Civ IV

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Before the culture defense bonus becomes overwhelming (unless you're willing to sacrifice many of them). Taking a second capital in the early BC is a huge advantage.

If you rush with warriors then you want to rush asap. Delaying a rush is never a good idea (and something I should have kept in mind in my current game). Building a large number of warriors can cripple your economy if you go zerg crazy but it can work out pretty well (less competition for city sites from your now dead neighbours, former capital cities and if you're lucky a wonder or a Holy city).

@Aldeth: you should really consider using the BUG mod it helps a lot with finding all the relevant information in game.

 

VERY early. In fact, if you play on a very small map on a single continent, settle your capital on a plains hill for the extra hammer, then build nothing but quechuas, you can pretty much win the game within half an hour. You don't have to worry about crippling your economy because you don't even need an economy. 4-5 quechuas can take over the world.

Hence why the Incans have been banned from any Civ IV related competition.

 

I didn't know that but it's no surprise as they are broken (even more on a small map).

Besides Huayna Capac's traits (Financial/Industrial) are excellent. That makes up for quite a nice advantage in game.

 

I'll need to try that then. I've never gone anywhere near that extreme.

You get a defense bonus from your city's culture rating? I didn't know that.

 

The little % figure next to a city is its defensive bonus, much of which comes from a city's culture. You need to bring lots of catapults and trebuchets to eliminate the defensive bonus from enemy cities with lots of culture.

 

Today I tried going for the cultural victory with Prince difficulty, and Louis XIV as the leader. I like both Creative and Industrious traits, and they support the goal pretty well. Everything went well for about 4000 years; I got excellent city locations (Paris had 5 different initial resources, including marble), got the wonders I wanted and the military was sufficient. There was only one other civ (Chinese) on the same continent and diplomacy went fairly well, brothers in faith and all that.

Then, roughly in 500AD I noticed that I was badly behind in the tech race and my army was the weakest. For 200-300 years I could only build out-dated military units or research etc. I found building culture didn't help much so early, so I tried to catch up the tech gap. My three best cities were the best three overall, and with Pacifism I started getting more Great People, especially artists. I spent them on two Golden Ages and mostly created great works, since the +6000 (Epic game) in culture seemed huge. After getting Liberalism and Free Speech (+100% in culture) things started looking brighter. My top three cities -I only had 4 cities, bad mistake- all had over 30,000 culture points and they were creating about 250 points per turn. With few more Great Artists and right buildings the 75,000 points needed was within reach.

Then the Celts sneak attacked with huge fleet, Paris fell in two turns and I gave up . I think two other civs were in the line after them, and my chinese allies were almost as weak as my own medieval army. In retrospective I should have built a few more cities early on to get more research and more important, to build more units. Economy was surprisingly strong through the whole game. At some point the gameplay was kind of tedious, but I'll try it again .

 

Or use a spy to negate the bonus for one turn (sometimes that can be enough).

 

OK - Cultural victory. First thing you need to decide is whether you want to go for the fastest cultural victory possible, or whether you want a more general game.

If you want the fastest cultural victory possible, then you need to set up a custom game and choose the other leaders in the game. If you choose all the peaceful, easy going ones (like Mansa Musa, Lincoln, Gandhi etc), then you can happily run a low-military economy and focus entirely on culture.

Cultural victory in this sort of game is ALL about Great Artists and Cathedrals/Stupas/Academys etc. So you need:
- lots of food to run lots of Artist specialists
- three religions spread quickly through your empire
- no more cities than the minimum you need to get the number of temples you need for each "Cathedral"
- Parthenon
- no other wonders (you don't want to contaminate your Great Artist pool with non-Great Artist great people)
- once you get to Liberalism, switch to Free Speech and you turn off science completely and turn your economy 100% to culture. You don't need any more techs.
- use your hoard of Great Artists to culture bomb whichever of your 3 culture cities is falling behind
- try and build 3 "cathedrals" in each of your culture cities, but only if you get them early enough. Towards the end, you're better off building culture than any more buildings.

If you do all this right, you should be able to win culturally somewhere between 1200AD and 1700AD - long before any of the other AIs can win by any other means.

 

This method isn't very satisfying way to play, I want to win it the hard way .

Building just Parthenon is enough, but what's the harm in building Statue of Zeus, Mausoleum of Maussollos, Sistine Chapel and so on? Especially if the leader is industrious and there's marble available? And how do you handle unpleasant neighbours, like Mongols or Aztecs?

 

Build more units so you can face them when they attack you. If you share the same religion, try and have them attack someone else (you can pretend you're fighting on their side and then get the diplomatic bonus). In the end don't ever trust them and should you have an opportunity to crush them do so as soon as possible.

What I like about Montezuma is that he may have asked for tribute and attacked you (giving you plenty of points for your next Great General) but given the right circumstances you can still get him to fight your wars for you.

In my last game that I've just finished tonight (Giant Earth map, marathon, noble difficulty), Montezuma was defeated by barbarians but Qin Shi Huang was able to get 91 cities by the 19th century (Cyrus had 70) and I barely won the Space Race (I had to raze one of Pericles's cities to prevent him from getting a Culture Victory which was a problem because Pericles had a really huge military and lots of nukes).

That was close but you know what they say, the opera isn't over until the fat lady sings. I think I'll try a Prince game next.

 

1. Sure - if you decide to play with the unpleasant neighbours then you need to divert some of your culture building effort towards military effort - plus foster good relations with some other strong neighbours who can help you out in a pickle. But playing the 'pure' culture game is a really useful exercise in understanding the specific mechanics of this aspect of the game. Just as playing a pure conquest game teaches you the specifics of a military focus.

2. The harm in building all those other wonders is that they don't provide anywhere near as much culture bonus as Great Artists and Cathedrals. Except maybe Sistine Chapel, because of its impact on the culture from all the artists in your cities. To get the very fastest culture win, you wouldn't build those other wonders.

 

The problem I see with playing just to beat the game is that you then do not really play the game. Civ is a game of building and strategy and fiddling around with your empire. I have always seen the victory conditions as something secondary. I mostly just enjoy placing cities and developing them. Never won a fair game beyond Prince difficulty mostly cause I get the nerd rage if someone attacks when I do not feel that I am ready and quits the game.

 

Either you consider the game to be an intellectual passtime like chess (studying moves and working on improving specific aspects of your game) or you play it less seriously ("fiddling around").

The paradox is that in the first case you are picking your victory condition before you've actually played the game (hence the choice of the number of AI civs and their leaders) but if you randomly play the game then you'll probably have to focus a lot (and I do mean a lot) on your military even if you wanted to achieve a cultural victory.

So either your game is predefined or you'll have to play a wargame. If you don't want to lose of course. I guess playing without caring whether you win or lose can be liberating but as far as I'm concerned I just hate losing. The problem is that I won't reload or use the world builder either and I'm definitely not that good at micromanagement after playing more than two hours but I do enjoy reading about strategies and trying to use them (badly most of the time) and to me that is playing the game. Thus I see nothing wrong in removing some victory conditions if I have a particular game in mind. Given that I tend to mess things up in practice (and rarely listen to my own advice), the fact that I try to improve my game doesn't prevent me from ending fiddling around for a way to get out of some unforeseen predicament.

 

I've got a question about unit experience. I'm playing a game with Cyrus at the moment, but my units don't seem to be gaining any experience past a certain point. My scouts, for instance, don't seem able to go above 5 exp points, whereas my axemen and immortals appear capped at 10. Is there some limit here that I'm unaware of? They've only been fending off barbarians up to now.

Ah, and another question. Is there some reason that every time I upgrade a unit, it is bombed back to 10 exp points, regardless of however many more points it had before hand? It sort of makes trying to keep your units with you through the ages a thankless task, as they'll not realistically be able to go beyond lvl 4 or 5. With the exception of great general units, apparently.

 

You can't get more than a few experience points when fighting barbarians (5 points).

Hence the importance of traits (Charismatic like Cyrus), buildings (barracks, drydocks, West Point and settled great generals), civics (vassalage and theocracy).

When you upgrade you take a level and your unit shows 2 numbers the one before the slash indicates the current number of experience points that the unit has accumulated in this level whereas the second number indicates the number required to get the next upgrade (or level).

Keeping a unit is tricky but with some luck you may keep a high level one (to the point that even attaching a great general wouldn't get this unit an upgrade!) it takes some time and even more luck but it may happen (especially with Praetorians and Samurais, these are tough units who see a lot of action for quite a long time).

The amount of experience gained depends on the odds and you gain more experience when you attack (as the game system favours the defending unit).

FYI you can rename any unit by selecting it and clicking on its name on the left. I tend to rename the units that survive and get to high levels.

For instance here is a screenshot featuring my current renamed level 6 Elite Veteran of Mongolia.

EDIT: of course the fact that when you upgrade the unit its XP gets bumped back to 10 doesn't make you lose the levels you have acquired. So you might want to delay that upgrade until you get that next level (unless the unit is too weak for that era, hence my point about Praetorians and Samurais).

 

Everything Caradhas says is correct. There is some sense in developing units beyond 10 exp points, because certain wonders (West Point for sure) requires you to have at least one unit up to a certain level in order to even build it. Whenever I get a great general, I usually attach his to a unit - always a single unit so all 20 experience points go to that unit - and keep that unit for a long time. In one of my recent games I had two armor units with great generals attached that each had over 80 experience points - yes 80. They would have kept all of their abilities had I advanced to the point where I could have upgraded them to modern armor.

 

That's quite an achievement Aldeth. I struggle to keep my high level units alive. With West Point and settled Great Generals you can train new level 4 units. It's not that bad.

Could anyone give me pointers about the medic great general? I get that you take medic III for the extra healing but it seems to be a bit tricky to keep it alive. How do you do this?

 

Ok, so actually the game is applying a sort of soft level cap at 10 exp. points. Which would make the charismatic trait less useful than I first thought, except for units with great generals attached to them, which do not appear to lose their xp even when being upgraded.

I've only ever attached great generals to single units, but, if the above is also true for groups of units with great generals attached to them, it would be interesting to attach a gg to them so they can keep their exp points (and if they all get free upgrades as well, great).

Caradhras: I don't think the xp limit for fighting barbarians is +5, as no matter how many xp points my units start with (0, 3, 5), they max out at 10 when fighting barbarians. Except for scouts, who seem capped at 5.

This rule seems somewhat unfair to me, though. In my current game, playing with 11 civs on a huge map and the raging barbarians option on, my next door neighbour would long since have been annihilated by barbarians, had they not opted to become my vassels and I'd felt somewhat compelled to help them out, as a good liege lord should. It seems to me that, in fighting off veritable hords of barbarians, my units should get more out of it than just the 10 xp points.

/edit

I've had a unit with around 130 xp points. There was some luck involved in keeping him alive, but when hidden in a stack of units, he only needed to survive a single attack and could hide behind others in the stack to nurse himself back to health. In fact, in that particular game, I had 4 units with a different great general attached to each of them.

Don't make them fight hard to win fights, as this'll likely only make you lose them. Use siege weaponry to soften up stacks of harder enemies, then let them rake in their xp by attacking the weakened enemy. In that particular game, it helped a lot that I was Japanese and that I had the technological advantage over my opponents, so I could simply outclass them with little risk to my generals.

/edit again
5 generals in a stack. And in case you're wondering, yes, I did use the world editor to make sure my units kept their xp when I upgraded them.

/this is really the last edit
Installed the BUG mod yesterday and I'm loving it. Had to increase the resolution, though, the clutter was becoming excessive. Has anyone here tried the BAT mod and if you did, what did you think of it?

 

Actually, it's only the unit that has the GG actually attached to them that retain their xps. Other units that receive experience from the GG will still go back down to 10 xps when you upgrade them.

 

Thanks for clearing that up.

In my experience the GG unit always ends up defending and therefore gets butchered... Would attaching the GG to a mounted unit (no defensive bonus from terrain) work? Provided there is at least one unit to defend, that goes without saying.

@Henkie: I may be wrong about the exact number but I know for sure that there is a cap with barbarians (I guess in order to avoid abusing barbarian hordes to get uber units and GG points). Still you can get some bonuses for rookie units.

Nice screenshot by the way, 5 GG?!

Regarding the BAT mod, it introduces different models for almost every units so you'll get different units depending on the civilization you play. There is a major drawback though and that is the overall performance. I can run huge maps with BTS late game without any lag but the BAT mod really slowed my rig so I decided to stick to the BUG mod. Still, if you don't play huge maps (or have a fearsome computer) that could work for you.