I haven't bought the game, but in it said in the manual i downloaded that 18 was the most amount the game could handle. In Civ 3, you could have up to 31 civs! so this is a step backwards in my opinion. I was looking forward to this game, but now it seems there are less modding attractions than before. Or am I mistaken?

Also this game has no flavor units, which was disapointing. several years of modding has given civ 3 a huge amount of flavor units which i put in my own scenario, with also 31 players.

Theres only one consoling thought for me: Since this game is in 3D, would it be easier to transfer the 3D models people made when they moded Civ3 to Civ4?

Omg That Sucks!!!!

There is flavor in the game, however it's based on a civs preference of growth/religion/economy/military/science

ONLY 18 CIVS??? Tell me this isn't true! I'm not buying this if I can't have more civs. That would be so disapointing. :(

Civ3 only had 18 civs as well. The other Civs didn't come until the expansion.

Yeah but they are talking about a hard limit.

You can have more than 18 civs in the game to choose from. You don't replace any. But I understand that you can only have 18 on a map.

I'm greatly disappointed at this because Soren said it was hard coded. I'm hoping this limit is raised in the future.

When i say 31 civs, I mean I can play 31 Civs at the same time. If I understand the manual, I can only play up to 18. Hopefully this will change? Sid Mier, can you comment?

i would guess maybe the Python if not the SDK would let you do add more than 18....
i dont see why not.
unless hard-coded means the central engine of the game? i dunno...

Performance wise, I doubt we want more than 18 on a map at any given time anyways.

Still is kind of a drag though.

Was it possible to add new civilizations in an unpatched vanilla Civ3? I seem to recall severe limitations to what the original editor could do (undo not working, inability to assign specific civs to a starting location, and inability to place units and cities are stuff I distinctly remember, but I can't remember about adding civs).

you couldnt add anything without the patched editor.

Performance wise, I doubt we want more than 18 on a map at any given time anyways.

Still is kind of a drag though.

Yea, as i seem to recall civ3 was hard to play when all 31 of thoose nations had a nicely sized army :cry:

I beleave civ4 is based on performance not having a sheer number of civs that do nothing but waste game space.

I don't really see the point of having 31 civs. 18 does me fine on this game judging on all the new features and faster gamplay its hard enough without having another 12 trigger happy civs on the map.:lol:

I don´t have the game yet, but there´s some XML file, something that allows to add more than 18 Civs in a game. Seriously, that must be possible, otherwise is a amazing drawback.

He was talking about having more than 18 civs in general, not just in a single game, but in a mod in general, like having 100s of civs to choose from in the civ selection screen. Also people may like having more than 18, for a more realistic expierence(since there are more than 18 countries in real life), why not let some people have that?

Seriously though, someone should go into the civ4 editor(those that have the game) and see if you can add in new civs.

Its a turn-based game, why would perfomance matter?

you couldnt add anything without the patched editor.

That's what I thought.

So, by comparison, I think Civ4 isn't so bad.

It is possible to add as many Civ to choose from as possible - this is edited in a XML file, and there is no hard limit on this. But in a game you can have at most 18 Civs at a time. This is a hard-coded limit. Note that in original Civ3 this limit was 16 per game. It was increased later on to 31.

I should say that unless you have some mega-powerful computer, Civ4 as it stands would be unplayable with 18 Civs. For most people even with very powerful computers the game gets quite slow with 9 Civs on a large map.

In vanilla Civ3, there was a hard-coded limit of 17 civilizations in any one bic. This is not a step backwards. Also, remember the "nothing will be hard-coded" comment? When we get the SDK we can change it.

So its a false alarm....:crazyeye:

I should say that unless you have some mega-powerful computer, Civ4 as it stands would be unplayable with 18 Civs. For most people even with very powerful computers the game gets quite slow with 9 Civs on a large map.

In that case, Civ4 is gay. Everyone go back to playing Civ3. Thank you. :)

Bingo. So we wait until the SDK cames.

I still don't think the concept of "a game loosely based on Civ" has sunk in yet. ;)

Mistake, see post further down.

I was disappointed with the 18 at first but once you play the game for me 18is more than enough

Was going to re-iterate my points but sgrig did the job nicely

Just wanted to add:

18 civs may be enough for some people, but others including me prefer the challenge of 30+ opponents. Its not really the fault of Firaxis - becuase I gather there would be lag and processing problems even with Gamebryo. Even with those problems I'm stubborn enough to play a buggy, laggy game with more civs rather than less. Its just about customising the game to your own personal taste.

I hope with further increased processing speeds in the future, the limit will be upped. I'm running a 3.8ghz, twin 512 at the minute, but I don't mind upgrading even further in the future, such is the Civ addiction.

It seems even 18 is a stretch... now I'm not complaining, because so far I do absolutely love this game. By I just custom bought a brand new computer about a monther a go with a top notch gfx card, a gig of ram, 64 bit AMD athlon processor, the works. Completely designed for the "gaming" stuff, I don't play very many flashy games that require super computers, but I figure, if I have a computer than can run those, I should be able to run just about everything else.

But on Rhy's map with 18 civs, by the late game, just as I'm starting to discover riflemen and such (nearing the end of the industrial era) with 2 of the 18 civs dead and gone I've got the world lagging TERRIBLY. I can't smooth scroll across my map anymore... I try my best not to even look at the other civs or I'll be frozen for a bit of load time, if I zoom out, an even bigger freeze.

and just once, for the first time last night (but too soon for the first time) the game actually randomly quit on my when I was moving a stack of 8 units.

the game is beautiful, and it has the greatest atmosphere of all the civs combined. But I'd honestly give all that up for the same functionality as the other civ. Some games just aren't supposed to be 3D I guess.

They really went nuts with the "less is more" idea.

I have issues with the 18 civ on map limit, because i´m designing the Medieval Ages Mod and I´m planning on putting 40 Civs in a map. That´s my issue.

It seems even 18 is a stretch... now I'm not complaining, because so far I do absolutely love this game. By I just custom bought a brand new computer about a monther a go with a top notch gfx card, a gig of ram, 64 bit AMD athlon processor, the works. Completely designed for the "gaming" stuff, I don't play very many flashy games that require super computers, but I figure, if I have a computer than can run those, I should be able to run just about everything else.

But on Rhy's map with 18 civs, by the late game, just as I'm starting to discover riflemen and such (nearing the end of the industrial era) with 2 of the 18 civs dead and gone I've got the world lagging TERRIBLY. I can't smooth scroll across my map anymore... I try my best not to even look at the other civs or I'll be frozen for a bit of load time, if I zoom out, an even bigger freeze.

and just once, for the first time last night (but too soon for the first time) the game actually randomly quit on my when I was moving a stack of 8 units.

the game is beautiful, and it has the greatest atmosphere of all the civs combined. But I'd honestly give all that up for the same functionality as the other civ. Some games just aren't supposed to be 3D I guess.

They really went nuts with the "less is more" idea.


This brings up a good point. Today's computers, even the ones designed for gaming, simply can NOT handle more than 18 civs on a map. It's a combination of reasons, namely, proccessor power and RAM. There's a lot to handle.

Really, if you want a TON of civs on the map, play civ3. If you want a 3d landscape, and the many changes to gameplay and other things, play Cvi4. If you haven't played civ4 yet, then please, don't knock it until you've tried it. It's a new game, not an expansion.

With modding, you can make hundereds of new civs. It's likely a whole lot easier to do, too, since it's all xml based. I'm sure tools'll come out (user made, and firaxis made) that'll make adding units, civs, changing specific game options, ect a lot easier.

thedaian has a good point. Civ4 is a completely different game. As much as I like it, I know I'll go back to Civ3 soon for some more modding and playing. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Civ3 can handle much larger and more complex worlds, and is faster. Civ4 is more realistic in many ways, and more immersive. I'll play them both and enjoy them both.

If 18 is the limit of Civ's that can be played in a single game, I'm fine with that. The problem for me doesn't lye with the number of civ's that can be played. So you make 100 civ's, ok now what. In order to play them you have to play a random map because the only way to play them is through the py code. The non-random map, like Earth would require XML modifications each time you would like to put in other civ's and who knows how to get the desired x\y location. I guess you could guess them and then try and then guess them and then try and guess them and try, but who wants to spend all day Saturday setting up a single instance of your desired game. :(

I don't understand all this talk about the processing power required to handle extra civs? Processing power I think would be mainly dictated by map size. If have twice as many civs, they would be each half as big on average, and hence take roughly half the time to process each, so the processing power is about the same. Admittedly, there may be some actions that require constant time, maybe diplomacy, but most time consuming actions, like moving all units and setting cities production, would require time proportional to civ size. I played plenty of games of civ3 with 32 civs, and they were not noticably slower in the end game than games with 8 civs. They were slower in the early game, but turns progressed so quick then it didn't matter. But once the map filled out, 8 civs or 32 civs was irrelavent. So I really don't see the reason why the developers hard coded the maximum number of active civs to such a low level. I would imagine increasing the limit would require little effort and have little performance penalty if the code it well structured, but I may be wrong.

I remember having to make a scenario in Civ2 with only 7 civilizations and 1 barbarian civ. I say, if you can't do it with 18 civilizations, it's time to readjust the scope of your scenario.

And in the epic game, I find it hard to pay attention to 10 civilizations let alone 30... most of them are small and completely irrelevant to me except as cities that have been set up ready for me to take... and the barbarians already do a fairly good job of that for me.

I remember having to make a scenario in Civ2 with only 7 civilizations and 1 barbarian civ. I say, if you can't do it with 18 civilizations, it's time to readjust the scope of your scenario.

Do you remember the time where you had to deal with having 640 kilobytes of memory. If you can't adjust your operating system and programs to fit in two megabytes, its time to readjust the scope of your operating system and programs.

Seriously, times have moved on. Civ 3 handled 32 civs at a time without any problems. You might say Civ 4 has better graphics and what not, but adding extra civs requires little extra graphics resources, as the graphics required is determined by map size, not number of civs. I don't see any reason for the step backwards.

Once again, if you compare it to vanilla Civ3 it's not a step backwards. Civ4 will undoubtedly have an expansion pack or 2 eventually, and a lot of new things will be added. It took 3 more years of development after Civ3's release to produce PTW and then Conquests. You can't expect Firaxis to spend that much time developing a new game to make it perfect before its release. Everyone would lose interest.

Patches and expansions will come. I think the main slow-down with multiple civs is that during each AI's turn they must weigh 'where to move' each unit based on current diplomacy and relations with 17 other civs. The AI also trades and must sort through 17 other civs with which to do so. What to research based on 17 other civs current advantages/disadvantages must be calculated.

Jump to 31 civs and you've more than tripled the amount of calculations needed. Civ4 may be slower because there ARE so many new features that need to be accounted for by the AI.

King Jason: What's your CPU, Ram, Video Card?

Am I crazy.

On my CIV III even with all expansions, I could only have 16 or 17 civs playing on one map. I could never have all 31 playing.

If it is possible to have all 31 playing, please let me know how to do it. I would love to utilize this option.

Scenario Properties, change number of players.

Thanks Weasel.

Is that something I need to be a "mod" to do, or is that just in the game.

If it is just in the game, I really feel like an idiot.

Thanks again for the heads up.

I want to also stress what Crayton said. Each civ takes up X ammount of room in memory, and in Civ IV this is larger than ever before. If you look on the map a GREAT deal of extra numbers are kept track of than in any other previous incarnation. Soren and the rest of the Firaxis team put 18 as the limit FOR A REASON. It is not because they are lazy. It is not because they hate you. It is because the number of computations would triple from the levels they are already at and consume more ram. 3D has little to do with this specific issue. Had the game remained 2d sprites they would still have the same issues.

Let me put it to you this way. Had they made 31 civilizations playable even if computers would not have been able to run it you would have complained that the game was buggy and unstable and that they shouldn't of had so many civs playable.

And here is my final point. THIS ISN'T YOUR GAME! I made similar comment to people who had problems with the content of The new star wars movies. They felt that abc shoudl have hap[pened instead of xyz. If they wanted to have a story (on in this case a game) with particular features then make it yourself. Is Civ IV perfict? Nope and they are already working on patching it I'm sure, but don't cry because they limited the current playable levels to 18 civs.

Weasel,

I cannot find scenario properties. What am I doing wrong. Thanks for the help in advance.

I disagree croxis about your reasoning. basically you are saying, they did it this way, therefore it is the end. But I am talking about the Modding aspects!

It IS all about me. Modding is about doing what you want and not what the developers want.

It is one thing to say that Firaxis should have put this Civ in instead of that, or this unit should be here but not that, with modding, I can change it myself and be satisfied. Firaxis didnt have to hard code this limit. perhaps it would be true that the game would play much more slowly if we use 31 civs instead of 18.
But so what? maybe a few of us have very powerful computers because some of us(really big nerds) like playing Civ instead of buying a Ferrari, or maybe we just want to put 2 or 3 more civs in, which in that case, whats the difference between 18 and 20 civs?
The free market will decide and most of us when we discover the computer cant even handle even 18 civs stop it, then thats our choice but give us an option.
The more options the better.

to sum it up: There is no need for the developers to "protect us from ourselves" we know what we want, and we know our limits.

also theres nothing stoppping a modder from making a unit with almost infinite attack, movement, which is immediately available in the stone age and called The Space Marine UU of the Billy bob civilization. This is too silly a scenario, and not something developers would have in mind, but they shouldnt get rid of the Civ editor because some silly fool would waste the Civ editor on ridiculous project like that.

In that case, Civ4 is gay. Everyone go back to playing Civ3. Thank you. :)
You mean it's happy? Why would I not want to play a happy game? I like happiness, it is good.

Or, oh, do you mean THAT kind of "gay"? Awesome, maybe the workers will dress better.

:p

Anyway, is there seriously no limit to the number of Civs to choose from? I'd never want to play with 18 civs on one map, but can I really make like 400 different civilizations to choose from? There MUST be some kind of limit there, mustn't there? Because if not, I foresee some long weekends of making up some crazy civs :D.

Just to striagten this out: In the Mystical Civ 4 editor land you can add a 19th (and so on) or not? I don't give a wooden nickle about having 37 bajillion civs on the map at one time... I just want 37 bajillion civs to choose from.

Has anyone ever considered that after they work out more bugs and issue several patches, they might make an expansion that adds more civs at a time and possibly adds some more leaderheads to the single ones in the current one.

just a thought.

18 civs in a game at the same time is enough for me. What's important is that I can add new civs to choose from.

Hardcoded 18 civ limit?! :sad: :rolleyes:

Making any kind of 'feel right" world history scenario is going to be very hard (if not outright impossible) with only 18 civs - it was barely possible with 31 civs in Civ3.

Of course, the possibility of barbarian cities does help a lot if scenario is only focusing the very top dogs, but I suspect until they figure out a way to optimize the CIV AI engine - or whatever is making system slow down with more civs on map - any serious large mods/scenarios of any quality will be few and far between in CIV.

THIS ISN'T YOUR GAME!

In case you somehow missed it in all the interviews and previews, one of the primary selling points of Civ 4 is that it'd be one of the most moddable games ever created - precisely so we could tweak it as we please, to truly make it OUR GAME. And that's not even addressing the fact that we aren't renting the software, we're buying it - and that means IT'S OURS.

Max

Just to striagten this out: In the Mystical Civ 4 editor land you can add a 19th (and so on) or not? I don't give a wooden nickle about having 37 bajillion civs on the map at one time... I just want 37 bajillion civs to choose from.


That should be possible(and even relaticly easy once you know how I think). You just can't have more than 18 on the map at a time.

I just wish they would have picked a better 18 civs to choose from. Also, it's great to have different leaders for different eras but they should also have different UU's. George Washington and Navy Seals? 5 or 6 civs on a map at a time is about all my computer can handle without 5 minute waits between turns. I wish they would have been selected more along historic lines say five ancient, five medeival, five Age of discovery/Napoleonic and five modern/WW2. But then that would make 20, not a stretch from 18 I would think. Just my 2 cents for what it's worth.

I just wish they would have picked a better 18 civs to choose from. Also, it's great to have different leaders for different eras but they should also have different UU's. George Washington and Navy Seals? 5 or 6 civs on a map at a time is about all my computer can handle without 5 minute waits between turns. I wish they would have been selected more along historic lines say five ancient, five medeival, five Age of discovery/Napoleonic and five modern/WW2. But then that would make 20, not a stretch from 18 I would think. Just my 2 cents for what it's worth.
well, well, you want more than 18 civs to choose from? well check the mod section and my post about playable barbarians. no UU but they have the two remaining trait combinations and favorite civics.

18 isn't such a bad limit. If the community can find some sort of way to spawn civs from revolutions or barbarian cities, this could actually end up making Civ 4 a much more realistic (and enjoyable) game.

I can see why the limits is there but it's a little disappointing. True, all scenarios don't need to have 31 civs ingame to be good but still..

I hope the limit will be raised as the game performance is improved.

Fraxis did what they did for a reason. Yes more civs can be added tot he main screen, so there can be more than 18 options, but only 18 can be played in the game. We wont know for sure why this is the case until we get the code. And despite this limit, the game is still the most moddable even without the sdk. Civ 3 had a hard playable limit, as does civ 4. More does not always mean better.

Its a turn-based game, why would perfomance matter?

It's turned-based but everyone's turn happens at the same time. So my meager P4 1.6GHz can only handle 5 civs at resonable speed. If anyone can play an 18 civ civ4 game, let me know what you're running

I can run an 18 civ game quite easily. I'm running an athlon 1700+ I think. You could probably play 100 civs, as long as the world size isn't too big. The world size matters more than number of civs.

I can run 18 civs at once as well, but I've only tried it on a duel size map so far. Not sure if my computer could handle a huge map...
EDIT:By the way, I'm running a 2.4GHz computer with 1024MB RAM and an Nvidia Inno 3D Geforce FX 5200 graphics card.

18 Civilizations? I can only play with 12....unless I use Rhye's earth mod.

Is there a way to play 18 civs without using any mods. I tried custom build a world with 18 civs but it only takes 12....

I can run 18 also, 2.2 GHz AMD with a gig of ram.
128 MB Video card, forgot specifically what kind.