Warlords: the Good & the Bad

BarrenEarth said:

Oh the good: makes a great coaster...

Just paid $30 for what should have been a big patch

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Why would they add all those scenarios in a patch? That is foolish.

Why would you pay the $30 after you have read on this website all about the new changes if you don't like the new changes? That is even more foolish.

It is more than a patch...and neither Civ IV or the expansion have been expensive if you shopped well.

I got Civ 4 for £17.99 and the expansion for £15.99 which together makes £33.98 which is good going given I got them both in the first week of release.

Well, as far as the regular game goes, one of the only things that bothers me is Ragnar's horned helmet... they had enough sense not to put a phoney "Viking" helmet with horns in Civ3 and then apparently forgot not to do it in Civ4... but I'll live.

The scenarios however, are dismal at best and honestly, I'm not surprised since Firaxis frankly sucks when it comes to scenarios.

In the Genghis Khan scenario, I was able to roll over the enemy civs fairly easily but then like a bolt out of the blue, I had to deal with these large barbarian incursions throughout the entire empire from northern Manchuria to the Russian steppes.... Because the game REQUIRES that you be constantly expanding, it leaves very little time to shore up your cities and so I was consistently losing cities to the Barbarians even in China.

Sometimes I said the hell with it and let the Barbs have them... but even if I'd kept no cities and razed every one I captured, the Barbarians were still making mince meat of my invasion forces while the civs whose lands I was invading had a couple of units fortified in each city and never bothered to emerge to make the slightest bit of effort to confront me.


In the Unification of China scenario, diplomacy is really not an option in spite of that being one of its selling points. You can't spread your family bloodline (religion) because no one is willing to have open borders with you because they're too upset that you're not of the same bloodline. So you pretty much have to systematically wage war on each faction, conquer all or most of their cities, and either wipe them out or make them vassals which they'll only do if they've got a couple of tiny outposts left. You could go for the "Diplomatic Victory", but again, you've got to eliminate a lot of the competition through war since everybody hates each other.

That said, other issues in the Chinese scenario included that A) they reused the Uranium model for Jade on the map which was fine except that the icon in the interface is still the barrel with the radioactive warning sign...

Not only that, but there's this distinction drawn to make it clear that religion isn't religion but rather family bloodlines... but then don't bother to change any of the texts... so everything still says "religion".

The Viking scenario was ok, but also with problems. Among them was that if you ransom a city, you can't recapture it again without forever preventing you from ransoming another city. That's fine.. what's not fine is that I wanted to check and see if there was some kind of a safety mechanism to prevent you from accidentally taking a city you'd already ransomed... so I saved the game and, of course, there wasn't. I just walked into the undefended city. I loaded the saved game and whatever trigger had been activated to prevent me from ransoming cities was still active in spite of the fact that I'd loaded a saved game from before I tried that out... Not of consequence if you play it straight through, but annoying nonetheless.

I also had no idea how much gold I needed to accumulate eventhough it was the victory condition. The manual simply says the amount varies based on difficulty level and there was nothing in-game to explain how much I needed.

Also... I started losing my Longboats to "Wessex Triremes".... come on now... at least give them a new name if not a new graphic.

And that's all I've played so far, but at this point it's a poor showing in the scenario department. A lot of really good and interesting ideas with potential for unique gameplay distinct from the main game but horribly executed.

That said, I like some of the tweaks and changes and there's stuff here to keep modders content for a long time.

So all in all, it's okay.



P.S. I love all these people who seem to take offense to the fact that Firaxis is a business who's intent is to *gasp!* make money! Honestly, nobody but video game and software companies get this amount of flak for charging for goods and services...

Dom Pedro II said:

The Viking scenario was ok, but also with problems. Among them was that if you ransom a city, you can't recapture it again without forever preventing you from ransoming another city. That's fine.. what's not fine is that I wanted to check and see if there was some kind of a safety mechanism to prevent you from accidentally taking a city you'd already ransomed... so I saved the game and, of course, there wasn't. I just walked into the undefended city. I loaded the saved game and whatever trigger had been activated to prevent me from ransoming cities was still active in spite of the fact that I'd loaded a saved game from before I tried that out... Not of consequence if you play it straight through, but annoying nonetheless.

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There is a red circle around each of the cities you ransom... at least there was for me.

Yes, I also had a red circle, but I was curious as to whether or not you would get some kind of a prompt if you should accidentally try to move onto the city square. Didn't happen... but the bigger issue was that when I reloaded the game, I was still flagged as having recaptured a city even though I loaded a saved game from before I ran that little test.

I'm very pleased about the changes made to the new game.
-New Civs
-UBs
-New music (which alone may have been worth the price of admission!)
-better balanced combat system
-Great Generals
-Some interesting new wonders
-Vassal States (which may end up being the most strategically significant addition)
-cleaner stacking interface
-new traits

And this is to say nothing of the scenarios! Maaaaan, this is one cram-packed XP which I highly recemend to all.

bfordyce said:

Great, make horse archers even crappier. Who cares if they have 20% withdraw now? Looks like they are determined to make horse archers primarily pillaging units.

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Well, aren't horse archers supposed to be primarily pillaging units? Historically, light cavalry is not a city-smashing unit.

Dom Pedro II said:

In the Genghis Khan scenario, I was able to roll over the enemy civs fairly easily but then like a bolt out of the blue, I had to deal with these large barbarian incursions throughout the entire empire from northern Manchuria to the Russian steppes.... Because the game REQUIRES that you be constantly expanding, it leaves very little time to shore up your cities and so I was consistently losing cities to the Barbarians even in China.

Sometimes I said the hell with it and let the Barbs have them... but even if I'd kept no cities and razed every one I captured, the Barbarians were still making mince meat of my invasion forces while the civs whose lands I was invading had a couple of units fortified in each city and never bothered to emerge to make the slightest bit of effort to confront me.

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I did find it kind of silly that one's major problem in the Genghis Khan scenario appears to be dealing with barbarians. Aren't we supposed to be the barbarians? I also held onto a few cities... maybe the barbarian problem becomes less of an issue if you just raze cities, but still...

Looks great. Great generals are cool and they handled the concept far better than the ridiculously overpowered "army" unit in Civ 3. The only scenario I have taken a stab at is the Mongol one and it has been fun. Looking forward to the barbarian one as well.

They wanted to make warfare more interesting and they have definitely succeeded. The "rush to slavery and hack out an army of conquering axeman" strategy has been delivered a serious nerf and it was overdue in my opinion. I started a regular game with Hannibal last night and I suspect he is going to be my new favorite leader now that Cathy has been crushed by the trait change and UU nerf.

acuoio said:

I think a lot of developer time went into testing and balancing. I know it was said here that they made a safe expansion, but there is a lot more that just that. There was a lot of balancing that had to happen, especially when you add in Vassalage, new leader traits, great general, and the boost to XP. People ask for all these things but they forget about the balance to the game.

One big balancing act they did was to make slavery more appealing and chopping less. You get less wood from chopping, they increased the health of forests, and reduced the civic cost of slavery. They balanced early warfare by providing a counter to axemen and galleys. They also had to balance experience now due to the Stables, the Great General, and the new leader trait, all of which add more XP to your game.

Sure, we could add Chinese Tea and Roman Olives as resources, but that would just displace other resources (not to mention that these resources are specific to eras and regions, which is why they are in the scenarios). You start adding more resources and then you have more health in your city which breaks the reason for health buildings. You get more resources to trade with/for, which in turn creates the same problem.

Again, you can keep throwing in more units and more world wonders, but at some point, it gets watered down and out of balance.

I've never played any Civ scenarios, but this xpak definitely made me want to. That was the bulk of the xpak and the reason it was released. I think Firaxis was pretty clear on what features would be included.

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I don't agree, an expansion doesn't unbelance the game when throwing extra's like units tech's and other stuff just make the game last some turns longer, put in an extra era for instance and I would be absolutely delighted!

Did they fix the poprush bug in Warlords? When you have a production bonus (from organized religion or a forge) and you whip some population, do the production bundles still only come in packets of 30?

E.g., could someone with Warlords try this: build a library in a city that has a forge in it. Put 55H into the Library's build. Then, poprush the library to completion. This should take one population, because 1 pop=30H*1.25=37.5H. With the bug, you actually got 60H, so your library went to 115/90H but it should go to 92.5/90H.

Just curious. This alone will tell me if I'm going to go get Warlords or not.

I'm rather upset that you can't play the Earth scenario on warlords.

AriochIV said:

I did find it kind of silly that one's major problem in the Genghis Khan scenario appears to be dealing with barbarians. Aren't we supposed to be the barbarians? I also held onto a few cities... maybe the barbarian problem becomes less of an issue if you just raze cities, but still...

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Exactly my point... I held onto China and the Uigur towns that weren't auto-razed and made vassals of the Uigurs and the Song, but even if I had razed everything, the barbarians were still cutting my army to ribbons while invading Kara-Kitai... If they wanted to make it more challenging, they should've made the opposing civs more difficult... It's quite possible that they didn't intend for this to be an additional challenge but rather just forgot that with more empty space comes more barbarians. Although the numbers they came in suggests that they were supposed to be numerous.



Also, since my earlier commentary, I tried out the Peloponnesian War scenario... Quick comment: Chichen Itza, the Great Pyramids, and Angkor Wat should probably not be in it... It's been a while since I've had a class on Greek history, but I'm fairly certain that's wrong.

opensilo said:

When you have a production bonus (from organized religion or a forge) and you whip some population, do the production bundles still only come in packets of 30?

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No.

Whether it's totally fixed, or only partially fixed, will have to be discovered.

What do you expect for an expansion coming out only half a year after the first release?

Dudedudeyo said:

then what the Pc's first most moddable game?

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gcc

...if you were good enough, you could modify it to BE Civ 4



(yes, that was a stupid joke. Please forgive me)

One bad I havent seen mentioned is the scenario I posted in "Bug or Feature" thread here.... Its a pretty big *bad* too...

Declare war on someone and right in the middle of the war they can vassal themselves out to another civ who will automatically declare war on you along with all their allies and other vassal states.

You have no option to end aggression, you just simply became a casuality of a brand new World War.

Is there a way to play the earth map with warlords?

DaviddesJ said:

No.

Whether it's totally fixed, or only partially fixed, will have to be discovered.

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Then it is probably fixed, because it would (presumably ) be much easier to tell that you weren't getting the correct number of hammers using the new 2-decimal place values.

Thanks for the response!

There definitely has to be more flexibility with the Vassal status, I'll admit... Or at the very least, the diplomatic status of the master should take precedence in the relationship.

I've played for about an hour and a half and I like the changes so far. $30 is not much to pay and I think they added a good amount of material. I'm not really a scenario player, but I might check them out in this.

New civs, new leaders, new rules (eg. Vassal States) and a ton of tweaks to units and buildings is a lot more than a patch, imo.