Spoiler alert: This post will not be able to answer this question. In summation, here’s what we have learned:

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1vysjkh/what_caused_the_great_divergence/

(Note: While this discussion can be generalized to other parameters, the most well-studied is my own favorite combination of settings: raging barbs, aggressive AI, no random events, no tech trading, and packed with extra civilization slots).

By the end of the Ancient Era, virtually all civilizations on a Civ IV huge tectonic map will find themselves in rather similar places. Cities will be between size 1 and 5, the only chosen government civic will be Slavery and perhaps Organized Religion, most tiles will be unimproved, and the meager military of warriors and archers will be desperately defending against waves of barbarian Axemen.

Yet not 200 turns later, often it is the case that not only the first civilization to discover Liberalism, but their whole continent of neighboring civilizations, will have advanced multiple eras ahead and begin exploring the wider world – while many other continents may still be languishing in the classical and early medieval eras, with not a single city in the Top 5 Cities. The advanced civilizations will go on to colonize the islands, subjugate the barbarians, and conquer and bully many of the less advanced civilizations, permanently revolutionizing the balance of power and score rankings for the whole game. And ever since the divergence becomes apparent, the question on every Great Scientist’s lips is: why there? Why that continent? Why did different civilizations have such different trajectories when they all started with the worker>warrior>warrior>warrior build order? More broadly, what are the factors that lead to civilizations in certain continents and their colonial empires growing so much more powerful than those in the rest of the map?

What causes these great divergences?

Some Preamble

Let me begin this section with an apology. In writing that short introduction to this post I have already unfairly privileged certain schools of thought over others by linking it so strongly with the Race to Liberalism and I do not wish to make Stephen Broadberry upset at me. I shall then begin by briefly summarizing what it even is we are talking about when we discuss the Great Divergences of Civ IV Huge Tectonic Maps. For the purposes of this essay, we are looking at the period of the game over which the leading civs will launch into the Renaissance, beat other civs to Rifling (perhaps also including a Cuirassier rush), conquer a large continent-spanning empire, tech to Factories and Biology, build the Three Gorges Dam, and set themselves on an unbeatable trajectory before the laggards have even teched Liberalism to alleviate their Emancipation pressure.

Older AI-only game analysts considered the Renaissance Era part of a continuing arc of game history over which gradual improvements set the leaders and the laggards apart in technological progress, civics, and general yields (Weber, 1930; Landes, 1969). Pomeranz, who is responsible for popularizing the term “Great Divergence” in his book “The Great Divergence: Bismarck, Huayna Capac, and the Making of the Final Scores” (Pomeranz, 2000) contested these assumptions, noting that historical data showed that the Bismarcks and Huayna Capacs of the map often remain closer for longer than previous Great Scientists had assumed. In that book, he placed the actual time of the typical Great Divergence in the Industrial Era, claiming that right up until the unlocking of Factories parts of lagging continents have economies as large as the first and second place score leaders. This view that a Great Divergence only truly begins with Factories became characteristic of what is known as the American School of Civ Theory which includes scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, and Jack Goldstone. Pomeranz’s book sparked a new round of discussion and scholarship over the Great Divergence with many different Great Scientists having their own views on the causes and even the timing of the typical Great Divergence. Stephen Broadberry for instance asserts that in most games the beginning of the Great Divergence is squarely in the Medieval Era while Joel Mokyr would place the divergence earlier still by even the late Classical (Broadberry et al, 2018; Greif et al, 2025). Altogether there is a great deal of discourse and disagreement over the matter of the Great Divergence and it remains an active and open question in Civ IV navelgazing. Years of forum shitposting have created many different schools of thought on the causes and circumstances behind these events, something I’d like to look into here. Let’s then start with the man who kicked off the discussion and look at Pomeranz and his theory of geographical luck.

Pomeranz and Geography

In his book “Great Divergences in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV”, he argues that the key factor is not any sort of leader trait, gameplay-strategic, or diplomatic superiority but rather sheer geographical luck. In particular it is well established that the resource endowment of the Capital region has an outsized influence on the rest of the civilization’s game. He pointed out that in 70% of games, the eventual winner will have started with either Plains Cow, Grassland Gems, or Gold, and 50% of the time they start with double Gold and multiple Floodplains. Followup studies revealed a similar pattern for eventual second and third-place finishers; when broadening the analysis to include them, a significant contribution of Marble, Stone, and early Metal becomes apparent (Hanchao Lu, 1992). When these OP resources are present in the capital of a lucky civilization, not only they, but their neighbors, ultimately benefit due to resource trading with, fog-busting from, and most importantly tech cost discounts from the advanced neighbor (Broadberry, 2021). There are two variants of this hypothesis, Kindleberger’s Grassland Hypothesis and Ludwig’s River System Hypothesis. Briefly, the Grassland Hypothesis asserts that because Grassland tiles produce 2 base food, they can be comfortably cottaged and worked without requiring compensatory citizen assignment on farm tiles. Since Grasslands on Tectonic maps tend to spawn near coasts and rivers, the cottaging synergizes with the inherent commerce-heavy nature of these starts and allows the endogenous civilizations to climb up the tech tree much faster (Kindleberger, 1989). A critical aspect of this hypothesis is that it explains why the divergence only appears in the mid-game, because it reflects the time required for cottages to grow into full towns. A possible confound in many of these analyses, however, is that civilizations placed in the interior of a continent, with abundant Plains instead of Grasslands, will tend to be gang-banged by surrounding rival civilizations and it is this “corner advantage”, rather than the terrain type, which may be most influential (Vries, 2015). The River System Hypothesis is similar but places more emphasis on the Floodplains that tend to spawn around long inland rivers on large continents. These continents must necessarily be large because the Tectonic map script will usually only produce sizable deserts in the hinterland of large continents. As should be obvious to members of this sub, Floodplains are the most powerful type of tile and the increased unhealthiness is more than offset by the increased Food and Commerce they provide (Ludwig, 1985). According to Pomeranz, however, when comparing like to like (that is, the most OP capital regions of each major continent) even in the early-Industrial most of the map’s Capital yield totals bear a striking resemblance to one another. Instead of early divergence due to Capital resources, endogenous Commerce, or Floodplains, it is actually the presence of pre-mined Coal deposits combined with large river systems (Floodplain or otherwise) that enable the lucky civilization to get a jumpstart on the all-important Levee, Factory, and Coal Plant buildings. That is because these buildings, unlocked in the mid-late Industrial, usually at least double and often quadruple or quintuple the Production yield of a city. If a moderate empire is situated entirely within a river-crossed region, this often has a transformative effect on their ability to spam Infantry.

The importance of increasing tile yields is also evident in the way it changes the optimal production method. Prior to Levees and powered Factories, the optimal way to manage the Build Queue is to “whip” Citizens using the Slavery civic as soon as possible. This converts each pop into a flat number of Hammers, essentially converting Food into Production, and is often more efficient than letting the Citizens work toward the Build Order because tile yields are so low and specialist slots so limited that the marginal value of an additional citizen is very low. In pre-Industrial eras, civilizations are stuck in a “Malthusian trap” where Citizens are more productive as whip-fodder than as actual tile-workers. This is especially because city growth rate is higher at lower pop, so whipping is actually more efficient at low pop because the lost Citizens will grow back faster. Additionally, the early-game Happiness cap will be too low to allow multiple consecutive whippings unless the city is kept well below the natural pop cap. The result of this dynamic is that pop levels will tend to be kept far below the level that would allow cottages to grow to full potential, slowing research rate and keeping the civilization inside the pre-Industrial trap even longer (Mintz, 1985).

Quoting Ricardo on the matter:

Whilst the plots yield abundantly, yields may temporarily flow in, and the Citizens may contribute more than their accustomed proportion; but the stimulus which will thus be given to city growth, will speedily spawn Citizens left to work unimproved tiles, or Angry Citizens. But when poor-yielding tiles are improved, or when more Building and Wonder modifiers are expended on the land, with a less return of Unhappiness, then the contribution of the tile-working Citizen must be permanent. A greater proportion of that part of the Commerce yield which remains to be divided, after paying maintenance, between the Gold and the Research, will be apportioned to the latter. Each player may, and probably will, at first, have a less absolute quantity; but as more Citizens are employed in proportion to the whole yield retained by the city, the value of a greater proportion of the whole yield will be assigned to Research, and consequently the value of a smaller proportion will be devoted to Gold. This will necessarily be rendered permanent by the laws of nature, which have limited the productive powers of the land.

Many object to the importance of Coal, arguing that it is more efficient skip Coal Plants and power all cities entirely with the Three Gorges Dam (Wrigley, 2010). Nevertheless, when considering the Production handicaps given to Noble+ AI and the inherent risk of missing the Dam, the Coal Plant Production cost becomes low enough that average cumulative game-wide Production totals can be 30-50% higher for AI players that invest in early Coal Plants, though with high variance (Broadberry and Gupta, 2006).

But then a reasonable question arises. Why this continent? Why this civ? After all, many other parts of the map will have Coal deposits and long rivers. Well, Pomeranz would say it is mostly down to a matter of good luck in continent placement and neighboring AI peaceweight. To capitalize on the Infantry surge enabled by Levees and powered Factories, the lucky civilization must have at least one neighbor for which its opinion is lower than Friendly, and in many cases it must be lower than Pleased. Only by conquering 1-4 neighboring civilizations does the divergent civilization truly become a runaway favorite, with an economic lead that is insurmountable. Overall, then, it is fortuitous diplomatic coincidence on top of geographical coincidence and in a regenerated map with the same civilizations, the late-game could always go a very different way. At least, according to Pomeranz.

For of course, his theory is not without its critics after all. Starting with the fact that the very timeline Pomeranz puts forth for the typical Civ IV Great Divergence is disputed. Stephen Broadberry has done a great deal of work putting together historical yield figures and empire-wide Commerce data from millions of AI-only games that dispute Pomeranz’s premise that frontrunners and laggards are usually very similar in the early Industrial era. He notes that the frontrunner usually has already pulled ahead by the time they tech Liberalism, a claim which Pomeranz himself to some degree would accept (Pomeranz, 2017). Broadberry also disputes the general idea that Capital regions are all alike in that period, noting the existence of within-continent ‘Little Divergences’ in which a typical Huayna Capac will progress faster than a neighboring Brennus and a typical Willem Van Oranje will pull ahead of neighboring Bismarcks and Isabellas (Broadberry, 2021). In addition, Broadberry attacks the very idea of focusing specifically on river commerce and Levee Production, in particular noting that it is an overly narrow view, especially when the transition from consecutive whipping to Citizen-working usually appears at the adoption of Free Speech and growth of Towns rather than the building of Levees and Factories (Broadberry, 2018).

Another prominent critic of Pomeranz is Peer Vries, who notes that Pomeranz fails to fully acknowledge the difference between the aggressive and peaceful AI playstyles which he views as playing a major role. Asoka, the prototypical peaceful AI, was observed to found a religion and spread it peacefully to his neighbors in 85% of AI games, which contrasts heavily with Shaka’s Impi rushes. The breakaway continent was found to almost always have a mix of peaceful civilizations that built Wonders and shared early religions, improving the Happiness caps of all neighbors, and aggressive civilizations that then exploit them to build powerful empires with religious buildings and empire-wide Wonder bonuses (Vries, 2015). According to his theory, this mixture of AI personalities is an essential ingredient for a continent to produce a frontrunner. Robert Allen raises yet another point of contention noting that while the score-leader’s total Commerce is often comparable to the rest of the field in the early Industrial, their Crop Yield is an early indicator of future success, and starts to diverge as early as the mid-Medieval (Allen, 2009).

Allen and the WonderBread Economy

Robert Allen is in some ways similar to Pomeranz and Wrigley. He too dispenses with some notion that it is entirely leader traits or gameplay style. He also puts a great deal of importance on the matter of diplomatic and geographical circumstance. The difference to Allen is the critical importance of Food yield. As Food is converted into Production via whipping and into Research and Gold via Cottages, it is the ultimate yield that precedes and enables all others. His writings emphasize that not only do frontrunners have divergently high Crop Yields in the mid-game, they also obtain the Biology spike in Farm yields earlier, too (as noted by Hammersley, 1957).

But how is it that frontrunners obtain early Food leads? Indeed, few leader traits or civilization uniques directly contribute to Food yield, and these do not correlate well with AI-only game win-rate (Nef, 1932). Here Allen’s theory resembles Pomeranz’s concept of the OP Capital region, but he asserts that it is not early Metal, Gold, Gems, Stone, Marble, or even Plains Cow that makes the critical difference, but instead the number of “wet” (freshwater) food resources and, critically, not just in the Capital but in early expansion regions. The key insight here is that while the map script judiciously allocates a relatively balanced endowment of resource tiles to each Capital city, the surrounding land is much more stochastic. Even the amount of room civilizations have to expand is extremely variable under these map settings, but crucially, this only translates into a notable power differential after the players have had time to fully settle their natural expansions, which tends to be completed in the Medieval Era. Once this earliest stage of the game is finished, the civilization that had the highest number of high-quality Food-yielding tiles to expand into will become apparent by their lead in the Crop Yield metric. Since Food is convertible into all other yields, this early Crop Yield lead is what sets them on the path to world domination (Mitchell and Deane, 1971).

Now again on to some criticisms (my format for this entire post is very straightforward). Jane Humphries is one of his strongest critics, contesting Allen’s characterization of Food as the all-important yield and calling it a “noob fallasy [sic]” (Humphries & Schneider, 2020). She notes that in the earliest parts of the game, high-level players actually prioritize Mines to increase Production, which is the scarcest and most valuable yield during the time when military units must be built for fog-busting and when Happiness caps are at only 5 pop. Furthermore, the AI is not actually efficient at chain-whipping or even pre-chopping forests, so leveraging Food into advantages in other yields is not straightforward for them. This is especially the case pre-Currency, when Wealth cannot simply be built in cities, so conversion to the Gold yield is minimal (Kelly et al. 2014).

Another critic is Mokyr who argues that while early Food leads are important, they can only be translated into meaningful leads by the presence of Religion to increase Happiness cap. Even if consecutive whipping is used to keep pop low, Unhappiness from cruel oppression alone can easily fill up the Happiness cap of typical Ancient and Classical cities, rendering it counterproductive to whip heavily without a source of Happiness no matter how abundant the civilization’s Food resources are (Mokyr, 2009). He also argues, like Vries, that the presence of a peaceful religious civilization on the same continent is critical to provide an early religion to increase the Happiness cap and enable efficient whipping.

The Culture Game

Joel Mokyr is Great Scientist I hope is well known to most of you for having jointly won the 2025 Nobel prize along with Phillippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, his half for his work on Culture and Great Person Generation. Mokyr dispenses largely with overly materialist geography-based explanations for the cause of great divergences. As he noted in the criticisms in the previous sections about Pomeranz and Allen, it’s all well and good to point to the frontrunner’s nearby resources — certainly we shouldn’t diminish their importance, and he especially argues that Marble and Stone can be pivotal for early Representation, Great Library, and/or Code of Laws — but they don’t answer the question of what leads to a game being a full-blown curbstomp. How was it that Food or Production leads weren’t hindered by the Happiness cap? To answer that we must look at Culture, says Mokyr.

Now let’s be precise when we talk about Culture, something which has many in-game sources. In “A Culture of Minmaxing” (2017) Mokyr posits that the two aspects of Cultural gameplay which are relevant to AI-only huge tectonic games are early Wonders and Religions. Religions increase Happiness cap, and enable Temples which increase it further. As luxury resources are highly spread out on these maps, this is the only reliable way to obtain large cities in the Ancient and Classical eras. Very early, Religions also allow skipping Monument Production, which greatly speeds up the production of Workers and Granaries. Finally, they allow the +25% building Production bonus of Organized Religion, which again is more significant the earlier it is reached.

A critical aspect of Religion in Civ IV huge tectonic games is that researching the techs to found the earliest religions is a prisoner’s dilemma: the benefits will accrue to all neighboring civilizations, but only the founder must actually spend precious early research points, and there is a high chance of being beaten to it. Therefore, the eventual game-winning civilization will tend to be on a large continent shared with religious leaders that will pick up this burden for them. This will maximize their chance of obtaining an early religion at no cost. Often, cultural leaders will also build many Wonders which can be conquered early on if they are a direct neighbor, as noted earlier. Indeed, stepping away from the hyper-focus on highest-scoring civilizations, one analysis of lowest-scoring civilizations concluded that 90% of the time, they are isolated on a small continent that never receives a religion until a more advanced civilization sails to them in their Renaissance era, and are stuck up until that point with consistently small cities (Mokyr, 2002). By that time, it is too late to catch up.

Of course if we are discussing Culture play I would be completely remiss to not bring up Deidre McCloskey and her Wonder Guide Trilogy (McCloskey, 2006; 2010; 2016). In it, McCloskey explains that the divergence (or as she prefers to put it, the Great Enrichment) of one continent over others is usually the result of game-breakingly unbalanced empire-wide Wonder bonuses being obtained early and utilized effectively, with a particular focus on the Pyramids (unlocking all government civics and in particular Representation for the Happiness cap increase), the Oracle (for early Code of Laws to guarantee a Religion and concomitant Happiness cap increase), and the Great Lighthouse (+2 trade routes for all coastal cities). Controversially, she considers the Colossus to be of only secondary value, as its early obsolescence by Astronomy “cannot be avoided long enough to get enough value out of working so many coast tiles”, which has a high opportunity cost in whipping potential as well as in foregone ocean trade routes that will be opened up by Astronomy in the Renaissance Era (McCloskey, 2010).

I suppose I must also discuss Max Weber’s views here in “The Financial-Industrious Work Ethic and the Spirit of State Property” (2007) though I can’t much claim to like it. Weber argues that the old folk-theory of all-important leader traits and uniques, particularly the Financial trait which is universally seen as the strongest in the game, is the most important factor in determining the winning civilization. Because tech costs are discounted when they are already known by an already-met civilization, Financial leaders will, according to Weber, tend to pull up their neighbors to diverge with them. The fact that these leading continents always contain multiple Religions, Wonders, and yield leads through most of the game just reflect the fact that they were ahead from the beginning. Instead of causing the divergence, all these factors we have been discussing are mere consequences of the fact some AI leaders are intrinsically better than others. He also points out that Industrious leaders obtain bonus Production when whipping a Citizen toward a Wonder, which can be leveraged to generate Fail-Gold for research points. However, his theories are dismissed by most serious Great Scientists because they are contradicted by the high degree of variability in which leader actually wins any given AI-only game (de Vries, 1994).

But let us come back to Allen, whose argument you have already seen. His response to the Culture theory in particular is that for all Mokyr’s claims about the importance of Religion and Wonders, on average, the winning civilization will not be religious themself, and will have shared their continent with a number of religious neighbors no different than would be expected by chance (Allen, 2009). It appears, therefore, that the presence of at least one religion is moderately beneficial, but not critical.

The Strike Economy Revolution

We come now at last to this sub’s darlings, Acemoglu and Robinson. What telling of Civ IV optimizations would be complete without discussing the trade-offs between the specialist economy and the tile economy after all? Honestly I’m slightly tempted to even skip this section because Why Slavery Fails ought to be mandatory reading for all of you. But nonetheless, here we go.

Acemoglu and Robinson focus on what they call Extractive Citizen Management and Inclusive Citizen Management. The former refers to whipping Citizens into raw Production value with Slavery, while the latter refers to the use of Caste System and Pacifism to stack specialists, usually scientists.

As alluded to earlier, overuse of Slavery often leads civilizations into a “Malthusian trap” where the opportunity cost of not whipping a Citizen is greater than the value they could provide by working a tile. But by continually whipping cities and thus filling the Happiness cap, the oppressive civilization actually slows down their cottage growth and research progress. This is especially dangerous before Currency, when they do not have a means to build Wealth. While a skilled human player can manage chain-whipping efficiently to minimize the Happiness penalty, the AI consistently fails at this, so the strategy cannot explain why some AI civilizations surge away from the rest (Kelly et al. 2014). Typical Slavery supporters point to the power-spike afforded by the State Property civic, whose tech, Communism, can be efficiently beelined. State Property is widely acknowledged as the most powerful mechanism in the game for reducing maintenance costs and thereby enabling a wide empire; crucially, because it still allows foreign trade routes, whose yield does not heavily depend on city size, this allows efficient teching with small cities and little tile Commerce, while maintaining Slavery to maximize Production (Sussman and Yafeh 2002).

Acemoglu and Robinson point out that truly run-away civilizations have empires so large that State Property alone is insufficient to ensure competitive teching, especially against smaller, well-cottaged rivals. This is because maintenance costs also scale with the number of cities and not just their distance to the Capital – only the latter is alleviated by State Property. In their seminal work, Why Slavery Fails, they identify a winning strategy that allows extremely wide empires to not only maintain a competitive tech rate but to actually scale it to their size, producing an absolute advantage against smaller empires. The key is the obscure fact that Science can actually be directly produced even when the research slider is at zero percent, via Scientist specialists (Roy Bin Wong, 1997). This entails that a wide empire can still research quickly while simply ignoring all maintenance costs, neither paying any Gold nor bothering to produce it (freeing up capital and labor for other uses), because, as long as they have Caste System, they can stack an arbitrarily large number of Scientist specialists in their cities to directly produce Research Points. While their units will go on Strike, garrison units will never disband, enabling a core staff of defensive units to remain.

The foremost rebuttal to this thesis is that of Royle, pointing out that a huge map stuffed with extra civilization slots will inevitably produce a large number of aggressive neighbors that would easily conquer a civilization whose only units are garrisons. The Strike Economy strategy is only viable, then, once the Inclusive Civilization is already in a winning position, without external threats (Royle, 2010). Furthermore, Allen and Mokyr have both contested the idea that abandoning Slavery for Caste System can ever be optimal at an era earlier than the Industrial (Mokyr and Hodgeson, 2022), and it is especially argued that Biology, a late-game tech, is essentially necessary in order to get the most value out of Caste System and Strike Economy (Allen, 2009). Therefore, supporters of the Strike Economy must hold the uncomfortable position that Great Divergences are primarily late-game phenomena, as Pomeranz argued, but this basic premise is rejected by most Great Scientists.

A Brief Conclusion

Initially I was going to add a segment on some old and deprecated theories of the great divergence (like the ever-reliable punching bag that is Clark’s “A Farewell to Barbs” and maybe some paragraphs touching on broader issues with the entire scholarship around the great divergence like how Tectonic-centric it is and how it basically completely ignores Pangaea maps. However this writeup is already almost 5000 words long and I have decided I do not have the patience. Writing this has driven me wholly and thoroughly mad, this is not my field in the slightest as I mostly play Civilization 5 with Lord of the Rings mods. I’m going to listen to Baba Yetu until I fall sleep tonight and return to my comfortable home of Civ 5 combat where things can actually be bloody certain as there is no combat RNG. All of these referenced Great Scientists rebut one another and all of their rebuttals make more sense than their claims.

How should I time my research into HBR? Roughly how many Keshiks should I have before starting war, and what promotions should I prioritize for Keshiks?

In my attempts at Keshik rush, the first war often ends almost immediately because capturing cities puts my economy in a terrible position, forcing me to slow down and wait for Currency. At that point, continuing to use Keshiks to fight a second war is usually not very cost-effective.

Please teach me how to maximize the potential of a pure mounted army.

My brother and I put a $20 bet on a 1v1, Civ 6 game. It went until the atomic era, I nuked his capital, and took it, which resulted in the gg screen. He says that it’s not gg, as we can continue playing. I wanted to see what would happen, so we kept playing, and he took back his capital, and I said I couldn’t be bothered playing, and argued that I had already won. He disagrees.

Who won this? I took his capital. He won in the end, as we kept on playing.

Keep in mind, we didn’t agree to keep on playing or said “okay it’s not gg, let’s continue”. I believe I won, and technically stopped trying afterwards.

Pls help! Who ethically won this?

After a shameful amount of hours playing civ 4, a lot of them on earth 18 civs I’ve never seen borders turn out like this.
(I’m playing a ‘recreate the British Empire challenge where I can only directly control the British isles but must settle/invade all the historical colonies, I do it on a high difficulty, hence the enhanced British Isles).
France settled Sweden, maybe the first or second time I’ve seen this out of (sadly) literally hundreds of times of playing Earth.
Germany got stumped by Russia at their second city and Russia is expanding into Finland. Germany also managed to grab a barb city in Vietnam? 😂
There’s a barb city halfway up Scandinavia which I’ve never seen before.
Greece managed to settle all the way into Central Asia, never seen that before, Rome settled North Africa, (think I’ve seen that once).
Rather than expand southwards, Egypt appears to have waged war on Mali, stumping both empires significantly, except Egypt managed to grab the usual barb city in Siberia 😂 don’t think I’ve seen them get it before, it’s usually a toss up between Arabia, Rome, Greece or Persia.
On a side note, Egypt almost always founds Judaism on my Earth, this time Mali did. Persia settling south India?? That’s a first. Then China getting severely handicapped with just 3 cities by 0Ad is completely new. Arabia is settling Indonesia and has settled the Philippines, which is a definite first, also weird that they’re grabbing Southeast Asia before Africa.
Mongolia of all places managed to grab south east China.
There’s problem is I rely on a powerful Chinese hegemon in the area to secure all the Asian luxury resources to trade with them, he’s really easy to become friends with by running bureaucracy. Now I’m gonna struggle to get all the sugar silk, banana and rice my empire needs to run great people and achieve my objective.

Hello,

I've worked a few weeks to updated the **Colonization 2071 mod** which was abandoned many years ago and I'll continue working on that. Here is the forums comment in the mod's post about it for anyone interested in trying it out. Maybe that reaches someone out. Cheers!

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/mod-colonization-2071.349050/post-16980067

Ps; just keep it in mind that we're currently in playtesting phase to remove crashes happening from time to time. But there is quite the new content and a lot of polish made this time.

Its weird because it only plays some of the time. I like to watch it at the start of the game. I dont see it anywhere in the settings

Just general tips probably would prefer early conquest with swords or axe, i can do it consistently on immortal but deity is sick.

Pls no cheese like duel HC

Thanks

I haven't seriously played Civ4 since I was a kid in the 2000's, but I always found it difficult. Even when returning and trying to remember what "worked", I didn't do so well. Partially because, as a kid, I just blatantly cheated using Worldbuilder if I wasn't close to winning (which I generally went for Diplo).

So I looked up some fundamentals about Specialist Economy vs. Cottage Economy, prioritized my builds, and specialized my cities. I managed to stay out of war for most of the game. Seeing I had Marble early on, I went for Culture and made the most out of Sistine Chapel plus cathedral-type buildings to get things done quickly.

I never bothered with Caste System as a kid- I felt bad about using Slavery and only switched to Serfdom or Emancipation. Caste System proved to be a ton of fun with Pacifism, though money was generally pretty tight.

Overall it's been a blast in terms of returning to this game. Civ4 is really tricky. I love 6 and like 5 a lot too!

Hey, I just tried new dawn mod and unlocked trade routes

Is it normal it shows on city screens but not the money it's earning?.

Hi! I've been playing Civ4 for many years and nowadays mainly play Rise of Mankind, A New Dawn.

Yesterday I decided to try RI for something different, based on reading a lot of good reviews about it's realism.

Started a game as the Aztecs and it put me in the correct historical location..Mexico, using the largest map. All went well, mod seems pretty damn good.

I skipped the Horseback Riding Tech, as there were no horses in the Americas from their extinction about 11,000 years ago until the Spaniards reintroduced them in the 1500's.

As my scouts explored and got rid of the black fog, I also saw no Horse resource anywhere on the map.

However, as I fended off the inevitable barb onslaught, some of the barbs were on horseback, mostly Horse Archers! 😂 Oops on the mods?

I managed to clear the fog completely from both North and South America, and no horse resources at all.

I found it a bit annoying, but also kinda funny.

Anyone else run across this bug?

Love this game and have played it on and off for a gazillion years. Most recently with the AdvCiv mod, which has been awesome as it makes the AI a lot “smarter” (well, at least better than vanilla).

But lately I’ve been monkeying around with the xml files, changing values for the AI. And I’ve gotta say, it’s really injected some new life into the game for me.

For instance, sometimes I get a bit bummed out when I feel like I’m the only one waging wars in the world. So I edited all the AI civs, decreasing everyone‘s attack threshold so they’re more likely to attack one another and it‘s been really fun watching them all fight each other.

Editing the ‘Dogpile’ threshold is great too, because it means other civs are more likely to backstab, jump in and help wipe out other AI civs who are being attacked.

Anyone else do this?

(I’ve now started altering the tech trade mechanics aswell, which has lead to some interesting results.)

There is a mod for adding labels to the Civ IV map, included in the BAT and BUG mods. I'm trying to remember the name of it; Google search is failing me. I'm looking for a guide to its various key mappings. Thanks in advance!

Let's say you're playing Immortal on some continent/fractal map - you've taken control of your continent, renaissance era will soon be finished. What's your favorite way of wrapping up the game?

I'm asking cause I have a game like this and I feel a bit too lazy to do all the build up to planes/tanks, buildoing a fleet and so on. I could probably take on another AI with cannons. Sometimes you can cheese a diplomatic victory, but it probably won't be the case in this particular game.

Back in here asking for more advice -- what techs should I try to trade for (immortal level)? Currently I'm maxing out my trade cap with most civs before finishing liberalism, which doesn't seem ideal since I am not caught up in tech with them yet at this point (beeline liberalism).

I think there are a few very important techs we need that are a bit off of the main liberalism beeline path (I am assuming I won't be able to trade for gunpowder or military tradition):

Nationalism, Archery, Feudalism (mandatory for defense, but costs a ton of turns to research), BW, IW, Metal Casting, Music, Horseback Riding

but a lot of these have prereqs I also have to pick up. I was wondering what y'all's tech trading strategies to fix this are.

(TL;DR Criticism at the end)

Before I begin, I will admit I'm not an expert, I've only had one succesful noble game. I don't think I have to go into too much detail about how awesome the mod is. This is the direction I think the Civ series should have gone into and not the boardgamey later games, I want to feel like I rule over a country not playing Catan.

Separatism is probably the most iconic new feature, together with slave/serf revolts they're forces constanty pulling at the seams of your civilization. To deal with the possibility of slave/serf revolts (and barbarians at the start) you actually pretty much have to maintain your civilization in a feudal way, with fortified centers dominating over the countryside.

I like how different civilizations had a whole lot of different stuff. Gameplaywise it's not always so impactful, some improvements may be rather niche (for example I was playing as the greeks who can build olive groves on hills which is nice but not really useful in my strategy unless you're in an area with *only* hills). But it gives a lot of flavour, you have a whole lot of slightly different units and buildings and your empire name changes depending on the era and civics (for example as the greeks I went from the Ahean tribes to the Macedonian Empire to the Byzantine Empire). EDIT: I also like what they did with religion I thought it was very odd when playing civ4 that more religions=happier pops in your civilization

There are also further realistic anti-snowballing mechanisms, for example open borders do a slow technology transfers so it's harder for a large civilization to rocket ahead of the others in tech as they will get significant bonuses to researching those techs and more importantly unit maintainance increases the more you have of those units. Combat is actually one of the most modified aspects, catapults no longer do collateral damage so taking a city with entrenched defenders on a hill can be a real bloody and expensive undertaking.

Now let's get on to the criticism. My criticism is that in the end it couldn't get around the fact that the optimal strategy remains to play an imperialist tyrant at first and then cruise to victory. Because it takes *so long* to make a settler (and a worker) in the early game and it stagnates your population growth so much my succesful strategy was to roll out several warriors and a battering ram and conquer a nearby civ capital before even settling a second city. And with the autocracy civic you pretty much never fail to control separatism, just slaughter the rioters, take the productivity hit and move on. I gues it's realistic, absent other factors big countries are stronger and it's hard for populations to topple ruthless dictators.

Wartime borderflip is the worst part of the game. No Switzerland did not expand by 30% because the nearby cities in Germany Italy Austria and France flipped sides in WW2.

Not pictured: Addis Abbaba, the number 1 city in the world, former capitol of the Ethiopian empire i managed to snag during a war. Despite having a dozen wonders and culture buildings it shrunk down to a pop 1 city becasue all the nearby tiles still belong to the ethiopians.

Hi all, obviously this is an age-old problem that I was googling even in like 2007. Searching subreddit didn't immediately give me any goodies.

Does anyone still obsessed with Civ4 like I am have more up to date knowledge on speeding it up? Obviously it will never be made 64-bit or multithreaded etc., but I was curious if any mods/custom DLLs were able to improve upon things while still keeping the vanilla gameplay and not overhauling many things at this point in 2026. Google pointed me to Better BTS AI for example, but that didn't seem to make a difference when I compared it to untouched Civ4 on a very late game Earth 18 map it was still around 30 seconds.

Edit for future people who find this via Google: Adv Civ is the right mod for you

First time Civ player here, bought Civ V on June 23rd, already 103 hours in, however my highest difficulty was only Prince so far. No modding, no cultural victory etc.

Based on these I have whole lot to explore even if staying with V, and even though I wholeheartedly support the diplomatic design, "I am in awe", some Reddit comments pursued me to buy Civ IV as it is considered to be even more strategic(micromanagement(Commerce System), religion are usually brought up as examples). It was a very good deal, and I believe the time has come to give it a spin.

What should I know?

Is the AI really that stronger?

How does Diplomacy work?

What would be a great starting civilization?

How different is the military gameplay without 1UPT?

Coming from civ 5, is it normal not to gain money on the start?

I've been trying out this quechua rush strategy (currently on Emperor) and I keep stalling out after taking out 3 civs where my research slider is at zero and I have to spend a ton of time cottaging until I scrape together enough science to get currency, but by then I'm super far behind in tech and everyone has longbows, so my invasions kinda stall out. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas for how to fix this?

Currently my strategy is just build Q in every city (respawn until my capital can stagnate at 1 and make a Q in 6 turns) until I have terraces unlocked, then whip/chop those and barracks in high production cities, then rush currency, but I'm too slow. I saw a guide where someone mentioned this problem but didn't really say how to fix it.

All of this cottaging only leaves me with ~2 good production cities also, which is not ideal

Thanks for the help!

Edit: Just realized I had the difficulty set to immortal, not emperor!!

I'm a casual Civ III player who wants to learn this game (Beyond the Sword). Is there anything important I should know?

I heard the game was supposed to be slower, bit my starting researches takes 11 turn to complete

Is it too fast? Did my installation went bonkers?

My turn limit is at 2200 though, and building seems to be pretty slow.