All things Civ IV

Cafe Society
21

I’m going to steal a convention employed on the Civ fansites referred to earlier in the thread and keep a running diary of a game I’m starting now. I’m choosing different options than I have in the past and as a result I suspect the game to be anything but a model of how anyone else should play. Keep in mind that I pretty much suck at this game. Maybe it’ll be helpful in showing what not to do. Most likely it’ll only be of interest to me, in any case I assume the OP won’t mind. Along the way I’d appreciate any advice, criticism or whatever else you feel like sharing. Remember, I do not claim to be very good at this game and I’m hoping by keeping a journal of this game and minimizing the amount of automation I use I can help myself to better focus on the details that make a average player great. If I mention something that sounds silly or make a choice that you don’t understand ask me why or speak up so that one of us might learn something. If you don’t care or find it interesting feel free to tell me to shut up :).

Here’s the choices I made:

Level: Noble (Neutral start, what I almost always play)
Civ: American (starts with fishing and agriculture, unique unit is Navy SEAL)
Leader: Washington (Financial and Organized traits)
World Size: Standard
Map Type: Pangaea, Tropical (Never played Pangaea before)
Game Speed: Epic (First for this too, I usually play standard)

I tend to play a somewhat reserved style of game, focusing on research and getting a big tech edge and growing my cities quickly. Often I wait until I can leverage production and technology advantages before doing any warmongering, and in some games I never do more than skirmish. Being mediocre at the game, it usually means a best-case scenario for me is a narrow Space Race victory right around the year 2000.

Things aren’t likely to change drastically in this game since I’ve chosen the commerce king in Washington. Going in I intend to play a game that gets me way ahead in techs. Ideally I want to reach my UU and go on to a domination win militarily while the AI Civs are still playing with Cavalry and Grenadiers at best. I probably won’t research any early religions and will try and be buddy-buddy with all neighbors right out of the gate.

On first glance I seem to have a excellent starting position. Without moving either unit I can see marble adjacent to my settler and elephants two squares away. There’s silk 3 squares away which should be helpful as well. I’m situated on a river with 3 flood plains all immediately within my borders. There’s also a goodie hut 2 squares west. So far this is probably the best starting position I’ve ever seen. Off to the north I can see an ocean just at the edge of the fog so I presume I’m on the northern edge of the super continent.

Upon founding Washington it reveals pigs which will be within my borders at the first culture bump. Things are looking peachy. I choose to build a Warrior off the bat since I don’t want to slow my city growth at this stage with so many fruitful tiles close by. I choose to research Mining first, I want to get using that Marble ASAP. It’s a slight bummer that the flood plains and lack of open water make my inherent traits somewhat useless for now.

The goodie hut provides me with Animal Husbandry…SCORE! I’ll be able to milk those pigs sooner than later, and I need to keep my fingers crossed that I find Iron/Copper and Horses nearby soon.

I’ll check back in once I’m ready to think about founding a second city.

22

At the risk of upsetting people (I hope I won’t), I’d like to ask whether anyone would mind responding to post #4. Thanks! :slight_smile:

23

There was a patch (regular exe file - or you can dl within the game) just before Christmas that brought the version up to 1.52 - although from my perspective, it’s been stable from the beginning. A lot of it was gameplay tweaks. Hardware issues seem to boil down to two: RAM and video cards. I had 512MB of RAM and found the game unplayable at end game, but after adding a gig (I’d planned to add more anyway) I’ve seen zero problems. It’s frozen a couple of times near end game, but it autosaves routinely so you’re never really screwed. My video card is fairly vanilla (cost ~$60) and aside from needing to update the drivers, has presented zero problem.

24

My step-son-like-unit’s computer had no trouble with Civ IV right out of the box. It loaded conventionally, ran without worries, had no glitches, didn’t take long times to work, etc. The upgrades have had no impact negatively so far. I’ve played SP, MP, and PBEM, all of which has worked as advertised.

He has a pretty basic Dell, though it does have a pretty good graphics card in it, so he can run Battlefield 2 and Everquest 2 without trouble.

25

My issues are with memory and video.

I’ve only got 256 MB RAM, which I don’t want to upgrade because a new machine is in my immediate future. (Oddly enough, the last time I bought a new machine was to run Civ III. :slight_smile: ) It causes the game to run slow at all times, and very slowly once a lot of map is visible. Doubling my virtual memory setting helps that somewhat. It’s not unbearable, just slow.

I have onboard video, which a lot of early problems were reported about. They must have put something in the patch. When I installed, the game sneered at me. It automatically set the video options to lower settings. I also killed the battle views, and that helped. My machine does lock up sometimes on “Init Graphics” when loading a save game, but not all that often.

Do download the most recent patch.

26

I’ve got an oldish homebuilt PC. The game had no issues right out of the box for me as well. The only trouble I’ve had is in playing the in-game videos. They get a little choppy and it’s either due to my 512MB Memory or 128Mb GeForce FX Video card. Doesn’t really hurt gameplay as I tend to skip past those things anyways. I d/l and installed the v1.52 patch and haven’t noticed the changes. All in all I think concerns are close to nil unless you’re running a very old box or something with a very specific combonation of components.

27

I’m right at or just above the recommended specs (esp. the video card) and haven’t had any crashes, or at least very few. The game does LAG hardcore on very large maps, especially late in the game – it can take several minutes to load a game or wait for the computer to take its turn! Wonder movies and “Leonard Nimoy Moments” also tend to lag horrifically late in the game.

The game also makes my PC heat up significantly…all those AI calculations give my CPU a major workout!

(There…happy now?) :smiley:

28

That does sound like a mighty sweet start. You should post screenshots.

In the game I played tonight, I spammed the map with 5 scouts and wound up scoring Horseback Riding, Sailing, Compass, and Construction from goodie huts. I’m so far ahead of the AI in tech, it’s sick. :cool:

In another game I got iron & copper early on, but found NO horses anywhere nearby, and nobody would trade with me either. Even after destroying Genghis & Louis with only swords, spears & war elephants (had to trade for the ivory too, and the AI always cancelled the trade after 10 turns, so I was forced to build as many elephants as possible during that short window!) there were no horses to be found anywhere nearby.

Then, after a barbarian raid on the fish tiles near my capital city, I built a couple galleys and noticed…hey, is that another coastline just offshore? Sailed over there and found two small islands, EACH with horses. They had been there all this time!!!

29

Thought about it, and if I can figure out a place to host them I might. I’m not going to be as thorough as the experts on the fansites, but showing you guys what the land looks like could be cool.

30

Wow, thanks for all those responses! Last question: does the game still have the option of saving the random seed? Not saving it was a cheat for good huts and bad battles in Civ III.

31

Not an expert by any means, but here are some tips.

Most of these are from CivIII that still seem to work pretty well.

-I generally play rather defensively, since the inclusion of culture capturing big cities don’t seem to be worth it, because they rebel. Razing seems to be the answer

-Optimal city placement. Making sure the coverage doesn’t overlap while there aren’t gaps in between.

  • Trade technologies. I trade safe, non-military techs fairly often. Usually to trade for other techs, but sometimes just to clear out their bank accounts as well. Their inabilty to run their economy at a deficit seems to hamper them immensely.

  • Trade dangerous technologies to neighbors to your rivals.

  • Trading technologies, seems to insure that I am in the lead technologically which means I don’t have to worry about aggressive neighbors. The instant they declare war, I’m on the phone having other civs declaring war in trade for tech. It will cost you up to three technologies, but forcing your enemy to fight a two or three front war seems worth it.

32

If you play a custom game, you have the option of checking “New random seed on reload.” It is unchecked by default.

33

I’ve heard a lot about poor performance on Civ IV, and I was thinking about having my boyfriend build me a PC with my tax return so I can play PC games again (I’ve got a Mac these days). What do I really need to make it run well? I looked at the requirements at Maxis, sure, but what do I need to make it run non-frustratingly?

34

On this note, am I the only one who has mislabeled disks for Civ IV? The two disks are labled “install” and “install/play”, but if I try to play on the latter, it asks me to insert the disk, and I have no trouble playing on the former.

35

No, it was a common error in the initial release. Mine are the same way.

As for strategy, I haven’t had as much time to play the game as I would like, but I’ll take any starting position so long as I discover marble, stone or horses somewhere in the neighborhood. Marble or stone because they’re too good to pass up; horses because horse archers make holding back the (ridiculously, cheatingly contrived) barbarian hordes manageable. If I can police the hordes I can continue expansion and usually grab enough to make up for the lack of other resources; even iron and copper aren’t necessary until I need to start assaulting other cities.

Old CIV2 habits die hard, I still like to explode across the map as quickly as possible.

36

Personally I find the barbarian hordes an annoyance and have taken lately to turning them off completely. I’m competing against the other civilizations…the barbarians are too much of a wild card that can devastate a civilization and pretty much sap the fun out of the game. For me at least.

I know what you mean…this was my initial strategy as well though in this game it doesn’t work as well. You get penalized for having too many cities early on by negative income. I’ve run into situations where I had the most cities by far in the game yet I had to set my technology development to like 10% or run out of money. Now I go a lot slower, having cities build up to 4’s or more before I send out a settler.

I’ve got an older 1GHZ Pentium IV with a gig of RAM and an older nVidia 5600 video card with 256mb of RAM on it and the game plays reasonably well for me. My only problem has been in the end game if I don’t do the Spaceship thing and the game devolves into a high tech slugging match. Then the game tends to slow down (I suspect because of the ridiculous amount of units the computer manages to squirel away) and occationally I get an error that blows me to the desktop saying I’m out of virtual memory. Other than that the game runs fine for me with this lesser system. At a guess I’d say that, as with other games, the amount of system RAM (and RAM on your video card) is the key, not necessarily the speed of your processor.

-XT

37

A couple quick tips.

My favorite military strategy in Civ3 was to conquer an enemy city and hold it, using it as a fortress to protect my guys and pick off exposed enemy units. But this doesn’t work as well…Civ4 barracks don’t heal units in one turn, plus it takes a lot longer to pacify a city, plus cities revolt back to the parent civilization much quicker. You can’t expect to hold one city on an enemy continent anymore, it will revolt back pretty quickly…although now it doesn’t kill all your garrison troops when it revolts, just dumps them back in your territory. What this means is that you have to keep moving…capture the first cities, but keep going hard razing and capturing to keep his cultural borders pushed back.

It’s also usually a mistake to found a colony city on an AI occupied continent…unless you constantly push the colony city’s culture up it’s going to get absorbed sooner or later. Colonies on islands (islands being defined as land masses with no start sites) do much better, even if everyone is colonizing the same island the AI isn’t as good at culture pushing as a human, and if it comes to war it’s much easier to capture enemy colonies than his core cities, and the colonies won’t flip back.

As for starting locations…stone and marble are very rare resources. If you don’t have stone or marble don’t bother with the early wonders. Some AI civ with the special resource will invariably beat you to them since they get them for half price.

You really have to beware too much early expansion. Big change in Civ4 is that buildings cost no maintenence, maintenence is based strictly on number of cities. Early cities can barely pay for themselves, you’ll be forced down to 20-30% research rate if you expand too fast.

It’s a big help to have the same religion as your neighbors. A civ that shares your religion will almost never stab you in the back. If you found a religion you must get a great prophet as soon as possible to build the holy city shrine, it is a huge moneymaker.

I wouldn’t be obsessed with specializing cities. But the main thing to realize is that a lot of buildings, great wonders, and national wonders increase output by a percentage, not a fixed amount. And you can only have one instance of each national wonder, and each city can only have two national wonders, and you have a limited number of cathedrals based on your number of temples. So it’s better to pile all production increasing improvments into one city, all gold improvements in another, all science improvements in another, and sort out great people and specialists the same way. Specialization is really just as simple as opening up the city screen, sorting the city list by the parameter you want, and building your new national wonder or great wonder in the city with the highest score in that parameter. And it is always better to pile all your cathedrals into your core cities unless you absolutely need them to increase your cultural borders. So when you get a great scientist, find your highest science producing city and build an academy there, when you build Wall Street build it in your best gold producing city, etc. That’s all there is too it. But every city can use every improvement, there’s no need to refrain from building a production-enhancing improvement in a city just because it’s a “science city”.

One nice change is that military units are now a lot more expensive than they were in Civ3…each unit seems to cost about twice as much, in a big war you’ll have a lot fewer units, and you’ll protect your veterans a lot more carefully, there’s a lot less attrition where you blindly hammer your troops at a city until it falls. Defense is a lot stronger now, if you try to just hammer a city with waves of troops you’ll lose most of them. In Civ3 the AI civs would compare the number of units you had to gauge your military strength, now they actually add up the power of all your units…no more garrisioning cities with warriors. And it takes huge amounts of gold to upgrade your units, and no Leonardo’s Workshop! You’ve got to maintain a credible military, or all the aggressive AIs will smell blood in the water. And the AIs now gang up on weak civs…if a civ is losing a war, lots of other civs will declare war on it and try to grab some spoils before it is destroyed completely. If you find yourself in that position…weak military gets you DOWed, an aggressive AI starts kicking you around, and suddenly half the planet DOWs you, you might as well quit.

38

Ahh but barbarians build well-placed cities for me to conquer and justify my enormous, veteran cavalry that will some day be put to good use. With an early power unit (Roma victor!) or horse archers they’re manageable, otherwise yeah, you’re hosed.

They cheat shamelessly. I remember once I had a source of bronze, just one, right? So I’ve got it well-defended, three (!) horse archers patrol the area, no axe man is getting to my precious bronze. So finally, after dozens of battles on the periphery, I let the bronze square go fog-of-war for ONE turn. Sure enough, they spawn right on top and pillage the mine. I was so pissed I deleted the save and didn’t play for a week.

But generally I play with them and have found they actually bring more to my empire than they take from it. It’s just that the benefits don’t come until after you’ve got them beat. Per game, I’d say 30+ full vet units, and maybe 5-6 resource rich cities by the time you’ve got gunpowder.

39

Let me echo what others have said, the real factor seems to be memory. I have a 1.8GHz CPU and it seems to be plenty, but my 512MB memory is at the lowest end of what I’d bother to play with. Build one with a good video card and a gig of memory and you can do middle of the road everywhere else.

I’ve got those discs too. No biggie.

Can someone explain what this means. I have no idea what “random seed” refers to. Thanks.

40

The random numbers on your computer aren’t really random, they’re pseudorandom. Games usually base their “seed” for the random number function from the last few digits of the system time when you start the program. The function will always generate the exact same set of random numbers based on the seed. Think of it like…the game looks at the system time, and gets a number “2:33:45.53”. It could then take that number, and look up the 2334553rd digit of Pi, and use that as your random number, the next random number would be the 2334554th digit of Pi, and on and on.

Anyway, the point is that if you save the game, get a bad “random” result, reload the save and try the same action, you’re going to get exactly the same “random” result. So you’ll always get the same result from popping a hut, or the same “spearman defeats battleship” combat result, unless you reset the seed. You can do this by burning that random number that gave you the bad result by performing some other action that requires a random number, then doing the action that got you the bad result.

It only matters if you’re using game saves to get better results from random events. For some people it’s practically a religion, they just can’t accept a bad roll of the dice that they “shouldn’t” have gotten. It makes no sense to me, I’d rather crank my difficulty level down a notch than go to all that trouble.