Civilization 4

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If you play Beyond the Sword, having some extra gold may be a good idea as some random events will require you to spend some gold to avoid a loss or get the most out of a good event.

It seems to me you've grasped the basics real quick, next you'll have to find out about specializing your cities depending on the resources in the fat cross, prioritizing research (some techs give you access to interesting civics, wonders or even free great people), tech trading (diplomacy) and war (catapults are your friends).

Great People come in several categories and they can be added to a city or consumed to research a tech and to accomplish a mission (spying, establishing corporations in BTS or rushing wonders and founding religious shrines).

 

I'm gonna take all this info on board, and start a new game to see how it goes.

 

The basic rule of thumb is you only need as much gold to pay the upkeep costs of your city. It's usually wise to have something in your treasury for some random events that Caradhras points out, but there's no reason to work towards building a huge treasury. I usually set my research bar at the highest level I can while still getting at least 1 gold per turn.

 

One thing i'm very bad at is city placement. I often have my poor settlers wander round for about 300 years at the start of the game looking for somewhere nice to set up shop. Always seem to start somewhere crap (loads of mountains, or the middle of the desert, or somesuch)

 

You should settle your first city where your first settler spawned. Experienced players may choose to move one tile away to get a better city placement but you shouldn't waste several turns moving around.

Bear in mind that the area around your settler is made better by the map generator so that capital sites are more often than not better sites to build a city.

You can regenerate the map until you gets a start that pleases you. On higher difficulties it makes a huge difference. Since you're a beginner don't waste too much time on starts surrounded by ice or large mountain ranges. You don't need the challenge.

Regarding city placement, it's good to plan ahead according to the role you want this city to fulfill. You want some food for the city to grow and some hammers to be able to train units and get buildings. Hooking up resources should also be a priority. You can settle a city on top of a resource making it available as long as you retain control of the city. It may look like a good idea but the major drawback is that you won't benefit from the tile improvement that having a mine, a farm, a plantation or any other improvement would otherwise yield.

There is also the question of rivers and hills. Hills grant bonuses to defense and river tiles can be used instead of roads but also later on for even more improvements. You'll find more about this in game.

Food heavy cities make for great specialist farms (you can grow more people and save food to have specialists who in turn will net you Great People points). Hammer heavy cities make for great unit production cities (and you should always have at least one city pumping out units to defend your empire).

Bear in mind that every city has a Happiness and Health cap depending on several factors (population, buildings, civics, difficulty level, etc). Once people are sick or unhappy, your production will be inferior to your population level.

Also don't follow the AI when it comes to city placement. The AI gets some bonuses so it can get away with spamming cities in very unlikely places. Managing your empire is another thing that you need to learn before playing on higher difficulties. There is nothing wrong with lowering your research percentage to recover from a recent expansion. In Civ IV more land always means more power. You may have a hard time recovering from the hit to your economy but when you do, your larger empire will be incredibly more effective.

Early rushes make the game much easier when you manage to pull them off.

 

I now have 7 cities I had 4, but then another civ started to annoy me a little...

 

Well done Cap, that's the spirit!

 

On most games if you build your capital city wherever your settler starts you'll get at least 2 (and often 3) special resources in your big fat cross. I agree with Caradhras taht the only way you would build your first city in a location other than where it spawned would be if you could improve the city location by moving one tile.

Every turn you don't have a capital city is a turn where you aren't generating income, you aren't generating research, you aren't build units or buildings, etc. Basically, you cannot do anything until you have your first city. Worry about optimal city placement starting with your second city. Like Caradharas said - start locations usually are at least decent in terms of location. (IMO, cows are the best early resource you can hook up.)

 

I'm wondering if is it smart to waste a single turn to move the capital city to the shore of a sea? It seems to me that the trade income bonus later on will be decent and that early in the game one doesn't need to build roads to connect the cities that connect to the same body of water.

 

I have done so for exactly that reason.

 

It is very rarely a good idea to have your capital city by the sea. It is usually better to have an inland capital. Cottages and land-based resources will usually make better use of the Bureaucracy bonuses. There some exceptions, but some experienced players will even build a new palace to shift their capital later in the game, just to avoid the coastal capital. The other problem with the coastal capital is that it will often not be central enough to effectively keep city maintenance under control.

But you have to take each situation on a case by case basis.

 

I agree with that. All I'm saying is if you DO happen to get your starting location near the coast, then there's a pretty good chance that you have at least one sea-based resource as well. It seems kinda silly to build your city a tile inland and not be able to build a fishing boat to get there.

 

Oh yeah, definitely, one tile inland is terrible, because then you can't even use the Lighthouse to make your water tiles slightly less crappy.

 

I don't want to dump my saved games but I got hit by what I suspect is a bug by in my Civ 4: Beyond the Sword game.

Right now I'm doing pretty well but for some unknown reason every single unit on the map is no longer visible. For some strange reason cities' populations no longer appear either.

Is this a bug or did I activate some sort of a "hide ___" option that I can turn off. This is really undesired on my part and I'm hoping there is a fix that doesn't involve getting rid of my saved games.

 

Before getting rid of your saves, see if it works with another save or a new game.

You probably toggled something off. Look around at the bottom of your screen, there are icons on which you can click to toggle things on and off.

 

Thanks, that was the problem.

 

Those buttons can be tricky.

Say pplr, what type of victory are you going for?

 

Diplomatic.

I tend not to want to wipe every other nation off the map.

Right now I've had 2 wars declared on me (island states so its easier to handle defensively).

But when I spread out I'm hoping to generate vassal states rather than cities that will join the next empire over.

3 types of victories are Conquest (don't want to do it), Diplomatic, and Space-I took off the Domination one to keep the computer from going for it and to avoid my own slipping into it somehow.

 

I like Diplomatic victories (Space Race feels a bit cheap IMO).

As far as defending from an AI that attacks with galleons, it's rather easy since the AI can't manage that well, the stack of doom is divided but one has to be wary not to let an AI get a strong hold on the continent or island since that can turn things around if you haven't prepared your cities for a massive attack.

That goes for the player as well I had a game once in which my lines were growing a bit thin after overexpanding and I had to stop my conquest because of that. The good thing is that I had captured a crappy one tile Island city and it allowed me to mass a large force to conquer the nearby continent. Good times.

 

Is this like Colonization where you can assign colonists to positions within the city screen? If so, to speed up building times, have more people assigned to carpentry or have a carpentry specialist assigned to carpentry.