new gamespot article

• The game more about decision making and less about going through the established motions that have built up over the years.
• Consider that you will no longer be able to transfer production from one project to another, a major exploit since time immemorial.
• In Civ IV, when you lose a race to finish a wonder, you lose all the production made on it, and you can no longer transfer it to another project, though you will be refunded an amount of gold. (This rule also covers production of regular buildings and units as well, though in those cases, if you suddenly switch from producing, say, a settler to an archer, you simply save the production that's been made for the settler and start the archer from scratch. And when you go back to producing the settler, you'll pick up where you left off.)
• Soren Johnson [lead designer] said that key resources are more evenly distributed in Civ IV, which is good news.
• The bigger your city gets, the unhealthier it becomes. And that can take a toll on the population, as the city will eventually begin to starve. You can combat this by building certain types of buildings, such as aqueducts and hospitals, but what will really help is if you can secure access to the seven different types of food resources, which represent nutritional variety.
• "The game is balanced now to have not as many cities. You can still spread your influence over a broad area, but not have as many cities, necessarily." - Barry Caudill [Senior Producer]
• "In Civ IV, we have this sort of maintenance system that slowly pushes some pressure on civilizations that expand a little bit faster than what might be good for them at that time." - Soren Johnson
  The focus in Civ IV is on fewer, but more specialized, cities.
  This is something that the artificial intelligence will recognize, too, as computer-controlled civilizations won't spam you anymore with settlers, and if they try, they won't be able to cross your empire's borders anymore without your permission.
• Barry Caudill also said that Civ IV has some features from Civ III that let you select a specific type of unit from a stack that you can then send to one location, reducing the need to repeat the procedure umpteen times over.
• Stack Attack: You can actually stack up a bunch of units and send them someplace and give them an attack command. And if you're using combined arms...so you have some defensive-type units and you have a tank. The game will automatically look at who you're attacking, who their defenders are, and say, 'We should attack with this guy first. This is what the AI would do.
• In Civ IV, the amount of damage a unit does to another unit is now out of a scale of 100, even though that's more or less hidden from the user. The amount of damage a unit does is relative to its different strengths. So now when a spearman attacks a tank, he may hit three times, but that's only going to take off a quarter of the tank's hit points. Meanwhile, a tank hitting a spearman only has to hit him once or twice, and he's gone entirely.
• Dan McGarry (MP Designer) said that the server browser in the game will include buddy list functionality to keep track of your friends easier.
• Firaxis will cull all sorts of statistics from multiplayer matches, which will let it rank players, which is aimed to avoid some of the frustration when you find yourself in a multiplayer match with ruthless Civ pros.
• The game will also ship with a number of prebuilt scenarios with different sorts of victory conditions. For example, a World War II scenario will start you with all your cities and military units already built, and instead of conquering the whole world, you may have a more focused goal, such as taking or defending Paris.
• Cottages (new terrain improvement) with smoke coming out of their chimneys indicate which neighboring terrain squares are being worked.
• The quick game is very much for that one-night experience," Caudill explained. "We don't want it to feel like it's all compressed and jammed together. We want it to feel like you're playing Civ, but it just happens to take less time. So your tech costs are reduced, your unit production costs are reduced, your building costs are reduced. There are less turns to worry about, but you still have this huge sweep of time that happens in a Civ game. The epic speed is the same idea, just the opposite end.

Stack Attack: You can actually stack up a bunch of units and send them someplace and give them an attack command. And if you're using combined arms...so you have some defensive-type units and you have a tank. The game will automatically look at who you're attacking, who their defenders are, and say, 'We should attack with this guy first. This is what the AI would do.

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Aussie_Lurker said:

(b) couldn't help but notice the two blue circles on the map at time index 1:03. Anyone care to speculate on what this might mean?

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They have a collateral damage effect, [so] that when you attack a stack, you will also hurt up to six other units in the stack.

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Carver said:

I was waiting to hear a number like this. I was worried that arty might be too powerful, but this is probably just about right.

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This rule also covers production of regular buildings and units as well, though in those cases, if you suddenly switch from producing, say, a settler to an archer, you simply save the production that's been made for the settler and start the archer from scratch. And when you go back to producing the settler, you'll pick up where you left off.

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"In Civ IV, we have this sort of maintenance system that slowly pushes some pressure on civilizations that expand a little bit faster than what might be good for them at that time," he said.

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"Now you can choose religion, but the religions are pretty vanilla. We don't say that Christianity is better than Islam, or Islam is better than Hinduism. It's just a way to spread culture and another way to win the game. And through religion, we can add a lot more color to the game in terms of historical texture."

In many ways, the static religions are more like the old-style government types from earlier Civs, such as democracy and communism. Each religion is rigidly defined and grants certain types of bonuses.

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