Distilled Civ Tips and Notes

quote: Originally posted by jpk on 06-03-2000 01:24 PM 1. Unless you have a good reason to build something other than a caravan, build a caravan.

And when you've built enough caravans...

Build some more

[Sieve Too]

If you have enough military might, it is often better to forgo capturing the capital first. Usually the capital is geographically centered in the AI's territory, meaning you will be counter-attacked on all sides. Start from one end and work your way in. Make your first or second goal a city with a wonder you want, and a city that is easy to reinforce. Remember that everytime the AI moves its capital, that's 1000 gold less that you'll get from plunder.

[jpk]

This discussion assumes you are playing against the AI on a multicontinent world.

Capturing a useful wonder in another city is a good reason to go after a city other than the capital. If the Great Wall or Pyramids is built in a city other than a capital the first two triemes together with three caravans and a diplomat that I build will sail to that civilization deliver the caravans and use the proceeds to bribe the city with the wonder.

If a capital is in a really awkward location, and this is common, you may have to capture nearby cities either with bribes or attack. AI cities frequently go into disorder. If you are not in a hurry and have sufficient money, station a diplomat in a boat just off the coast, wait for the city to go into disorder and then bribe it.

The AI civilization spends a lot of money when it moves the capital. That makes other cities easier to bribe. If the AI capital moves to an easily defended location, wait until you have superior attacking units and then go after the city. Veteran cavalry are acceptably effective against pikemen.

So long as a city can build a trade item caravan you can build another caravan. Depending upon the stage of the game a single caravan, delivered to a reasonably distant civilization on a different continent, is worth several hundred to several thousand coins. More importantly, you get the same number of lightbulbs. A single caravan can give you as much science as your entire civilization generates by cities in several turns. The idea of play is to develop an overwhelming technical advantage. This means you do not need armies consisting of scores of units. AI Pikeman do not fair well when they battle armor.

[The Mad Viking]

If you're so cash poor that you want the plunder, I think you're doing something wrong. The value of the population points and the improvements and the units in a city make bribing the only way to go. This value is 10 to 100 times that of the plunder, and if you can eliminate the civs capital(s) and in so doing reduce their coffers to <1000 you can buy all the great stuff at firesale prices.

[jpk]

The Mad Viking is not mad. By the time you get to Railroad money should not be a major problem. Build and deliver those caravans!

[Xin Yu]

I say go for the capital. Don't occupy it, destroy it! Then you can bribe cities cheap before the AI build another palace. If you have spies, poison water supply to reduce the capital's population, works like a charm and let your reputation become notorious.

[Steve Clark]

That's a great strategy Xin and one that I used frequently. 6 diplomats and 3 superior attack units can take any walled capitals of size 12 in one or two turns.

[tonic]

I've asked for this info in the OCC10 thread (and have just emailed Paul about it). A table of the number of turns it takes for settlers and engineers to complete the various terraforming processes would be helpful (particularly for extremely time-critical OCC endgame switches - says the OCC greenie ).

tonic

[Paul]

I don't have such a table, but someone probably made one. However, I would like to say that in OCC games I never transform grassland to hills. If you have only two or three engineers you can't keep them occupied on such a time-consuming job. If I can't get 80 shields in OCC I prefer to mine grass to forests. That takes less time so your engineers can actually finish it before the end of the game and do other jobs such as clean up pollution.

[tonic]

Paul, thanks for the elaboration.

I'm probably reinventing the wheel here, but in the absence of takers, it's DIY (do it yourself) time. Here's the empirically obtained figures for *selected* terrains and terraformations showing the number of turns for engineer and settler, where x = undoable (us poor weak settlers )

grassl => hills 9 x
grassl => forest 4 9
forest => grassl 19 x
forest => plains 2 4 2 (Eng+Settler, both free to move next turn)
plains => forest 7 14 4 (Eng+Settler, both free to move next turn)
hills => plains 19 x
desert => plains 9 x 4 (2xEng, both free to move next turn)
tundra => desert 10 x
glacier => tundra 19 x
jungle => forest 7 14
jungle => grassl 7 14
jungle => plains 19 x
swamp => forest 7 14
swamp => plains 19 x

(Hope the simple tabling comes out OK - hard to judge from the limited input box)

Certainly selected for the OCCasion , the extra third colum shows some combined efforts - interesting how times are "halved" for odd numbers.

The experimental error appears to be +- 0.5. I'd be interested to get feedback to confirm or deny the occurence of spurious results. I'm sure others would also have encountered anomalous eg accelerated processes in normal play!

Turns taken for terrain improvements (roading, irrigation...) to come.

Sure, most experienced civers would have the figures in their head, but numbers are helpful particularly in the context of the challenge games for us novices.

Comments, additions and corrections welcome (yes it was a rush job .

[SCG]

it seems to me there is essentially a table in the rules.txt file - since the game uses the file to determine how long various improvements (irrigation, mining, what comes next when you terraform). Somewhere in these forums i came across a couple threads (of which i can't seem to find again just yet) dealing with that. One was how to teraform in 1 turn, and another involved changing what something got teraformed into (gave an example of teraforming the oceans into some sort of land and mining to bring back the ocean). Anyway, also knowing that an engineer does 2x the work as a settler, you can plug in a settler to get it to the odd rounds. As an example, it takes 5 rounds of work to get a forest to a plains. So you actually only need 1 round from the settler along with 2 rounds from the engineer (2x2 + 1 = 5), so the settler could be off finishing something else the turn the engineer starts the timbering, and then come in the second round to help finish it off - saving a round of work that can possibly be used elsewhere (like clearing another forest )

[tonic]

Now why didn't I think about rules.txt ? thanks for pointing that out, SCG.

Interesting your quote of 5 turns for the terraform, forest to plains (by a settler) compared to my empirical value of 4. This is an example of my observation about the error range for a given operation when the number of turns is greater than about 4 or so.

BTW sorry about the untidy table although it's just decodable - will use underscores next time .

[inca911]

Nice to see others bump my thread while I've been away. I was worried that I'd have to dig it up out of some abyssal archive! Thanks for the kind words on my summary work. Nice tactics discussion going on as well.... I'll be back with some more tips after work cools off.

[inca911]

Does anyone have a "Guide to Play By Email Games"? I've recently started one and we've overcome some unusual hurdles so far and I thought a guide might be nice.

[debeest]

Tonic, I'm fairly sure you should add one turn to each and every number in your table. I don't think there's any anomaly at all.

[inca911]

Bump to facilitate Great Library discussion.