After playing through another game of Civilization 4 that devolved into a technology tree race, it dawned on me that I have never fought a war with many of the units. Many of the early technology units, from about the longbowman tech to the infantryman tech, often go unused. What is the point of building an army of trebuchets when by the time I move them over to the enemy they are outdated? Why spend my resources on unnecessary military early on when those same resources could have me going up the tech tree faster?
To fix this, I would like to set the technology at a cap. When you start a game, there is a way to set which age you start in (ancient, classical, medieval, etc). Is there an option where I can set what age technology will stop? Could I have a game where knights, for instance, are the highest military unit that can be achieved? If this isn’t a main game feature, is there a mod that does it? FWIW, I have all the expansions installed.
That’s the closest I’ve been able to get to what I’m looking for (marathon is the longest actually). Even those games, however, end up with me fighting with mechanized infantry and stealth bombers for thousands of turns. I’m not much on offense, so I take my time when conquering.
You can adjust the cost of researching technologies in the XML. If you wanted to set a cap you could set the cost of industrial techs extremely high. The problem with this is that the AI won’t realise that the costs are extremely high and so will be pumping loads of their economy into researching a technology that they’ll never research. I think your 2 options are either:
increasing all techs cost (eg tripling the cost of them). That’ll give you more time in each era.
Late game wars are always turn-intensive, with so many types of units to marshall around.
As for setting a technology cap, there’s no way, unless you install a mod specifically designed for it. The good folk at CivFanatics Forum can help point you in the right direction.
ETA: Or, what ColdPhoenix said. :smack:
Another thing that could help is playing on smaller maps and/or with more civs (depending on your current settings, of course). Closer neighbors means less turns wasted just getting to the battlefield.
I mod the files to increase the cost to research tech, decrease the cost to build units, and then toggle on the option to disallow technology trades. The net effect makes it much slower to get tech, so that everyone spends time in each era. And because units are cheap, the opportunity cost to produce units instead of tech is low.
I also toggle on the prohibition against razing cities, and allow only diplomatic victories.
My favorite early war tech is the Roman Praetorian (Swordsman). You get it early, all you have to deal with is miserable archers. Add some catapults and they are unbeatable. The only problem is that it makes early conquest too tempting, you expand too fast.
If you expand too fast, you get such high maintenance costs that tech development suffers and lags. No good having a huge empire guarded by Praetorians, when all your rivals are driving around in tanks.
The way to deal with this is to ensure that your city development - such things as courthouses - keeps pace with the expansion of your empire.
I made a mod that cut off at the “medieval” tech era (knights, no gunpowder, iirc - it’s been a while) for similar reasons as the OP; it was fun, but one of the issues is your civ will feel stagnant beyond a certain point, because all that’s left to do is build military units and attack your neighbours. Of course, that’s fun if you enjoy warfare, but an element of suspense is lost as well, because you know that conquest is the only way someone’s really going to win - you don’t have to worry about your high-tech neighbour beating you in a space race, and cultural wins take longer without modern entertainment. After a few rounds of the medieval cutoff, I went back to standard games with longer length to experience more of an era and still have the “end game” of the match.
Turning tech trading off like Pleonast suggested helps alot. The AI seems to like to trade most it’s techs away the instant it gets them, which means everyone techs up that much faster. Stopping it makes everyone reasearch everything on their own, slowing it all down quite a bit. Once I turned it off, I never looked back. Marathon games with no tech trading seem to be just about right for me.
I’m gonna have to try that mod for my next game. I wish it didn’t keep city growth slow, though. I’d like to play a long game where cities can grow to their “maximum” size fairly quickly and spend most of the time with their growth turned off. Getting a new luxury resource or new happiness building technology would be a bigger deal.
I installed it per the instructions on that site but it does not give me the option to activate it under “Advanced, mods”. Am I doing something wrong? I have the game through Steam, if that matters.
