Analysis of the Civilization Traits

It can also make the difference between whether a city is eligible for We Love the King Day

Sorry for really noobish question, but what is the benefit of "We Love the King Day and when exactly is a city eligible to have this?
I've got some feeling that this might halve its upkeep costs - is this true?

Thank you.
 
"We love the king day" means the city costs no maintenance for that turn. Each city that has no net unhealthiness, unhappiness, is not starving, and is above a certain size (6? not sure about this), has a chance each turn of having a "we love the king day". More than one city can have this in a single turn.

Given the random nature, and that the probability doesn't seem that high, I generally ignore this phenomonon, and just accept the small savings it gives. There are far better reasons to ensure a city is not unhealthy/unhappy etc. This is just a little icing on the cake.
 
The greatest advantage to Spiritual is being able to move into and out of War on a moments notice, especially late game. The benefits of the war time civics is very high when one is actually in war. However if it takes you 3 turns to switch over, you'll have lost by then already.

Secondarily, you can use it to slip into Nationhood if you are playing the Tech Race build, and suddenly need to make good on your production of Infantry. (I *can* build Rifleman, but I *have* archers.... better switch to nationhood before I get conquered!).

I just had an interesting spiritual experience. This may be out of character for Ghandi, but shortly after the Pentagon was built apparently, I cued up several units, so there was only one turn left to build sam infantry, tanks, helicopters, and marines, and a few naval units as well.) Then I switched my government to a theocratic vassalage, and five turns later, I had an enormous army of fourth level units.

After those five turns were over, I switched back to more scientific based governments. Soon, all those marines were upgraded to amphibious Mechanized Infantry.

I think I'm still going to try to go for the cultural victory, but some of the militaristic civilizations around me need to learn to be more peaceful. They'll be happier and more productive under Ghandi's rule.
 
I just had an interesting spiritual experience. This may be out of character for Ghandi, but shortly after the Pentagon was built apparently, I cued up several units, so there was only one turn left to build sam infantry, tanks, helicopters, and marines, and a few naval units as well.) Then I switched my government to a theocratic vassalage, and five turns later, I had an enormous army of fourth level units.

After those five turns were over, I switched back to more scientific based governments. Soon, all those marines were upgraded to amphibious Mechanized Infantry.

I think I'm still going to try to go for the cultural victory, but some of the militaristic civilizations around me need to learn to be more peaceful. They'll be happier and more productive under Ghandi's rule.

Welcome to the fourms!:band:

This is one of the uses of Spiritual - getting in those war civics and then back to peaceful. Gandhi and, especially, Asoka are very good warmongers in human hands. Spiritual, as you mention, is a pretty good war trait. And they start with Mining, allowing for an early Axe rush.
 
This is the basis for a great article. It is missing several things though. First, it must go into more detail about the various trait specific building hammer bonuses. For example, +100% hammer granaries are a key advantage of the expansive trait that can be utilized to great effect very early in the game. Secondly, more attention must be given to synergistic factors or dampening factors that maximize or minimize the effect of a trait. For example, a leader with the finacial trait is well advised to spam cottages on riverside plots, since they will produce 3 commerce each immediately. Thirdly, each trait description should include tactics made possible or more powerful. For example, there are many ways the spiritual trait can be leveraged, such as switching from peaceful civics like representation, bureaucracy, caste system, and organized religion to warfare civics like police state, vassalage, slavery and theocracy.

This article wasn't even updated to warlords, despite plans for exactly that in post #2 by the OP. It also needs to be updated for Beyond the Sword, since that is the Civ IV release that 99+% of Civ IV players are using.

The article's title is also misleading. The traits are leader specific, not civilization specific. So the phrase "Civilization Traits" should be "Leader Traits". We should expect more acuracy from an article that has been included in the Civ IV War Academy.

Sun Tzu Wu
 
PRO is the worst trait in the game, best for EE. With IMP you war a lot and chop/whip settlers. With CHM war a lot and grow your cities. None of those are very good
 
Yes, the article was orginally written 8 years ago when there were only 8 traits and some of those were a lot better than they are now. For example, Protective was great back then when combined with massive wealth overflow from building walls.

Also, ranking the traits isn't as important as knowing how to effectively leverage them into a win. For example, the imperialistic is a good trait (meaning its not in the bottom half of any sensible trait ranking); it just needs to be leveraged properly. The same for the charismatic trait, though perhaps not as good as the imperialistic trait.

As I noted in my previous post, this article wasn't even updated for Warlords, much less Beyond the Sword. It really needs a good update!

Sun Tzu Wu
 
I agree. Charismatic is under valued. It is a very good trait as Fippy explained.

孫子武
 
I don't like Cha. The extra happiness is not needed when keeping cities small. I'd rank CHA on one of the last places together with EXP, but they're still better than PRO or probably also AGG.

And, yes, this guide should get an update. Especially SPIs advantages don't get explained in this theead, like i. e. getting a lot more tech-trades because one can shortly adopt another religion and can also change to the favoured Civic of somebod, often allowing to get the AI on friendly. Also tech-steals get cheaper, because one can switch to a State-religion different to the target's state-religion for the discount.
 
An extra happy allows for more whipping even when keeping cities small along with +1 size in the capitol which may not be a huge deal, but it's nice early. CHA is arguably also the best war trait.

I'm not saying that CHA is one of the top tier traits, but i don't think i would have it at the bottom either. It's better than IMP unless you are trying to aggressively block off land early. It's better than EXP (I've always thought EXP was rather overrated by many), and definitely better than AGG and PRO.

I find the value of ORG varies wildly depending on what kind of game is being played. In a straight war game the bonus from ORG often doesn't really kick in until AFTER you are in a winning position making it pretty marginal in that sort of game, but in a game with deep teching and a large empire it can be top notch.

I love Spiritual. It just opens up so many game play options that aren't possible without it. It can make the game a lot more fun to play.
 
I wouldn't say that CHA is the best war-trait. AGG + PRO allow for units to get the 2nd promotion from only Barracks or even from Barracks + Theocracy when drafted. I find this much stronger than if the 3rd promotion takes 8 or 10 xp.

Also, when is that more whipping needed? We can agree on, that once Calendar is in, having enough Happiness is np. Calendar is available from 1500 BC onwards on Deity, so that extra Happiness is mostly good in times when one produces Settlers and Workers, units that make keeping Happiness easy, because cities won't grow. Even when whipped, Settlers are 3-pop-whips, how much food would a city need to still grow into Unhappiness? And how much would +1 Happiness help? Unhappy citizens don't consume food when building Settlers and Workers, so growing into 1 :mad: at size 6 is only a minor thing.

IMP however allows for more cities at the same time, more cities mean more power, I find that way better than that little extra Happiness.

EXP is weak too as Workers sometimes can easily be stolen making the bonus of EXP completely unimportant, and yes, 1-pop Granaries are nice, but that's too little to make the trait good. The extra Health only matters in Space Races or other games where cities need to grow large, in Dom / Conquest, it barely matters.
 
The extra happiness from CHA is powerful in (semi)isolation when you will usually not get Calendar at 1500 BC and/or are unlucky about early luxury ressources (I very frequently "blessed" with maps where I have some wine and/or calendar stuff but no precious metals, fur, ivory). Unfortunately the promo bonus is useless in relative isolation without frequent wars.

The usefulness of some traits is also very dependent on skill/experience. E.g. ORG gives most of its benefits without having to do anything, similarly the border pops and cheap libraries of CRE, PHI and FIN are comparably easy to leverage.
But with SPI someone has to think about it (I used to find it pretty useless...). I tend to simply forget that I can change civics every 5 turns if I want to. (To my shame, it also took me long time to realize that after Music I could simply build culture for border pops in new or conquered cities...)
And when I have played a few SPI leaders in a row I tend to forget that I cannot just switch civics without barren turns...
 
Cyrus of Persia has Cha/Imp. I recently have tried always war games, and found that with the amount of combat Cha/Imp is actually a pretty strong combo.
 
Always war games are so completely different from normal games, that they cannot be compared. Last year, there were some crazy AW + OOC players. Their units sometimes made 200 and more xp. In such scenarios, ofc. CHA is great, but in all other games, having the 2nd promotion available from the start makes much more differene as if a unit is lvl 3, 4 or 5. Especially in the first wars, AGG and PRO are really nice. CHA gets its main benefit after the first wars, so when the game is alread decided.

An exception I just remember that is not AW is when playing Brennus on a map with many hills. His Guerilla 3 Swords are actually really powerful once they get 4 xp. Boudica is even better in that discipline, but SPI is far better than AGG imo.
 
I know it's off topic, but how is an always war occ game even played and won? If someone can provide me a link, I would love to watch a Lp video if someone doing it.
 
I know it's off topic, but how is an always war occ game even played and won? If someone can provide me a link, I would love to watch a Lp video if someone doing it.
They eddited the map, and made a capital with 4 unreachable Fishes, Stone, Marble and I think also s few Golds. Most mountains were forested and at cnokepoints + they built forts on them.
They had so many troops trying to conquer them that they got something like 20 GGs out of which they made super-fighters. Only 1 player achieved to conquer the world with those though.

Search for snaaty and Deity Always War + OOC. There are no videos of that games, but some writeups which are quite funny / unbelievable.
 
I've played 5 always war games only 3 victories. 4 were on small donut maps. One of the games I lost I played as Charlemagne and scored 9 GG's. However, I was eventually out teched and simply couldn't keep up with scores of more advanced units invading my lands. Always war games are so much different, yet its a good exercise that I think all players should try.
 
About Spiritual, the most important thing was left out: it lets you switch civics often. Basically translates into more great people (pacifism), more experienced units (+4 from Theo, Vassalage) and, as Seraiel said, better diplomatic relations.

Charismatic is not really about the +1 happy (that goes away anyway), but about the fact that it saves you hundreds of hammers in unit production costs. Faster promotions directly lead to more powerful units, indirectly lead to less casualties (faster healing through promotion), greatly improve the survivability of siege units (City Raider II with Barracks + any other source of +2 exp) and make "out of the gate" Level 3 mounted units possible.
You might think "okay, so what", but Level 3 is where promotions get interesting.
Oh and lets not forget how disgustingly overpowered Charismatic Leadership non-medic Great Generals are.
 
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