing. I've done all the suggestions I have read on various sites with no luck. It sucks to have a system that should knock this thing out with no problem, just to have it crash because of some unfindable conflict. This is going to suck real bad if it happens everytime I get late into a game.

[Ben E Lou]

Maybe I missed something in the tutorial or in my first read through the manual (and I don't have it here with me right now), but I'm not understanding how trade routes work. Do I automatically get one between my capital and every city? I somehow have one in Philadelphia with Washington.

[moriarty]

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

Ok, so Ie had my first real :this game sucks" experience. Deep into my first major game, and the program keeps crashing. I've done all the suggestions I have read on various sites with no luck. It sucks to have a system that should knock this thing out with no problem, just to have it crash because of some unfindable conflict. This is going to suck real bad if it happens everytime I get late into a game.

Man that does suck. I'm lucky I haven't had any issues with crashing yet. What video card are you using?

[ISiddiqui]

Maybe I missed something in the tutorial or in my first read through the manual (and I don't have it here with me right now), but I'm not understanding how trade routes work. Do I automatically get one between my capital and every city? I somehow have one in Philadelphia with Washington.

Philly is on the coast... I believe there is a tech that allows commerce between coastal cities and your other cities.

[TroyF]

Could it be the water Skydog? Not sure if that's the answer, but with you having the sailing tach and two coastal cities, that'd be my guess.

[Mr. Wednesday]

Originally Posted by SunDevil

Here is a beta tester who created a walkthrough for everyone who is on the fence buying the game, or something to tie over the people who are waiting for it.

http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/civ4intro.html

Anybody know what's going on with this page, why I can't access it any more? Is there an alternative location?

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by TroyF

Could it be the water Skydog? Not sure if that's the answer, but with you having the sailing tach and two coastal cities, that'd be my guess.

Yeah. That must be it. Sailing. Washington has +2 with Thermopylae, which is off to the south along the river. I think I recall reading or hearing that distance makes more lucrative routes. Can anyone confirm? If so, then it would behoove me to continue to scout along the river, no?

[Ben E Lou]

By the way, I hate Barbarians. I've finished one game and have started another. I tend to play with the largest maps possible (terra), with fewer-than-recommended Civs, so that everyone has lots of space. I ran into a Barbarian city of size 12 in the New World in my last game, and, I suppose, because there's so much unexplored territory, there are tons of 'em around in the early game.

[Ben E Lou]

Double Dola:

I especially hate Axeman Barbarians when my best unit is an archer.

[vyshka]

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

Ok, so Ie had my first real :this game sucks" experience. Deep into my first major game, and the program keeps crashing. I've done all the suggestions I have read on various sites with no luck. It sucks to have a system that should knock this thing out with no problem, just to have it crash because of some unfindable conflict. This is going to suck real bad if it happens everytime I get late into a game.

What is the state of your machine when the crash occurs? Are you getting funky things on the screen? What kind of video card do you have? I was having the game lock up my system after about an hour of playing. In the end it seemed my 6800 GT was overheating. I added more fans to the case, and a pci slot fan under the video card. After that I was able to finish out my game playing from ~1890 until 2020 without any issues, running at high settings.

[Eaglesfan27]

Originally Posted by SkyDog

Yeah. That must be it. Sailing. Washington has +2 with Thermopylae, which is off to the south along the river. I think I recall reading or hearing that distance makes more lucrative routes. Can anyone confirm? If so, then it would behoove me to continue to scout along the river, no?

I read in the manual that trade occurs along all rivers and the ocean with the appropriate technologies. I'm also 99% sure that I read that international trade routes are more lucrative and that the further away the trade route was the more lucrative it was.

[Ksyrup]

Originally Posted by TroyF

Could it be the water Skydog? Not sure if that's the answer, but with you having the sailing tach and two coastal cities, that'd be my guess.

"If an improved resource is within a city's "city radius," that city will get the benefit of the resource, roads or no roads. However, cities further away must be connected to the resource's space via roads, rails, rivers or coastline to get the benefits. And your capital city must be likewise connected before you can trade the resource to another civ. (This is another excellent reason to build roads between your cities as early as possible.)" (Pg. 72)

According to that passage, within your civ, as long as you have some connection via road, rail, river, or coastline to the resource and all of your cities, they are automatically connected to the trade network for a particular resource. I'm not sure a tech even comes into play.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

"If an improved resource is within a city's "city radius," that city will get the benefit of the resource, roads or no roads. However, cities further away must be connected to the resource's space via roads, rails, rivers or coastline to get the benefits. And your capital city must be likewise connected before you can trade the resource to another civ. (This is another excellent reason to build roads between your cities as early as possible.)" (Pg. 72)

According to that passage, within your civ, as long as you have some connection via road, rail, river, or coastline to the resource and all of your cities, they are automatically connected to the trade network for a particular resource. I'm not sure a tech even comes into play.

I'm not talking about resource access, though. I'm specifically talking about the "trade routes" that bring gold in to cities. I'm pretty certain that what I'm seeing is the result of the "Sailing" tech, now that I re-read it in the Civilopedia.

[dixieflatline]

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

Ok, so Ie had my first real :this game sucks" experience. Deep into my first major game, and the program keeps crashing. I've done all the suggestions I have read on various sites with no luck. It sucks to have a system that should knock this thing out with no problem, just to have it crash because of some unfindable conflict. This is going to suck real bad if it happens everytime I get late into a game.

I know lots of others have asked which video card and I had a crashing problem as well. I went back to the last auto save and it kept crashing again and again every time I built the oracle. Anyway, I tried a bunch of things and nothing worked until I downloaded the lasted video driver and poof, everything worked. I had not encountered any video problems before that and everything had run smoothly. I had even built several wonders before hand. Hope that helps.

[Ksyrup]

Originally Posted by SkyDog

I'm not talking about resource access, though. I'm specifically talking about the "trade routes" that bring gold in to cities. I'm pretty certain that what I'm seeing is the result of the "Sailing" tech, now that I re-read it in the Civilopedia.

Ah, gotcha. I haven't gotten into the game enough yet. But I have read the manual!

[Peregrine]

Originally Posted by spleen1015

What happened to your infrastructure? In the game I described ealier, I had to go get them in order to stop them from destroying everything. If I just laid back in my cities, they destroyed all of my tile improvements before they wiped me out of my cities.

Sure, they do a good bit of infrastructure damage, but with my allies hitting them hard they usually sue for peace before they take any/many cities and I can always re-build infrastructure quickly. I generally like to make sure I have some close allies who share my religion, so when that thorn in my side civ declares war, they soon find themselves in a three way war and give up pretty easily.

[Ben E Lou]

I'm also not understanding why there's not a one-to-one correspondence with regard to trade routes. Washington is only allowed one trade route. It is now with Athens (another problem I'll get to later...) However, both Atlanta and Philly have a trade route with Washington.

The issue with the Athens trade route is that I've yet to find Athens with my explorer. I've found Spart and Thermopylae, and ther's a road heading south from Sparta that I would suppose leads to Athens. I'm thinking, however, that trade benefits shouldn't be bestowed until the city is actually located. Thoughts?

[Peregrine]

This may be a dumb question, but I'm confused about catapults. When I have them, I can use them to bombard cities to wear down their defenses, or directly attack like a regular unit to do collateral damage. Is there some kind of third option I don't know about? Because I've noticed a few times when I get attacked by the AI that they can attack with a regular unit and a nearby catapult gets the attack animation at the same time, is there some kind of supporting fire option?

[GrantDawg]

Originally Posted by vyshka

What is the state of your machine when the crash occurs? Are you getting funky things on the screen? What kind of video card do you have? I was having the game lock up my system after about an hour of playing. In the end it seemed my 6800 GT was overheating. I added more fans to the case, and a pci slot fan under the video card. After that I was able to finish out my game playing from ~1890 until 2020 without any issues, running at high settings.

It is doing a number of things. It started with a funky color video lock, but now that I've turned everything down to the most basic settings, it is just completely crashing to reboot. I thought it might be a over-heating thing, but then I turned off the auto-reboot on overheat, and it is still doing it. I have a Radeon 9600 All-in-Wonder with brand new Omega drivers and all the old drivers completely removed (before people start on that).

[GrantDawg]

Originally Posted by dixieflatline

I know lots of others have asked which video card and I had a crashing problem as well. I went back to the last auto save and it kept crashing again and again every time I built the oracle. Anyway, I tried a bunch of things and nothing worked until I downloaded the lasted video driver and poof, everything worked. I had not encountered any video problems before that and everything had run smoothly. I had even built several wonders before hand. Hope that helps.

Yeah, that was the first thing I did., I also turned off the videos for Wonders. No luck.

[Coffee Warlord]

Originally Posted by Peregrine

This may be a dumb question, but I'm confused about catapults. When I have them, I can use them to bombard cities to wear down their defenses, or directly attack like a regular unit to do collateral damage. Is there some kind of third option I don't know about? Because I've noticed a few times when I get attacked by the AI that they can attack with a regular unit and a nearby catapult gets the attack animation at the same time, is there some kind of supporting fire option?

Noticed this too, and understand it I do not.