Hey all, I finally got BtS. So many options. I am wundering what to do?

I think I am going to start Holy Roman Empire with the New Age war, or what ever it was called.

What should I expect when playing, or what options should I be choosing when playing a new game.

Love to hear all your help and tips for playing

wow.... That covers a lot of ground, sort of like going to a car enthusiast's forum and asking 'what kind of car should I buy?' - there are hundreds of people who have their favortie settings, but the basic answer is, for you, it comes down to what you like!

For Civ IV, I decide based on what kind of game I like to play. Some basic questions to keep in mind (if you're talking launching via the 'custom game' anyway):

1) Do you hate barbarians?

If barbarians annoy you, select the 'no barbarians' box. If you see them as free XP and like the excitement of early combat, check 'raging barbarians'. If you don't care, stick with the standard.

2) The World.

Like water maps, to build navies on and conquer the seas? Go for island or snaky continents, or change the water level. Want lots of land? try pangea! There are literaly dozens of choices here, I won't break them down (and, frankly, I'm not qualified to break them down anyway!)

3) Victory conditions

I usually leave these alone, but these are good tools to customize the kind of game you want to play. Want to play Civ as a wargame? Select 'always war' and then disable all victory conditions but conquest. Or, disable a victory you hate (i.e. if you dislike the diplomatic/UN option...)

4) Other options

The neat thing, as you mentioned, is the ability to customize - there are lots of options in there! Here are a couple I like, but they're just my opinion:

- No technology brokering. (you can only trade techs you've researched). This way, you still get tech trades, but (in my opinion!) it slows the rate of tech spread between the civs and makes tech more valuable. If you don't like tech trading at all, you can select that instead.

And, finally, game speed. I find normal to be a pretty quick game, tech-wise and production-wide; epic and marathon are nice because you have more time in each era, and the units/buildings you gain don't become obsolete almost the minute they're built (as they can sometimes in the faster speeds...)

OK, a long rambling post - but my advice is (as I'm trying to do with Fall from Heaven 2!) just dive in and play a couple of games with the default settings. Then, as you're more familiar with the BtS options, you can go in and customize the options to create exactly the kind of game you like.

My apologies if this was way too basic - I couldn't tell from your post if you were brand new, or an experienced civ player new to BtS, and decided to err on the basic side...

Either way, good luck! :)

EDIT: I didn't notice before, but I see now you've been a forum member for 4 years now, so all of this is probably WAY too basic!! Ah, well, I'll leave it in case someone else comes in looking for really basic option advice!

Anyway, sorry about that!

Hey all, I finally got BtS. So many options. I am wundering what to do?

I think I am going to start Holy Roman Empire with the New Age war, or what ever it was called.

What should I expect when playing, or what options should I be choosing when playing a new game.

Love to hear all your help and tips for playing

I assume you are familiar with Civ and just want to try out the cool new BtS stuff. So, I recommend starting a custom game and playing a map type called "Big_and_Small". It gives you a mixture of interestingly shaped and natural looking landmasses, which I like in a map, but the even nicer thing is you can normally meet everyone just using pre-caravel boats. Also, there are 2 settings in this map type where you can choose the size of the "islands" (i.e. small landmasses which don't have any civs on to start with) from between either 'tiny' (crap 1 or 2 tile islands) or 'islands' (more interesting and varied sizes), and the location of the islands from between either 'separate' (not normally accessible by coast-going boats) or 'mixed in' (you can get to them with galleys etc). I strongly recommend choosing 'mixed in islands'.

There are some cool new 'advanced options' with BtS as well, and I recommend that you try "choose religions", so that Buddhism and Hinduism aren't the first religions to always be founded.

As for victories, the space race has been revamped so that's worth a go if you like that kind of thing.

For your first couple of games, I recommend you play a Random leader (unless you have a favorite) on normal speed / normal-sized map (Big & Small is a great map choice, as well as Hemispheres), at whatever difficulty level is good for you.

You can safely ignore the Espionage system on your first few games. However, when you're ready to dive into it, there are plenty of great strategies you can employ around Espionage.

Once you get through a few games, it should be pretty clear where to go from there ;)

thanks, guys, i have tried what you said, and started 3 times, being rome and holy empire.

I think I love this game now, With Civ IV it was ok, but didn't kept me playing but I can't stop BtS. This is what Civ IV should have been, thanks guys for the help.

Hemispheres is a really good map, it's like Terra with the "New world" but it already has civs on it so really you could be the "New world" to them :P

Whats fun is by the time you reach the other Hemisphere you've weeded/vassaled out the weaker civs on your side (or been weeded :mad: ) and only the power players are left by the time of Transports and Tanks for invasions.
Makes for some fun civing :p

For some reason I always disable Space race/Time.
Who wants to run out of time when you might just be getting into a big world war? Or who wants a message that the other guy is making a space ship and you can't do anything about it besides nuking that civ or racing to space yourself :sad:

In my games only the Supreme world power can rule, no cheating :lol: yet you still have peaceful ways out :king:

i like playing the hemispheres map as well...enjoy the game...it is a blast!