I don’t think this has been posted, here is an IGN article with good detail and some screenshots: http://ie.pc.ign.com/articles/107/1075587p1.html
You think wrong. 
No u.
Check again. 
Actually, they were right. The one most recently posted was the preview with some interesting stuff in it. The earlier one was a designer interview that was pretty bland.
I still think attrition would have been a nicely nuanced way to avoid the SoD problem. Get too big a stack together for too long, units start taking damage from starvation. You could nicely work in different terrain effects here (fertile grassland supports more cavalry, that sort of thing).
Historically, generals would have to disperse armies to forage and concentrate for battle.
Ah, yes, just me being plain old wrong. I’d seen that second preview and mistakenly thought it had been from this thread (silly me).
Well get your act into gear or you will be doomed to be opposed by Montezuema for the rest of your battles.
Nooooooooooooooooooooo! Can’t it at least be Isabella? You can reason with her!
I dunno, it never bothered me all that much. So I guess I’m me, to tell everyone I don’t get why they’re getting so worked up.
Sure, from a realism point of view it’s silly, but then so is, say, spending “research points” towards a known goal. Science doesn’t work that way (which, btw, was addressed in SM:AC, where you spent your research more or less blind. Why they went back to the old & stupid system is beyond me - it was brilliant !).
And from a gameplay point of view, there were mechanisms to deal with them : counter-units & splash damage. So, yeah, don’t get the hate.
Now if we were talking about the Blob of Stupid Defeat problem from the Total War series… 
Yes and no. I admit I’ve always been reluctant to change, in all parts of life. While still not being a conservative, for some reason. Guess I’m not enough of a geezer yet 
Once I get used to the new ways though, I’m all good. So I agree that civ4 is a more interesting game than civ1. Which is not to say that newer games are always improvements on the old ones, or that proposed changes are the best way to address observed issues.
As I said, we’ll see. I’ll certainly give it a fair whirl before launching into a real “get orff mah fat cross !” rant ;).
Oh, and if I’m iffy about the new Panzer General-y combat system, I’m thrilled by the idea of each strategic resource node only allowing a finite number of elite units. Makes them *really *worth squabbling over. Me likey.
I’d like to post a belated thank you for the info. When you posted this I wasn’t in the mood for a new Civ IV game, but I tried this out the other day. I had been under the impression that one couldn’t edit the game’s data files this easily. It’s only a little more involved than mucking with the text files in SMAC, and I had tons of fun doing that.
I’ve figured out how to tweak a few things so far, like lifting the limit on the number of active missionaries you can have at once and the business of needing X temples per cathedral. I’ve also figured out how to increase the move speed along roads and railroads.
I’m currently trying to figure out two things:
- How to make monasteries automatically spread their religion the way a shrine does; I’ve seen it in a mod before. I think I’ve almost figured this one out.
- How to remove the limit of how many national wonders I can build in a single city (or at least raise the limit high enough that I can build all of my national wonders in my favorite city). I’m stumped, but I suspect it’s right under my nose.
If anyone knows off the top of their head what line(s) to tweak in what file(s) to do either of these (for BtS), I would greatly appreciate it.
Okay, I’ve figured it out. My first hunch was wrong, though.
Finally had the time to read that article and I must say that it got me awfully fired up. It sounds like the changes they are making are right up my alley and should make combat less frustrating for me. I was especially interested in the concept of City-States that it describes. I was never very good at using and understanding the diplomacy aspect so this might be a challenge but I think it will become more logically coherent. Managing resources and trade seems like it will be very important as well, I’ll be curious to see if the micromanaging of cities is lessened in the new version.
Gimme gimme. Time to start saving up, a new monitor, video card and Civ V game will be on my shopping list the day this comes out.
I still miss capturing the capital to spark a civil war. THAT was cool.
I’m curious about spies and espionage. It seems like every Civ version retools this. It was unrealistic, but I loved flooding my neighbors with waves of 007s inciting unrest and stealing tech.
I hated espionage, and anything that required me to move a bunch of individual units around. I wouldn’t mind it in an abstract form.
Civ 4’s BOTS espionage was part abstracted, and you could actually use it without having to use units at all if you wanted (it just meant you could only do passive espionage).
Not to mention that BTS also gives you the option of disabling espionage at the start of each game; espionage points generated by buildings (courthouses, security bureaus, etc.) are converted to culture, and nobody can build spies. I usually pick that option because foreign spies (even from non-enemies) can become a nuisance that detracts from my fun. If there were an “abract-only” espionage option, I’d probably prefer that.
I’ve got to say that the preview shots show the best-looking farmland in any Civ game to date. Civ III looked horrendous because it just had irrigation canals that made the landscape look mushy rather than productive. Even Civ IV’s farms are disappointing; they look like isolated pockets of farmland mysteriously arranged in a grid. This, on the other hand, shows a lovely carpet of continuous farmland similar to what real (modern) farmland looks like from a bird’s-eye view.
Espionage in Civ3 didn’t involve units at all. You could do some basic espionage just by having an embassy with the other civ (look into one of their cities or attempt to steal a tech, if you’re at peace), and once you got an intelligence agency, you could plant a spy with just a couple of clicks, which just put the spy directly in their capital without ever being a unit, after which you could see what roster of units they had, do the embassy missions while at war, or attempt to do fancier stuff like sabotage production or spread propaganda.
Make your own option. I quickly got sick of AI spies tearing up my improvements and destroying my buildings every damn turn, so I disabled spies altogether via XML, but still have the “abstract” part of espionage.