One of the biggest and most beloved strategy game franchises out there is the Civilisation series and everyday more and more people jump into the series. The thing about Civilisation though is that the tutorials haven’t always been great and Civ 5 was no different. Considering how big Civ 5 is this is understandable but this means that newcomers often feel overwhelms so here is my Beginners Guide to Civilisation 5: Brave New World.
Take full advantage of what makes your Civilisation unique
Warning early game siege towers by Assyria are really hard to combat.
In Civ 5 every leader you can choose from has their own unique traits, units and buildings. These are all based on the history surrounding their countries as well as the leaders themselves. Do to this every leader has their own unique spin on the game and these abilities when taken full advantage of can in some cases be the reason you win the game.
For example Shaka Zulu gets the unique Impi unit who if you create a small army of will become a carpet of death that nothing can stop because they get a free ranged attack before they attack in close range. Meanwhile Poland ability grants them a free social policy every time they move to a new era meaning beelining to the next era is often the best strategy.
The Tradition Tree is nearly always your best starting policy
One of the first decision your going to need to make no matter how you play in Civilisation 5 is what Policy tree you want to unlock and they all have their uses. The Liberty tree may look very tempting with its free workers and settlers and the honour trees free Great Generals is another decent idea.
However no matter what type of game you want to play Tradition is your best starting policy. The main focus of Tradition is in growing your capital city as big and as quickly as possible by way of providing your main city with more of everything. In the long run Tradition is your best starting tree because the bigger city, the more you can work by way of titles and specialists in buildings.
While Tradition is the one of the best, the worst by far is the Peity tree. Don’t get me wrong there’s some good boosts in there like the ending policy which adds a powerful reformation belief to your religion but at the start of game you’ll want to focus more on your cities and less on a religion you mightn’t even be able to create.
Always try to keep your happiness in check
No matter how big your empire is and no matter how powerful your military is, you’ll always want to keep your happiness in check. Having more happiness means your cities will grow faster, your production is faster and your military fights better but at the same time the same can be said in reverse if you let your happiness fall.
Gandhi can be very nuke happy in Civilisation for some reason
At the start of the game keeping a positive happiness score can be tricky since you won’t be able to build happiness buildings or work luxury resources till you research the proper tech. If you want to work land luxury resources like gold and spices early you can just settle on them but that means you can’t work them to improve them later.
Another option is becoming friends with the games city states that have luxury resource but again early on you can’t afford them and they don’t always have quests available to increase your influence.
Because of this I recommend that you try to limit your cities grow at least till you go down to one happy. Once you get down to one happy prevent all your cities from grow. This will limit your growth but will keep your unhappiness get out of control. On the plus side your cities will keep gathering food so by the time you let your cities grow again your cities could grow the next turn
Don’t fall for the Wonder trap
In Civilisation there are a unique set of buildings called Wonders. These buildings as based on one of a kind real world buildings and after anyone researches their corresponding technology they can build them anywhere. These buildings have powerful if sometimes situational abilities like Petra’s ability to make desert title more useful or the Terracotta Armies ability to replicate your army.
These abilities make Wonders a very tempting item to build and that goes for the AI as well. The main problem with building wonders is that they need a lot of production to build in a decent time and if the AI beats you to it, the amount of production you had into it turns into gold and as nice as gold is, you could have used that time building sometime for that city like defences.
It’s there for recommended that on higher difficulties you completely ignore the early wonders as the AI will beeline them. The main exception I would make for this is if your playing as Egypt whose unique ability is building wonders faster as well as having a starting bias with marble which increases the speed you build early game wonders.
Besides that if you’re not playing as Egypt than I suggest that if you get a Great Engineer, keep them around till you can build the wonder you want and take advantage of their ability to rush the wonder to its final turn.
Those glowing orange clouds means someone nuked France… again.
Don’t go after every tech
When it comes to playing a successful game in any game of Civilisation, one of the earliest lessons you need to learn is that you can’t get every tech in the game. If you were to try this, the AI will easily over take you later in the game. I’m not saying you should avoid technologies for the entire game but you should instead beeline towards the technologies that best suit the victory condition your playing towards.
By beelining towards techs the ones you missed will become easier to get latter since in Civ 5 technologies require less science to discover when the tech your researching is in an era you already pasted. Tech prices are also decreased after the AI discovers it before you, making cleaning up older tech a breeze. Having a higher science output then when you first had a chance to research it helps too.
Try and keep around some tourism to defend against pressure
One of the most annoying messages you can get in Civ 5 is that smug message from the AI where they brag about how much your citizens love buying goods from their civilisation. Besides how smug the AI message is, getting this message from the AI also means that they’re one step closer to winning a tourism/culture victory and we can’t have that.
Due to this it’s recommended that even if your going for a domination victory, you should keep some great works or artifacts around to help combat the other AI’s cultural pressure. The other plus side to this is that each Great Work adds to your culture per turn.
Know when the AI is planing to declare on you
When it comes to the AI there will be some obvious signs that they are planing to declare war on you. One of the biggest signs is that they will have siege weapons like cannons and a great general on the march towards you. Another good sign that you may be in trouble is that the AI will often start spamming there units since that’s when there armies the most dangerous.
Depending on how big your army is and how confident you are in your skills you can kickstart this war before the AI is finished positioning their units. This way you can get in the first hits and possibly take out their great general early while getting points towards earning your own.
Alternatively you can pay the AI to go to war with someone else and that brings me nicely to the next part.
For quicker battles you can turn off the animations in the options menu.
Keep the AI at war as much as possible
One option that will always be available to you when your negotiating with the AI is to request that they declare war on other AI and you should take full advantage of this. Remember that an AI at war is a AI who won’t attack you even if you have the weakest military in the game. Other advantages to this is that they will often stop building wonders, giving you a chance to finish yours and it can be useful to keep those runaway AI in line.
The main problem with getting the AI to go to war is that they will often request a lot in return. Depending what they want you should consider giving it to them. One sided open borders for example is acceptable since you want them to keep each other busy and in the event that they do declare war on you, they’ll be kicked out of your borders anyway. Another thing you should consider is giving them the tactical resources they want since often you mightn’t use them. The plus side to doing this is if they declare on you, they lose those resources and if they hit a negative amount like say -1 coal, all those units get a large debuff to their stats.
Best way to win a democracy victory is to throw money at the City States
Trade luxuries for bulk sums of gold
Just like in the real world in Civ 5 money or in this case gold makes the world go round. You will need to make a lot of gold in Civ 5 as its needed for nearly everything. Most buildings have maintenance costs and on top of that your roads and military need money as well. However while roads do cost money per turn to maintain, you do earn extra gold per turn for every city connected to your main city so its recommended that you get some.
So your going to need as much money as possible and that’s where the AI comes in. You can only trade for bulk sums of gold after you make a declaration of friendship with them but its worth it for the money. For example you could trade a luxury resource for 7 gold per turn or alternatively sell it for say 5 gold per turn and around 200 gold instantly.
Download some mods
My final piece of advise for Civilisation 5 is to go and download some mods already. Civilisation 5 is one of the most modded games in the series and since the first mod appeared on the Steam workshop, even the Steam version can easily get in on the fun.
Yet Eggman isn’t the weirdest leader you can mod into your game.
There’s a mod in Civ 5 for nearly every feature in-game. Think that the game needs more buildings that we have today, there’s a mod for that. Not enough wonders to lose to the AI, there’s plenty of them too. Want to play Civ 5 as characters from other games like Eggman from Sonic, well you know the answer by now.
The cool thing about the mods available for Civ 5 is that there are even some to fix some of the common problems you might be having like a mod that decreases the effectiveness of the Warmonger penalty or the always useful better UI mod.
Modding Civilisation 5 can open up a bunch of weird and fun games and scenarios that you wouldn’t be able to have otherwise. For example you could play as a version of Lenin who believes in Commerce and Freedom.
Watch some Youtube videos
The final tip I can give you about learning Civ 5 besides playing the game is to go on Youtube and watch others. Youtube has tons of videos made by people who’ve been playing the game since it was released so you can learn a lot from them after just a few videos.
As for who I would recommend watching, I’d say two good youtubers would be Quill18 and Marbozir. They both do a good job of explaining what there doing and there entertaining to boot.
So that’s my beginners guide to Civilisation 5 and while reading a guide and watching videos can help you get started,the best way to learn Civ 5 is by playing. Despite that I hope this Beginners Guide to Civilisation 5 was some help.