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Old 04-12-2007
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Boudica Boudica is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2007
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Default C4 playing tips

After playing CIV for a year now (I was the tester Sajenus, famous for the numbers behind those prosperity calculators) I've found the two keys to success are Happiness and Patricians. Besides skillful city design of course. By request, here are my gameplay "secrets" that help me win in the shortest time. Ironically, this means playing week by week, on slow speed, with as much micromanagement as you can tolerate.

• I use an elaborate spreadsheet to plan for my city's needs (to me, this is as much fun as actually playing... sick, I know). For Time Trials, you want the smallest city possible. For Most Denarii, you want the largest (food production will be your limiting factor). Next I make a test layout on pause, making sure planned patrician housing has all needed coverage and that overall Culture rating meets the requirement. I don't have a neat block formula, just make it fit the terrain. Take a few screenshots for reference, then back to spreadsheet to determine which essentials to build with initial funds (reserving about 4000 Dn for roads and trade routes). The goal is to have positive income from exports within 2-4 months.

• My preferences for initial exports are 1) Marble, 2) Jewelry and Utensils, 3) Glass and Pottery, 4) Furniture, 5) Weapons, 6) Gold and Iron and Timber, 7) Sand and Clay, hopefully not have to wait for farm products like 8) Wine, 9) Olive Oil. In my opinion, Weapons are too labor intensive to be a good startup industry. With the same workers and resources, you can make 30% more money exporting Utensils and Furniture.

• To get things rolling right away, it helps to have temporary housing at the immigration point. Depending on distance from the "real" city, I may build up to 10-12 insulae and 2-3 domus, with just a well and a prefecture to keep this "slum village" under control until no longer needed. These houses do have an adverse effect on anything related to citywide services (epidemics, gods benevolences, etc).

• Usually Mercury is important in the beginning, so make sure you've got 20 dwellings with shrine coverage (they don't have to be occupied). Later, I often mothball Mercury to control distribution: goods go a lot further when shoppers only buy one unit at a time. This is particularly helpful when a new food/good first becomes available in the market, or any time you find houses running out of items. If relying on Mercury's raw materials bonus, don't forget to increase camps while mothballed.

• When growing a large city, speed up immigration by building entertainment venues. Coverage is not as important as variety, with a Coliseum most effective. When the Entertainment Advisor says "There are so many exciting shows and games in this city, people are hurrying to immigrate" you're gaining over 400 new plebs a month!

• Until there's enough workers, make the most of the ones you have. You can mothball a farm or gathering camp after it spawns two laborers, and they'll go happily off into the field and keep working. Unmothball it when the cart returns until they set off again. Watch farmers carefully: they return to their farm 6 weeks into their 8 week cycle, before going out again to collect the harvest (don't mothball sheep and cattle farms during initial 6 month maturity phase, untended livestock will wander away). This is micromanagement in the extreme and quickly gets overwhelming, but if you can stay focused for the first 2-3 months, you'll get amazing production out of a few hundred plebs. Keep this method in mind during any labor shortages. You can also use it when retrieving goods for factories, warehouses, granaries, depots, markets -- once the cartpusher is out the door, it doesn't matter if the building remains staffed or not. While mothballed, a market will sell goods but no taxes will be collected. An unstaffed trade post will buy but not sell goods.

• If you need more labor, don't hesitate to build more housing. Every residence, including insulae and Large Villas, pays more in taxes than it costs to support, provided no imports are necessary (except exotics for patricians). Temporary housing can be used if you run out of vacancies due to slow evolution.

• In the early days every denarius counts. I don't pay any wages until houses have food. It takes 4-6 months for new residents to become unhappy, and by then food should be available. If not I evict them and get fresh tenants.



Now onto the essential tricks of money making. Especially important in Bling, which was all about how fast you could accumulate 83,000 denarii to purchase 6x100 exotic goods.

HAPPINESS
Attending to your people's needs is more than altruism, it yields significant financial rewards from increased taxes and decreased wages. I constantly monitor the many Happiness indicators and think it's the key to the game. Despite misleading in-game Help and/or your assumptions, there are only two absolute requirements: some food and a minimal salary. Absence of these will cause rioting, but all other deficiencies can be countered by adjusting wage and tax rates.

Access to water is very important to Happiness but not water quality (well, fountain, pipes -- try giving patricians a well instead of pipes and see what happens).

You don't need to pay nearly as much as the standard wage. Plebs with 3 foods and water are content with 9 Dn. For equites with 3 foods and water, start at 17 and subtract 2 for each basic good type. Increase wages by 2 Dn if any food types are missing, and for each 10% rise in unemployment.

Plebs pay proportionally little sales tax so to them 0-2% is "low", 3-7% is "normal", and 8-10% is "high". Patricians react to each 1% increment, and equites to every 2% (thus 5-7% is "normal" for equites, if you raise taxes beyond this you must also adjust their wages by 2 Dn). Patricians are content with any 6 types of food + basic + luxury goods. If you provide additional goods, you can raise one or the other tax above 6%. You can also max out taxes and temporarily upset them once in a while (like the first month they get exotics, and you want to recoup 100 Dn tax on each unit purchased, or in conjunction with a Mercury festival which doubles tax revenue for 2 months). Since taxes are collected at the end of the month, you could, if you're very patient with counting "ticks", do this every month, and return rates to normal after they're paid. Very tedious but useful if you get into financial distress.

Generally I provide as many goods as possible, not only for Happiness but because houses will stockpile 3-4 of each type. At 6% sales tax that's 6 Dn on each food unit, 12 Dn on Basics, 30 Dn on Luxuries, 60 Dn on Exotics. Consider this: every time a domus purchases a luxury good, it's equivalent to a 30 Dn export! At a minimum, a fully stocked insula pays 144 Dn /yr and a domus 147 Dn /yr (if Bacchus isn't providing free luxury goods). While still evolving it can be 3x that. Thus my recommendation to build the largest city you can if maximum funds are your goal.

In the early years when houses are acquiring lots of goods, keep the sales tax high (raising wages and lowering property tax if necessary). After the city is fully evolved and settled into the regular consumption rate of 2 goods per year, lower the sales tax, so you can increase property taxes on higher level estates/mansions, and decrease wages on the large labor force.

Since each class responds differently to tax changes, it's a complex interaction. Experiment with it and don't worry, crime won't break out the first or second month a house is yellow or orange.


PATRICIANS
Did your strategy for Bling depend on a massive manufacturing sector producing 450 export goods per year for 25k profit? My 20 Large Estates generated more than that in taxes, so with a bit of extra income from a reasonable amount of exports, I could afford to purchase 600 exotic bling in just 3 years.

No doubt about it, patricians are the fastest way to make a lot of money, and there's no way you'll win any Most Denarii scenario without building as many as possible. Compare scores in the online contests to convince yourself, particularly this one. So far no one's come close to that total. The trade potential in Ephesus is about 20k /yr, while tax income was 200k /yr. Granted this is an extreme example (it was a test) but it proves the point.

I build villas as soon as there's a steady food supply, usually within the first 6 months. A Large Villa requires no exotics and pays 700+ in taxes at 6% rates. I start buying exotics the first year, distributing one type at a time until all villas are covered (this isn't necessary, but it helps me control patrician evolution). Use Mercury to limit shoppers to one unit per trip, and Bacchus to multiply the existing stocks. The Bacchus blessing comes approximately every 2 years, so if you can get at least 3 types of goods into each estate (consuming 2 /yr) and 5 types in each mansion (consuming 4 /yr), you may never have to import another exotic! Patricians are not so expensive to maintain and far more lucrative than many players believe.


I bet now you're sorry you asked, but hopefully you found in the above something new and interesting. Unfortunately you might not get another chance to challenge me until September. Try some of these tips in the meantime, and we'll see what happens then!
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