While technically true, as stated, this is also misleading.

Minority religions can build their religious buildings (Temples, Monastaries, "large" buildings (Cathedrals et al)) and you DO get the full benefit from (most of) these.

Examples:

1 Temple: +1 Happy
5 Temples: +5 Happy

1 Monastary: +10% research
4 Monastaries: +40% research

1 Cathedral: +50% bonus to all culture in that city.
3 Cathedrals: +150% bonus to all culture in that city!


None of these effects require you to have a state religion, or a specific one: they are always available to cities with multiple religions, if you take the time to build all the relevant buildings.


- Sirian
Do you mean you can now build more than one cathedral in a city?

Do you mean you can now build more than one cathedral in a city?

One per religion present. Only the Christian large temple is a Cathedral, though. Islam builds a Mosque, Judaism a Synagogue, etc.

Question about combat: How exactly does first strike work? Does it only work on defense? Someone suggested that it does, but I might have misinterpreted that. It also seems like a decent unit with several first strike would destroy other units- Samurai with Drill promotions?

Edit: Ack, they can't take Drill. Kind of silly.

One per religion present. Only the Christian large temple is a Cathedral, though. Islam builds a Mosque, Judaism a Synagogue, etc.

Even a little bit too "political correct" this is a briliant ideea !!! :goodjob:

But this is also valid if you choose a religion as State-Suported on ? :mischief:

Regards

I read the entire thing, and some concepts finally clicked. I apologize ahead of time if someone already asked this, I haven't read every post in this thread.

You touched on multiple religion combo's, but didn't make any indication that you planned to have more then one religion. Is there any point to researching multiple religions? I don't really understand this area yet. The only thing I really grasp is that the first one to research a religion gets the full benifits as a state religon, but beyond that I am lost.

Thanks.

In your walkthrough, you write: "In 325BC, thanks to some help from a forest chop (cutting forests adds shields, just like in Civ3), Mecca completes the Pyramids:"

In civ3, shields gained from cutting forests didn't contribute to wonder production because it would be very exploitable. What has changed in civ4 to avoid the exploitability of producing wonders by mass-cutting of forests?

Thank your again for the great walkthrough. :goodjob:

Questions


If you don't mind posting in this thread (hopefully it wasn't answered already, if so just link me to it).. could you provide a few more examples of good "leader/tech/religion etc" combinations that you allude to on the site (Industrious - wonder heavy etc). Like what would be a brief synopsis of what a full military strat would be? or full wonder strat.

Well without going into too much detail, each of the civ traits tends to be best at doing certain things.
- Spiritual civs have a strong chance to found an early religion, and their lack of anarchy lets them have a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to the civics (you can swap them almost non-stop as the situation dictates).
- Philosophical civs pump out Great People like no one's business.
- Industrious civs dominate on wonder-building.
- Creative civs get culture automatically in each city, so I usually play them aggressively early on, pushing out a lot of settlers and founding cities right on the borders of other civs, knowing that I can win the culture border wars thanks to my free culture.
- Aggressive civs are the best at fighting early wars; their Melee and Gunpowder units get a free Combat I promotion. That's a huge deal, not only because it adds +10% to overal strength, but because it opens up additional promotions (like Shock, Cover, etc.) and allows their units to get THREE promotions with just a barracks + Vassalage or Theocracy civics (Aztec Jags are downright scary - no resources required and very easy to get to three promotions early on).
- Expansive civs get free health, which basically means their cities can grow to larger sizes (and remember, population still = power in Civ4) not to mention they have half-cost granaries for early expansion.
- Organized starts out slowly, but the half cost civics really start to make a huge difference in the middle of the game, and saves a gigantic amount of money towards the end of the game. You can run the most expensive civics out there and barely feel it (also plays more of a role on the higher difficulties where civics costs hurt more).
- Financial gives you an extra commerce on any tile already producing two or more commerce. It's almost like having the Civ3 Colossus in every city! I'm sure you can see the advantages of that...
You'll have to play around with these and experiment to see which are the best combos for you. :D


Hey Sullla, I notice you mentioned how Caste system is your 'favourite civic', but are there any 'counterbalancing' negatives to it that sometimes means you DON'T take it. For instance, is it a costly civic to maintain (money-wise) under certain situations, or have you found times where you simply couldn't spare the production/food for it? I am curious about this because Sirrian mentioned JUST how difficult it was to balance civics, and so I wanted to know how balanced you felt the civics were!

Personally, I like Caste System because it's a versatile civic - I wouldn't say it's overpowered. Let's look at the other choices in the Labor column. Slavery allows you to rush production with population; not going to be used all that often, but could save you from dire consequences too (especially in MP). Serfdom leads to workers build improvements +50% faster. There's the Industrious trait from Civ3 right there! I'd say that Serfdom presents a viable alternative to Caste System, certainly. Then Emancipation later on has NO civic upkeep, causes your cottages to mature faster, and causes unhappiness for other civs not running it. And Caste System is also the most expensive civic in the Labor column to run. Is it still a no brainer? :) (The main reason I'm using it heavily here is because I'm Philosophical, and it combines well with a Great Person strategy).


But isn't Pyramid wonder too powerfull ?

It is indeed a powerful wonder, but keep in mind it only unlocks the Government column civics (not all of them), and it's not an easy wonder to build either. Even with stone, it took over 20 turns for me to get it in this game. I easily could have had some additional cities if I had not chosen to pursue the Pyramids. I'd agree it's strong, but I wouldn't say it's too powerful.


Sullla, you appear to have 4 cities at the moment (275 BC-ish). Would you regard this as 'typical' for an average game? The maintenance thing really does seem to work, preventing lots and lots of little cities.

There is no typical number of cities to have at a certain date; in different conditions, I'll prioritize expansion to a greater or lesser degree. I wasn't really pushing it very hard in this game, to be honest; I was more interested in building up a few cities than pushing hard for a lot of small ones (which can also be a viable strategy at times). I will say, however, that the days of having 25 cities by 1AD are gone - you won't be seeing that. Still, you can definitely have more cities than I had here if you push expansion.


What happens when a holy city is captured or destroyed. If captured do you gain access to the benefits of the holy city or does it switch. And if it is destroyed does another city take over and if so how is the new one determined.

In CivIII, a recently captured city lost all culture and all cultureproducing buildings Does the same apply in CivIV.

And how many turns does anarchy last, in civIII it could last for up to 5-6 turns which made me avoid government switching entirely after I decided for one and thus fought wars as a Democracy (works as long as you are more powerful and finish things fast enough ). I think you said turn of anarchy somewhere, does that mean it is only one turn of anarchy

If you capture a holy city you can gain all of its benefits, expect that any shrine in the city will be destroyed (you'll have to use another Great Prophet to rebuild it). All cultural buildings are lost upon capturing a city (aside from world wonders, of course) as in Civ3. Culture also has to start from zero again. Razing a holy city will remove any possibility of building a shrine for that religion, but the religion itself will still exist if it is present in other cities. There is only one holy city for each religion - a new one is not created if the original one is destroyed (therefore, protect the holy city!)

Anarchy usually lasts one turn in Civ4 when swapping civics. If you change a lot of them at once (like 4 or 5 at a time), you will have additional turns of anarchy. You will not get 8 turns of anarchy from a civics swap though; I think 3 is the limit (not 100% positive of that).


Question about combat: How exactly does first strike work? Does it only work on defense? Someone suggested that it does, but I might have misinterpreted that. It also seems like a decent unit with several first strike would destroy other units- Samurai with Drill promotions?

Combat in Civ4 takes place in rounds; each round the game uses the combat odds to calculate a winner and the two units keep fighting until one is destroyed. First strikes cause extra rounds to take place before the combat proper starts; with two first strikes, a samurai gets two "free" rounds of combat where if it wins the other unit gets damaged, and if it loses it suffers no damage. They are thus free hits on the other unit before it can respond. 2 first strikes is actually pretty strong; the samurai has a decent chance to kill outdated units before they even get a chance to fight back, and give it a big advantage in combat against units with equal strength. It is unfortunate that Samurai can't get Drill promotions though (the promotions are done by unit types, not individual units).

And regarding what Sirian posted, he's absolutely right. If you have two religions in a city, you can build two temples, two monasteries, etc. I didn't mention that before because I was thinking in terms of "what effect does a second non-state religion have?" and you don't get any DIRECT benefit from it beyond shrine income, but yes you can indeed build additional religious buildings from having a minority religion. And that's in truth a pretty significant benefit. :cool:

EDIT: Roland, the reason why you can't over-abuse forest chops is that workers can't plant additional ones in Civ4. Thus, no reason to have the shields not apply to wonders.

Am i the only one that thinks this should be stickied?

-SA

Well, first up, for my money, a combination of 2 free engineers, culture and a bonus to getting a great engineer would be a more than fitting reward for building the Pyramids. Failing that, you could always have them double the bonus of Obelisks as well ;)!

Anyway, Sullla, you mention that you can't plant forests!!!! That changes a LOT! Are you forever denied this ability, or is there a tech where you can-eventually-grow forests yourself (I am thinking ecology!)?

Lastly, as I have said above, Caste system doesn't sound ALL that overpowered, for many of the reasons you already mentioned, Sullla, but I still stand by my belief that-at the very least-representation should come with a Medium or High upkeep to help balance out its power!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Pyramids does not provide two free Great Engineers (like OMG that would be unbelievably strong!) It provides the usual 2 Great Person points per turn, and those happen to be Great Engineer points (like how Stonehenge provides Great Prophet points). You are a little confused, Aussie. :)

OK, let's look at the Government civics then. Hereditary Rule grants you happiness for each military unit in a city, WITHOUT LIMIT. You can grow your cities way beyond the usual happiness limit using this civic, or take advantage of a luxury-resource-poor start. Police State grants +25% extra production of military units AND -50% war weariness. It's the BEST civic in the game for fighting wars, hands down. Universal Suffrage grants an extra shield to every tile with a town on it (can be very strong if you go the cottage-heavy route) AND allows you to rush-buy stuff with gold. Under Representation, you can NEVER rush anything, unless you pop-rush it with Slavery. Uh - those are all pretty viable choices! :)

Now Representation *WAS* the best civic for me, but that's because I was basing my strategy around heavy use of specialists to generate Great People, being Philosophical. If I had picked a Financial civ and gone the cottage route, Universal Suffrage would have started to look a lot more attractive. Keep that in mind. :D

Not confused, Sullla, just putting forward alternative suggestions for what pyramids could give instead of access to all government civics. OK, two free engineers might be too powerful-how about just the one? My point is that it makes good HISTORICAL sense, because a lot of builders, craftsmen were brought in from across Egypt to build the real pyramids, and this is what a free specialist could represent.

As for representation. I have NO problem with its effects, just its low upkeep. IMO, the three top government civics should be either medium or high (perhaps Hereditary Rule and Rep could be Medium, with Police State and Universal Sufferage could be High!)
As I said, these are opinions based on my 3rd hand observations alone. Perhaps I will feel differently after playing the game!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

I havea nitpicky question. It's apparent from your city screens that you're getting a fair number of bonuses that don't really show up. For example, the Mecca size 7 screen under today's update shows you with 12 health, and only five from food resources. One is probably from the river; is the other 6 your difficulty-based freebie? Same question for happiness; I count a mere 2 :), but you have 9.

Further, a few city screens show a lot more hammers than are on the map. On the same screen, Mecca has 15 hammers from its tiles, but is putting 33 towards Pyramids. Even assuming you have 2x from stone, that's an extra 3 hammers from somewhere. Likewise, the first Damascus screen on the next page shows 8 hammers when I see 7 on the map. The next shot shows 26 hammers coming from 11 on the map, although you have 2x again from Spiritual. Where's all the extra production coming from?

Thank you Sulla for a nice distraction from all the school work I have to do. I await your next update

Khaim -- I think that's at least partially attributable to the Civics bonus from Organized Religion. +25% hammer production for buildings (including wonders) in cities which have your civ's adopted religion.

Arathorn

One per religion present. Only the Christian large temple is a Cathedral, though. Islam builds a Mosque, Judaism a Synagogue, etc.

So is there any reason to not want a religion in your city?

and secondly does a religion ever leave a city?

Even a little bit too "political correct" this is a briliant ideea !!!

You say politically correct, I say accurate. It would be a little annoying to see the same improvement over and over; having them have unique names is much better.


- Spiritual civs have a strong chance to found an early religion, and their lack of anarchy lets them have a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to the civics (you can swap them almost non-stop as the situation dictates).

Question: when you switched civics, you did both switches at the same time rather than doing the first one and waiting until you discovered the second. Why was that?


If you capture a holy city you can gain all of its benefits, expect that any shrine in the city will be destroyed (you'll have to use another Great Prophet to rebuild it).

Ha. Excellent.


All cultural buildings are lost upon capturing a city (aside from world wonders, of course) as in Civ3.

Ouch. How much does that hurt conquest?


There is only one holy city for each religion - a new one is not created if the original one is destroyed (therefore, protect the holy city!)

Excellent.

That's a very good write-up, Sullla. The only disappointing thing is that you didn't change your in-game name to be Sullladin.

Thanks for your response Sulla

Here are a few pretty newb questions. I'm new to Civ so bear with me :)

I wanted to try an early military Aztec Jag strategy but it didn't pan out too well. This question is to anyone, if an opponent civ has like 4 defensive units in a town, is it worth even attacking? Seemed pretty impenetrable. It was 2 warriors and 2 archers. I got owned. What are some keys to city attack?

Another question to anyone..

What are the various ways to increase food, production, commerce? I'm sure there are many but can you list some that you can think of off the top of your head (including structures, wonders, techs etc)

How about increase happiness (ie: counter unhappiness)

How about increase health?

Thanks very much for your help.

You can blame (or credit) me directly for the Pyramids. I'm one of those who nudged things toward some throwbacks to Civ1, and giving the Pyramids back (something akin to) their original effect was one of my suggestions that Soren decided to use.

I have no regrets! I'm pleased with the effect it has in actual games. :cooool:


The effects of wonders can be modded to something else for those who want that. :) Takes a little elbow grease, though...


- Sirian

So is there any reason to not want a religion in your city?

and secondly does a religion ever leave a city?

Yes
No

Hope that helps. :)

Your walkthrough is extremely usefull and informative, I shall keep reading it after I get the game because it contains many ideas for good strategies.

The pyramids seems me also good for an early military rush. +25% unit production is a lot and could easily decide wars. If you combine that with the aggresive trait and civics who give +experience could you do a devastating military rush, against enemies who have to pay more for their units then you(they can't acces police state yet). Napoleon could be a good leader for this strategy, Aggressive + Industrious seems me the perfect traits for this strategy.

Yes
No

Hope that helps. :)

well... Yes and No (I'm glad of the first...although not knowing what it is just causes more curiousity... The second, I'm kind of disappointed in, especially with regard to the first, because if it would be good for religion to leave a city, then I'd want to be able to do it. (although maybe the 'unspoken penalty' can be reduced by various methods... so that even though you can't eliminate Christianity from your cities, you can minimize the bad effect from Christians...which would be sensible, the religions can go underground but never be eliminated.)

Thoughts of possible penalties...increased sympathy with another power (war weariness when attacking them, increased flip/rebellion probablility, increased gold/LOS to someone else's Holy City.) If religious buildings made these problems worse, that would make them more balanced... is one more +1 happy/+10% res/+50% cult for that minority religion worth the increased flip chance+war Weariness?

Paragraph 55-A

Yes.

Paragraph 55-B

No.


Now my bases are covered, all questions can be referred back to these two paragraphs. Ahh mighty Thief, you are a contractual genius!

Yes Sirrian, I WILL 'Blame' you ;) :)! Seriously though, of all the Wonder effects I have seen, this is the ONLY one which seems 'overpowered'-all the others seem just right. I actually like how they have changed The Great Library-so that it isn't quite the 'game-breaker/maker' it used to be. I confess that it is this that formed the basis for how I believe the Pyramids SHOULD work (and, guaranteed, I WILL be modding it ;)!)

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Bump back to the front page!

Yes Sirrian, I WILL 'Blame' you ;) :)! Seriously though, of all the Wonder effects I have seen, this is the ONLY one which seems 'overpowered'-all the others seem just right.

What's overpowered about it?

* Universal Suffrage "Town" effects are completely useless early on. The gold rushing can help, but you can't spend gold you don't have!
* Representation Happiness is redundant with Hereditary Rule (HR can actually be better), so it's only the research -- and if you have less than a few specialists, you lose more in Civics Upkeep than you make in science!
* Police State can help you with warmongering, but Vassalage or Theocracy helps more!

By contrast, Aussie, everything you've proposed -WOULD- break the game balance as it exists now. Even one extra "free" Engineer would double the rate at which Great Engineers can be spawned in the early game -- and those can build an ENTIRE wonder in one turn.

Go ahead and mod it! Have fun. :) Try whatever appeals to you. I can appreciate the notion that you want to change some things. That's why the game is moddable -- you can have the game you want, or get closer to it.


- Sirian

Ouch, Sirian, no need to get angry with me :( ! Well, I assume you are getting angry with me, 'cause you sound it. Like I said in my earlier post-I ADMIT that my views are based on 3rd-hand experience at best, perhaps I will change my mind when I play the game. I am curious though, if a free engineer from pyramids is sooo powerful, then how come Great Library grants-is it 1 or 2?-free scientists? Wouldn't this make Great Library too overpowered. Like I said, it was the GL effect which influenced my thoughts on what a good effect for pyramids-in both gameplay and realism terms-would be.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

This should be stickied :)

Sullla, this really is well written, I am even going to tear myself away from the game (when I get it...canada) to read the next chapters!

@ Aussie : Though I find many of your posts interesting to read, the fact that you make all kinds of assumptions on a yet-to-be-released game (at the time), and this on a large scale, can get annoying. ;) I myself like to throw my little comments on something when I feel like it. But you often judge things before actually experimenting with it, and before it is set in stone, and it's generally an assumption about one feature, without considering the big picture altogether, which can be VERY MISLEADING when you get a brand new game written from scratch and totally reworked like this is the case now. To give you an example, I consider it OK to rant on those silly wild animals as barbs (one could just say "let's replace them with more primitive human barbs"), whereas what's the point in claiming that roads are broken because they don't yield gold anymore, without knowing how gold works in Civ4 ? Just an example, as it's the kind of things you keep repeating over and over. Save your time, fellah !! :D

when will ths be finished?

OK, the truth is that I merely OBSERVE-I never STATE-there is a WORLD of difference. Mainly, I always attach the caveat of 'it looks like' or 'it seems' or 'perhaps I am wrong but....'. I have, EVER said 'oh this feature will definitely be PERFECT' or 'oh, this feature is definitely CRAP' or 'this feature IS 100% OVERPOWERED'. Which is why I so often get so annoyed at people who DO make statements of that kind. If you are going to accuse me of something, then at least ensure that it is based on FACT!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

The horror! Part 4 is 5 minutes late!!!!!

So I'm in a rut. My order is "being processed" at Amazon right now. (Of course, they charge my credit card two days before shipping...)

The horror! Part 4 is 5 minutes late!!!!!


10 minutes now... :(

Oh where is Sullla? :cry:

Oops, double post.

Edit: On the plus side, he took my suggestion to add links to parts two and three. :)

Half and hour :P

I'm so excited to get Civ 4

10 minutes now... :(

Oh where is Sullla? :cry:


I just got an email from Gandhi apparently he built the Manhatten Project and we'll Sulla and his civilization are no more........ :D

ManiacMarshall: The natives are getting restless. If you don't get part 4 up soon your workers might have to hook up some lux to keep em happy :-P. I, however, am going to bed and will read it tomorrow :-D

Sulla: I'm in the midst of a Civ4 MP game, they can wait a few more minutes :-)

Shouldn't be long

- Maniac

*Goes into Anarchy*

Sulla beated me in mp . :cry:

Sulla beated me in mp . :cry:

How badly did ye lose?

And... Does that mean he will post soon? :eek:

Sulla: I'm in the midst of a Civ4 MP game, they can wait a few more minutes :-)

A few more minutes? More like 90 more... :crazyeye:

I'm too obsessed.

A few more minutes? More like 90 more... :crazyeye:

I'm too obsessed.


I reckon he should have to put part 5 up as well! :D

I'm too obsessed.

At least you aren't alone...

A few more minutes? More like 90 more... :crazyeye:

I'm too obsessed.

Actually instead of few more minutes we should read that as one more turn...which means everyone needs to go to bed ...or back to their own Civ IV game.

Sorry guys, I was involved in a dynamite MP game tonight that lasted longer than expected. I intend to write up a summary of that as well for my website soon (possibly tomorrow if all goes well). Anyway, Part Four has been posted! I'll see if I can go through some of your questions tomorrow. (It's after 2am?! :sleep: )

Ouch, Sirian, no need to get angry with me :( ! Well, I assume you are getting angry with me, 'cause you sound it. Like I said in my earlier post-I ADMIT that my views are based on 3rd-hand experience at best, perhaps I will change my mind when I play the game. I am curious though, if a free engineer from pyramids is sooo powerful, then how come Great Library grants-is it 1 or 2?-free scientists? Wouldn't this make Great Library too overpowered. Like I said, it was the GL effect which influenced my thoughts on what a good effect for pyramids-in both gameplay and realism terms-would be.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

I'm not angry. I know you're excited about the game! I am, too.

The balance issue is specific to Great Engineers. You can't get more than one regular Engineer at a time in a city until you get all the way forward to factories or Ironworks national wonder. That is a deliberate design choice. The ability of the Great Engineer to rush an entire wonder on the spot is very powerful. Too powerful to turn loose willy nilly without breaking the game. (How did we come to this conclusion? I can't say, but maybe you can add it up for yourself if you think it through from the logical starting point.)

A player literally has to avoid popping many of the other great leader types to get a Great Engineer or two in the early game. That's doable, but it takes dilligence. (Have to go for Metal Casting quickly, then run a single Engineer for a long time, nonstop, in one or two cities, without "getting ahead" of their pace with other great leader types in other cities -- otherwise you just keep moving the goalposts and you never do get an Engineer!)

Later in the game, the lid comes off with Factories and you can get lots of Engineers in the late game -- BUT then they often no longer rush a complete (very costly) wonder by themselves and you need two or you have to build part of the wonder manually -- AND you can't rush Projects.

Changing anything in the early game can ripple all the way through the game.

That's not necessarily bad. There are many ways that Civ could be done well, and the things we settled on are only one of them. Some mod things could be fun just to try, whether or not they work out as intended. I'm sure the Pyramids as you envision them could be fun for you or for me -- but I am used to examining more than that. I have to look a bit wider, to how a game balance question would be answered in MP, or on high difficulty in the hands of the AI, or in the hands of players hungry for any advantage they can get and ready to identify, exploit and publicize a major rift in the game balance.

The Great Library will give you more research and get you more leaders, but they won't be Engineers. The Scientists could be used for any number of things, but they won't give you a free Great Wonder of your choice!

The Pyramids were a fancy burial mound -- really REALLY big ones designed to support the beliefs (and egos) of the leaders of Egypt at the time. Any effects given to them in the game are going to be ahistorical -- almost everything in the game is ahistorical from a purist standpoint. It's the only wonder in Civ4 that opens up late game Civic choices earlier in the game. I think that's kind of cool!


- Sirian

Hi Sulla!

So first off I want to say I have learned so many things by reading your guide and understanding your strategies.

Out of everything you did in your guide, there is only two things you did that I don't understand your reasons for doing. Why did you keep Hastings and York? I thought that with the higher matience costs of Civ4, you would have razed them due to their lack of usefulness (being in such unproductive lands)

And I know you wanted to take out Elizabeth but why did you settle Najran/ use a culture bomb in the sourthern unproductive lands (instead of expanding north). It seems you could have take out Elizabeth without Najran by attacking from your orginal borders and settled Najran in a more fruitful spot north before the AI claims it.

Thanks alot!

Oh and don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to tell how to play at all! I'm just trying to learn from a seasoned beta tester why you did what you did! :)

having read part 4 just now, I have a few remarks or questionmarks about the game.

1. flips are really back, maybe not an immedtiate flip, but nevertheless, they are back. does that also mean, if you capture a core city from a cultures-strong civ, that it would revolt sooner or later and flip? does sound like it.

2. culture bombs: seem too powerful to me, maybe could be softened, if the AI knows how to use them. Do they use this tool?

3. war: you can now actually see the amount and type of enemies in a city. like spies for free. artillery seems again way powerful, just as a combo or arty/Cav or tanks could shred any town in Civ3.
again, is the AI capable of launching the same intelligent assaults?

Overall, I am a little concerned that the depth in decision making will be too much for the AI. Maybe you could enlighten me, Sullla.

By the way, it's an excellent write-up

Hurray! Sorry I was so impacient Sullla, I was just rather excited!Even more so now with the prospect of 'overseas colonisation'... :)

1-So, you seem to have a lot fewer cities in 4 than you would in civ 3 by AD 430 . Other than the penalty imposed for having cities, why are there so few settlements in your possession?

2-Catapults are in danger of return-fire now?

3-How is it that upon conquering York, you have full culture-borders, but when you ake London, its borders are 1x1?

4-Great People seem... pleasant.

5-You razed Nottingham, the Confucian holy city. Two questions:
5a: Does that automatically make Confucianism dead? Or, can a religion carry on without its holy city? Is it advantagous to destroy an enemy-religion's holy city (to reduce income of an enemy civ/stunt that religion's growth)?
5b: If it dies (by the conquest or in general) can it restore itself? Or is a religion dead permanenetly in the game once crushed?

6-You seem to be encouraging a multi-religious state... Is it good to have multiple religions in your empire? Only if they are all founded by you? I'm still trying to understand the whole dynamic religions bring to Civ 4...

7-Do civs still have that silly obsession with colnising every nook and cranny of the world?

8-Do leaders remember things permenantly? By which I mean; if you did not defeat England, would Victoria eventually forget her grievances?

@Sirian. Well, in that case, what about 2 free 'Citizen' Specialists (or +1 per city)? Basically, your city gets the equivalent of +2 hammers, without sacrificing food AND with no danger of unbalancing the Great Engineer side of the game. Combined with the +2 Great engineer points and culture, I think this would be quite balanced AND is, IMO, one of the most historical representations of the Pyramids effects.

@Sullla. Noticed how you mention the danger of having 'homogeneous' stacks, but then you sent out a pretty homogeneous stack of elephants and cats. Did you only do this because you were pretty CERTAIN that Vicky was stuffed? ;) Would have loved it if she had a suprise up her sleeve :)! Fantastic walkthrough, I am TRULY loving it :)!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

@ThERat. For my part, though I would prefer a good 'secession' model ;), I don't have a problem with culture flips being in the game-given the refinements they have made (i.e. not random and no losing your units). If Vicky had been SMART, then she would have called Sulla up and offered him the city in return for some kind of 'consideration'-or gifted it to him because it wasn't worth anything to her any more (just a liability). I have heard stories of the AI taking such initiative.
As for Culture Bombs, it should be pointed out that, with fewer cities and the multiple uses of Great People, I get a very strong sense that culture bombs are not as powerful as you might think. All you need to do is see how LONG it has taken him to produce just 1 of these guys (around 150AD was it?) Thats a long time between drinks, as they say. Given that he might want to join a great artist to a city as a super specialist, or use it to gain a tech OR use it as part of a golden age, I wouldn't be suprised if he only used culture bombs a few more times in this game (at a guess!)
As for siege weapons, given the fact they can be killed in combat-and given that they are usually a darned sight weaker than other units of their age-I don't think they are too overpowered. Also, as Sullla himself said, if Vicky had had long bows or mounted units, his Cats would have been toast. It really does sound like there are no true 'uber-units' in the game. I do agree with you, though, that I would prefer it if you didn't automatically find out what units were in an enemy city-you should only be able to discover that info if you can 'look inside' their cities. But that is just IMO. Anyway, I look forward to seeing what Sullla has to say on all these matters (or Sirian :)!)

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

@Sullla. Noticed how you mention the danger of having 'homogeneous' stacks, but then you sent out a pretty homogeneous stack of elephants and cats. Did you only do this because you were pretty CERTAIN that Vicky was stuffed? ;) Would have loved it if she had a suprise up her sleeve :)! Fantastic walkthrough, I am TRULY loving it :)!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.


Remember he said that he wasn't worried that Vicky would attack with catapults because Vicky doesn't have the technology to build them.


It's amazing that we have to think of all these things; I'm going to have to really strategise more when I play Civ4, it will make the game a lot more fun if I put more thought into what I am doing. (I usually don't because I am too lazy :lol: )

actually if you can see which units the enemy has, that gives a HUGE benefit. Please tell me that this counts only for low difficulty levels. It would be so anticlimatic IMHO

actually if you can see which units the enemy has, that gives a HUGE benefit. Please tell me that this counts only for low difficulty levels. It would be so anticlimatic IMHO


TheRat, don't forget that generals in history would usually know what units the enemy has before the battle commenced. And don't forget that the AI knows what you have too.

And don't forget that the AI knows what you have too.I thought they got rid of the whole nonsense of AI cheating, that's what all the beta testers claimed. Sullla or Sirian or any other beta tester needs to clarify this, please :)

I thought they got rid of the whole nonsense of AI cheating, that's what all the beta testers claimed. Sullla or Sirian or any other beta tester needs to clarify this, please :)

It isnt a cheat if AI and Player have same ability...

Hi Sulla,

Civ4 isn't out yet here in the midst of Africa, so I'm very glad to see how the game acrually works! Very good walkthrough, i like how you diversify to show as many aspects of the game as possible.
"Oh, why do I have to wait so long for Civ4?"

Hi Sulla,

Civ4 isn't out yet here in the midst of Africa, so I'm very glad to see how the game acrually works! Very good walkthrough, i like how you diversify to show as many aspects of the game as possible.
"Oh, why do I have to wait so long for Civ4?"



Welcome to CFC , KizilKaR [party] !


I'm in the same boat - I'm not getting it until sometime in January ( unless I'm very lucky ) .

actually if you can see which units the enemy has, that gives a HUGE benefit. Please tell me that this counts only for low difficulty levels. It would be so anticlimatic IMHO

Not sure what you're talking about.


Aussie: two or three Citizens in one city would be fairly innocuous. On the other hand, would you really want to invest several hundred early shields to get a trickle of them over time?

I'm not quite getting why you have such antipathy for the early access to Government civics. :) You mentioned balance, but this ability is not overpowered. You mentioned historical accuracy, but a lot of other things fail that test even more strongly. Is there something else? Or is it the charm of having multiple wonders repeating similar forms of what the Great Library does?

The city specialists are definitely one of the most interesting parts of the game, thanks to the Great Person element. I can understand wanting to play with more of them. The fact that the Citizens don't impact Great People, though, makes them a LOT weaker and less interesting than the other types. The idea might go from too strong to too weak, just like that! Kind of crazy, I know. :crazyeye:


- Sirian

Sirian, i was talking about the fact that Sullla could see all units in the English towns that he attacked, thats quite a change from Civ3.

Also, could you answer those questions I posted before that, thanks so much. :)

Many thanks Sulla. The walkthrough is far better than any review to give a feel of what the new version is like to play. I shall sacrifice 50 warriors in your honour.

3-How is it that upon conquering York, you have full culture-borders, but when you ake London, its borders are 1x1

I am guessing because the screenshot was taken while it was in the 3 turn revolt after being taken

I also have some questions this time around.

Can you still disband cities in Civ4 or must you decide on capture if you destroy or keep the city. If disbanding is still allowed, is it linked to the pregame setting of no city razing.

How does ship bombarding work? Can ships still bombard land units? The artillery bombard attack is balanced because in the attack they can be lost (but do lots of collateral damage).

If culture flipping is switched of in the pregame settings, what game effect would be left for the city of Hastings? There is also a pregame setting called City Flipping after conquest (which seems to be switched of in your game). Does this mean that if a city is conquered, then it can never flip or has this pregame switch some other meaning?

Why can't the city of Elephantine flip?. In Civ3, if a city didn't control all of its city-tiles, then it could flip (under some conditions). What are the rules in Civ4? If no wars arise, will the natural development of culture mean that Elephantine will reclaim some tiles currently controlled by your culture? Is there some (easy) formula that you know that determines which culture controls a certain tile?

Thank you for taking the time to write this excellent walkthrough and showing us the different ways to victory in civ4.

OK, the truth is that I merely OBSERVE-I never STATE-there is a WORLD of difference. Mainly, I always attach the caveat of 'it looks like' or 'it seems' or 'perhaps I am wrong but....'. I have, EVER said 'oh this feature will definitely be PERFECT' or 'oh, this feature is definitely CRAP' or 'this feature IS 100% OVERPOWERED'. Which is why I so often get so annoyed at people who DO make statements of that kind. If you are going to accuse me of something, then at least ensure that it is based on FACT!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.
No problem for me, here's an excerpt of a post of yours in this very thread, written yesterday :

As for representation. I have NO problem with its effects, just its low upkeep. IMO, the three top government civics should be either medium or high (perhaps Hereditary Rule and Rep could be Medium, with Police State and Universal Sufferage could be High!)
As I said, these are opinions based on my 3rd hand observations alone. Perhaps I will feel differently after playing the game!
Notice the use of the modal verb "should", about something you're not in a position to judge, since you haven't played the game yet, nor written a thesis about it. Also notice you confess your lack of knowledge about the game, somehow contradicting the use of "should". Was that worth the effort ? ;) Why not asking questions instead of making assumptions for a change ? Just my opinion, and I could find tons of other examples when the search feature is back.

Sulllllla, exactly how many l's are in your name? I've seen it different ways (even when written by you). Is it 2 or 3.



:rolleyes:

Many many questions have been posted since I last had a chance to answer some of them... Serves me right for starting a MP game at 10pm and having it end up as a 4 hour event! :)


I havea nitpicky question. It's apparent from your city screens that you're getting a fair number of bonuses that don't really show up. For example, the Mecca size 7 screen under today's update shows you with 12 health, and only five from food resources. One is probably from the river; is the other 6 your difficulty-based freebie? Same question for happiness; I count a mere 2 , but you have 9.

Further, a few city screens show a lot more hammers than are on the map. On the same screen, Mecca has 15 hammers from its tiles, but is putting 33 towards Pyramids. Even assuming you have 2x from stone, that's an extra 3 hammers from somewhere. Likewise, the first Damascus screen on the next page shows 8 hammers when I see 7 on the map. The next shot shows 26 hammers coming from 11 on the map, although you have 2x again from Spiritual. Where's all the extra production coming from?

You're right, sometimes the numbers don't appear to match up. Partly that is due to some civic effects taking place that aren't immediately visible (like Organized Religion's production boost), but there are other effects as well. The main reason why the shield numbers don't match up is because in a lot of the screenshots, the overflow from the previous build is being counted in the number (if I have 10 shields of overflow in a city that usually gets 15 shields/turn, it will display as 25 shields/turn for that turn). That's what's mostly going on. Regarding the health, you get +2 health for founding a city on fresh water, and +0.4 health for each forest tile in a city's radius (that's probably what caused that).


when will ths be finished?

It's a seven-part Walkthrough, so I guess that means the last part will be on Monday. Like I said, it's a full game of Civ4!


Sulla beated me in mp .

Mat was in the MP game we were playing last night. But hey, don't complain to me, Mat - you declared war on ME! :lol:

http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/MP10274.jpg


Out of everything you did in your guide, there is only two things you did that I don't understand your reasons for doing. Why did you keep Hastings and York? I thought that with the higher matience costs of Civ4, you would have razed them due to their lack of usefulness (being in such unproductive lands)

And I know you wanted to take out Elizabeth but why did you settle Najran/ use a culture bomb in the sourthern unproductive lands (instead of expanding north). It seems you could have take out Elizabeth without Najran by attacking from your orginal borders and settled Najran in a more fruitful spot north before the AI claims it.

Hastings was worthwhile to keep because there was a corn resource there and a lot of water tiles. Even one food resource is more than sufficient to create a strong fishing village. It was pulling about 70 beakers/turn by the end of my game - by no means a waste! York's land wasn't great, but I needed the city to secure a copper source and grab the furs. It was never anything special, but even junk cities are useful for grabbing key resources.

Secondly, of course I could have killed Victoria without using a culture bomb there. But remember, I'm also playing this game to demonstrate various different things, and I wanted to show people what you can do with the Great Artists. Culture flips are rare, so I wanted to document one taking place. Finally - to be honest, there were no resources I didn't already have nearby to the north. The ones I needed were actually down there in the tundra! So from a resource perspective, it also made sense to head down there first. Not to mention strategically securing my southern flank.


1. flips are really back, maybe not an immedtiate flip, but nevertheless, they are back. does that also mean, if you capture a core city from a cultures-strong civ, that it would revolt sooner or later and flip? does sound like it.

2. culture bombs: seem too powerful to me, maybe could be softened, if the AI knows how to use them. Do they use this tool?

3. war: you can now actually see the amount and type of enemies in a city. like spies for free. artillery seems again way powerful, just as a combo or arty/Cav or tanks could shred any town in Civ3.
again, is the AI capable of launching the same intelligent assaults?

1) NO, a city you capture in war will never flip back to its original owner. Cities captured in war will not flip back. Period. Everyone hated that feature in Civ3, so it's not something that will ever take place in Civ4. Now the city you take may be uselessly unhappy, but it won't flip.

2) The culture bombs are only really strong when used in the right places (areas that have little to no culture built up). If you go back and look at my second culture bomb, you'll see a more typical result. On the other hand, I have yet to see an AI civ use a culture bomb, so that's one area where the AI can still be improved upon.

3) This is simply a different dynamic in Civ4. You can see the enemies in the cities if you move next to them. It doesn't really change the game all that much, since you have to be next to the cities to see the enemies usually. The reason why I could often see the enemies ahead of time here is because I had Hinduism in most of the English cities.


1-So, you seem to have a lot fewer cities in 4 than you would in civ 3 by AD 430 . Other than the penalty imposed for having cities, why are there so few settlements in your possession?

2-Catapults are in danger of return-fire now?

3-How is it that upon conquering York, you have full culture-borders, but when you ake London, its borders are 1x1?

4-Great People seem... pleasant.

5-You razed Nottingham, the Confucian holy city. Two questions:
5a: Does that automatically make Confucianism dead? Or, can a religion carry on without its holy city? Is it advantagous to destroy an enemy-religion's holy city (to reduce income of an enemy civ/stunt that religion's growth)?
5b: If it dies (by the conquest or in general) can it restore itself? Or is a religion dead permanenetly in the game once crushed?

6-You seem to be encouraging a multi-religious state... Is it good to have multiple religions in your empire? Only if they are all founded by you? I'm still trying to understand the whole dynamic religions bring to Civ 4...

7-Do civs still have that silly obsession with colnising every nook and cranny of the world?

8-Do leaders remember things permenantly? By which I mean; if you did not defeat England, would Victoria eventually forget her grievances?

So many questions! :lol: 1) Why are there few cities? Well, where else would I have put a city? I had the land covered decently with the cities I had. Of course I could have crammed in some more cities, but there wouldn't have been much of a point to that; ICS strategies generally are counterproductive in Civ4. I should have placed Baghdad on the coast and placed a 5th city between it and Damascus, but otherwise I was happy with my city spacing.
2) Well, cats have to attack in order to do damage, so yes. They can bombard city defenses without attacking though.
3) I didn't have full borders at York. What you're seeing is actually the borders from my CAPITAL, which has a ton of culture and is close by.
4) OK. :)
5) Religions don't disappear without their holy city. So long as one city in the world has that religion in it, it will still exist. However, a holy city can never be rebuilt - once it's gone, it's gone forever. No one will ever build the Confucian shrine in this game.
6) Multiple religions won't hurt you. They open up the possibility for additonal shrine income, allow you to build extra temples/monasteries/cathedrals, and add extra happiness under Freedom of Religion. Now, is it worth prioritizing a second religion over doing something else? That's a question that can only be answered in the context of a specific game.
7) Yes, to some extent, but not as bad as in Civ3. If the AI didn't expand aggressively, the game would be too easy (see Civ1 and Civ2).
8) Leaders tend to have a long memory. If you help them they'll remember it, and if you don't, they will too. Vicky and I would have had very bad relations essentially permanently if I had made peace with her. But declaring war on her and razing her holy city will have that kind of effect...


@Sullla. Noticed how you mention the danger of having 'homogeneous' stacks, but then you sent out a pretty homogeneous stack of elephants and cats. Did you only do this because you were pretty CERTAIN that Vicky was stuffed? Would have loved it if she had a suprise up her sleeve ! Fantastic walkthrough, I am TRULY loving it !

I attacked the way I did because I knew what techs Victoria had (from using the F4 technology screen) and she didn't have Construction for cats. Furthermore, the only pre-medieval unit that can do any kind of damage to elephants are spearmen, and I knew Vicky wouldn't be able to build them once I took her copper mine on turn 1 of the war. Therefore, there was no real danger is using a stack based upon mostly elephants. If her copper had been right in London, I would have mixed in some axes to take out the English spears. And yes, the AI has surprised me before. You'll see later on in the Walkthrough that the AI *WILL* use cats for suicide damage, and use them to bombard city defenses too. They certainly aren't up to the same level as a human, but they aren't totally clueless either.


actually if you can see which units the enemy has, that gives a HUGE benefit. Please tell me that this counts only for low difficulty levels. It would be so anticlimatic IMHO

Not sure I understand this one... I can see the units in Vicky's cities because either 1) my religion is in them and I have line-of-sight in the city, or 2) I have a big stack of units right next door to it. There's really no need for the units in a city to be a secret, when you think about it.


Can you still disband cities in Civ4 or must you decide on capture if you destroy or keep the city. If disbanding is still allowed, is it linked to the pregame setting of no city razing.

How does ship bombarding work? Can ships still bombard land units? The artillery bombard attack is balanced because in the attack they can be lost (but do lots of collateral damage).

If culture flipping is switched of in the pregame settings, what game effect would be left for the city of Hastings? There is also a pregame setting called City Flipping after conquest (which seems to be switched of in your game). Does this mean that if a city is conquered, then it can never flip or has this pregame switch some other meaning?

Why can't the city of Elephantine flip?. In Civ3, if a city didn't control all of its city-tiles, then it could flip (under some conditions). What are the rules in Civ4? If no wars arise, will the natural development of culture mean that Elephantine will reclaim some tiles currently controlled by your culture? Is there some (easy) formula that you know that determines which culture controls a certain tile?

Currently, there is no abandoning cities in Civ4. That may be added in later on, but for now you have to decide when capturing a city whether to keep it or raze it. Ships cannot bombard land units; they can, however, reduce the defenses of a city in the same way that siege units can (I'll have more to say on this later in the Walkthrough).

Without city flipping on, Hastings would have simply been a useless city. It would have revolted constantly and been unable to work any of its tiles, since they would all have been in my borders. Of course, I would have conquered it soon enough anyway... No City Flipping after Conquest is the default option for a game; it means that a city captured in battle can never flip back to the original owner (remember, everyone hated that in Civ3). If you change that option, you can re-enable the Civ3 city flip back to the original owner. I have yet to see someone turn that on. :)

Elephantine doesn't have a chance in the world of flipping. You have to have a dominant percentage of culture in the city's center tile (the one that the city is actually on) for it to have any chance of flipping. Elephantine held onto all of its first-ring tiles, so it's in no danger. There IS a formula that determines who gets control of each tile, but I don't it off the top of my head. You *CAN* check how much culture for each civ is on each tile by pressing and holding Shift and then mousing over tiles. That will display how much culture for each civ is present on each tile - whoever has the most controls it!

More good questions, I'll do my best to keep answering them.

@kryszcztov. Read the entirety of the post, and you will see it is couched in provisos and caveats-never statements of genuine FACT or belief! IMO means 'in my opinion'. This is very important, especially when I stress that this OPINION is based on not having played the game, meaning that though I feel this way now-on the outside looking in as it were-I might very well change my mind when I am inside the game. Its certainly not like a certain person who loudly proclaimed the game was crap regardless of proof to the contrary from people who had played it-you will NEVER hear me speak in that way, and I do wish you would stop insinuating that I do!

@Sirian. For me, Pyramids represent a massive feat of both engineering and population organisation/recruitment. Based on everything I have heard, even a Citizen can be pretty good to have-IF ITS FREE. Historically, this might represent the fact that Egyptians were press-ganged from across the empire to work on the pyramids. On its own, I admit that is pretty innocuous but, along with the GP bonus and the culture effects, I think the Pyramids would be worth building. As to why I don't like the whole 'access all civics' thing-I don't know-perhaps its because I didn't like it in Civ1. As I have stressed so many times, though, I won't be touching ANYTHING in the game until I have played at LEAST half a dozen games to get a feel for all the balance issues. Do you at least think my idea has merit as an 'alternative'? Also, can you have wonders which grant access to a SINGLE civic? Say, a wonder which gives you access to representation alone dozens of turns before it becomes available on the tech tree?

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Part 4 was really interesting. I was having a terrible time knocking out a French player who was basically equal to me...until I rushed to cannons. I didn't really understand what an impact artillary had on city battles. It is really hard to take a city without them. Even with 5x the units, good defensive units can hold off an attack. With cannons I marched from town to town. I had been trying to take the same town for 20 or so turns, and wiped him out 15 or so turns after I got cannons.

Remember Sulla Culture Bombed York essentially surrounding it, thus when he took it, York “may have been 1x1 but because it was fully surrounded it was completely within the culture boundaries of his empire. When He got to London different story. He will have to in his post war efforts grow his culture boarders together. Just a guess, I haven’t seen the game nor played it, but it seems like a logical reason.

Sulla, thanks for a great read whilst we Brits patiently wait til next Friday...

I have a question: in many of the screenshots I see "100% Arabian" or similar text in the mouseover info box. Is that the strength of your culture in that particular tile?

Chris

....I think the Pyramids would be worth building. As to why I don't like the whole 'access all civics' thing-I don't know-perhaps its because I didn't like it in Civ1.

dont forget it's just government civics, the left most column, not all civics..;)

@kryszcztov. Read the entirety of the post, and you will see it is couched in provisos and caveats-never statements of genuine FACT or belief! IMO means 'in my opinion'. This is very important, especially when I stress that this OPINION is based on not having played the game, meaning that though I feel this way now-on the outside looking in as it were-I might very well change my mind when I am inside the game. Its certainly not like a certain person who loudly proclaimed the game was crap regardless of proof to the contrary from people who had played it-you will NEVER hear me speak in that way, and I do wish you would stop insinuating that I do!
Man, I never hinted that you thought the game or whatever feature was crap !! :eek: I just pointed out that you always make assumptions ("IMO it should be this way"...) about things you don't know (enough). While it is perfectly fine to add "IMO", it doesn't negate the fact that you have a view about features while not having a clue how it influences the rest of the game (and you acknowledge it !). It is just that it can be a little irritating at times, all the more as most of your posts about this could be forgotten once the big picture is in place in front of you. But if this is what you like to do...

BTW, I also dislike the fact that the Pyramids give you access to all the government civics. I'm just not saying it is overpowerful and should be change to this or that... I just don't like the concept of getting things ahead of their corresponding techs, but it's just a "liking" feeling. I won't go as far as having an opinion of what to replace it with until I have experimented with it. :)

thanks for answering my questions, really nice of you :goodjob:

also, I like the sound of the answers, especially the culture flips, I hated that feature.

See my answer to Sirian, and you will see that I am just a guy who enjoys speculating about this and that element of the game-what SOUNDS overpowered/underpowered to me, what I might consider doing to change it, but always under the strong proviso that I am NOT going to touch the game until I have played it through plenty of times to get a feel for it. Also, I try to avoid couching my opinions in such as way as to suggest that Firaxis 'got it wrong' because, quite frankly, I know they and the beta-testers have worked very hard to get the balance right, but still I LOVE to speculate ;)! To be fair, I did much the same thing with Civ3 and-guess what-I play on vanilla settings almost without exception.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

I'm sure no one will see this at the end of a huge list. But of all the tips, tricks and previews I've read, this tops them all. It's so useful to see how it all works together. :king:

By way of a 'bump', I thought that I would add my thanks to Sulla for this excellent series. In fact, it was due to reading this walkthrough that I decided to go ahead and order Civ4 from Amazon. (I think you are doing the Firaxis PR job on this forum :) )

I guess one issue I have is that you seem to be strolling through the game far too easily! I appreciate that you have been playing for months, but you certainly make 'Noble' difficulty seem too easy for a first game; yet I would lose more often than win on Regent in civ3. (I refuse to use 'cheesy tactics' such as 0% research, S.O.D., leaving certain cities empty, planting+chopping forests etc)

Looking forward to the next installment, (dont get caught in any late running MP games;) )

I just wanted to add my thanks for an excellent walkthrough experience. Thanks a ton Sullla!

Culture bombs....I get a mental picture of Itchy painting a picture of a bomb and mailing it to Scratchy, at which point it explodes...

Actually, I'm in my first game now, and are playing on Settler difficulty. Though I think i'm finding it a tad easy, since I've managed to found four religions so far (Actually, I haven't tried, its just happened that way..I only went for Buddhism in the beginning)

Yup, I said I wouldn't keep reading the walkthru once I got the game but I have kept up with it just to continue following the adventures of Sulla since it's a good read.

In my current game I'm attacking Germany and I took FOUR great artists with me (my capital is a wonder laiden GP producing machine - I've had 12+ GP so far). So anyways... Germany has/had 3 huge cities and I took out the middle one since it was the closest, dropped a "culture bomb" and it didn't move the borders at all - my new city is completely enveloped by German taint. It eliminated the resistance but now the city is starvin. I took out one of the nearby cities and "bombed" it too so things are looking up, but I gotta take out his last big city to finally get a firm grip. I was mildly shocked when my "culture bomb" didn't budge the border at all!

I have a question: in many of the screenshots I see "100% Arabian" or similar text in the mouseover info box. Is that the strength of your culture in that particular tile?


Yes it is.

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, Sulla. It is really nice and helpful to get information and insight from someone who obviously already understands the game very well.:goodjob:

About the city flipping: I think I will turn it off completely or turn it on in wars, because I find it strange to have different culture flipping rules between a captured city and a home city. That just doesn't feel right for me, it feels a bit gamey (and it is important how a game 'feels'). It is good to know that strong culture pressure still is a problem for a city even when culture flipping is turned off. So in a game with no culture flipping, culture will still be very important (also for the defence bonus of cities). And if culture flipping were enabled in war, than with the new culture flipping rules, you'll still have some time before it flips. Also the worst problem, losing the units, is gone. I'll play a game with the standard rules first of course.:)

It is also nice to know that there is a pregame option to turn off city razing. I like the many options to fine tune the game before you start. The customer is truly king in this game.:D


One additional question, it is probably a difficult one.
According to what I read in previews (and some forum discussions about these previews), you can't infinitely expand in the beginning of the game because of the city upkeep, but it is possible to maintain a large world spanning empire in the end of the game. This probably has to do with the buildup of infrastructure (terrain improvements, health/happiness improvements and resources, courthouses, marketplaces/banks, etc.) and the development of the right civics and maybe some other things that get enabled by certain technologies. Also the resistance of the more efficient smaller nations is probably not easy to overcome (at a difficulty level that is challenging for the player, clearly noble is not challenging for you :) ).

Now imagine that you play a game with totally no enemy opposition, no other civilisations, no barbarians, no wild animals, no opposition to stop your expansion, except for the city maintenance (yes I know, boring...., but it is just a theoretical game ;) ).
At what point in the game would it be feasible to maintain a world spanning empire for you? I don't mean the moment that it becomes profitable to do so, but the first moment that you could build such an empire that doesn't go bankrupt while running 100% tax. With point in the game I don't mean a year, but more a general indication like late renaissance or early modern age.
The second question is: at what point in time will it be economically beneficial, meaning that every city produces more in science+commerce+culture than it costs in maintenance.

I know that removing opposition removes the usual opportunity costs of expanding your empire and thus moves the date that such an empire would be possible far ahead of anything possible in a typical game. But I ask this question just to gain some insight in the underlying city maintenance rules. In a normal game, the costs of expansion compared to the relative low value of the added cities will cause you to try to improve your empire in different more lucrative ways.

Thanks for the walk through Sulla, very useful as I start out on my Civ4 experience!

BTW, I also dislike the fact that the Pyramids give you access to all the government civics.

The thing I dislike most about it is that I plan to add more Civics down the road (as part of my future era mod), some of which I definitely don't want available in the ancient times. So, I now have to steer clear of the Government category altogether, and put them in the other four categories. But as the game stands, I think it's a nicely-balanced effect.

Sullla, great walkthrough. I don't have Civ4 yet (amazingly, I'm going to try waiting for Christmas, to keep the family happy), but your walkthrough is far more instructive and better laid out than any of the previews I've ever seen. Heck, if someone like Gamespot just linked to your page as an example of how the game plays, it'd be an improvement on their usual reviews. (Plus, Firaxis would probably sell more copies!)
In fact, it's such a good read that I started going back through your Civ3 game reports... then the Final Fantasy ones... then the Diablo 2 one... then back to the Civ3 ones again... man, I'm not sure I can make it to Christmas.

A bit of a quiet day today for the Walkthrough, after falling off the front page for most of the time. Of course, that's what happens for non-stickied threads...

I'll answer questions again tomorrow morning, I'm a little too tired to do it now. Part Five has been posted! Happy reading. :)

A bit of a quiet day today for the Walkthrough, after falling off the front page for most of the time.

we did warn you that many of us would lose interest if not posted at once or at smaller intervals due to starting our own games and getting lost in our own world. it is a very nice walkthrough and thanks for your effort.

love ur walkthrough, kudos! reading ur part five as i read it. so informative! thankyou so much! makes me understand the game much more!:goodjob:

A bit of a quiet day today for the Walkthrough, after falling off the front page for most of the time. Of course, that's what happens for non-stickied threads...

I'll answer questions again tomorrow morning, I'm a little too tired to do it now. Part Five has been posted! Happy reading. :)I haven't had any questions because you lay things out so clearly. This is a great read.

One little quirk I did find funny though was how when you chatted up FDR for the first time you had a +1 to relations because of years of peace between your two peoples. Yeah, that will happen when you have never even heard about them until just then. :mischief:

Thanks again!

Question for Sullla:

What exactly are the effects of the Forbidden Palace? And how does distance maintenance work? I've still got to wait about two weeks...

Sirian, i was talking about the fact that Sullla could see all units in the English towns that he attacked, thats quite a change from Civ3.

It is? Maybe my memory is going bad! So many details, some are bound to get lost in the shuffle! :lol:

However, I must tell you that the defenders already have PLENTY of advantage without being able to hide their unit mix while the attackers have to reveal theirs. For MP purposes alone, fairness on this score is now essential.

I'd like to answer more questions -- and I will -- but maybe not every question asked. I only have so much energy for chatting, before I need to stop and go play some Civ4 to recharge. I hope that folks can understand. :)


- Sirian

As to why I don't like the whole 'access all civics' thing-I don't know-perhaps its because I didn't like it in Civ1.

Ah. Well, I actually found it more beneficial to skip the Pyramids in Civ1, but instead build Colossus and Copernicus in the capital, beeline to Democracy (preferably before 1AD when the tech costs went up -- hey don't get me started on THAT, OK? :lol: ), and exploit the WLTPD population growth to quintuply my empire's population overnight -- and to be running with no corruption from that point onward. The Pyramids actually SLOWED ME DOWN there so I would skip them, once I had figured it out.

As for the "free" Citizens, they would be free from then on (if Pyramids were changed as you describe) but they would not be free overall, since you have to spend a lot of shields building the pyramids to get the "free" shields. See? If it is -just- about shields, that may not be enough. With the Engineers you first described though, building the Pyramids would then translate in to one or two addition, FREE GREAT WONDERS, which is something we had to avoid in the core game.

Whenever anything was so overwhelmingly beneficial as to be the only attractive option, we would either beef up other options or tone down the runaway item -- sometimes both.

Somewhere in there, there are alternative effects that would be balanced. You may have to iterate a few times to find them, though!


Civ4 modders are either going to need a very sharp eye to get things right on one or two tries, or they will need a lot of testing and design help -- such as working in sizable teams on one mod. We had a hundred or so of the best Civ players all working on just one rule set -- the core game -- and we still could not make everything perfect! I'm confident that some really great mods (small and simple, as well as large and dramatic) will be made. :) It's going to take lots of work to get there, though. :cool:


- Sirian

Hiya Sullla! Hope you are enjoying your rest ;)! I have just looked over the Financial advisor-and two key questions come to mind:

1) With Civics maintainance costs, is the final cost in any way connected to the number of cities in your nation?

2) Unit maintainance cost looks awful low (1+1 for supply=2!!!) Why is this the case, how much does EACH UNIT cost to maintain-and is this cost effected only by if your units are inside/outside your territory?

3) Sort of a linked question. Can Great Merchants travel across oceans and, if so, can they be killed if their transports are attacked? Connected to this is the more general question of can Great People be in anyway harmed/captured and, if so, does this impact much on relations?

Look forward to the answers :)!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Hiya Sullla! Hope you are enjoying your rest ;)! I have just looked over the Financial advisor-and two key questions come to mind:

1) With Civics maintainance costs, is the final cost in any way connected to the number of cities in your nation?

2) Unit maintainance cost looks awful low (1+1 for supply=2!!!) Why is this the case, how much does EACH UNIT cost to maintain-and is this cost effected only by if your units are inside/outside your territory?

3) Sort of a linked question. Can Great Merchants travel across oceans and, if so, can they be killed if their transports are attacked? Connected to this is the more general question of can Great People be in anyway harmed/captured and, if so, does this impact much on relations?

Look forward to the answers :)!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

I guess I can help answer the question from my experience so far. Excuse me for not being as used to the game as Sullla (Btw, whats with the name? sometimes its Sulla, then Sullla, which one is it already?!;) )

2) the unit maint. is not low. 2 gold per turn is A LOT of gold! especially early on when your land is not as well developed. Often, you have to sacrifice research to support a large army. It's a nice balance implament.

3) Great People can be transported (I believe) and yes, they can be killed.

I've updated my website to include a major Civ4 section and prepared a detailed game report called the Civ4 Walkthrough.
Did you or will you make a similar walkthrough for Civ3 as well?

What's Inflation by the way (I gather some sort of reverse Wall Street effect?)... is it also the thing that leads to the loss of stored shields/beakers?

Well, thats why I said 'looks' awful low-because I am looking at it through the prism of Civ2 and 3. I guess my main purpose was in asking-how does the game 'calculate' the costs of your armies-is it a direct 1gold per unit, or does it work in some other fashion now? I confess that I am VERY confused about how unit maintainance works.
Oh, and I do have another question. It says galleys can only operate within your cultural borders. Now, can you still use them to enter SOMEONE elses border (say if you have Open Borders or are at War)? If yes, then can you traverse 'open sea', as long as you end your movement within a border, or is it a blanket ban on moving outside of a cultural border?

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

looking at one of the screenies, I have to say, the concept of 'no need for road everywhere' must have gone wrong since I do see a lot of roads, in fact everywhere :crazyeye:
And that looks awfully messy...modders can surely get this better

anyway, the game seems a little eventless, and that would be in line with what people say. Or maybe too much of AW has spoilt me.

Great update. Cant wait to see how the forces of Hinduism do against Gandhi and the Indian infidels.

Another neat aspect of the walkthrough is that it helps you introduce the game to a non-Civ player. I was trying to describe the game to a friend and it just wasn't impressing him. I gave him a link to Sulla's walkthrough and he was saying OMG no wonder you want this game so bad!

PS Thanks to the powers that be for sticking the thread!

Answering Questions Again


One additional question, it is probably a difficult one.
According to what I read in previews (and some forum discussions about these previews), you can't infinitely expand in the beginning of the game because of the city upkeep, but it is possible to maintain a large world spanning empire in the end of the game. This probably has to do with the buildup of infrastructure (terrain improvements, health/happiness improvements and resources, courthouses, marketplaces/banks, etc.) and the development of the right civics and maybe some other things that get enabled by certain technologies. Also the resistance of the more efficient smaller nations is probably not easy to overcome (at a difficulty level that is challenging for the player, clearly noble is not challenging for you ).

Now imagine that you play a game with totally no enemy opposition, no other civilisations, no barbarians, no wild animals, no opposition to stop your expansion, except for the city maintenance (yes I know, boring...., but it is just a theoretical game ).
At what point in the game would it be feasible to maintain a world spanning empire for you? I don't mean the moment that it becomes profitable to do so, but the first moment that you could build such an empire that doesn't go bankrupt while running 100% tax. With point in the game I don't mean a year, but more a general indication like late renaissance or early modern age.
The second question is: at what point in time will it be economically beneficial, meaning that every city produces more in science+commerce+culture than it costs in maintenance.

A long question, but I do in fact understand what you mean. There are certain techs on the tree that are critical for cutting down on the overhead of your civ and allowing you to expand faster. I have in fact played out some games that were close to being pure builder ones (like starting alone on a large island and being isolated until Astronomy). So in my experience, the critical techs are Code of Laws (which enables courthouses) and Currency (which enables Markets AND gets you +1 trade routes per city). Banking, which enables Banks, is also quite important.

Once you have courthouses, you can start cutting down on the maintenance costs in your cities, and building a lot of them does indeed have a drastic effect on how much cash you're bleeding out in maintenance. You can also build a Forbidden Palace once you have enough courthouses (see below). Markets and banks increase the gold your civ is producing, allowing for more expansion and ironically, also usually letting you increase your research rate as well! (since you are getting the same amount of gold from a smaller percentage of wealth on the sliders). So while that's not an absolute answer, courthouses and markets help out enormously when fighting maintenance costs. As for the second question, that's one that depends on each individual city. Some will be worthwhile right away, others might have to be built up for a while first.


What exactly are the effects of the Forbidden Palace? And how does distance maintenance work? I've still got to wait about two weeks...

Maintenance costs are counted in two ways: first, the number of cities you have (more cities overall means higher maintenance costs) and secondly, the distance from the palace. Colonies on another continent will have higher maintenance costs because they are far away from the palace. The Forbidden Palace (and also the Versailles world wonder, by the way) act as another palace for maintenance cost purposes, thus dropping the "distance from palace" element of maintenance costs in nearby cities. The overall effect is somewhat similar to Civ3 - build the Forbidden Palace to act as a second palace, and your costs will drop significantly.


1) With Civics maintainance costs, is the final cost in any way connected to the number of cities in your nation?

2) Unit maintainance cost looks awful low (1+1 for supply=2!!!) Why is this the case, how much does EACH UNIT cost to maintain-and is this cost effected only by if your units are inside/outside your territory?

3) Sort of a linked question. Can Great Merchants travel across oceans and, if so, can they be killed if their transports are attacked? Connected to this is the more general question of can Great People be in anyway harmed/captured and, if so, does this impact much on relations?

1) I'm not entirely sure on this one. I do know that the civics costs increase slowly over time as you proceed through the tech tree, but I don't know if it's also linked to the size of your territory. Sorry if I can't give a conclusive answer here.
2) The maintenance costs are low because this is Noble and I get a fair amount of free units. Crank up the difficulty, and the unit costs tighten up like a vice. The unit cost is determined by how many units you have, the supply cost is determined by where they are located (0 in your territory, increased when in enemy lands).
3) Great Merchants can travel on caravels across oceans, along with a couple of other unarmed units (missionaries, scouts, spies, etc.) If their boat sinks, they go down to the bottom too. The Great People can all be attacked and killed, so be careful with them. This doesn't have an effect on relations, but you may be seeing red if Montezuma kills one of your Great People!


Did you or will you make a similar walkthrough for Civ3 as well?

I did not make one for Civ3 (I learned that game the same way as anyone else), but I do have more than 20 full-game reports on the Civ3 portion of my site that will shed a lot of light on that game for those who are interested. :)


What's Inflation by the way (I gather some sort of reverse Wall Street effect?)... is it also the thing that leads to the loss of stored shields/beakers?

Inflation is not the thing that makes you lose shields over time on builds (we usually refer to that as shield decay or shield loss). Inflation is rather a slow, gradual buildup of costs to reflect the increased expenses of running a large empire. It will grow over time as your civ grows in size and complexity. There's not a whole lot you can do about inflation other than be aware of the fact that it's there and you need to counter it with increased revenue.


Well, thats why I said 'looks' awful low-because I am looking at it through the prism of Civ2 and 3. I guess my main purpose was in asking-how does the game 'calculate' the costs of your armies-is it a direct 1gold per unit, or does it work in some other fashion now? I confess that I am VERY confused about how unit maintainance works.
Oh, and I do have another question. It says galleys can only operate within your cultural borders. Now, can you still use them to enter SOMEONE elses border (say if you have Open Borders or are at War)? If yes, then can you traverse 'open sea', as long as you end your movement within a border, or is it a blanket ban on moving outside of a cultural border?

I believe that the unit costs are simply one gold per unit for each one that is over the amount of free support. Keep in mind that 20 units is a VERY large army in Civ4, whereas it would have been of minor notice in Civ3 (not everyone will like this, but IMO it greatly cuts down on the game's tedium - fewer units that are each more important and can be individually customized with promotions). It will make more sense once a copy arrives in Australia and you can start playing around with the numbers, Aussie. :)

Regarding galleys, you misread this one slighly. The ban on galley movement isn't on limiting them to your borders, it's limiting them from entering OCEAN tiles. They can't ever enter ocean tiles EXCEPT if they happen to be within your cultural borders. I'm not 100% certain if you can enter ocean tiles that are within the cultural borders of a civ with which you have Open Borders, but I think you can. If you are at war, you can't have Open Borders with a civ by definition, and you definitely can't enter ocean tiles in their territory. They can and often will explore neutral territory, but galleys have to hug the coastlines because they can't enter the ocean.


looking at one of the screenies, I have to say, the concept of 'no need for road everywhere' must have gone wrong since I do see a lot of roads, in fact everywhere
And that looks awfully messy...modders can surely get this better

Well... personally I think it was a bad decision by marketing to take the angle of "no more need for roads everywhere!" Technically, that is correct - you don't *HAVE* to build a road on a tile because the commerce bonus has been eliminated from roads. But tell me this - you have a worker on a tile that's just finished a tile improvement, and you're NOT going to have him build a road on it? Granted, there are some cases where it's more important to go on to the next tile improvement, but 9 times out of 10, I'm going to have the worker build a road on the tile that he's on to facilitate easier movement. So while you can choose to keep your cities linked only by one road, that's going to be counterproductive if another civ invades, and you don't have a road network in place for your units. The alternative - PENALIZING the player for building extra roads - would be worse than the problem though. (This really doesn't bother me at all, I'm not sure why some people seem to want fewer roads.)

Good questions. More coming in Part Six tomorrow - is Gandhi's come-uppance at hand? :D

1) I'm not entirely sure on this one. I do know that the civics costs increase slowly over time as you proceed through the tech tree, but I don't know if it's also linked to the size of your territory. Sorry if I can't give a conclusive answer here.

Inflation is not the thing that makes you lose shields over time on builds (we usually refer to that as shield decay or shield loss). Inflation is rather a slow, gradual buildup of costs to reflect the increased expenses of running a large empire. It will grow over time as your civ grows in size and complexity. There's not a whole lot you can do about inflation other than be aware of the fact that it's there and you need to counter it with increased revenue.



So there are some costs that might increase with Time alone?
Or is inflation strictly determined by 'size and complexity'....actually the

better question is; Does Inflation have an 'equilibrium' value. Ie if your Civ doesn't change (no new techs/no new cities), It will reach value X and then stop growing?

PS just have to say this is great again...oh and one more question

How do railroad work if the unit isn't ONLY moving on railroads ie Washington-New York =15 square railroad
New York-Boston=5 square road if a cavalry started at Boston, how far would it get (10 squares to Washington? because the railroad takes it 10 and it has 1 square movement left or what?)

All I can say is HOLY CRAP - London is so amazing I have to wonder if you edited in those extra sea foods! :P

The good reading continues.

It's worth noting, I think, that Sulla is doing everything possible in his game to generate wealth (founding, spreading, and gaining money by religion; open borders for increased trade and spread of religion; missionary action to spread religion; dumping great merchants for big gold gains; civic choices (your capital is usually a strong city and your holy city, so bureaucracy (+50% prod/cur) can make it into a powerhouse; building courthouses and other gold amplifiers (grocer, market, bank all jack your gold).

So his maint costs aren't really a factor because his income is maxed. If you don't do most of those things or you expand before you can do those things, your maint costs will have much more impact on your research.

BTW, in my previous noble game I got 3700g on a normal map by sending a great merchant overseas via submarine to the capital of an AI that I didn't have open borders or even decent relations with (sub is invis and can penetrate borders to drop off spies or GPs). It was a happy moment.

Very nice, I can't wait to see how this "holy war" turns out :) Or do you take Sunday off?

Hmmm, it may have been a happy moment, Zhanz, but that does sound like an exploit which seems like it needs to be taken out of the game-again, though, only based on how it sounds to me. I mean, it just doesn't seem to make sense to me that you can make a trade mission with someone with whom you have no existing trade relations!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Hmmm, it may have been a happy moment, Zhanz, but that does sound like an exploit which seems like it needs to be taken out of the game-again, though, only based on how it sounds to me. I mean, it just doesn't seem to make sense to me that you can make a trade mission with someone with whom you have no existing trade relations!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Sure you can... black market trading ;)

D'Oh, I hadn't considered that AT ALL!!! Consider my last post totally revoked-it makes PERFECT SENSE. In fact, hmmmm-I wonder if I can use this as a means of creating a true 'black market system'?? Thinking, thinking :)!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Sullla - thanks for putting this up. This is definitely an awesome resource for learning things about the game that no reviewers or previewers really talked about. It's the kind of hands-on reporting that really gets you into the game and how it works.

This is doing alot to help hold me over until I get a computer worthy of playing the game next week. Keep up the good work! :)

Hi Sullla. Just had another quick question for you or, to be more precise, a concern somebody raised over at Apolyton. If you send an AI to war with another, do they ALWAYS come to you after one turn asking you for help? Its just that I would have thought that Mansa would have gone at it for a few turns, then come begging you for help when-or if-he got his butt kicked! Just curious about the true benefit of sending two other civs to war with one another is all ;)!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Getting towards the end of things now. Part Six of the Walkthrough has been posted! :)

Questions addressed again tomorrow morning.

After capturing so many Indian cities, did it knock your maintenance costs through the roof? Is it feasible to win by conquest and keep every city? Or are the maintenance costs too high? Also, is it ever possible to move your Forbidden Palace?

Hiya Sullla, another question for you. Aside from losing units, is your War Weariness growth effected by such factors as whether you are fighting an offensive or defensive war? I always found it somewhat annoying is Civ3 that my people would get so peeved at me for defending them from foreign invasion-and it would be nice to know that defensive wars don't carry the same penalties any more. In fact, it would be nice if you had 3 kinds of War Weariness-defensive (the smallest, mostly unit-loss based), allied (going to war to honour a defense pact/help an ally-slightly higher than defensive, but still primarily unit-loss based) and Offensive (rises quite quick, based primarily on war length, with unit-loss added in). But perhaps this is only Mod territory ;)!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Anyone noticed the Musical Reference in the war weariness text ;)

Are you going to wipe the last heathen civilization off the face of the earth before going for a diplomatic or space race victory?

Sullla,

Great walkthrough but a couple of questions:

1) when you showed the London screen it still said 100% Arabian, how come there as no english? Is nationality gone in Civ4 or did you build a worker?

2)The pace of the game seems fast, is this because you are just hitting the key points or is it that the game just keeps hitting you with stuff?


3) the AI didnt seem like it put up too much of a fight is that because you've been playing it so long?

thanks for the walkthrough I cant wait until I get the game

+26 with Mansa Musa?! nice one..

I'm impressed the Romans found a way to take one of Hatty's cities, but I am also surprised Hatty didn't do a lot to protect herself, what was she doing?!

Great read Sullla, now its time for you to settle the new world!

Hey Sulla

Presumably Hatty had open borders with Caesar (which allowed the Romans to come through Egyptian territory and attack you) could you have asked Hatty to get rid of her open border treaty with Caesar instead of asking her to go to war with him?

Sulla I'm not seeing a next button. Only homepage and back. Which sucks because i can only read the first pages of your walkthroughs and I am quite interested in all the details.

So lemme know what's going on with that and awesom stuff by the way.

There is a Next button for me, but if it's not showing then just replace the number on the URL: it goes 1, then 1a, then 2, 2a, 3, etc.

Another enjoyable read.

However you have mentioned something this time which is of some concern to someone who hasn't yet got the game, and I would be grateful if you could tell me something more about it. That is: when you mentioned "The one weakness of the Civ4 AI when it comes to war is capturing cities" and you expressed surprise at Ceasar capturing a city. Despite whatever improvments Soren has made, is the AI still very poor at taking cities?

Thanks for any info on this.

The one weakness of the Civ4 AI when it comes to war is capturing citiesIt sounds not very promising indeed. Another one was the Roman :smoke: move leaving the Indian city instead of helping out. Guess the part that you can help an ally with units will be purely for the human to tke advantage of.
And I saw Sullla attacking in stacks, seems the catapults attacking ain't that horrible for the human to counter. In fact, the Indian town had only 1 pult, something we are so used to see in Civ3. That was in fact a game breaker, the inability of the AI to fight a artillery war.

In fact, as stated yesterday, the AI seem to be complete pushovers, but that might be the level of difficulty. I certainly hope so.

On a positive note, the AI giving back the favor of declaring war for no cost seems promising.

I guess gameplay will tell.

Hey Sulla,

Possibly the best walkthrough I have ever seen, and certainly the best thread ever here on Civ Fanatics. You have provided a true feel for the game, as you set out to do, and reading about your civ and how they have stood/are standing the test of time is truely enjoyable. Not just because the game is good in itself (which it is) but because you have taken time to explain every intricate detail, and the logic behind each of your decisions.
Thanks for the walkthough...
Look forward to seeing part seven, the conclusion.

Great work Sulla.

So much information casually displayed. Its like reading all those early GOTM accounts again. I'm sure they had a huge impact on the way people approached Civ3.

You do this kind of thing so much better than anyone else.

A nice read again. Thank you also for answering my maintenance related question. :goodjob:

Sullla - I would like to ask a question about unit upgrades.

You mentioned earlier that these were quite expensive. If so does that prevent the AI from upgrading units? Will we see Spearmen around when Tanks etc can be built?

In your walkthrough you avoided building Riflemen/Infantry until you wanted to go to war and the units you are fighting all appear to be earlier era units - Spearmen, Longbowman etc. Is that normally the case - or just the way this game panned out.

So does the AI upgrade older units and does it build more modern units in the game? Also if you go to war against an AI Civ will it switch research to military Techs? Will it switch production to military units?

Thanks for a great write-up. :goodjob:

My civ4 game has been delayed until 11/3, so I really appreciate the walkthru. The walkthru as well as all of the comments are quite informative and will give me a heads up for when I finally get the game.

It makes me even more anxious to start playing.

Sullla - I would like to ask a question about unit upgrades.

You mentioned earlier that these were quite expensive. If so does that prevent the AI from upgrading units? Will we see Spearmen around when Tanks etc can be built?

In your walkthrough you avoided building Riflemen/Infantry until you wanted to go to war and the units you are fighting all appear to be earlier era units - Spearmen, Longbowman etc. Is that normally the case - or just the way this game panned out.

So does the AI upgrade older units and does it build more modern units in the game? Also if you go to war against an AI Civ will it switch research to military Techs? Will it switch production to military units?

Thanks for a great write-up. :goodjob:

Actually on that it sounded like there was a base cost to upgrading so that upgrading from Warrior to Axeman to Maceman to Genadier might be more expensive than doing one upgrade from Warrior to Grenadier?

I have a feeling that may contribute to some of the Spearman/Tank complaints, because it means you want to wait on your upgrades, which means obsolete units will hang around a lot longer than if upgrading was worth doing anytime you had spare gold and an upgrade available. [because in Civ 3 the complaints were often around spearman in civs that could build riflemen, or at least musketeers]

Great Walkthrough Sullla. It's truly the best I've seen. You did a great job explaining every single point of the game. I'm exited to read the conclusion. Good Job!

take down rome

Thanks for the vicarious game! My pre-order is still back ordered . . .

I've got the game, and I've been playing it some. Got a question or two:

Why do the "cathedrals" have different requirements? For instance, the Buddhist "cathedral" requires you build 4 temples first. (I think... I founded every religion EXCEPT Buddhism. Don't ask how much cheating I did. :D) The Hindu "cathedral," however, requires 12 temples. Since I only had nine cities, I never could build the Hindu "cathedral."

I tried to build the monasteries in each of my cities, but they went obsolete before. I'm so looking forward to tech slowdown mods. :) (That, plus an expansion of modern units...)

Hes running late again!

Sullla,
How does settling on resources work in Civ IV compared to Civ III?
As you know, in Civ III settling on strat and lux resources didn't matter but you lost the food if you settled on a cow, or wheat etc.
Now it seems obvious that you still don't want to settle on cows and such because you wouldn't be able to improve the tile with a pasture, but I am curious as to how it works exactly.

Hes running late again!

Do you realize that the time changed last night, due to a wierd american (and a few other places) custom called daylight savings time? Basicly, it was 11pm Eastern Time when you posted.

For more info on this practice, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

I'm sure Sulla will return shortly with the next part.

Hes running late again!

Daylight Savings Time, dude. Did you reset your clock?

Ok thats weird

Why did the US go an hour forward as well? Shouldnt they have gone back an hour? (They are after all going into winter)

Questions Again
I meant to answer some more of these this morning, but I've been swamped with work this weekend. Still believe I got to them all here though...


After capturing so many Indian cities, did it knock your maintenance costs through the roof? Is it feasible to win by conquest and keep every city? Or are the maintenance costs too high? Also, is it ever possible to move your Forbidden Palace?

Actually, in the late game the lid really comes off of the maintenance costs and conquest becomes readily doable. Once you get markets/grocers/banks in your main cities, you suddenly have a lot more income to play around with and can sustain a much larger empire. In this particular game, I was still running 100% research most of the time, and was never losing money at 90% research (occasionally I would have to up the luxury rate from war weariness, however). The point is that once you have some practice at developing a civ's infrastructure, it's quite possible to win a Conquest victory and build a huge empire. You just have to develop your civ a bit first - can't grab a million cities with no infrastructure in them during the Ancient age.


Hiya Sullla, another question for you. Aside from losing units, is your War Weariness growth effected by such factors as whether you are fighting an offensive or defensive war? I always found it somewhat annoying is Civ3 that my people would get so peeved at me for defending them from foreign invasion-and it would be nice to know that defensive wars don't carry the same penalties any more. In fact, it would be nice if you had 3 kinds of War Weariness-defensive (the smallest, mostly unit-loss based), allied (going to war to honour a defense pact/help an ally-slightly higher than defensive, but still primarily unit-loss based) and Offensive (rises quite quick, based primarily on war length, with unit-loss added in). But perhaps this is only Mod territory !

I don't know exactly how war weariness is calculated in Civ4. I *THINK* that it's tied to whether your units are fighting in your own territory or in foreign territory (since that's the way that unit support works), but I'm not certain of that. Try poking around in the XML files to see for sure. For that matter, once I have some time next week, I need to summarize some of the game's info and explain what certain things like difficulty levels actually entail. Just have to find the time first... :crazyeye:


Sullla,

Great walkthrough but a couple of questions:

1) when you showed the London screen it still said 100% Arabian, how come there as no english? Is nationality gone in Civ4 or did you build a worker?

2)The pace of the game seems fast, is this because you are just hitting the key points or is it that the game just keeps hitting you with stuff?

3) the AI didnt seem like it put up too much of a fight is that because you've been playing it so long?

1) I don't know how nationality changes in Civ4. I believe that over time the people in a captured city will slowly change into your nationality. Also, any new population points grown in a city will be your nationality. Since London grew from size 3 or 4 when I captured it to 20+ under my control, it makes sense that most of the people would be Arabs. And I guess the rest changed to my nationality over time (?)
2) A lot of people on these forums have been complaining that the game is slow, heh. Civ4 starts out a bit slower than Civ3, but the game soon assumes a nice pace and never really lets up until it's over. I have, of course, also tried to emphasize the more interesting parts of my game (lots of building turns summarized quickly in Part Five, for example) but I really can't remember the last time I felt bored once I got into a game. The lure is always very strong to keep playing more turns! :)
3) Gandhi didn't seem like he put up a fight? Well, he did the best he could, but longbows against rifles and infantry is a losing proposition. I was an entire age ahead of him on tech, so I'm not sure how much he really could have done. This is only Noble, remember... I've been spanked *HARD* on Emperor quite a few times, so you won't hear me say the AI "doesn't put up much of a fight." :D


+26 with Mansa Musa?! nice one..

I'm impressed the Romans found a way to take one of Hatty's cities, but I am also surprised Hatty didn't do a lot to protect herself, what was she doing?!

Good question! I don't know what Hatty was doing either. Caesar did, however, put together a nice stack and took down the city. Bombard, suicide damage, capture. Egypt probably wasn't ready for the fight, since I got Hatty to declare on Caesar, and got a black eye as a result.


Presumably Hatty had open borders with Caesar (which allowed the Romans to come through Egyptian territory and attack you) could you have asked Hatty to get rid of her open border treaty with Caesar instead of asking her to go to war with him?

No, this isn't it... As soon as you declare war on a civ, any Open Borders treaties are canceled and any units within that civ's territory teleported back to their own borders. If Caesar had any units in Egyptian territory, they would have been instantly moved back to his borders when Hatty declared war. No Right of Passage Rapes in Civ4.

And why should I ask Hatty to drop Open Borders with Caesar if I can get her to declare war at no cost just based on our positive relations? ;)


However you have mentioned something this time which is of some concern to someone who hasn't yet got the game, and I would be grateful if you could tell me something more about it. That is: when you mentioned "The one weakness of the Civ4 AI when it comes to war is capturing cities" and you expressed surprise at Ceasar capturing a city. Despite whatever improvments Soren has made, is the AI still very poor at taking cities?

Well I'm going to be honest when it comes to the AI in Civ4. It does a good job of fighting, but its biggest problem has always been capturing cities. That's not to say it WON'T capture cities, just that the AI tends to be weaker in this area. Of course, much of my experience is with an older AI that has since been improved. Caesar's capture of Heliopolis is one of the better moves I've seen from the Civ4 AI when it comes to war. I still need more experience with the release version AI before I can make any definite statements on it though.


It sounds not very promising indeed. Another one was the Roman move leaving the Indian city instead of helping out. Guess the part that you can help an ally with units will be purely for the human to tke advantage of.
And I saw Sullla attacking in stacks, seems the catapults attacking ain't that horrible for the human to counter. In fact, the Indian town had only 1 pult, something we are so used to see in Civ3. That was in fact a game breaker, the inability of the AI to fight a artillery war.

In fact, as stated yesterday, the AI seem to be complete pushovers, but that might be the level of difficulty. I certainly hope so.

Hold on here a minute. You're looking at one game and reading WAY too much out of it. This is a game on Noble, the Civ4 equivalent of Civ3's Regent. I can whip the Civ3 Regent AI all day long, and by now I can do the same to the Civ4 Noble AI. This game shouldn't be any more revealing than reading about someone kicking around a Civ3 Regent AI in a war.

Furthermore, the Civ4 AI is *MUCH* better at fighting wars than the Civ3 AI *EVER* was. Sometimes they attack in stacks, sometimes they send in pillagers, they know how to use siege weapons and do *REAL* naval invasions (yes, I'm serious!) - well, I could go on. I had a huge tech lead in this game and spanked a backwards opponent. Gandhi's cats didn't hurt my stack much because it was a cat against a rifle - something would have been wrong if it had!

Is the Civ4 AI as good at fighting wars as a human? No, of course not. But they are not pushovers by any means. Try playing on Emperor if you don't believe me. :)


You mentioned earlier that these were quite expensive. If so does that prevent the AI from upgrading units? Will we see Spearmen around when Tanks etc can be built?

In your walkthrough you avoided building Riflemen/Infantry until you wanted to go to war and the units you are fighting all appear to be earlier era units - Spearmen, Longbowman etc. Is that normally the case - or just the way this game panned out.

So does the AI upgrade older units and does it build more modern units in the game? Also if you go to war against an AI Civ will it switch research to military Techs? Will it switch production to military units?

Actually, the AI is pretty good about upgrading its units. The reason why Gandhi had so many old units is because most of the medieval units don't upgrade until you reach Rifling (they can all upgrade to riflemen), and he hadn't quite gotten there. Longbows can't upgrade to muskets, for example. You'll still see some outdated units, but the AI does a pretty good job with the upgrades. As for why I had some outdated units lying around... umm, I wasn't expecting to fight? Not the best planning on my part.

The AI definitely swaps over to military units if you declare war on them (I've tested this in debug mode) and I think that they'll be more likely to research military techs too (not 100% sure of that though).


Why do the "cathedrals" have different requirements? For instance, the Buddhist "cathedral" requires you build 4 temples first. (I think... I founded every religion EXCEPT Buddhism. Don't ask how much cheating I did. ) The Hindu "cathedral," however, requires 12 temples. Since I only had nine cities, I never could build the Hindu "cathedral."

You need three temples for each cathedral. 2 temples = 0 cathedrals, 4 = 1 cathedral, 9 temples = 3 cathedrals, etc. You also need to keep the type of each one in mind: 3 Hindu temples required for 1 Hindu cathedral. If you start cheating in buildings, you may see some weird results. :lol:


Hes running late again!

Nope! Daylights Savings today here in the US. We're now finally back to GMT+5 again as we should be. :)


Sullla,
How does settling on resources work in Civ IV compared to Civ III?
As you know, in Civ III settling on strat and lux resources didn't matter but you lost the food if you settled on a cow, or wheat etc.
Now it seems obvious that you still don't want to settle on cows and such because you wouldn't be able to improve the tile with a pasture, but I am curious as to how it works exactly.

Settling on a resource will connect it instantly if you have the requisite tech (if you have Animal Husbandry and you settle on a cow, you'll instantly have the resource in that city), but you give up the ability to build a tile improvement on it and get the big boost on that particular tile. Generally speaking, it's therefore better NOT to settle directly on resources. Sometimes though you may want to (like in MP to have a resource that can't be pillaged is sometimes very good!) There are no permanent rules in a game like Civ.

And that should be it! Part Seven is being posted as I type this. I want to thank everyone who replied with so many kind words over the past week - your sentiments were what made the project worth doing. I'll try to answer more questions tomorrow as they come up, but then the Walkthrough will officially be concluded. I hope you enjoyed reading it. :)

thanks Sullla for answering my and for that matter, all questions :goodjob: It's really appreciated. I am glad to hear that the pushover is due to the level of difficulty.

It's all because I can't play it yet myself. Else, I would know already about the AI. We have been warring too much in all our AW games, so we do hope for a nice opponent that challenges us.

Anyway, your walkthrough is really nice, I am sure everyone here looked forward to the next part every single day :)

Actually, Solver mentioned something very interesting about the AI in regards to war just yesterday, I think. He was telling Yin how there are effectively 2 main levels of 'war mentality' (or was it 3?): Low Level and All Out. If I recall, an AI will often start on low level-sending in fast pillaging units to disrupt your infrastructure and attack units in the open. However, if it asks for peace and you refuse, then it ramps things up to 'All-Out', where it will start to bring in the heavy hitters-in big mixed stacks that are hard to completely counter-and really go at it. I think there may even be an 'annihilation' level of war AI-but that this is reserved for very specific circumstances and/or very aggressive civs. If true, though, this gives me the greatest hope of all for playing an incredibly intelligent and effective AI opponent.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Congratulations on a hard earned victory. 26 hours 45 minutes though? Way too much micromanagement being done there! I just don't have that kind of patience and I guess that's why I suck at these games. :p

One question about not getting the votes from Hatty: did you check her in the diplomatic screen to see why she liked Roosevelt so much? Maybe it wasn't a bug and she did just like him better.

Sullla, very very very nice read. You've really inspired me not only to play the game more, but to write in a more organized and coherent way. With every installment, i was simply taken back by your organization. And you basically wrote each in a short span of time which is even more amazing.

I agree that you should have investigated into why hatty didnt vote for you, maybe the AI is just really really smart not to let you win? :lol:

I'd like to find Solver's posts about multiple war states.

But for those who think the AI can't wage a war, I wrote up a little story over in Stories.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=3242079#post3242079

I would beg to differ. I didn't have Sullla's huge tech lead, and the AI taught me what it learned about fighting.

I agree that you should have investigated into why hatty didnt vote for you. . .

Maybe 'cause Sullla kept calling her 'Hatty' :p

Maybe 'cause Sullla kept calling her 'Hatty' :p

Well can you see the AIs level of relationship with others? perhaps Roosevelt gave her more of what she asked for, participated in more wars or something. Most of the rest should be the same (they were both part of the 'Hindu block' had years of peace and probably Open Borders) Maybe she just didn't want you to win, thought she had a chance at a Space Race if she could keep you from imposing world government.


So I guess in no-AI-MP "Diplomatic" victory is basically Population Domination and "Domination" is Land Domination.

Thank you for this great walkthrough. It's improved my own knowledge of how to play the game, as well as given me some wonderful insight into the rules and game in general.

I only have one question. Do you know if the "Free Camera" option is disabled in the final version? Because, I've yet to find it. I've looked in just about everywhere, manual, keyboard listing, ect. It'd be great to have a Free Camera, but it seems to be disabled. Any thoughts?

Actually, Solver mentioned something very interesting about the AI in regards to war just yesterday, I think. He was telling Yin how there are effectively 2 main levels of 'war mentality' (or was it 3?): Low Level and All Out. If I recall, an AI will often start on low level-sending in fast pillaging units to disrupt your infrastructure and attack units in the open. However, if it asks for peace and you refuse, then it ramps things up to 'All-Out', where it will start to bring in the heavy hitters-in big mixed stacks that are hard to completely counter-and really go at it. I think there may even be an 'annihilation' level of war AI-but that this is reserved for very specific circumstances and/or very aggressive civs. If true, though, this gives me the greatest hope of all for playing an incredibly intelligent and effective AI opponent.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.


Sounds really good since that's how I and probably a lot of players play, war is either for minor goals or for the purpose of taking out the enemy as a significant player/extracting major concessions.

:thumbsup: It's been a great walkthrough and I've learnt from it :)

... Now all I need is to get Civ 4 :D

Did America declare war on the Romans at some point that I missed? I found it odd Caesar abstained rather than vote for Roosevelt since he clearly hated you. You mentioned it only takes 40% to win Sec. General, what conditions would lead to there being more than 2 candidates? If the rest of the world had voted for Roosevelt he would have had a majority, so I assume needing less than 40% means there can be 3-way elections

Im getting a permissions error when I try to view the walkthrough? It was working fine 10 minutes ago. Has something happened?

Same here..

I'm getting access denied too when I was half way through - wont even let me view the one I was just in...

yup... access denied :(

I'm getting the error message:
Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /civ3/sullla/civ4_walk_1a.html on this server.

Ok.....was going to post about the "permission Denied" error but some others have beaten me to it!

Edit: typos

My lolipop got stolen by a big bully. I can't access the last page, FORBIDDEN ERROR.

As Sulla is probably sleeping right now we'll probably have to wait till later to get it fixed. :(

Now how am I gonna waste the next 6 hours of work.... :mischief:

Must say that the execution of the story and the follow up here with the answers is outstanding!

Very well done, paid media often can't get that kind of quality.

Greatly enjoyed reading it and learned a lot!

So ready to play the game now, if only it arrived...

I’ll be sure to watch your site for more reports!

As Sulla is probably sleeping right now we'll probably have to wait till later to get it fixed. :(

Now how am I gonna waste the next 6 hours of work.... :mischief:

Well I've got good news for you, chief!

Just use google's cache, it's all there. Here's the link to the first page: Google Cache Page 1 (http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/civ4_walk_1.html+&hl=en)

Well I've got good news for you, chief!

Just use google's cache, it's all there. Here's the link to the first page: Google Cache Page 1 (http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/civ4_walk_1.html+&hl=en)

WOOHOO! Now I dont have to do any work!!

cheers! :goodjob:

oh wait... It only has page 1 cached... already read that! :(

Oh well, back to work....

I wanna know what happens in part 7:sad:
i will just have to put the page on auto refresh and stare at it until something comes up.

Thank you, Sulla, for a very entertaining and informative read. :) Your approach was great for pointing out lots of little details on the game screen and the pacing was just right, introducing new points at the appropriate times and not overwhelming a reader unfamiliar with the game.

You're a credit to the team! :goodjob:

I only came across the link to this yesterday so read through to part 6, I can't wait for the concluding part! I really enjoyed this, thanks, it was great fun playing the game with you, so to speak. :)

FORBIDDEN to acces this page ... wtf?

im guessing he went over his bandwidth limit

It seems like the entire server www.kalikokottage.com is sealed off

Heh, I read all of it :D (Just before the first "access forbidden" errors were reported.)

Anyway, I've refrained from commenting until the thing's complete.

First of, thanks Sullla, an excellent read, and a really good intro into the game (one way of playing it, at any rate!).

Now how about a warmonger walkthru, a research-oriented walkthru for a fast SS win, oh and a deity walkthru...? :joke:

Anyway, it's help lift the disappointment of still not having Civ4 :goodjob:

Ack I started to read this great walkthrough this morning but when I try this afternoon the server seems to be locked :-( Hope this will be fixed pretty soon :-) I will go out a bit :-)

I just barely got to read it through though it disappeared when I tried to view the summary, the last page.

I myself am not sure exactly what happened... I suppose that the bandwidth limit was exceed and the website was forced to shut down for a while. I'll see if I can talk with my website provider and get things working again (this is actually the first time that this has ever happened to my website).

Hey sulla. thanks for the walkthrough. It's much better than reading common reviews. I really enjoyed it, and I can't wait to read the last part.

If you want a quick solution (for your bandwidth problem), just register at http://www.100free.com/ and copy your site there.
You get unlimited bandwidth, but it's only for 25mb, should be enough I think. You can get a site up in a couple of clicks only.

Just trying to help.

:)

Whilst your wrestling with your website provider Sulla, is there any chance you could bundle up an offline version? ZIP file or something containing the HTML or even a word version?

I'd really like to continue reading and I'm sure there are others who would also like too.

Good luck getting your site back up though! :)

Cheers for the walkthrough :goodjob: As I dont have Civ4 yet, it helps to learn a bit about it before I do get it.

Hey, the page doesn´t work...

I 2nd the zip Idea...
I need my walkthrough /help fix.....

thanks Sulla this is the 1st gem of Civ 4

I 2nd the zip Idea...
I need my walkthrough /help fix.....

thanks Sulla this is the 1st gem of Civ 4

Did America declare war on the Romans at some point that I missed? I found it odd Caesar abstained rather than vote for Roosevelt since he clearly hated you. You mentioned it only takes 40% to win Sec. General, what conditions would lead to there being more than 2 candidates? If the rest of the world had voted for Roosevelt he would have had a majority, so I assume needing less than 40% means there can be 3-way elections

I'm pretty sure there are only 2 candidates, but people could abstain....actually what happens if everyone abstains in a vote for Secretary-General, does another set of elections get held when thenext voting round would be, or does it wait for as long as a normal 'term'?

Sulla ... great job !! Millions of congratulations !! :)

Anyway - one thing ( still ) sound strange for me regarding gameplay ... but anyway probably is just one more unjustified rant ... combination of slow developement/relatively fast tech progress ... may unbalance the game ... or make it a little bit strange ... :mischief: ... hmm ...

Anyway - thanks again Sulla !

Regards

any advance on when those of us who havent't read part seven will be able to see it?

I've just found this walkthrough, and it's already been killed by the raging barba^H^H^H^H other visitors to this site.

Is there any way the files could be zipped up? The suggestion of placing this zip, on a smaller space/more bandwidth site is a good one.

Another option: This is such a popular thing, that I would also suggest contacting the hosters here at Civfanatics. The walkthrough is an EXCELLENT introduction to Civ, and should be on this site/Apolyton, to help people who are new to the game, or are contemplating purchasing the game.

PLEASE NOTE THESE FORUMS SUPPORT PDF AND ZIP. THE ABOVE WALKTHROUGH COULD BE PUT INTO MULTIPLE ZIPS/PDFS, AND EVEN POSTED IN THIS THREAD..

Whilst your wrestling with your website provider Sulla, is there any chance you could bundle up an offline version? ZIP file or something containing the HTML or even a word version?

I'd really like to continue reading and I'm sure there are others who would also like too.

HA! Now -that- is dedication. A player sorely in need of a fix.

I love it. :lol:


- Sirian

if this was posted all in one shot, i don't think we'd be seeing the problem. people have bookmarked page 1 and are using next all the way through to get to the current day's page consuming a lot more bandwidth since we're downloading it all every day. ;) maybe post a link at the bottom of each page saying going to your table of contents.

Is their nothing you can do sulla to ease our sufering?
cant you take out the pictures for now and have a word only version? that will use a LOT less bandwidth.

I'm happy to host the content on my website, either zipped or live, which is on a pretty good provider. I need someone to put me in touch with the author, as I have no way to find his contact information.

pm sulla on this forum

Great walkthrough Sulla!
It helps to kill some time while waiting for Civ4.

I imagine it will be working tomorrow (1st Nov) as the bandwidth will be reset for beginning of the month?

Almost as bad as waiting for 4th Nov for the actual game!:(

Does anyone have off-line version of that walkthrough? :rolleyes:

At the moment, I am trying to get in contact with my webmaster to see what we can do to fix the website and get it running again. The entire server crashed (even the parts that aren't covered by my website!) so I hope everything is OK. This is the first time that that has ever happened, so the Walkthrough must be popular... (I also had no fewer than 11 PMs today informing me of the problem, hehe).

Here's what we're going to do for now: I'm posting a pair of files here. The first one is a Word document with all of the text for Part Seven in it. I've cut and pasted from the html, but it should be easy to read (ignore the command tags). The second one is a zip file with all the pictures from Part Seven in it. If there are continued problems getting the website up and running I'll do the same with the other parts, but I hope we'll be able to resolve that and get things running soon. (It takes a lot of work to put these things into another format). Thank you for your patience, everyone. :)

Zip File (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads10/Civ4WalkthroughPart7a.zip)

EDIT: OK, so apparently you can't upload Word Documents to the CivFanatics server. Weird. Anyway, I stuck the Word Document INTO the zip file, so it's all one download now. Hopefully that will fix things.

This should really be up on the Civ4 website. It is a fantastic ad for the game!

So much for the drop off in interest when that game comes out! :lol: Looking forward to the site coming back on. Thanks Sulla for your generosity and effort to make this available to us all!:goodjob:

First of all a big thank you to Sullla for providing me with something very good to read while waiting for the release of Civ IV in the UK.

I have a question about your capturing the former Egyptian Islam capital from Caeser and gifting it to Hatty. Will the AI dislike you if you keep their former cities? Will they like you more if you gift them their former cities? Will they ever return your former cities to you if they happen to liberate them?

Apart from maybe getting Hatty to like you more in order to get her to vote for you I think with the extra population from that city you would have had more votes in the UN and hence more change of winning the vote, hence I didn't really understand the purpose of this gift.

THANK YOU FOR THE ZIP!

Here's some tips to make reading the files locally a little easier.

Extract the Zip file to it's own folder.
Rename the word Document file so that it is not .doc, but .html
Open the renamed .html file in Wordpad.
Erase from the start of the file to the h2 align="center" part. (Don't erase the less than sign!)
Do a search and replace. Search for
http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/
replace with: nothing Leave the replace part empty. Hit the replace all button.
Save the file
Start Internet Browser, Using File Open, open the .html file.

Enjoy!

It was a bit more difficult to link the pictures to the text but the seventh part of the walkthrough was still a good read. Thank you for this great walkthrough and for your trouble to ensure that we could read the seventh part of it. :goodjob:

Two final questions:
Are you sure that Hatty and Roosevelt didn't have a good relation? You seem pretty sure of yourself, can you view the relations between other empires in some adviser screen?

Why were you using longbowmen alongside your tanks and modern armor (picture 147 says that your longbowmen killed a horse archer)?

Actually, Solver mentioned something very interesting about the AI in regards to war just yesterday, I think. He was telling Yin how there are effectively 2 main levels of 'war mentality' (or was it 3?): Low Level and All Out. If I recall, an AI will often start on low level-sending in fast pillaging units to disrupt your infrastructure and attack units in the open. However, if it asks for peace and you refuse, then it ramps things up to 'All-Out', where it will start to bring in the heavy hitters-in big mixed stacks that are hard to completely counter-and really go at it. I think there may even be an 'annihilation' level of war AI-but that this is reserved for very specific circumstances and/or very aggressive civs. If true, though, this gives me the greatest hope of all for playing an incredibly intelligent and effective AI opponent.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.
This makes a lot of sense. On my game yesterday this is EXACTLY what Catherine did to me. She declared war when I didn't have a lot of military and started sending troops over, but only stacks of 1/2/3/4 at a time. Eventually, once I killed all her troops, she asked for peace, and I refused because I was about to assault one of her cities. In the next turn a stack of 11 invaded me! I held her off with my stack and both were basically destroyed (only had two horse archers left). Then only a few turns later another stack came into my territory. I was only on noble, but my army had been destroyed from her first stack and I wasn't really worried about my military prowess in this game so my defense sucked. I was going to go for a diplomatic win. Anyways, she took a city, then I signed peace, giving her two of my techs. I think what you said is accurate.

Thanks again Sullla for the great walkthrough. I'm reading the last part now. Great Job organizing all of the information in the walkthrough!

Your walkthroughs a great read, Sulla. Pity about the forbidden error thingy. :(

I myself am not sure exactly what happened... I suppose that the bandwidth limit was exceed and the website was forced to shut down for a while. I'll see if I can talk with my website provider and get things working again (this is actually the first time that this has ever happened to my website).

Phew, am I glad! Don't get me wrong: it's a pity, you have trouble with your provider, but when I tried to check out the last two parts of your walkthrough I thought my employer finally catched me surfing the civ-sites all the time and blocked them for me :lol: :gripe: ... ****, I'm getting paranoid! :eek:

(great read, your walkthrough!!! helps me alot getting behind things! :thanx: )

One question while we are waiting (hopefully this hasn't been forwarded yet):

You mention you don't care THAT much what kind of Great person is showing up... Does this mean, specialization of cities is not THAT much of an issue?

In my current game I use different specialists in order to raise Great People, but try to keep the chance for Great Engineers high by giving them a headstart (had a wonder where I got a free specialist/engineer in every city...). Good strategy or crap??

And secondly one thing I don't know, but am I'm right assuming that the amount of Great People-Points needed to get a Great-Person isn't measured City by city but civ by civ, correct? Or is it even worse and it's measured by the no. of Great People born on Earth!? (In that case I screwed up....)

Thanks in advance for enlighten me! :)

thanks for answering thequestions Sullla

any chance you'll do a walk through on emperor level so we can watch the ai whup on you?

Anyone who hasn't looked at it yet, try unzipping this into the folder with the images. It should look nicer.

Many thanks, Khaim... I got the pics but wasn't able to download the .doc earlier and I'm keen to read the final part. It's also a lot easier on my poor old eyes than the original white text on black! :)

Off to read it now...

THANK YOU FOR THE ZIP!

Here's some tips to make reading the files locally a little easier.

Extract the Zip file to it's own folder.
Rename the word Document file so that it is not .doc, but .html
Open the renamed .html file in Wordpad.
Erase from the start of the file to the h2 align="center" part. (Don't erase the less than sign!)
Do a search and replace. Search for
http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/
replace with: nothing Leave the replace part empty. Hit the replace all button.
Save the file
Start Internet Browser, Using File Open, open the .html file.

Enjoy!


Thanks for the info. :goodjob:

For those who have not tried this tip - you get the text and pictures together. Just ignore the htlm bits and pieces.

Good job - Nomad_Wanderer

I put Part 7 into a single, self-contained PDF and can do the same with the whole enchilada if Sulla wants to send me everything. I can't host it but I'll gladly put it all into neat PDFs and send it to someone with some hosting resources.

Update: Not surprisingly, the Walkthrough generated enough traffic to kill off my webshost's bandwidth, and so it had to come down. (Over 100GB of traffic in a week! You guys are monsters! :lol: ) Sirp has been a saint to put up with it for most of the past week. :D

I've had several offers of web hosting today (you guys are ALSO really kind! :)) and I'm in the process of hearing back from some of them. Once I have a new site, I'll do my best to get the Walkthrough up and running again. So it may be a few days, but things should be up and running again at some point soon.

You need three temples for each cathedral. 2 temples = 0 cathedrals, 4 = 1 cathedral, 9 temples = 3 cathedrals, etc. You also need to keep the type of each one in mind: 3 Hindu temples required for 1 Hindu cathedral. If you start cheating in buildings, you may see some weird results. :lol:

I may have cheated in giving myself a great nine-city starting position, but I didn't mess with buildings. :p

Could it be related to map size? I was playing on huge. And someone else was presumably playing on a smaller-than-normal size when they went for a six-city cultural victory, since they got a cathedral for every two temples.

Thanks Sullla for your time! :D
Thanks to all the others helping Sullla!

Great read, but I came across something that got me thinking.

You won by Diplomatic victory, and noted that in Civ4 it now bases votes on population, so that given a little more time you could simply have voted yourself into the win. How, exactly, is this different than a Domination win, then? It's still the same basic effect; conquer as much as you can, and you can't lose. Only the percentages vary.

One of the things I liked about Civ3's one-civ-one-vote system was that if you went on a conquering spree as you approached the modern era, the other civs would all vote against you unless you took them all the way out. But in Civ4, it looks like once you get to 50%ish of the votes, it's impossible to lose at diplomacy. Because of this, I'd actually prefer Civ3's setup.

Or is this just me?

That looks like you need 2/3rds of the world population to back you. If you've got 2/3rds of the world's population in your borders, you should've really won a domination victory by now ; )

It's not so much sullas civ4 walkthrough i'm missing ( excellent though that is), but his civ3 chronicles :( It's phenomenally inspiring stuff!. It's how civ should be played. Like reading through pages of history.

I tend to play disjointedly not really knowing what the hell i'm doing or researching. This has been a real eye opener. Just hope the site gets back up soon :)

Thanks Sullla

PP

Sulla, thanks for your walk through.
It made me order my civ4 copy now instead of Xmas as originally planned.
Hopefully your site will be up again soon. This walkthrough is worth reading again when I actually have the game. Can't imagine a better introduction.

@Nomad_wanderer
Great tip, works like a charm and makes reading from the zip as easy as using the web site. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for the walthrough, it's been great. I live in Australia and it comes out in a few days. Can't wait to get it and start playing!!!

BTW this is my first post. I've been browsing civfanatics for years now, but only recently have decided to be a member

If you've got 2/3rds of the world's population in your borders, you should've really won a domination victory by now ; )

It goes both directions; anyone who wins the Domination victory in the Modern era could have, by definition, won a Diplomatic victory more easily. After all, which is easier: 66.7% entirely by yourself, or 60% once your allies are added in? The only way there'd be a discrepancy would be if your cities were so much larger than everyone else's that you didn't take up much land, or if you would have won Domination before the U.N. was built.

But the real point was, playstyles. With this change, the only consistent way to win Diplomatic would be to follow the same playstyle used for Domination or Conquest wins. You can no longer be that minor power that's managed to assemble a voting bloc against the warmonger; you now have to be that warmonger. (Especially true in multiplayer, since no one will vote FOR you there, but then again, that would be true of the Civ3 system too.)

Thank you, Sulla!!!! Super job!!!!

Just 4 days left to get the game and I can't wait!!!!!!

Thanks for the writeup, it's great!!

If it's a static file (ie no PHP, ASP, whatever) I could offer you some webspace for it (also contacted you by PM).

Here's what we're going to do for now: I'm posting a pair of files here. The first one is a Word document with all of the text for Part Seven in it. I've cut and pasted from the html, but it should be easy to read (ignore the command tags). The second one is a zip file with all the pictures from Part Seven in it. If there are continued problems getting the website up and running I'll do the same with the other parts, but I hope we'll be able to resolve that and get things running soon. (It takes a lot of work to put these things into another format). Thank you for your patience, everyone. :)

Zip File (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads10/Civ4WalkthroughPart7a.zip)

EDIT: OK, so apparently you can't upload Word Documents to the CivFanatics server. Weird. Anyway, I stuck the Word Document INTO the zip file, so it's all one download now. Hopefully that will fix things.

Sullla...I'm sorry, but I missed Parts 5-7...is there a way I could get 5&6 as well? Or do you think the site will be up soon? Great job by the way!

Hi there..ı cannt still get the avesome walktrough..please helpme about it:)

But the real point was, playstyles. With this change, the only consistent way to win Diplomatic would be to follow the same playstyle used for Domination or Conquest wins. You can no longer be that minor power that's managed to assemble a voting bloc against the warmonger; you now have to be that warmonger.
I would tend to think not. Certainly that's one way to do it. However, if you build the UN and are relatively small in population yourself, you can still win by lining up enough friends behind you. Certainly that seems to be the intent, at least.

Now Sulla did mention that there seemed to be some bugginess regarding the vote with respect to how Hatty voted. So it may not be the case that things will work as intended right now, but presumably that will get corrected sooner or later.

How about zipping the whole thing and distributing it as a Torrent-file? There won't be much traffic if everybody keeps uploading it after finishing the download.

I would tend to think not. Certainly that's one way to do it. However, if you build the UN and are relatively small in population yourself, you can still win by lining up enough friends behind you. Certainly that seems to be the intent, at least.

But you see, it doesn't work that way in practice. If one overly-aggressive civ has more than 40% of the world's population, you simply CAN'T win a diplomatic victory, no matter how many buddies you line up, unless you get that one civ to vote for you. That's why I was saying the Civ3 one-vote system was nicer; it DOES allow for those sorts of wins.

Changing the threshold from 60% wouldn't be enough. If you raise it (the only way to keep it from precluding a Domination victory), it'd be even easier for a single aggressive civ to prevent anyone else from winning. If you lower it, it becomes easier for that single civ to win outright.

Maybe the solution is to have votes depend on Score, not just population. There's precedent; the influence of countries like France and Germany on the U.N. are far out of proportion to their actual population, and everyone's way behind China in population after all. Changing it to Score would overlap a bit with many of the other victory conditions (histogram, cultural, domination) without completely overshadowing any one. Plus, it'd be really easy to see how many votes everyone will get, since the score is right on your screen at all times.

And on a related note: why would anyone vote for you? Just in general, why would any actual players vote for anyone other than themselves or Abstain? Think about it from the multiplayer perspective; the only reason for player A to ever give votes to player B is if he'd rather see B win than player C. But a loss is a loss, and any strategy that guarantees you can't win is just dumb; you'd be better off abstaining, on the off chance that you could find some way to win yourself down the road, no matter how improbable that seems.

Ahh, but score is based on population and territory. So the bigger you are....

Sulla's walkthrough is so great that it has caused a number of new Civfanatics members.

Welcome to Turkishfan, Pablitor and tomcat885![party] :band: [party]

Hi

For everyone who's interested:

You can get Sullla's Walkthrough Part 7 as a PDF here:

Link [PDF] (http://pozor.ch/Civ4WalkthroughPart7.pdf)

The PDF was created by KingSponge, i'm just hosting it.

Happy reading!

Rince

The links are dead. Where can I read the first 6 parts??

Changing the threshold from 60% wouldn't be enough. If you raise it (the only way to keep it from precluding a Domination victory), it'd be even easier for a single aggressive civ to prevent anyone else from winning. If you lower it, it becomes easier for that single civ to win outright.

My choice would rather be to say that no one civ can ever hold more than 50% of the votes for any resolution and that in order to pass a resolution (or win a diplomatic victory as well being voted SG) requires the votes of at least two civs. That would prevent any civ from stealing en election as well as preventing any one civ from vetoing it as well.
(It would also mean that the UN is pretty much worthless when there are only two unfriendly civs left in the game which would also seem to make sense)

yeah, I didnt read it over the weekend. Where can parts 5 and 6 be found?

Update: Not surprisingly, the Walkthrough generated enough traffic to kill off my webshost's bandwidth, and so it had to come down. (Over 100GB of traffic in a week! You guys are monsters! :lol: ) Sirp has been a saint to put up with it for most of the past week. :D

I've had several offers of web hosting today (you guys are ALSO really kind! :)) and I'm in the process of hearing back from some of them. Once I have a new site, I'll do my best to get the Walkthrough up and running again. So it may be a few days, but things should be up and running again at some point soon.

depending on size i could also mirror some parts of it too onto my webspace....even if its just 1 part or something.

You really need to know about http://www.coralcdn.org/

It handles these problems.

Unfortunately I only read the first one and have missed all the others.

Continuing with the UN discussion maybe one could say that if any one civ becomes too powerful or has waged too much war the UN tends to break down, it is after all a forum for discussing grievances and coming up with ways to organise peace, not for any one civ to dictate terms on the others.:borg:

Or maybe if you are a warmonger even your allies will refuse to vote for you. When you run around conquering nations you would hardly be trusted to unite the world in peaceful coexistance, not even by your close friends and allies. (Maybe that is why Hatty kept voting for Roosevelt);)

That way warmongers would not be able to control the UN, they can rule the world with nukes instead.:nuke:

Sulla, great job.
I hope you are well compensated by Firaxis or 2K Games. Your walkthrough definitely persuaded me to buy the game!

laylowmay, although I was not paid by Firaxis for the Walkthrough, they have been extremely generous to me over the past few months (they invited me to the official release party last week, which was a total blast!) :D

GREAT NEWS regarding the Walkthrough: corwin90 has volunteered to give my website a new home! :goodjob: I can't express how much I owe him a debt of gratitude for this generous gesture. (Sirp, my previous webhost, has been amazingly helpful over the past three years as well - I feel bad for damaging his business with all the traffic I generated this past week).

Goal is to get the Walkthrough files transfered and back up TONIGHT on the new webhosting. I will post updated links when (if?) that takes place. Also in the news, KingSponge is putting together a downloadable PDF file of the Walkthrough so it can be viewed offline. Part Seven is the only one done so far (a link is above), but once I get the site back up and running again he plans to do the rest. I'll add links on the first page when they are complete. Thanks to KingSponge for helping out Civ fans! :)

Sulla, just wanted to say I really love your walk-through. It's clear and beautifully done!

Unfortunately, I only got into the first few pages before your site came down. I will keep checking and hope it goes up again! Even though I'm playing the game myself as of yesterday, I want to see more on what you have to say about it!

Question.

In screenshot 134 (the zoomed-in shot of Mecca) you are still at war with the dead Victoria and Gandhi). Does that give you war-weariness or other war-related things ? ?

i'm getting a 403 error at the site now.

Walkthrough is back up! :cool: The new address is at:

http://www.guybailey.com/sullla/civ4.html

First page has been edited to reflect this. :D (The links in my signature now also go to the proper place.)

Sweet! I guess you cant hear a 'thank you' too often, so... Thanx for the great walkthrough, its a real nice piece of eye-candy.

Hey Sulla, any way you could show an 18 player epic game with raging barbarians. I'm curious to see how this game differs w/ the other one you just showed. Also if you do that, please choose a non spiritual civ. Thanks for your walkthrough, it was very helpfull.

Now it says "Service Unavailable". :cry:

EDIT: The Walkthrough has been reposted at its new location. Please update any bookmarks you might have. :)
- Sullla
great :)

now i can read the last 3 parts i missed due to excessive civ4 playing ;)

good work

It's still unavailable for me... :cry:

thanx Sula great work

The new location seems to have buckled under the strain already :cry:

Still haven't finished reading it yet :(

Does not work for me either.:(
Hopefully you can get it to work soon.

I was lucky enough to see it before the site got into problems and I must say that it was a great read.

More informative than any review I have read.:goodjob:

Well, I have to say that the entire timing on this Walkthrough has been PERFECT!!! I am picking up Civ4 tomorrow, and so this has maintained my anticipation levels right up until the purchase date. Now, I would be lying if I said there weren't things which bother/concern me, or things which don't look right from my CURRENT vantage point-but my overwhelming sense is that this will be the MOST FUN civ experience I have had since Civ2!!! Thanks a BILLION Sullla.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Well, I have to say that the entire timing on this Walkthrough has been PERFECT!!! I am picking up Civ4 tomorrow, and so this has maintained my anticipation levels right up until the purchase date. Now, I would be lying if I said there weren't things which bother/concern me, or things which don't look right from my CURRENT vantage point-but my overwhelming sense is that this will be the MOST FUN civ experience I have had since Civ2!!! Thanks a BILLION Sullla.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Hope you enjoy it, I would just recommend altering the research speed otherwise the experience flies by way to quickly...

Start here

http://www.guybailey.com/sullla/civ4_walk_1.html

Now it says "Service Unavailable". :cry:

Had that problem too, but I just pressed return after setting the cursor in the address field of my browser and then it worked...

Hey all.

I am a Civilization noob. I never played the original games (back in the 90's) and didn't pay much attention to the expansions and sequels, even though I have a friend who is a Civ-junkie.

He was soooo excited by Civilization IV, I started to read the reviews and previews and being a strategy game fanatic (RTS, that is) so I became interested in it. My wife gave it to me for my b-day.

While I enjoy a big fat manual and I ALWAYS do the tutorials I was left head-scratching with a perplexed espression. I just didn't understand the way the game worked, and worse, I didn't see the fun in it.

Until.....

I came accross Sulla's walkthrough and things started to make sense!! I started a new game on yesterday at 11:15 pm.... at 6:40 am today I was crushing my enemies!!! Not only that, I feel I haven't begun to scratch the surface! The liberty to do what I want with my civ!! It's like a drug (I finally feel the "one-more-turn" syndrome, now: make it go away).

Wow I just read what I wrote, it sounds like one of those TV Store (as seen on TV) commercials.

Anyways, from Spain I say: thanks Sulla!! Your walkthrough prevented me from returning the game, and is on its way to make me a Civ Fanatic.

I'm glad you joined the ranks! :)

Sulla's walkthrough is great stuff indeed! :goodjob: Was great to read it while waiting for the game to arrive. Shame 7 days wasn't long enough for the game to show up here, but that's not Sulla's fault :D

Should have it soon now, any day... is that the doorbell I hear? *runs off*

I think the best thing about Civ is that you can "waste" your whole day playing it and then not even feel guilty for wasting your time like with most games because you genuinely feel you've done something constructive; built your civilization up further and come closer to preparing that invasion of your weakest neighbour :D

1 Nov 2005 10:30 PM CST - Sullla posts that the site is back up

2 Nov 2006 8:12 AM CST - The site has likely consumed all its bandwidth

I checked the bandwidth usage, and it shows 1 Gigabyte of bandwidth consumed on 1 November. So, I guess it is reasonable to assume that the site (only about 15 Megabytes) consumed the entire 20 GIGABYTE monthly bandwidth in less than half a day.

I will email the hosting company and see if that is why it is unavailable.

Best regards to all of you helping me learn to play this great game!

Lol sullla keeps breaking peoples' websites!!

Maybe the zip file is the way to go.....or even the Torrent as someone said earlier.....would be more efficient that way!

So, I guess it is reasonable to assume that the site (only about 15 Megabytes) consumed the entire 20 GIGABYTE monthly bandwidth in less than half a day.

20G/15M = 1333

So if everyone accessing the site accessed all the content (and disregarding the fact that a megabyte isn't a million bytes and a gigabyte isn't a billion bytes), you'd use all the bandwidth after about 1300 hits. Even if some content gets missed by a lot of people, it's probably not going to go higher than 2000. ;)

Lol sullla keeps breaking peoples' websites!!

Maybe the zip file is the way to go.....or even the Torrent as someone said earlier.....would be more efficient that way!

Did anyone download a copy of the site? If so, please zip it and send it to me and I'll whip it up into PDF files and get it hosted on PlanetCiv (Fileplanet). I'm sure they can handle it. :)

Maybe he should submit it as a forum thread/article and ask for it to be hosted here. We seem to be killing bandwidth on other sites way too fast :/

I REALLY want to read this walkthrough, and haven't had the chance to see even the first part of it...

While I have a host that could handle 40-50GB per month in traffic to help out, I don't know that is the solution.

Here is an idea:

1. Take your html files and create a ZIP file out of it. This should be viewable from a local machine. (I could make a PDF out of the whole thing if you like)

2. Upload it as a bit torrent file. Then everyone can share in the bandwidth cost. It's fast, free and easy.

If you don't know about bit torrent, I'll be happy to create it for you, post it and link it here in the forums.

bit torrent info
http://www.bittorrent.com/introduction.html