Civilization IV

[Rosacrux redux]

Gelatinous Cube, since each and every game coming out you imagine different, why in the nine hells don't you join a gaming company and try to produce a game more to your liking?

BTW what are your favorite games (strategy) - to know where you're standing I mean...

[Geoffrey S]

Here's hoping they'll work on a new Aplha Centauri game at some point.

[NodachiSam]

Here's hoping they'll work on a new Aplha Centauri game at some point.

That would be awsome. I can't understand why they havn't already.

I'd like to see the whole basis for the various civilizations be greatly improved (utterly silly the way it is now), in order to show the ebb and flow of various nations throughout time, and I'd like each turn to only be one year--regardless of time period. It would make technology take a back seat to things like diplomacy and war, which should be the real backbone behind a strategy game.

(break of a post)

Time Compression is already in effect quite nicely, by making each turn a year long! However, all I really want is for each era to be a game in and of itself, with it's important wars, politics, and empires. As it is now, the same empire will be dominant from the Stone Age 'till the Nuclear Age--and that's a direct result of the poorly designed faction system, and the ridiculous rate of time compression.

(break of several posts)

The Civ series has changed remarkably little since its inception. Much less than most other series' out there. A little more depth would do it good--yet Civ 4, from the reviews i've read, seems to be all about simplifying it.

I totaly know what you mean about civilization being too simplified. It isn't at all historic, though I don't think it they explicitly claim it is. If they do it is scoffable, pwah! *sticks nose up in air*

The problem with the Civ factions is because of the time scale they have a compromise between a political unit and a "culture". It is kind of awkward to begin with, no culture or political unit has ever survived more than 2000 years with the Romans being close if you don't count the transition from Republic to Empire as a break. The Chinese could be said to also have had a very long lasting culture even though it too evolved over time.

It would be refreshing if we could see factions flourish and flounder. I've never played any of the Paradox games so I can't say much about them but I really like how factions can grow stronger and weaker in the TW series. I like as well the civil wars and faction reemergences occur which reflect the internal conflicts that states experience. You never experience that in Civ games. No city decides to rebell against you and start a new faction because your leader has so little influence over them. Also, what type of city leaves one faction and joins another? Wouldn't it prefer independance? I never experienced it anyways.

I think that each era should be given great importance. I recall from Civ3 that the earliest era was the shortest and the latest the longest when in fact the reverse tends to be true. I think 1 year per turn is perhaps too strict though. Certainly I don't think they should skip centuries in earlier eras but the earlier eras did have less exciting things per time period than later eras. Also, if you played each year a turn that would be 5000 turns for a game at least if it starts at the building of the Pyramids, which could take an awful long time to say the least. Such a game would have to be meticulously balanced so as to remain exciting for so long a time. The ancient and middle age eras should definately be longer though.

[screwtype]

It would be refreshing if we could see factions flourish and flounder.

Well, maybe. But I wonder how you are actually going to make a challenging game if you have your most powerful rivals fading away just as a function of time?

The object of a game like Civ is to conquer the world, it isn't to have an historic simulation of history. If you wanted that, you would in my opinion have trouble grafting it onto the Civ paradigm. IMO you are talking about a totally new game - a totally new genre even - and one that I'm not sure a lot of people would be interested in playing.

I think that each era should be given great importance.

I don't know about "great". Great-er, in some cases, certainly.

if you played each year a turn that would be 5000 turns for a game at least if it starts at the building of the Pyramids, which could take an awful long time to say the least

That's exactly my point. In a game that tries to cover the whole of history, it's a pretty tall order to expect it to cover every period at length and still remain playable. Certainly some extension of time in some eras might be workable. But I mean, if you are really going to have 1000 turns in the stone age, who is ever going to advance past that era before they have either conquered the other civs or been beaten themselves?

The ancient and middle age eras should definately be longer though.

Dunno about the ancient. But I definitely used to feel that the gunpowder era didn't get its fair share.

[The_Doctor]

http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/civ4intro.html

This is a "walkthough" of the game.

A new section will be added each day until next monday. You should probably skip the intro.

[screwtype]

The bugger skipped right past the speed options. Not elaborating at all other than mentioning they exist.

Yeah, pity about that. But I guess we'll find out soon enough.

http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/civ4intro.html

This is a "walkthough" of the game.

A new section will be added each day until next monday. You should probably skip the intro.

Hmm, that's a handy site Martinus. I might read right through that later, but I don't think I'll do it now.

One of the pleasures of a new game is discovering things for yourself

[Fragony]

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo just what I need so C4 rocks; RIP social life. Civ/smac are just to addictive it is the devil I say. But that won't stop me from getting it, you never really know if you are actually having fun when playing these games, but you just cannot stop.

how is the pike vs tanks thing ;)

[English assassin]

how is the pike vs tanks thing ;)

Not fixed, according to the review I read.

[Kalle]

What are you on about people???

Civilization from number I-III (allthough III was both steps forward and backward) are clearly the best campaign, turn based empire building games ever.

In comparison totalwar campaigns suck, europa universalis games suck (god i hate how they handle battles and units in europa universalis soooo booring). Allthough there are elements in these games that civ should learn from.

I will find out about civ IV today yeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaa :)

Kalle

[econ21]

Civilization from number I-III (allthough III was both steps forward and backward) are clearly the best campaign, turn based empire building games ever.

In comparison totalwar campaigns suck, ...

Different folks, different strokes. I found Civ2 to be about the most addictive game ever (electronic crack), but also strangely unsatisfying. I ended up concluding it was just not fun and I'd been wasting my time. But just one more turn...

By contrast, I can walk away from TW games almost anytime, but when I do find them, I relish them. (Maybe you are distinguishing the campaign map part of the game from the battle map part, in which case, I kind of see your point.)

IMO, comparing Civ to TW is kind of like comparing doing sudoku to listening to fine music.

[ChaosLord]

Strength is the base factor English Assassin, theres many things that modify it. Like Archers get bonuses to defense in cities, Axemen get bonuses versus melee units, Spearmen get bonuses versus mounted units, Mounted units get bonuses against artillery. And artillery gets a bonus versus melee and has the ability to damage all units in a stack in an attack. They're also like Civ2-Civ1 in that it has to actually attack not just bombard.

In addition to all this cities provide a substantial defensive bonus, so you can't simply run over your neighbors with hordes the latest most powerful unit of the era once you get it. If you want to actually capture anything but a poorly defended city you'll need combined arms including artillery so you can destroy the defenses in the city and negate their bonus.

From all i've heard its been balanced quite well, and of course unit abilities aren't limited to just those. Units gaining experience in this is handled by gaining promotions, these promotions able to grant them abilities like bonuses attack cities(City Raider I-III), or bonus versus Archers/Guns(Cover), or the one i'm definitly going to be using the ability to use enemy roads(Commando). Theres thirty some-odd promotions in all so theres alot of combinations/setups possible.

So yeah, you really can't just look at base unit strength for comparing units.

And yeah Simon Appleton is right, you can't really compare the two. TW is focused on a time period and around the battles, whereas Civ tries to span many time periods and be open to peaceful or agressive strategies.

[English assassin]

Well, fair enough, I think maybe I should actually play it before I bitch about it.

Although in some ways I'm reluctant to get that addiction going again...

[UglyandHasty]

I'll get it tonight. Took me 6 phone call before finally finding a shop with a copy on sale. Most shop only had the pre-ordered copy.

[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.

[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.