Civ 4 City Maintenance @ High Difficulty

[Matthew Gallant]

Anybody playing at Emperor or higher?

I got to 9 cities and the city maintenance costs were such that I had to lower my science rate to 10%. And this is with just one warrior per city, three or four libraries, and a couple of obelisks and lighthouses.

I find that a little excessive. Actually, it's untenable if you don't found a religion so you can build some temples and keep your cities from getting mad when they hit 5 population to get enough commerce-- which is enough to keep from going bankrupt and get the dunce cap on Pliny's List of Most Advanced Civs.

You can't really expect people to stay at five or six cities until they get Code of Laws, can you?

And this is just at Emperor!

[Ben Sones]

You can't really expect people to stay at five or six cities until they get Code of Laws, can you?

In my current game, I had three cities when I discovered Code of Laws, and I was doing fine. It's 1500 now, and I'm at war with Japan, and have taken several of his cities, and I'm still not up to nine yet. Not on Emperor, but still. You can get by on fewer cities, and I think you're meant to. Large empires get unweildy, especially early on. I sort of like that aspect of the game, actually.

[Angrycoder]

I dunno, to me that sounds about right for Civilization. Playing at any of the difficulties that penalize you and give advantages to the AI has always been an exercise best left to the min/maxer players.

Just go check out some of the game of the month threads at civfantatics to see what I am talking about for civ2 or civ3. They go into such excruciating detail with planning each and every turn it boggles the mind.

[Cold Blooded]

Believe that Mr. Soren Johnson, who graciously posts here, has mentioned in interviews that Civ 4 was meant to stop the "rampant expansionism" that was so easy in Civ 3.

As mentioned, game is very possible to win with fewer cities; culture victory just requires that you have 3 cities with extremely high culture rating, for instance.

[Ranulf]

Believe that Mr. Soren Johnson, who graciously posts here, has mentioned in interviews that Civ 4 was meant to stop the "rampant expansionism" that was so easy in Civ 3.



Which is of course highly amusing given the same damn thing was said about Civ3 and its corruption rules so that it wasn't as easy as civ2.

[TomChick]

And this is with just one warrior per city, three or four libraries, and a couple of obelisks and lighthouses.

I don't think this has anything to do with the maintenance cost. Your maintenance cost is based on a) the number of cities you have, b) their distance from each other, and c) what civics you've implemented.

-Tom

[Ben Sones]

Yeah, some of those civics are pretty expensive. And Mercantilism, in particular, has a pretty high hidden cost if you have trade routes with lots of your neighbors. I looked into switching to Mercantilism in my current game, realized that I'd lose one or more five-to-six gold trade routes in each city, and shelved the idea. A free specialist in every city was really tempting, but I just couldn't afford it.

[Tim Partlett]

You know, the thing I liked about Civ I and II was the "rampant expansionism". I loved taking over the world. One of the things I didn't like about Civ III was its corruption and the attempt made by the designers to make me play their way, not how I wanted to play. I know the rampant expansionism leads to all that irritating late game city management, but it should be possible to allow an easy way of automating that while at the same time allowing people to be Genghis Kahn if they want to be.

[malphigian]

I got to 9 cities and the city maintenance costs were such that I had to lower my science rate to 10%. And this is with just one warrior per city, three or four libraries, and a couple of obelisks and lighthouses.

That's your problem right there. City cost is now based on number of cities, it's got nothing to do with your city improvements. You have 9 cities with cruddy economies.

You know, the thing I liked about Civ I and II was the "rampant expansionism". I loved taking over the world. One of the things I didn't like about Civ III was its corruption and the attempt made by the designers to make me play their way, not how I wanted to play.

I dunno, you can still get plenty big, you just can't do the garbage ICS strategy of spawning an endless number of cities with no economy to cover the earth. I'm pretty sure taking over the world still works just fine.

The problem with the previous civs is that the rest of us who didn't like the aforementioned ICS were forced to play that way to be viable.

[Ben Sones]

You know, the thing I liked about Civ I and II was the "rampant expansionism". I loved taking over the world. One of the things I didn't like about Civ III was its corruption and the attempt made by the designers to make me play their way, not how I wanted to play. I know the rampant expansionism leads to all that irritating late game city management, but it should be possible to allow an easy way of automating that while at the same time allowing people to be Genghis Kahn if they want to be.

You can be, but your civilization has to really be focused on it, I think. You can't be Genghis Khan and still have an otherwise balanced civilization--this game has a pretty strong guns-or-butter dichotomy. If you want to play the merciless expansionist, you have to tailor your empire to that. You aren't going to have as much of a focus on culture or science (but neither did the Mongol Horde). And eventually you may have to make concessions in how you run things or you won't be able to hold it all together, though that is also pretty historical.

Expansionism can help pay the bills, too, because pillaging is actually pretty lucrative, in addition to being a critical military tactic.

[metta]

I'm glad they've finally killed the ICS strategy. Having a core of 5-8 fully functional cities and a few dozen that were little more than settler shacks with no facilities or infrastructure always felt too 'gamey' to me. Flipping the upkeep from buildings to cities was an inspired design choice. Now we have smaller empires, with better developed cities. It feels like they've cut away alot of the dead wood - micromanaging shields and happiness and all those dozens of settler pumps in the late game - and delivered a richer game experience.

[Tim Partlett]

You haven't really been able to play Infinite City Spam since Civ I/CivNet, as they fixed it in Civ II. Certainly you could still spam cities, but not the one city next to each other nonsense from the first game. Civ III pretty much put that entire strategy to bed: you couldn't play anything like that even if you wanted to. I felt it was a bit heavy handed, personally, and I found myself restricted to fairly small civilizations. If they've strangled that strategy still further, then I'm going to be disappointed, but I'm hoping it is like Ben says, and that I can do both, just with different costs/benefits.

[Lum]

"Noble" level is the one that has no benefit/penalty to AI or human, and is quite capable of kicking my puny human carcass (especially with barbarians rampant).

[Soapyfrog]

I got to 9 cities and the city maintenance costs were such that I had to lower my science rate to 10%. And this is with just one warrior per city, three or four libraries, and a couple of obelisks and lighthouses.


I had this same effect playing at Prince level so I am not sure it is related to the difficulty level. Basically overexpanding (11 cities by 1AD) set me seriously back in research for a good chunk of the game, and I never managed to get back to number 1 in research before the end of the game.

However there are economic benefits to overexpanding. You do wind up with a larger production base, and cosiderably more territory than the more cautiously expanding AI. This means (usually) more resources and, despite tending to fall behind the tech curve for awhile, an improved capacity to wage war.

Basically though, yes, at some point you need to let your cities develop and gain the commerce to support your enlarged empire. Cottages are a great investment in this regard.

I am thinking the best strategy is to figure out the expansion curve, such that you expand steadily but slowly as your core cities develop enough commerce to support new cities.

[Mike O'Malley]

Playing last night, I managed to culturally surround an inferior neighbor.
The only real asset the Indian city had was a lake; everything else was being lost to my fast-food consumer culture. I broke our open borders agreement so this guy couldn't go anywhere and then had to put up with hundreds of years of diplomatic proposals to:
Reinstate open borders. Yeah, why not give him the opportunity to position armies outside my cities.
Trade world maps. This one cracked me up because all he could see was me.
Trade him 1 gold for a fish. Anything to build good will, I suppose. I of course denied it and watched him continue to harvest fish, his only real commodity, and have nothing productive to do with them.

I love this game.

[metta]

You haven't really been able to play Infinite City Spam since Civ I/CivNet

ICS was alive and well and loathed in Civ's II & III. Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civ IV, states in the manual (page 177) that the ICS strategy was targetted to be killed by them in Civ III, by turning up corruption and, when that proved unsuccessful, again in Civ IV, by reworking maintenance costs.

Clearly someone was still able to play Infinite City Spam, eh? >.<

Maybe you were able to put up twice or three times as many cities in Civ 1, but I don't think the tactic is defined by numbers; it's the process of only really developing a few core cities and leaving dozens of others laying fallow, so they contribute to your commerce and score, but never get big enough to riot. I'm glad that strategy looks to finally have been excised.

[Timemaster Tim]

that the ICS strategy was targetted to be killed by them in Civ III, by turning up corruption

Corruption meant that your spammed cities were non-productive. I think there was an assumption that a city with no production capability was worthless. But the very fact that you held the territory was worth something, and the core cities where your real production took place could be used to fund the unproductive cities and buy any needed improvements.

[Alan Au]

Even Civ 3's non-productive ICS spam was incredibly annoying because of the way culture and resources were tied into territory ownership. The AI would continue to erect cities in the little unfilled gaps between my cities and the coastline. (Invariably, that's where critical resources would later show up.) That means that the only effective Civ 3 strategy was to wall off a piece of the continent and repeated demand that the AI removed units from your territory. Of course, this all got fixed with Civ 4's closed borders. Yay!

- Alan

[Tim Partlett]

You haven't really been able to play Infinite City Spam since Civ I/CivNet

ICS was alive and well and loathed in Civ's II & III. Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civ IV, states in the manual (page 177) that the ICS strategy was targetted to be killed by them in Civ III, by turning up corruption and, when that proved unsuccessful, again in Civ IV, by reworking maintenance costs.

Clearly someone was still able to play Infinite City Spam, eh? >.<

Maybe you were able to put up twice or three times as many cities in Civ 1, but I don't think the tactic is defined by numbers; it's the process of only really developing a few core cities and leaving dozens of others laying fallow, so they contribute to your commerce and score, but never get big enough to riot. I'm glad that strategy looks to finally have been excised.

Well, I used to play online with the guys who invented the ICS strategy back in CivNet, and it definitely was not possible to play the exact same strategy in Civ II because Firaxis introduced a few new rules deliberately to prevent it, such as not being able to build one city right next to another. ICS was eventually banned from CivNet ladder anyway, so anyone who played there regularly had few problems converting over to Civ II. Civ III, however, pretty much crushed the popular strategy of the first two Civ games, and pretty much forced the player to follow the path that the designers wanted in order to prevent that irritating late game city maintenance. There was absolutely no ICS, as it was originally understood, in that game

ICS was basically this: build nothing but settlers until you had researched knights, then build nothing but knights. Cities would be spammed in every single possible space. The strategy was banned because it was unstoppable, and eschewed most of the basic principles of the game. There was no government change, no city development, no unit variation - just settlers and knights. You couldn't get away with this in Civ II, but you could build a great number of undeveloped cities and profit from that more than actually developing your civilization.

[Ben Sones]

I think the point is that there while Civ II did away with that particular strategy, Civ IV does so in a way that is not only effective, but also makes more sense historically, without encouraging large empires of purposely underdeveloped cities (sort of a "lesser ICS" strategy that was still very prevalent in Civ II and III), and without removing the possibility of playing an expansionist strategy. You just have to deal with similar problems that imperialistic civilizations had to deal with historically. I'm fine with that. It also opens up the possibility of playing a viable non-expansionist civilization, and I think that adds another layer to the available strategies.

In fact, I have a theory that my big mistake in my current game, in which I had intended to shoot for a cultural victory, was that I expanded too much. You need at least three cities to win a cultural victory (with a culture rating of 50,000 in each), but I think it may be a mistake to have too many more than three cities if you are trying to win with culture.

Here's why: as you expand, your borders move away from your core cities, and you start to need cultural improvements in your periphery cities just to keep neighbors from chipping away at your borderlands with their culture (because you can be sure that they are investing in culture along their borders). If you put all the big cultural improvements (like wonders or Artists' Great Works) in your core cities, your border cities will suffer for it. The solution, I think is simply not to have too many border cities. Shoot for a small empire of four or five cities, maybe, and try not to expand too much from there. With the smaller empire, you can rely on your core cities' cultural clout to keep your borders stable, plus you'll have an easier time defending yourself (and you will want to focus exclusively on defense, because you don't want to expand). It all makes sense, too--the idea of the cultural victory is to build better cities, not more cities.

I may have to try that in my next game.

[Chris Woods]

My cultural victory path, for what it's worth:

6 Cities, established in this order:
Capitol (Culture City I)
Food city (heavy population production)
Military City (needs strong production)
Culture City II (needs reasonable production)
Culture City III (needs reasonable production)
Money City (along river, lots and lots of villages for cash)


The three Culture cities should be building essentially only culture related improvements.

The Military City should get barracks then all units. Occasionally, veer off to put in a Heroic Epic or Forge or whatnot, but 95% of the time this city should be making nothing but military units. My rule is 5 defenders in a city (2x Archer, 2x Axemen, 1x Spearman) and then mounted units stationed around to harass the enemy and quickly eliminate threats like catapults.

The Food city is your Great Person factory.

The money City is to keep upkeep from breaking your back.


Early game:
Research as many religions as possible. While you don't have any, build wonders like Stonehenge in your Culture Cities. Your Food City should erect a temple ASAP and assign one person to being a priest so you can get a Great Profit. You shouldn't have any trouble finding a square that isn't really contributing to turn him into a specialist at population 6.

Additionally, your Food City should make the settlers for the last four cities and almost all your workers. If there is a real juicy bonus square near your capital you can build a worker from home, but your food city will be really good at this and have little else to do.

As mentioned above, your Military city should build a barracks then crank out Archers, Axemen, Spearmen and Horsie Archers.

Your Money City should try to get one specialist that's an economy guy (Can't remember the name, sorry) to get Great Economists. Always use your economist guys to do the foreign trade route option. On a "standard" size world I trade those dudes in for 2,500 gold minimum when going half-way around the world (takes like 9-12 turns) and 2500 gold will essentially upgrade all of a unit type to it's next tier, which is invaluable. Other then that, your money city needs to build hamlets and make tons of cashes. It should get all the science and money improvements to maximize it's money-ness.

Once your food city starts cranking out the artists, go add them to the culture city who is farthest behind the culture race. I'd add them until I got to about 3,500 culture points, then just start +4000 bombing in those cities. Just a general rule, though, so go with your judgement instead.

I've found this strategy to be really strong on Monarch provided you can make buddy-buddy like with neighbors. I usually get in one or two wars, but mostly I adopt whatever State Religion that improves relationship with my closest or most dangerous neighbors and commence with as much trade as possible. I always open my borders practically on sight.

Chris Woods

[Jason Cross]

I'm having a great time playing on relatively lower difficulty levels and trying for different victory conditions. I won the space race a couple times, was voted king of the world by the UN once, and won a cultural victory one (that one was a lot of fun, though my civ score was lowest of all there. I took over four cities just by culture. The just gave up, rebelled, and joined me.).

I'm now working on one where I'm a bit more militaristic. I don't think I'll wipe out the world, but I might get the population/land mass victory. Certainly if I don't, I'll win by score at 2050. Already took over about 4 french cities with Redcoats (against their horse archers and stuff), and so 3/4 of the continent is mine. Tokugawa is next on my list, but he's doing much better than Napolean was so I gotta build up a fleet of Tanks first.

My one complaint so far, outside of a few small technical bugs (I haven't been having the problems noted in the other tread), is that I can't pick an ending year when I'm setting up a game. I can pick "epic" game length, but that also makes all the research and building and stuff take longer. I want to play the normal game, just set it to end at 2100AD or something.

[Kevin Perry]

[list]Reinstate open borders. Yeah, why not give him the opportunity to position armies outside my cities.

Critical point-- a mistake I made at first. Open borders does NOT let them park outside your cities-- I routinely turned down my neighbors on this, to my cost.

If either civ in the open borders declares war, all units are teleported back to their territory first. So it's perfectly safe to do this.

[Alan Au]

I recommend 6-8 cities. Certainly it's possible with fewer, but otherwise you have problems figuring out where to put national wonders and their pre-requisites. With too few cities, you also run into problems with strategic resources. Plus, it's extremely useful to have a dedicated food city, which usually suffers from weak production output.

- Alan

[Ben Sones]

If either civ in the open borders declares war, all units are teleported back to their territory first. So it's perfectly safe to do this.

Well, not perfectly safe--you are giving them free intel, and "teleported back to your borders" still leaves them poised for invasion (though they can do that anyway). But it's not like they can roll an attacking force up to a city and then just declare war and attack it.

[Ranulf]

I got to 9 cities and the city maintenance costs were such that I had to lower my science rate to 10%. And this is with just one warrior per city, three or four libraries, and a couple of obelisks and lighthouses.

That's your problem right there. City cost is now based on number of cities, it's got nothing to do with your city improvements. You have 9 cities with cruddy economies.

You know, the thing I liked about Civ I and II was the "rampant expansionism". I loved taking over the world. One of the things I didn't like about Civ III was its corruption and the attempt made by the designers to make me play their way, not how I wanted to play.

I dunno, you can still get plenty big, you just can't do the garbage ICS strategy of spawning an endless number of cities with no economy to cover the earth. I'm pretty sure taking over the world still works just fine.

The problem with the previous civs is that the rest of us who didn't like the aforementioned ICS were forced to play that way to be viable.

Except of course, in Civ3, ICS to my mind was mostly required to make sure you got the resources you needed. One of my gripes with 3 was that they hamstrung you with major corruption to prevent big empires then made special rare resources valuable and thus an incentive to go to war and often times those resources were across the world, on another continent.

[Matthew Gallant]

I really don't like the idea of six city civs. That just makes for a dull game. I just played one on Emperor, lost by about 10 turns in the space race, i.e. quite badly. At least I never got invaded. My neighbor Napoleon won and had around nine or ten cities, I think.

[Enidigm]

You could make sloppy big empires in Alpha Centauri since corruption only affected energy production, not shields. So there was a clear trade-off but it wasn't impossible by design. You could also make up for some of the lost energy and research production with specialists

Civ 3 made it impossible to be so big because corruption reduced both energy and shields; after a certain point, additional cities were completely unproductive in every way.

So far i've found that i don't have enough space to make large empires. I mean physically, just not enough space. Also the game seems much faster and smaller scale then previous versions that i've played. Even on the TERRA map i've only enough room for two or three cities between coasts in most places.

[Toddy]

If either civ in the open borders declares war, all units are teleported back to their territory first. So it's perfectly safe to do this.

Well, not perfectly safe--you are giving them free intel, and "teleported back to your borders" still leaves them poised for invasion (though they can do that anyway). But it's not like they can roll an attacking force up to a city and then just declare war and attack it.

And that does happen, a lot. Especially on small maps or that damned Ice Age one on default settings, where everyone is crammed together. I love the border concept in Civ IV, but man is it tough to manage. Turn down rivals and they often feel hemmed in. Open up and they scout you and prey on weaknesses. I love this, though, because it means you have to judge each nation based on leader tendencies, and adapt your playing style, at least somewhat, to whomever you happen to wind up closest to.

As an aside, never trust that fucking Catherine the Great. She's boned me but good in three games this week.

Back to the original topic -- I love the smaller number of cities. Makes the game more manageable, and seem more realistic. Allows you to specialize and streamline management tasks. I usually wind up with 6-10 cities.

[Ben Sones]

I disagree with Matt about the dullness of playing very small empires. I think that it would have been dull in past civ games, but all the different city improvement stuff they added makes even small-scale empires interesting to manage, and games where you have fewer cities tend to have a brisker pace. It's not the only way I'd like to play or anything, but it's nice to have the option.

[madkevin]

As an aside, never trust that fucking Catherine the Great.

Or, er, as I like to call her, Catherine the So-So.

[TomChick]

I really don't like the idea of six city civs. That just makes for a dull game.

Dull game? You're telling us Civ4 is dull? I guess the only thing I can counter with is this: Civ4 is fun.

-Tom

[Rob Beschizza]

Which is the highest level where the player and AI are on equal footing?

[Anders Hallin]

As an aside, never trust that fucking Catherine the Great.
Or, er, as I like to call her, Catherine the So-So.
Someone should make that as a mod.
(Clone High, that is, not just change the name)

[ydejin]

Which is the highest level where the player and AI are on equal footing?

I believe that's the Noble level.

[Matthew Gallant]

I really don't like the idea of six city civs. That just makes for a dull game.

Dull game? You're telling us Civ4 is dull? I guess the only thing I can counter with is this: Civ4 is fun.

-Tom
Well, actually what I'm saying is that when I'm stewarding an empire, I like for it to be an empire and not a neighborhood.

I like to think that Napoleon could rise to invade Egypt and become emperor of France after conquering Italy, not immediately drive his country into bankruptcy after taking Milan.

I like "Allow Conquest Victory" to be an actual option, and not just a superfluous checkbox.

And while I suppose it's possible at the higher difficulty levels, I imagine that it will be extremely rare for games not to end via Space Race victories. They'll just be too short (the winner launched in 1954 in my failed game) and too demanding on your science/gold sliders for a Cultural and there'll be too much trade-based squabbling for a Diplomatic.

I suppose what I should have said, and what I meant, is that six city civs make for a dull game of Civ 4. Because you're channeled into a very specific strategy with no margins. It even limits your choice of leaders.

There's no tradeoff for even a moderate amount of early expansion-- it's just outright a losing strategy. Even building a city that doesn't overlap your capital's fat cross is a fairly bad idea. This makes Genghis a very sad Khan.

[Tim Partlett]

Damn, that sounds depressing, Matthew. That's exactly what I didn't want to hear. If my copy wasn't already in the post I'd probably cancel my order based on that description. I don't want to play Civ with only one strategic choice. In Civ I and II the playing of a "one city civ" or "one island civ" was a challenge and a choice, not something that the game design forced on me.

I know many people like guiding a small, relatively peaceful and easily manageable civilization into space, but I want to screw space travel and rule the world goddammit!

I'm hoping that either someone will discover how world domination strategies are possible, or the devs will patch the game to actually make it possible.

[Ben Sones]

Bear in mind two things:

1. The game has been out for a week and a half.

2. He's playing on Emperor difficulty. That's three settings above the default difficulty of Noble (it goes Settler, Chieftain, Warlord, Noble, Prince, Monarch, Emperor, Immortal, and Deity).

On balance, I guess my answer to "I can't conquer the world on a high difficulty setting after a week and a half of play" is "good!"

[Soapyfrog]

Don't worry Tim, Matthew is throughly misrepresenting Civ4.

The thing is, you CAN exapnd quickly if you want to. It's a viable strategy. However, slow, measured expansion works as well and has different benefits.

In civ3 and all previous, rapid expansion was the ONLY strategy. Now that is no longer the case, it is possible to grow your civ in several different ways.

World conquest is perfectly viable in Civ4. it's just no longer the 100% obvious win-win strategy. It also is more challenging, and requires more planning and thought than previous civ iterations.

All in all, I would say, and those who have played extensively would likely agree, that there is much MORE to Civ4 than previous civs in terms of viable strategies.

[Matthew Gallant]

World conquest is perfectly viable in Civ4.
On Emperor or higher? Send me your save game. I'm willing to believe it's just highly improbable, but I'd like to see it done.

[Matthew Gallant]

I'd even be happy with seeing a game with ten cities pre-banking.

[One Of Many]

Don't worry Tim, Matthew is throughly misrepresenting Civ4.

World conquest is perfectly viable in Civ4. it's just no longer the 100% obvious win-win strategy. It also is more challenging, and requires more planning and thought than previous civ iterations.



I don`t think Matt is mis-representing it at all. It`s a good, interesting and complex Game in many ways, but not a 4X in the grand sweeping tradition of Civ 2 & 3.

I`d be very interested in how _you_ got a World Conquest on a large Map, at Nobel or higher, against 5 or more AI Civs...... :?:

[Soapyfrog]

The bigger the map, the harder the feat.

It's sure do-able on a Standard map. Or are you upset you can't do it before 1 AD?

I just finsihed the Earth scenario (thats a Huge map), and I had 36-odd cities at the end of the game. The only reason why I didnt push more aggressively for world conquest was because the game kept slowing to crawl (and occasionally crashing).

edit: changed a can to a can't...

[Tom McNamara]

I'm having a great time playing on relatively lower difficulty levels and trying for different victory conditions. I won the space race a couple times, was voted king of the world by the UN once, and won a cultural victory one (that one was a lot of fun, though my civ score was lowest of all there. I took over four cities just by culture. The just gave up, rebelled, and joined me.).

I've found that I prefer to focus on culture (being a book lover, I like building libraries and whatnot anyway), but causing a culture rebellion in an opposition city feels dissonant because that faction's leader doesn't get upset at me. I would be rather annoyed if I just lost a city like that, but they never get angry at me.

Regardless, it's a ridiculously fun and addictive game, and surprisingly nuanced.