Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

I remember some cases where suddenly the new suggested name did not fit with the civilization so I must have exhausted the list..

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I reached that limit in CIV at least 10 times already. Yes, HoF Time and Highscore games with 200 cities are fun (when they're over ^^)

Kallikrates said:

In Civ II the text files with city names and other game parameters were easily editable. But surely also for Civ VI someone must have extracted the list of city names for each civ.

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Civ VI? Have I missed something? If you mean IV, then they are easily editable in the xml files. Not at civ computer now, can't check exact name of file with city names, but probably CivilizationInfos.xml, or something similar.

Re-posting in hope to get more advises

Should I try and let cities grow to maximum possible size (health and happiness not being an issue) to benefit from extra specialists? Or should instead organize work tiles in such ways that city only produces enough food for pop of 20 and cover all other tiles with cottages (+ occasional resource mines)? (no Slavery suggestions please)

More pop is always stronger stronger than less pop, so that question somehow doesn't make that much sense. If you found your cities wisely, no city will have 20 tiles to work because of overlap, so there I suspect a major error in your playstyle. Cities need endless time 'til they're size 20, way better to get more cities to smaller sizes faster. If you don't use overlap, that's a massive fault.

The most research you'll get through corporations, so Mining and Sushi on a map with lots of resources for them. As Cottages need a really long time to grow, they're often only good in the capital because of Buro, than Hammer-economy, so Workshops + Caste + build Wealth / Research is the strongest option. If your games go very long though because you lack experience, Towns can outperform Workshops, especially with Free Speech and Emancipation.

Hth.

well I do try to make cities so they don't overlap, or overlap on bad tiles (desert, mountain etc).
Each city usually has a food source that lets it grow faster. What I tend to do is build lots of farms first everywhere to get pop up, then replace farms with cottages or workshops where appropriate.

Hi Guys,

What do the happy faces and red faces on the domestic advisor screen represent? As each city on my domestic advisor screen has its own number of happy faces and own number of red faces (far right), however they do not correspond to the actual city's happy/sad faces when i look at each city's city screen.

As I never played a larger than standard map in Civ IV I do not think I ever founded more than 13 or so cities myself and never exhausted the list. Although I first was disappointed at the fairly small and crowded standard size maps (compared to CivII I had played for 10 years) when I once started a Civ IV large world map scenario on epic speed I quit from boredom after a rather short time.

Just found my answer here:

http://blog.wuphonsreach.org/2008/12/civilization-iv-beyond-sword-domestic.shtml

ChaosSlayer said:

well I do try to make cities so they don't overlap, or overlap on bad tiles (desert, mountain etc).
Each city usually has a food source that lets it grow faster. What I tend to do is build lots of farms first everywhere to get pop up, then replace farms with cottages or workshops where appropriate.

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See, and this is really very bad play. I don't know what the mod that you play does, but in standard BtS, you'd never advance higher than Monarch with such a playstyle.

There are various very good posts on the CIV Strategies and Tactics subsection, maybe you should give them a read. Especially Sisituls beginner guide and CIV Illustrated 2 - city placement.

Seraiel said:

See, and this is really very bad play. I don't know what the mod that you play does, but in standard BtS, you'd never advance higher than Monarch with such a playstyle.

There are various very good posts on the CIV Strategies and Tactics subsection, maybe you should give them a read. Especially Sisituls beginner guide and CIV Illustrated 2 - city placement.

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Well I have read few guides suggesting what to do, but not why do it.
Lets consider this example:

1 city that works 20 tiles vs 2 cities working same 20 tiles. (say half and half).

The way I see it:
2 half cities will grow up faster to 10 each, than 1 to size 20.
2 half cities will need twice less Health and Happiness to sustain (not a problem later in the game however)
2 half cities will use a lot more maintenance cost.
2 half cities will need all the critical buildings build TWICE (and possibly non critical buildings too if its a good production/science city)
2 half cities will be harder to defend than 1 city since you will have to split your troops between them

The first thing is the important one. 2 cities that are earlier at size 10 will allow you to get an advantage, like you i. e. get enough units and can attack someone earlier. From this guy, you again conquer cities, which you wouldn't have in the other case, so instead of units, you now got whole cities. You repeat this a few times, and you have won the game, earlier than the other strategy ever could have. This concept is known as “snowballing“ , so the single snowball that starts and ends as a lawine.

It's very hard to give you advice, because you can't use Slavery with your mod. With Slavery not being possible, it's attractive to grow the cities, so normal scenarios in where you i. e. share certain resources, to work them from a different city after having whipped another city that us too small now, don't work in your games. The whip is actually the main reason to keep cities smaller, because smaller cities need leaa food to regrow, therefore, whipping smaller cities oa more efficient than whipping larger ones.

What you should also not forget:

2 cities have twice the Traderoutes
The maintenance will only be higher until you've reached the limit of cities, at which the maintenance is capped
When being far advanced, like when having Corps, every city produces a benefit from TRs only, so 2 cities will generate more Commerce than 1
With Sushi, you can have almost twice the food in 2 cities, because Sushi can be spread to both
Same for Mining with Hammers

Maybe the best advice to give you is, that those cities are best, that bring you closer to your goal. The most imprtant thing in decisions, is the opportunit cost. When you want to settle, but have strong units, the units are better because they are cheaper and get you larger, well developed cotiesr instead of size 1 cities, so try to know more about your options, and evaluate them against each other.

Hth.

I've been using the CivIV with BTS purchased from Steam.
And it seems to be a heavily bugged POS with spyware/ads to boot.
Unit groups virtually never work, attempt to return to the main menu after playing for a while crashes, alt+tab occasionally crashes, CivIV.ini file returns to default so I have to reedit it to have it load BAT automatically, and the game also crashes randomly from time to time.

From what I gathered here, it is all common issues with the Steam version, which aren't frequent in other versions.

Is that true?

I just tried to start the game and am even getting the good old "Steam://rungameID/8800 application not found" error message.

I am frankly sick of it and would like to know
-Whether other versions are showing similar problems and
-Has somebody fixed his by getting rid of Steam and getting the game somewhere else.

All recommendations and comments welcome.

I believe Steam themselves offer a version signed as “beta“ , which is actually the old game, before the steam patch.

Otherwise: Civ Complete is for 5€ on Amazon.

I have 0 crashes since disabling particle effects.

Seraiel said:

I believe Steam themselves offer a version signed as “beta“ , which is actually the old game, before the steam patch.

Otherwise: Civ Complete is for 5€ on Amazon.

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This thing?

http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Meiers-Ci...&qid=1430952258&sr=8-8&keywords=civ:+complete

I have 0 crashes since disabling particle effects.

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I wanted to try that (I wonder where it is), but I cannot even start the game now.. The Steam shortcut itself (in the start menu, the one that is supposed to lead to steam.exe) is not working, and application reinstall did not change that

Sry, in America it costs 10$:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000W2FICG/ref=pd_aw_sbs_3?pi=AC_SY230_QL60

Edit:

Oh, no! Take a used one, 3$!

This is one of the 238,128 things I hate about steam; you don't even have control over the patching of your own games - that you're supposed to own (but don't). Hopefully you're able to find the game so you're not tied to steam any more, which will hopefully get rid of all the crashes and other problems you're faced with.

I'm playing the game in Linux, obviously the non-steam version, and it does crash from time to time. Don't think it has crashed yet while playing, but it does sometimes crash when I'm loading a save. No idea why that is, but it's easy enough to solve by re-starting the game.

Huh...
Not that it matters that much, but the EU has it at 30 bucks.. 3 times more than it costs in the States then!
That's quite interesting.

Btw, looking at your link (not Seriael's), I'd be careful about buying as a download version. Often there is no mention on the product page if it is tied to steam, and you can then get a nasty surprise later. I don't know if that is an issue with this particular product, but I've heard others complain about it for other games.

Pangaea said:

Btw, looking at your link (not Seriael's), I'd be careful about buying as a download version. Often there is no mention on the product page if it is tied to steam, and you can then get a nasty surprise later. I don't know if that is an issue with this particular product, but I've heard others complain about it for other games.

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Oh, thanks for the tip, that can be really useful.
That would REALLY suck, buying another copy specifically to get rid of Steam only to pick up another Steam version...

Hopefully someone else has bought it somewhere online as a download and can chime in.

Eagle777 said:

Huh...
Not that it matters that much, but the EU has it at 30 bucks.. 3 times more than it costs in the States then!
That's quite interesting.

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You need to search longer and also look for used ones. I bought mine in Germany and payed 5€.

America with 3$ is ridiculous though.