Question Session Again
JavalTiger said:
Since your sliders as of part 2 are set at science 90% and taxes at 10% how the heck does culture work? I would think you wouldn't be growing if you didn't have at least 10% in it?
Also is there a certian level or set variables for your religion spreading. I mean would Hindu have spread to Vicky any faster had you a temple or cathedral? Also why wasn't Medina already your religion? Your settler came from your holy city, you would think it would be totally converted.
Culture works in basically the same way as Civ3 (buildings/wonders provide culture) expect that there are also additional ways to generate culture too: having your state religion in a city, diverting a percentage of your commerce into the luxury slider, or running certain specialists that increase culture. These are additional ways to get culture, but the basic formula from the Civ3 is still in operation as well. Oh, and you don't even start the game with the ability to use the luxury slider - you have to research your way up to that!
Religion spreds faster after you build the Shrine for that religion; I believe that that's the only thing that affects the rate at which it spreads on its own. Not 100% positive on exactly how the religion spreading on its own works. Religion does not transfer along with settlers; each city starts out devoid of religion, and stays that way until either a religion spreads there on its own, or a missionary spreads a religion to the city.
Krikkitone said:
Three questions though
1. Culture (same question as Javal Tiger) do you get it the same as in Civ3 (buildings make it) or is there additional ways to do that.
2. Non-State Religions what are their effects? (particularly in multi religious cities)
3. Is city maintenance cost related to the upkeep cost of civics?
I think I already answered the first one. As for #2, non-state or minority religions don't have any effect so long as you are running one of the religious civics other than Freedom of Religion, but you may want to spread a minority religion around your cities anyway in order to get shrine income and to take advantage later on of the benefits from Freedom of Religion (+1 happiness for each religion in a city).
City Maintenance costs are unrelated to the civics costs; they are based on the number of cities you have and the distance of each city to the palace (or Forbidden Palace). I'll have more to say about maintenance costs later in the Walkthrough.
ToddMarshall said:
That last picture brings up something interesting. It looks like England's York has expanded its boarders, yet it did NOT gain controll of a 1st ring tile. Your capital still owns it despite it being THIRD ring?! Wow.
Yes, this is sort of an advanced point, but cities are NOT guaranteed a certain amount of tiles in Civ4. (In Civ3, cities were basically guaranteed to have a 9-tile radius, so you could use settlers aggressively to push back cultural borders). If you plop down a tiny new city next to a cultural giant's 5th ring borders, they still won't move unless you get some culture in that city.
ExMudder said:
I'm wondering why you didn't go for Writing after Animal Husbandry. Given that you are in contact with 3 civs, and Writing (I think) gives you the ability to trade techs (but not gold), wouldn't you have been able to jump start your tech by trading for Mining from Ghandi, Agriculture from Egypt, and Fishing from Vicky?
Or do all sides need to have writing for that to work? I realise you probably won't get a wonder tech or a military tech. You'd also be able to build a library, for culture and research.
Now this is one of those things that you have to play the game to understand.
First of all, tech trading is enabled at Alphabet, a tech beyond Writing, and an Alphabet beeline to open up tech trading can indeed be a good strategy to pursue. BUT, keep in mind that at the time I chose to pursue Mining, the ONLY thing my workers could do was build roads and pastures. They could not build mines, could not build farms, could not chop forests. Going for Alphabet would have meant that my workers would have to stand around doing nothing for 20 turns while I researched the tech. That would be rather inefficient! As I said in the Walkthrough, having to research the Worker techs makes for a great deal of strategy. I tend to knock them out fairly early, but in certain starting positions you could skip some of them and potentially do very well. A lot depends on where you start, and what resources you have next to you.
Carver said:
On the 1000BC screenshot the screen says "camera flying enabled." Thus I assume there is a 'restricted' graphics mode and a mode where you can spin the screen around like mad and such. Does leaving camera flying disabled noticably reduce the draw on the graphics card?
Yes, I turned on a game option that allows you to do the crazy zooming in and out to take better pictures. The default option still gives a lot of leeway, but has some limits. I don't know the specifics of performance, but my machine did slow down when I had it do some of the crazier stuff with the camera. Probably a good idea not to use the camera flying if your machine just barely runs Civ4.
The Caltrop said:
Question about religion: India has founded both Buddhism and Judaism... does that mean that Delhi is both the holy city of Buddhism and Judaism? Can you 'choose' to found a religion ina a city that isn't you capital?
How does multople-sponsoring of religion work, or even states with various non-sponsored religions?
When you found a religion, the game picks a random city of your to be the Holy City. Now it can be any city, but right at the start of the game you only have one city (your capital) so thus the super-early religions will always have the capital as their Holy City. You do not get to pick which city becomes the Holy City.
Multiple religions in the same civ is quite common. Only one of them can be the state religion, but you may want to spread around your miniority religions for shrine income benefit and for use of Freedom of Religion later on (see above).
ekanata said:
1. Does Gandhi taking a good move by inventing more that one religion?
2. In Civrules page it was said that an iron mine provide 4 additional hammer and that an iron deposit won't be revealed until a certain technology is discovered. Does it mean if later an iron deposit is discovered on your city square, you'll lose the potential 4 hammer by not able to mine the city square?
3. To build iron consuming unit, do you need to just connect road/river to iron square or do you need to build mine too?
4. Will you demonstrate 'slavery' and show us its related information? (like people-hammer convertion ratio, remaining turn until the city happiness fully recovered, etc)
1) Well, that all depends. It's never a bad move to have control of an additional religion, but you have to ask yourself, would it have been a BETTER move to research different techs? For example, I probably could have gotten Judaism myself in this game, but it was more important in my opinion to pursue worker techs and increase the growth curve of my civ. So that's a very situational question with no right answer; a lot depends on what your goals are. If you're going for a cultural victory, you should try to found as many religions as possible. The Gandhi AI likes to found a lot of religions, so you'll tend to see him pursue them aggressively.
2) Iron is a good resource to have, since it's both needed for lots of units and it adds a lot of shields to the tile it's on. If it turned out that there was iron underneath one of my cities, yes I couldn't mine that tile to get additional shields, but I'd be glad anyway just to have iron!
3) You need a road and a mine. Similarly, I needed a road on my horses and a pasture to be able to build horse units.
4) Sorry, I didn't use Slavery in this game. It's rarely worthwhile to whip your people for shields (growth = power), except on the very high difficulty levels where the happiness limits crowd you very early on. Slavery also useful on archipelago maps where shields are hard to come by. The general rule is that 1 pop = 20 shields if I recall correctly. In some MP games I've used Slavery to save my butt, but otherwise I've tended not to use it a lot.
southafrica said:
One question though, is there unit maintenance anymore?
Yes, there is unit maintenance. There is a certain number of "free units" your civ gets to support, and beyond that you must pay to support them (this number is set by difficulty level). Certain civics (Vassalage and Pacifism) can also either increase your unit support, or make you pay additional money for units. You also have to pay extra in unit support when your units are outside your civ's borders (makes sense that it costs more to support them in foreign territory, right?)
Ashmantious said:
One issue that jumped out to me was that Sulla is directing the actions of the workers. When I played Civ3 I usually set the workers to automate other than to connect my cities. I got the feeling that Sulla wasnt directing the workers to show us how it looks as much as an indication of how even worker placement takes a much more strategic role in this game. While some may feel that this adds to the micromanagement of the game, due to the fact that there wont be ICS (at least no without its own cost), I think the game is taken to another strategic level.
Not a question, but I wanted to comment on this. In Civ3, I would often find myself with literally over a hundred workers by the end of the game, and while I was still anal enough to move them all by hand, it was an enormous chore. The worker AI is pretty good in Civ4, but still not nearly at a level where I would trust it to move my workers (all previews aside, the worker AI is never going to be as good as a human). But the great thing is that you don't NEED a hundred workers in Civ4; one per city usually seems to be about right, and moving a dozen or so workers is something that's easily manageable. In other words, the game has been designed to cut out a huge amount of micromanagement hassel. It's infinitely less painful to move the workers yourself in Civ4.
Mitiu Ioan said:
The game seems to be verry slow in the beginning.
And personally I'm worried about the religion-tech research. This could be very unbalanced/random aspect during the game. Could I "survive" if I didn't found first available religion ? Or my citizens will be atracted by foreign heresies ?
Certainly a fair point. On many turns at the beginning of the game, I was spending most of my time exploring the map. On the other hand, you can also fly through these turns very fast, so it's not entirely accurate to say that the game's slow in the beginning. One nice thing is that if you don't like the pace of the Normal game, you can bump things up to Quick and play a much faster game. Some of our testers got addicted to Quick and couldn't get off the speed long enough to go back to Normal (*cough* Chieftess *cough*
)
By no means do you need a religion to succeed in Civ4. Religions add happiness and culture and let you do some neat additional stuff, but a no-religion start is entirely viable, and can even have some diplomatic advantages (everyone with different religions hates you, remember). Sirian's actually been arguing that it's more advantageous to skip a religion on the higher difficulties, and while I don't agree with him on that, I can see his point. Don't think you NEED to have a religion to win. If worst comes to worst, you can adopt the religion of your neighbor too.
Lots of good questions guys. And to rephrase what Sirian said earlier, it's no big deal if people aren't interested in the Walkthrough once they've already gotten copies of Civ4. That's fine! This is really intended for people who HAVEN'T made up their minds as to whether to buy Civ4 or not, and to give them enough info to decide whether it will be a good purchase for them. Believe me, you won't hurt my feelings if you're having too much fun playing Civ4 to come back and read more.
