Civilization IV

[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.

[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.

[The_Doctor]

I have it.

And it is incredibly slow. I only have 256MB of RAM. I need a hell of a lot more to run it properly. Luckly RAM is cheap now. I have turned all the options to low, which helped a lot.

I have not played it much, yet. Mainly becuase it is so slow.

I tried the medieval scenario. It took over half an hour to load, and then it was too slow to do anything. It is very well made. The map is of the earth with lots of civs and preplaced cities and religions. It looks like a lot of fun.

How access the editor outside of the game?

I really like the music on the menu screen.

[screwtype]

I've got a gigabyte. It runs fine on my machine. Except that the music doesn't work properly.

[Papewaio]

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.

I thought everything had a separate building queue. You could stop building something switch to something else, and once finished come back and begin where you left off... no transfer of production from one queue to another, and the only time shields turn to gold was for a wonder that was piped by someone else building it... mind you all I can do in Aus is READ about it.

[screwtype]

I thought everything had a separate building queue. You could stop building something switch to something else, and once finished come back and begin where you left off... no transfer of production from one queue to another, and the only time shields turn to gold was for a wonder that was piped by someone else building it... mind you all I can do in Aus is READ about it.

I guess it depends whereabouts in Oz you live, because I live in Melbourne and it arrived at the local EB store on Thursday. It took them ages to get BI though - that only just got here last week.

And what you're describing is not really a separate building queue. Yes, the game does appear to have some sort of "stop working on this and come back to it later" feature. But it isn't a separate pipeline, you can still only build one thing at a time. I'd prefer an RTW type system, where you have a separate queue for each.

But in any case, I really think on reflecton that the better solution is not a separate build queue, but just the ability to churn out military units in a turn or two, like RTW. The glacial pace with which you're forced to create an army makes the military option almost unviable.