Civ 5 'Founding Cities' tutorial walkthrough

The tutorial 'Founding Cities' is dedicated to teach a novice how to perform some simple actions in Civilization 5: founding cities, building units, and map exploring. It is almost as simple as the first Civilization 5 tutorial 'Movement and Exploration', but this time you have to find Natural Wonders instead of Ancient Ruins, and also need to build units for this by yourself.

Like the first tutorial, it is a small scenario with a lot of limitations, and where all advisors are set to the maximum level.

The scenario features and limitations:

• One settler and one warrior are available from the beginning, as in usual game.
• The first city will have 2 population after being founded.
• Only settlers and scouts can be built in cities (no buildings, workers, etc.).
• Settlers are much cheaper to build.
• Science and Religion are off.
• Social Policies are disabled.
• Automated explore command for units is removed.
• No rivals or barbarians.

Let's start this tutorial (Single Player > Tutorial > Founding Cities) and see what will happen there.

Ramesses, Pharaoh of Egypt, is on the greeting screen. Like in the first tutorial, the civilization and leader don't matter here, and reading the info about the unique abilities can be skipped.

At the beginning we have one settler and one warrior standing on a river near the sea coast. The goal of this scenario is written in a text box at the top of the screen: found 3 cities and discover 3 Natural Wonders.

As usual, let's try to finish this scenario as fast as possible, using the cities and units in the most rational way: some kind of challenge for an experienced player (but don't forget that the main purpose is fun, rather than records). Of course, the map is supposed to be unknown to the player.

General strategy is a little bit tricky this time. One of the ideas is that settlers can also be safely used as recon units, because there are no barbarians anywhere.

Found our first city Thebes with Settler where he stands (by the way, in normal game I would choose another tile for the capital). Note that the capital has already 2 population (special feature of this scenario) and therefore is able to build settlers from the beginning. Great!

The choice what to build in the city is not rich: only settlers and scouts are available. Surprisingly, after opening the city screen one can notice that settlers can be built faster than scouts (usually not). Decreased settler cost is also a special feature of this scenario.

It seems tempting to build only settlers, use them for exploring the map, and finally found required number of cities with them. However the ability of scouts move through rough terrain as fast as through plains seems to gain more turns than would be lost by building them. At first I order the city to build one scout for exploring the far lands, and only then I am going to switch to settlers.

There is one another effective action to make everything faster: setting citizen focus to production. This decreases the city growth speed but improves the production. Why the city growth can be ignored here? In normal game it is better to grow up your city before building a settler, but not this time. I suppose that only one scout and two or three settlers should be enough to explore the whole map. On the other hand city growing is quite slow process during which the production is not very high. Note that with focused production it takes 5 turns to build a scout and only 3 turns for a settler. Very fast!

Settler was consumed by founding the city and the only left unit is Warrior now. Order him to explore the east part of the continent, just because he is on the east side of the capital.

Warrior moves east.

Warrior moves east even more.

Warrior still moves east, but wide lands to the south are revealed. By following the coastal line he will move to the south from the next turn.

Warrior moves south.

A scout was built in Thebes. Send him to explore the west part of the continent. Change the city production to a settler.

Meanwhile Warrior discovered the first natural wonder: the Barringer Crater. Continue moving to the south to make sure that there is nothing left there.

Mountains are on Scout's way. Let him explore the coastal lands by traveling a long way around the continent. As to relatively short way to the center of the continent, leave it to settlers that will be built soon.

Warrior continues exploring the east lands and Scout continues exploring the west lands.

In general, move units one tile at a time, deciding each time where to go, not leaving any piece of land unexplored.

Thebes finished a settler. Before founding a new city, use Settler as a recon unit for a while ordering him to move north, where the center of the continent is supposed to be.

Scout discovered the second natural wonder: the Grand Mesa. Only one is left somewhere.

Warrior at last reached the cape of a long peninsula and can now at ease return north exploring yet unrevealed lands on the east coast.

It seems that Scout went close to the far west end of this part of the world. Although the far side of the continent is still under the fog, the form of the coastal line makes me think that there are sea tiles there.

Moving Scout to the north-east reveals rather large territory at once. Good! Also so did Settler when he climbed the hill to the north of the capital.

Now it can be seen that if Settler continues moving north, Scout will have nothing to do. Redistribute exploring the unknown land between them in the following way: Scout will be responsible for the northern territories and Settler will explore the lands to the east.

Scout, Settler, and Warrior continue exploring each own territory.

Meanwhile a second settler was built in Thebes. Move him to the north intending to help the scout exploring the north territories which can appear to be rather wide.

The city production can be switched to anything because there are already enough units in the game.

The first settler unexpectedly discovered the last natural wonder: Krakatoa! All that's left to do is to found two cities with the settlers we already have! That can be done in the next turn.

Found two cities at once fulfilling the goals of this tutorial.