Civilization IV

[Ser Clegane]

Bought it yesterday evening - and smuggled it into the house past Mrs. Clegane

[UglyandHasty]

Bought it yesterday evening - and smuggled it into the house past Mrs. Clegane

LOL I wish i could do that, unfortunatly, Mrs U&H is the one paying the bills and surveying the accounts! I have to settle for the angry eyes

[Papewaio]

Customs in Australia recently put in a new computer system... it is delaying all and I mean all shipments by days and upto weeks. The docks are overflowing. All critical stuff is getting through.

PC games are not on that list, so it will be a while before it hits the stores... unless one of the guys who installed the customs system is a civ fan and gets it through quicker.

[GodsPetMonkey]

Customs in Australia recently put in a new computer system... it is delaying all and I mean all shipments by days and upto weeks. The docks are overflowing. All critical stuff is getting through.

PC games are not on that list, so it will be a while before it hits the stores... unless one of the guys who installed the customs system is a civ fan and gets it through quicker.

I think you just worked out what on those new computer systems is delaying all those shipments!

"We really gotta get all that stuff moving! The boss is ticked!"
"But, but... Just ONE more turn"

[ChaosLord]

There are 650 turns in an epic game, and things are produced/researched more slowly. Next is 430 turns in a normal game and things produced/researched at the "normal" rate. And lastly 295 turns in a quick game where things are produced/researched faster. If you need a comparison, the standard game in in Civ3 was 540 turns. So normal will be faster then regular Civ3, and epic will be longer, with quick being for short games.

[screwtype]

Customs in Australia recently put in a new computer system... it is delaying all and I mean all shipments by days and upto weeks. The docks are overflowing. All critical stuff is getting through.

PC games are not on that list, so it will be a while before it hits the stores... unless one of the guys who installed the customs system is a civ fan and gets it through quicker.

They still haven't even managed to get BI to my local EB store yet. But Civ4 will be arriving on Nov 3 or 4. However you have to pre-order because there's a lot of demand.

I was going to pre-order, but I just can't convince myself I like the Civ paradigm enough to pay $89.95 for it...

[screwtype]

There are 650 turns in an epic game, and things are produced/researched more slowly.

I don't call that "epic". When I first started playing Civ3, I played a couple of "huge" campaigns where I actually ran out of turns. 540 turns is the default in a Civ3 game.

However you can set it to a maximum of 1000 turns and that's what I do with every Civ3 game now. I'll be disappointed if you can't set it at least that high in Civ4.

[frogbeastegg]

I pre-ordered it, ready for the UK release.

My feeble willpower, already near breaking point thanks to reading some very good stuff about the game on another forum, crumbled when I saw it was £15 off and eligable for free delivery on amazon.uk.

I feel very doomed now.

[The_Doctor]

I feel very doomed now.

Sid has taken another soul.

However you can set it to a maximum of 1000 turns and that's what I do with every Civ3 game now. I'll be disappointed if you can't set it at least that high in Civ4.

It says the game is very moddable. So you could increase the number of turns, the cost of each tech/unit/building.

[frogbeastegg]

A question, now you have all helped drag the frog into something she hoped to stay clear of for the sake of her life and sanity (oh, the perils of being a mod! Although I admit it was my own stupidity which led to me reading the thread on the other forum): does Civ4 support hotseat MP? As in 2 people playing on one PC?

Now, a second question, one which is more musing out aloud assuming the abopve question is answered "Yes.": when my boyfriend inevitably asks if he can play too, would it be crueller to refuse to let him play, or to let him play?

[The_Doctor]

does Civ4 support hotseat MP?

Yes. There are quite a lot of MP features.
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info/#MP

would it be crueller to refuse to let him play, or to let him play?

Not letting him play.

By letting him play you can control him completely. It will be like a new type of feudalism, but instead of giving land to their followers, rulers give them a few turns of civ4.

It will be called a Civocracy.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

hmm, I played it a bit. The whole founding cities/exploring to see where the resources are/getting to them before the other civs bit was quite fun...but the military strategy of the AI seemed to consist entirely of putting garrisons in there cities and leaving them there. One game germany had about 10 cities to my 4 and 5 times the units I had, but the left them all in cities and I captured them one by one. Brilliant. The other thing that bugged me was that there was no advantage to outnumbering your opponent, you could only attack one of their units with one yours. Yeah sure, that makes sense. Granted the battles aren't going to be like Shogun, but EU2 was a grand strategy game and had battles that made perfect sense...wars were very enjoyable.

And George Washington leading the United States to discover hinduism in 3800 BC with Moses as the great Hindu prophet is just weird.

Never played any of the other civs.

[GoreBag]

Apples and Oranges. Admittedly, Civ is a much broader scale than the EU games, and EU is real-time. It's intended to be a different experience and they're not really comparable except by "I had more fun with this game".

[screwtype]

hmm, I played it a bit. The whole founding cities/exploring to see where the resources are/getting to them before the other civs bit was quite fun...but the military strategy of the AI seemed to consist entirely of putting garrisons in there cities and leaving them there. One game germany had about 10 cities to my 4 and 5 times the units I had, but the left them all in cities and I captured them one by one. Brilliant.

Isn't there an option for changing the AI's level of aggression? There was in the previous title, and it made a big difference.

The other thing that bugged me was that there was no advantage to outnumbering your opponent, you could only attack one of their units with one yours. Yeah sure, that makes sense.

Yeah, that's how the previous combat engine worked, and though it can be very frustrating (and slow), it does at least make for a considerable challenge.

And don't forget you also enjoy the same advantage when defending your own cities.

And George Washington leading the United States to discover hinduism in 3800 BC with Moses as the great Hindu prophet is just weird.

Hard to argue with that

[frogbeastegg]

Thanks for that.

By letting him play you can control him completely.

Hehe! I already do; the poor dear loves me. Fair's fair; I'm inordinately fond of him too, which is why I wonder about keeping him from Civ4 for his own good ...

[screwtype]

Well I just hope it's better than Civ3. I spent the last two or three days playing it, to get a feel for the Civ paradigm again.

After a few aborted campaigns I finally thought I had things figured out again, so I went for it in my next campaign. I started a war in 300AD against Egypt. I had the advantage of horses and iron, Egypt had neither.

700 years later I had managed to capture two whole Egyptian cities, it cost me 16 hours of real time to do that.

The game is evil.

[GoreBag]

After screwing around with the ATI problem and not being able to run the game due to CD-mounting software on my harddrive, I fianlly got the game to work and spent all day on it. Then, I got a CTD...I never saved once. Thankfully, there's an auto-save function.

I can probably provide a more in-depth review once I settle down and get a hold of this 'just one more turn' problem I've picked up.

[The_Doctor]

So it is good?

What is the medieval scenario like?

[Slyspy]

Sounds to me that it is more or less the same as CivIII which I found rather boring. But then I had played CivII to death so perhaps thats why the sequels hold no charm for me....

PS Just read Simon Appleton's post above and agree aout Civ completely. I also get that feeling about RTW though.

[GoreBag]

I find the music kind of muted/diluted, but it does play.

[Arcanum]

In my opinion Civilization 4 is far better than Civilization 3, in all aspects. The combat system aswell as the AI.

Currently i'm in a game with Rome, around renaissance, I played OVERLY aggressive, meaning that I already had war with 10 of the 14 (I believe) factions.

I won every single war with them with another City to be mine, or at least defended myself well, as I must be the most hated men in all the world.

The combat system is working so much better than Civ 3, which was simply frustrating and irritating. Now you can look up your odds and you get a feeling of what will win and how you can reduce the enemies chances to win significantly.

Only attacking with one unit - granted - isn't too logical. But I always try to see it as symbolism
And HEY?! What do you expect, they will not change the whole Civ system, just because they got into 3D.

The Government management is so much better and more complex, while a lot easier to handle.

As for the AI: I'm playing on Noble (yeah, im a wuss) as that is the latest non-frustrating setting, as the AI is not cheating there, heh. And I get several big-scale organized attacks in the beginning of a war that I did not declare, for example.The AI positions itself well on hills and gets good defensive bonuses, also they use catapults well and their arm combinations are interesting. The sole reason why I am winning, is that my economy is better than theirs, beeing the largest,wealthiest and one of the most advanced civilizations that I am,simply because the defensive bonuses of cities and such are darn well big factors if you didnt know the meaning of the word "Catapult" for the half of the game.
Now of course everything has changed and I am using them, which is good for my own sake, because even the smallest state could destroy me in an offensive war without me having them.

Darn well, play the game and be silent! (I got the game on the 29th or so, by the way :) )

Ohh! And just another point to mention:
The Diplomacy!
It is just gorgous how good it is, the system with the enemy seeing pros- and cons- of a relation with you and if youre not a good neighbour, expect to get attacked at the best opportunity!

Alright, thats all for now. I slept around 4 hours...I am tired.

[screwtype]

Arcanum, I heard there is still a limit on the number of game turns you can play. I can't believe they still have this feature, assuming there is no way to mod it.

In Civ3 the default was 540 but you could crank it up to 1000. 540 wasn't enough in my experience but I've never played a campaign past 1000 turns. So what is the limit in Civ4?

[screwtype]

Okay, I bought the game, and first impressions are not that good.

To start with, my CD player will not recognize the disk at all! - the first time this has ever happened. But I think I've read that other people are also having this problem.

Fortunately, I also have a DVD writer, and was able to install and play it using that.

As for the game itself, well I've only fooled around with it for a couple of hours, but I'm finding it a lot less intuitive than Civ3. The method of moving units in the new game seems especially clumsy - you have to select the unit, then select the "move" icon at the bottom of the screen, then click on the map where you want the unit to go. In Civ3 all the units are auto selected for you one after the other and you just click on the map where you want them to move. I didn't notice any prompts to move my units at all with this game.

The other thing I don't much like is the game is eerily quiet. I always play games with the music off but there don't seem to be many audio cues to add a little flavour or help you out. And much of the personality is gone - you still have "advisors" but they are no longer human beings that pop up and talk to you about stuff in little speech bubbles, now the advisor is just the info screen itself, which sucks.

So I'm just not finding the presentation very engaging, which suprised me because I thought the presentation could only be enhanced with the improved graphics.

Also, in spite of the supposed great moddability of the game, there appears to be no way to mod the number of turns, which again in my opinion deeply sucks. And there don't seem to be as many options you can set regarding the sort of world you want to play in, or if they are there they are again not presented in a straightforward way.

Anyhow, as I said these are only first impressions, it's early days yet and I'll have to play it for a while before coming to a definite conclusion.

[GoreBag]

You can right-click to move. I've noticed very little difference between it and the go-to function.

I was disappointed about the advisors as well, but the other leaders have plenty of personality, I think. They'll even cringe or grind their teeth if you ask them about another leader they dislike.

[screwtype]

You can right-click to move. I've noticed very little difference between it and the go-to function.

I was disappointed about the advisors as well, but the other leaders have plenty of personality, I think. They'll even cringe or grind their teeth if you ask them about another leader they dislike.

That sounds good, but you don't visit the diplomacy screen very often. At least that's how it was in the earlier game.

I'm very suprised they got rid of the human advisors. They were a highly popular and much celebrated feature of Civ3.

I really miss my advisors

[The_Doctor]

What is the medieval scenario like?

I finally get it tomorrow.

[screwtype]

Dunno, haven't looked. I'm still struggling with the new features of the game. But I can tell you there are definitely some changes for the better in Civ4. In gameplay I mean, not just graphics and glitz.

[GoreBag]

What is the medieval scenario like?

I finally get it tomorrow.

Well, I haven't played the medieval scenario per se, but I've played through the medieval period twice now. It's a little more developed than Civ 3, I'd say, what with more melee units, and an added focus on resources in order to produce them (copper or iron). The scramble to get the resources to produce axes has caused some pretty fun conflicts in my last game. The Horse Archer unit has also been added.

[ChaosLord]

Arcanum, I heard there is still a limit on the number of game turns you can play. I can't believe they still have this feature, assuming there is no way to mod it.

In Civ3 the default was 540 but you could crank it up to 1000. 540 wasn't enough in my experience but I've never played a campaign past 1000 turns. So what is the limit in Civ4?

screwtype, modding the number of turns is easy. You just need to edit the Civ4\Assets\XML\GameInfo\Civ4GameSpeedInfo.XML file. That has the length of each each gametypes turns. So if you want infinite turns you'd just add something like this:

<GameTurnInfo>
<iYearIncrement>1</iYearIncrement>
<iTurnsPerIncrement>10000</iTurnsPerIncrement>
</GameTurnInfo>

after the last </GameTurnInfo> into a section for one of the speed type sections but before </GameTurnInfos>. That'd give you 1 turn per year after 2050 for 10000 turns, enough to finish any game. I don't really see the need though, the AI is pretty good at winning spaceship/diplomacy victories before time runs out. Also like in Civ3 you can simply choose to continue playing once time runs out or an AI civ wins, it just won't record score anymore.

If you need an XML editor to make those changes, I suggest SciTE. You can dl it from here: http://gisdeveloper.tripod.com/scite.html

If you do edit the XML file to use it without having to backup and replace the original just create a subfolder in the Mods folder in the Civilization4 directory. Then put the folers/files in it like it is normaly. So Mods\Yourmod\Assets\XML\GameInfo\Youreditedfile.xml would be the folders/files you add. Theres also an ini file needed, just look at the other mods and copy one of theirs, just like 5 lines. Then you just load the mod ingame or change the "Mod =" section in the Civilization4.ini file to point to your mods folder "Mod = Mods\Yourmod" it'll load it on startup then.


Anyway, just thought i'd help, you can do alot with the XML files and even more with the python, but some stuff you have to look around to find. I would have posted here earlier but i've been playing it too much, this has to be the most addictive one of the series.

[screwtype]

Okay I've played the game enough now to draw a conclusion and I'm afraid it's not a nice one.

I saw in the designers' notes to the game that they are congratulating themselves for thinking up clever ways to reduce the micromanagement burden from the previous games. In fact what they've done is turn the game into an even greater micromanagement nightmare.

In the previous game, all you had to manage was citizen happiness. But now they've added health to the equation, so you not only have to keep your citizens happy but healthy as well.

In addition I find that most of the bonuses you get from buildings etc are too complicated to be able to assess easily, and it's the same problem with the Civics. Again, I see in their notes that the designers think strategy games are all about creating tension-filled choices. So they give you a bunch of Civics that have both advantages and drawbacks. The end result is that it's very difficult to be able to figure out what advantages there are if any of one Civic over another. So there's little sense of achievement in getting some new Civic. And this kind of problem persists throughout the game.

Also I find there's no real sense of character or personality about the things you build. In a game like Age of Wonders, for instance, your city improvements really have a meaningful impact on gameplay. But it's all so incremental in Civ that buildings tend to lose any sense of identity, it's just an extra health point here and a culture point there, or some esoteric this-building-gives-me-an-extra-smiley-if-I-also-have-silk-in-my-resources formula. So you just end up slogging your way through one building after another after another to try and get a bit of functionality into your city. I mean, all computer games are ultimately about counting. But the idea of a game is that the counting is hidden from view in an entertaining package. In Civ, the underlying arithmetic is only too glaringly obvious.

I also have a problem with a lot of the basic design decisions. For example the designers note that they gave builders two moves so they could move and build something in the same turn. Okay, that's fair enough as far as it goes. But then, why do builders need a movement rating at all? With game turns measured in years, what's the point? You should be able to just pick up a builder and drop him anywhere in your territory when you want to build something. You should not have to run him from A to B, or worse still, have to transport him overseas on those Galleys with their piddling two tile movement rate so it takes you 50 or 100 years to get them where you want them! This is just more micromanagement hell.

I'd also like to know why after all this time there aren't separate build queues for units and buildings - especially given the long build times for buildings in this game. And why does it have to take so long to build military units anyhow? There's already an effective limit on the amount of military units you can build because of the gold it takes to support them.

It seems to me this game would be a LOT more interesting if you were able to churn out military units at a much faster clip. You might then actually be able to have some fun fighting wars without your entire tech development and economy falling catastrophically behind the other powers. As it is you can rarely afford to build a military unit because of the time it takes away from city improvements. It totally sucks.

There are some modest improvements in the game here and there, particularly in the glitz department. They did get rid of corruption thank goodness, and what they replaced it with seems to work quite well. But overall I still find the whole thing largely an exercise in frustration and tedium. This is a game that is desperately in search of a good dose of elegant simplicity.

PS Thanks for the info on turn modding ChaosLord.