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[Drummodino]

1) Montezuma is a backstabbing dickhead.
4) Montezuma is a backstabbing dickhead.
8) Montezuma is a backstabbing dickhead.

I have to disagree with these. I have never once had Montezuma act nice only to declare war on me. Ergo, he is not a back-stabber.

I have also never had Montezuma act nice to me.

My advice is not to spoil the game for yourself by reading guides, unless you intend to play multiplayer and want to perfect your game. Your formative days of playing Civ are some of the most wonderous and enjoyable.

Seriously? Monty loves to act nice to you while he's fighting someone else. However when he's done with them he will attack you 100% of the time.

OP: Prepare to have no social life for a while. This game is seriously addicting and awesome. I'd recommend pursuing a science or diplomatic victory if you don't have Brave New World. If you do any victory type is reasonable. Also be aggressive when claiming territory early-mid game. You want the spots with the best luxuries and terrain. Cities with lots of hills for mines are great production powerhouses. Also cities with access to marble have a +15% speed when constructing wonders (you want to be fast with those to prevent others stealing them from you).

Civs to watch out for:

Montezuma (Aztecs): This guy is pure evil. Destroy him at the first opportunity.

Catherine (Russia): Her sole objective is to own all of the land. If she runs out of room to expand she will turn aggressive. She's usually pretty trustworthy until then though.

Oda Nobunaga (Japan): Usually quite aggressive. Doesn't like making peace. Samurai are deadly.

Alexander (Greece): He can and will befriend all the city states (his unique ability is ridiculous). This can make him one of the strongest civs in a lot of games.

The Huns, Germany and Mongolia are up there with Monty for aggression as well. Never trust them.

Finally make sure to make good use of any unique units and abilities your chosen civ has. Units like Mongolia's Keshik, The Hun's battering ram, England's Ship of the Line can be devastating when used well.

 

[lacktheknack]

Build cities seven tiles apart for maximum efficiency.

Obviously, there's room to adjust this as needed, but I wish I learned this much earlier than I did.

Also, despite what people say, Montezuma, Gandhi and the other "oh-so-aggressive" Civs are only aggressive to them due to their playstyle. If you play a different sort of game, Civs will react to you accordingly. I always take a peace route, and Montezuma leaves me alone. Askia, however, does not.

 

[Syntax Error]

Screw the Great Library. The quicker you get it off your system, the better, because the National College is MORE important than that (the free technology comes in way too early to actually amount to something.)

If you want simple, play TALL. That means 3-5 big cities. Also, make sure to get your science rate as high as you possibly can, since no matter which victory condition you go for, you WILL need the science. Also, don't sweat it if the AI declares war on you. They can't properly make use of the 1UPT system, and, from my personal experience, they rarely have the army to back it up (I had two AI's declare war on me on turn 60. Up until we made peace on turn 100 or so, I did not see any unit near my border). I rejoice when someone declares war on me, because it means I can get slave labor (steal AI workers) indefinitely, and I won't get a diplo hit. This is huge, since you can keep your cities producing infrastructure instead of workers.

 

[Savagezion]

From personal novice experience:

-Japan is OP for dominance.
-Diplomacy is for shit and they'll back stab you regardless. Oh, enjoy the fact they'll spam you with "denouncing" messages.
-Any allies you get will just make a settlement right in the middle of your territory.
-If you're winning a war, don't accept the Peace treaty no matter what.
-When taking enemy settlement just raze it and place your own settlement, the negative happiness isn't really worth it and you'll be better off wasting the social policies on something else.
-If they've attack you in the past, they will do so again.

Happiness is a cap on your science,

Nope, it's your growth and attack effectiveness as well.

I agree with all your points, but Population is directly tied to beakers. You can get multipliers but your base beaker value is in direct relation to your population. Total Population = Base Science. Religion can add and so on but population makes up the bulk of your base science. So happiness caps your base science because it caps your population growth. The first 1/4 of the game should be molded by this alone. It will strongly influence the first half of the game. Happiness isn't much of a tool by itself, much less if in comparison to scienceopulation. More advanced units are better than a modifier.

 

[Zeren]

Try and control the sea and as many small passages of land as you can. If you break the enemy trade routes, they will be unable to sustain themselves and will become unhappy. If they are unhappy, they will be easy to destroy. The same can happen to you though.

 

[Fireaxe]

If fighting is sure to achieve victory, then you must fight.

That's my only comment.

 

[UniversalRonin]

I don't know if this works in 5, but I did it all the time in 2. Discover trade, use caravans to make on of your cities a hub for wonders of the world, Profit. Discover Fanaticism, Profit.

(The last new Civ I played was 3/ Alpha Centauri, but I still play 2 regularly. one of my favourite games ever. That plus I think 5 would probably murder my current laptop.)

EDIT: NEVER Trust Ghandi. In my experience Genghis Kahn will laugh at you for not having horses while demanding to know the secrets of Electricity, but Ghandi? he'll just nuke you into tomorrow.

 

[Kyber]

I think it might be better to just play it and find out for yourself, it will make you better and enjoy it more, but if you really want to know...

1. Don't trust anybody.
2. Declarations of friendships are useless, it's just an excuse for them to beg you for more money, they'll still attack you for "warmongering" or other ridiculous reasons. There are no BFF's
3. Keep your happiness and food in check, otherwise your empire will stop growing. So avoid building too many cities, and avoid building cities in places that have little food.
4. The AI is usually bad at fighting, especially on water. Most of the time, they will bring one unit at a time to your border in range of artillery.
5. Artillery is so good. Get artillery.
6. (Gods&Kings DLC) Religion is good, try to get your own religion and spread it to others. Missionaries are basically free when you buy them with faith. Always try to keep your own country religious to your religion.
7. If you're unsure that you won't finish a miracle before someone else, avoid trying, unless it's a really good one, and it doesn't take that long. But I'm sure I don't have to explain why it's not good to have a city do nothing for 30 turns and get nothing.
8. If you want to be nation with a lot of culture and is going for the culture victory, avoid building more than 3 cities. The smaller your empire is, the more culture it can generate if it's focused on one huge capital city.

 

[Fat Hippo]

Don't trust India, America, Germany, The Aztecs, or the Iroquois

You forgot Greece. Alexander is the "Civ IV Gandhi" of Civ V. Fucking jerk.

 

[smithy_2045]

Every AI is an asshole.

Workers are crucial for making a city contribute to your civ.

Take advantage of your uniques, but don't rely solely on them.

Control the chokepoints and the AI will send their waves of units starting to their death.

Archers, Composite Bows and Crossbows should make up 50+% of your early armies.

Wonders are a reward for being in a good position, not a necessity. You don't need any wonder to win.

 

[Mausthemighty]

What's really fun is to be an asshole yourself!
I played my first game Civ V as a bloodthirsty warmonger with the pointiest stick, annihilated any threat and backstabbed my allies when I saw an opportunity. It was a fun game. Now I'll go for a peaceful playthrough.

 

[Syntax Error]

I think it might be better to just play it and find out for yourself, it will make you better and enjoy it more, but if you really want to know...

1. Don't trust anybody.
2. Declarations of friendships are useless, it's just an excuse for them to beg you for more money, they'll still attack you for "warmongering" or other ridiculous reasons. There are no BFF's
3. Keep your happiness and food in check, otherwise your empire will stop growing. So avoid building too many cities, and avoid building cities in places that have little food.
4. The AI is usually bad at fighting, especially on water. Most of the time, they will bring one unit at a time to your border in range of artillery.
5. Artillery is so good. Get artillery.
6. (Gods&Kings DLC) Religion is good, try to get your own religion and spread it to others. Missionaries are basically free when you buy them with faith. Always try to keep your own country religious to your religion.
7. If you're unsure that you won't finish a miracle before someone else, avoid trying, unless it's a really good one, and it doesn't take that long. But I'm sure I don't have to explain why it's not good to have a city do nothing for 30 turns and get nothing.
8. If you want to be nation with a lot of culture and is going for the culture victory, avoid building more than 3 cities. The smaller your empire is, the more culture it can generate if it's focused on one huge capital city.

#2: Right now in Brave New World, DOF's mean a whole lot more. For one, it's required for gold Lump Sum trades. Another, it's a way to gauge AI behavior. You'll be safe from that AI as long as the DOF is in effect (because attacking someone while it is in effect will tag you as a BackStabber and will make relations with ALL other civs take a hit.)

#8: In BNW, the culture victory has been revamped, so while you can get by with 3-4 cities, having more can be more advantageous when Archaeology comes.

 

[MammothBlade]

Trust no-one.

Combined arms is the order of the day now. You need multiple unit types to win battles -especially sieging cities - on a tactical level.

Submarines are overpowered. They're sea snipers and can shoot through narrow land tiles that you thought were guarded harbours.

City states are needy, petty little shits.

 

[Kyber]

snip'd

#2: Right now in Brave New World, DOF's mean a whole lot more. For one, it's required for gold Lump Sum trades. Another, it's a way to gauge AI behavior. You'll be safe from that AI as long as the DOF is in effect (because attacking someone while it is in effect will tag you as a BackStabber and will make relations with ALL other civs take a hit.)

#8: In BNW, the culture victory has been revamped, so while you can get by with 3-4 cities, having more can be more advantageous when Archaeology comes.

I haven't played BNW yet, thanks for correcting me. I am interested in getting it, sounds like it's worth the money.

 

[deleted139124]

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[Frankster]

What exactly is "science victory" or "culture victory" or whatever victory?

Also, what is a "stack of doom"?

There's different ways to win the game (which you can enable or disable when creating the game):

Science victory: being the first to send a ship to alpha centauri full of eager colonists, so its a space race basically.

Culture victory: they changed it with the newest expansion so the name is a bit of a misnomer now. Basically when the your civ is so culturally advanced that your "tourism rating" (built up by wonders and certain buildings in which you place artistic pieces for tourists to gawk at) exceeds the culture (which acts as a defence vs tourism) of other civs that the whole world just decides to adopt your superior ways.

Whatever victory: the others are the classic military victory and the diplomatic victory where you get the world congress to agree to just make your civ the dominant civ for the rest of time.

Stack of doom: in previous civs units could be stacked upon each other leading to the infamous "stack of doom", a titan composed of multiple varied units that could steamroll anything in its path except for other stacks of dooms.
Bearing in mind that when attacking a stack of doom, the best unit in that stack to fight yours will be picked (so you attack with airplanes, the aa unit gets chosen, you attack with infantry, its the mg that fights you off), you can see why this was more effective then using multiple weak armies.
As civ got sequels the devs experimented with ways of dealing with this: such as a loss wiping out all the units in same tile (so if you did win a battle versus the stack of doom, then whole stack gets removed) and introducing collateral damage where you'd have units specializing in damaging the rest of the units in the stack of doom.

Stacks have been completely eliminated in the new civ so you won't have to worry about those

Im writing this off the top of my head so might have got some details awry but that's the gist of it i reckon.

 

[The White Hunter]

Never ever trust Montezuma.....Also Gandhi (despite popular belief)is actually one of the most aggressive AI in the entire game. Try and neutralize him early

I personally wait to annihilate Ghandi because he's usually shit at science and has terrible units, but the moment you let himg et ahead he'#ll turn on you.

The peace loving fuck.

OT: Just play the game a lot on a lower difficulty, recommend enabling tutorials for a few plays too.