Uchiha Obito

I'm pretty new to Civ IV, and have never played a Civ game before this one, and so I have a question. What tactics do you tend to employ? How do you like to climb the tech tree? Preferred Civ setups? I ask these questions b/c I turned the difficulty up when playing the other day and I got stomped. I'm always looking for ways to streamline, and I thought it would be nice if everyone would share their strategies or at least some of the more popular ones that they may have picked up elsewhere.

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Uchiha Obito

grrr! give me your technologies! lol, anyways, since no one has posted anything I thought I'd post a favorite tactic of my own.

I'm not sure how well known this tactic is, but I find it useful for gaining stonehenge and the pyramids within the first 30 turns. The best way to accomplish this is w/ the use of India and their fast workers, and requires that your first city is near about 4-5 tiles of forests. The idea is to research bronze working ASAP to gain the ability to remove forests. Typically, you will need about 15 turns to produce your first fast worker, so you should plan your tech research accordingly so that you don't have a fast worker who can't chop down forests yet. This plan does leave your city fairly wide open, but if you manage to get a fast worker out w/ the ability to remove forests the resulting increased production will give you the great early advantages provided by these two wonders. IMO, it's probably best to research hunting sometime right before or after bronze working so that you can bring out scouts to search for those all important villages, and from there your strategy is up to you.

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kin3

Try this link. It has a lot of ideas.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/index.php?

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The Old Guy
kin3

Uchiha Obito

tyvm, it's frustrating playing Civ IV w/ no real aim or direction!

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gavwarhurst

Wow what a late reply from me!

I'm new to the game and also get "stomped" nicely by the AI on the harder difficulties.

I tend to play as Rome and I think this means that I'm only really gonna get anywhere by being militarily orientated.

The problem is that this leaves me MILES behind on the tech race.

Is it best to just get as many cities out as possible early on?

Cadian

Not really, Too many and you run into a whole new set of problems. I try to get a strong core of cities set up with my Capital in the center, or as close as I can get it. Think 6 to 10 cities for your empire. See how you do with that and then adjust once you get comfotable and successful.

QuantumDelta

The game was designed to be difficult to ICS (Infinite City Sprawl) ICS was a ruling tactic in Civ III and Civ II ToT at the very least.
And, in Civ III it was even more devistating, since you could additionally capture cities with cultures there.

In IV the optimal number of cities for the sake of your actual individual cities, is 5, after that you begin to incur penalties as you acquire more, these penalties are exponential so just because you do not incur any penalties AT 5 cities does not mean this is the best number you can have.
I tend to build 10-12 cities over as vast an area as I can realistically defend considering my starting resources, in the hopes that 'key resources' are revealed within that area later on in the game.
However, remember that you will be more than likely taxed, if you over extend yourself.
The AI are pretty thickle and it is best if you wish to go down the military route - to align yourself with one, or two strong AI and beatdown the others.

Personally I find the easiest way to beat the AI is to out culture and out tech them, for some reason I've always been extremely good at teching and maintaining my armies/nations/whatever in TBSs' and typically I am at space race level by the early 1900s on the fifth-sixth difficulty levels...
Not an easy game though, not an easy game.

Kebub I was late into this thread.

Major.Hangover

I follow the same tactic all the way from Civ2 (yeh quite a way back)

Kill anyone on your continent so your on your own. Build as many settlers and cities as possible within the first turns.. then build up your economy when u finished with cities, by caravans, trade, etc. Finally being wealthy you can move onto the military and start to attack.

Ofcourse there was a problem if osmeone attacks whilst doing this tactic, therefore its always best to have some security in cities which will not be very costly.