Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

Also, are those Longbows I see? Does Rome not have proper defence? You have Grenadiers, Rifles, Cannons and better). You can just take all his stuff and not worry over a few lost tiles due to culture.

So this is odd. I have a Commando unit that refuses to attack in a way that won't get it killed.

The screenshot below shows my Commando Cavalry with 2 move points left. I'd like it to attack the city directly to the west of it, but if I give the order, it insists on moving 1SW and then attacking 1N:



But if it does that, it will use up all its movement (moving off unroaded grass tile to roaded tile + 1 attack) and will not be able to get back to the defensive stack. See below:



Is there a way to override this pathing and just attack 1W?

6K Man:

I don't know if you can override it but what is happening is that the Commando only has the extra moves when it is on an enemy road. Since it is on unroaded grass, it can't use the extra Commando moves unless it moves to the roaded tile. You say that it has 2 moves left. How many has it already used? If 2 then it can't move anymore unless it uses the road. Perhaps that is what is happening.

numpad movement should work

-> Lennier, Pangaea

So, it's about culture. More than that it's about the culture status of adjacent individual cities, namely Rome and Seville.

I can only get more culture by building cultural buildings, and, I've built the "ordinary" ones (theatre, palace, castle), I'll have to the "expensive" ones, e.g., Broadway, Hollywood. I can sacrifice population growth if I have any spare (I don't think I have), but I don't want to go into starvation, but I'm pushed for money so there is not much more work to be gained, so building will be slow.

I don't want a war with JC because I'm at (naval) war with the Aztecs, the second lowest scoring Civ in list at the lower R of screen, in a city grab - they have more troops than I thought tho'.

(I'm pushed for everything in the present game, which in fact I have already won on points, but I've gone back to a saved version to try to learn how certain aspects of Civ4 work)

How did you find out about Rome's defences ? I could only do this by aerial recon. I have never built a cannon (but I've the potential to, artillery and tanks too).

SmallBrain
12.April.2016

I've realized that culture, of course, can be slowiy increased by trading it off against research contribution

SmallBrain
12.April.2016

SmallBrain said:

-> Lennier, Pangaea

So, it's about culture. More than that it's about the culture status of adjacent individual cities, namely Rome and Seville.

I can only get more culture by building cultural buildings, and, I've built the "ordinary" ones (theatre, palace, castle), I'll have to the "expensive" ones, e.g., Broadway, Hollywood.

Click to expand...

Apart from the Theatre, those aren't exactly ordinary culture buildings. The Palace is only in your capital, and castles suck.

So late in the game, getting up the culture producing buildings wouldn't help a great deal, but early on, every little bit helps. Library, Monasteries, Temples, Universities, your state religion, and after 1000 years, the buildings will double their culture output. Early libraries will then give you 4 pretty early in the game.

That said, culture isn't really something you should focus a great deal on, unless you want to win by culture. If you're in a dire situation where you could lose food, it could make sense, but in more normal circumstances it doesn't matter all that much if you lose a mine or a farm, and it's not going to happen very often anyway. Your culture tends to be pretty strong in the BFC of a city, and unless an AI city is so close that it too can get those same tiles in its BFC, you're probably not going to lose them.

Of course there are more special circumstances, like an AI pumping out wonders in a border city, having the holy city there, getting Sistine, and things like that. But in 'usual' circumstances, you shouldn't be mass producing culture in your cities for fear of losing tiles. You can always ensure you gain those tiles by taking the border cities anyway

About the longbows. In one of the pictures there is a longbow outside of a Roman city. I assume he has better defenders than that so late in the game, but if he doesn't, you could so easily take his stuff.

Also, Cannons are fantastic. Try to go to war with them. They'll smash up just about anything in front of them, even Rifles when well promoted, and then you can take cities with almost any clean up unit you have access to. If you for instance get Cannons attacking cities defended by Longbows, even Maces, you will often see 80-90% chances with the first attack. They're simply so strong that you can wage war with them and barely lose a single one. Artillery is even better of course, but comes much later.

Three units that basically mean a paradigm shift in warfare are Cannons, Rifles and Cuirs. They're massive upgrades on what came before them.

I need a quick answer, I hope that somebody knows this:

If a different religion is dominant in an AIs empire, how long will it take that the AI switches the religion without any action of the player?

Tia.

Sera

6K Man said:

I know what you mean (I played a lot of Test of Time), and unfortunately the answer seems to be no. I say that because I've never seen a Civ4 mod with multiple map levels.

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Bummer. Thanks.

(Rodney and anyone else who's wondering: Test of Time allowed up to 4 maps, stacked on top of each other. So, for example, you could have a map for the surface of the Earth (land surface and ocean surface), a second map that mapped the bottom of the ocean of the same world (allowing for underwater cities), and a third map that mapped the upper atmosphere (allowing for cloud cities). Picture a 3-D chessboard and you're on the right track.

That made for some interesting combat situations when (for example) a flying unit would swoop down from the clouds, attack, and swoop back up again at the end of its movement, making counterattack by land-based units impossible. Deep sea submarines were invulnerable until they came up to attack depth. Etc.)

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Precisely this.

Seraiel said:

I need a quick answer, I hope that somebody knows this:

If a different religion is dominant in an AIs empire, how long will it take that the AI switches the religion without any action of the player?

Tia.

Sera

Click to expand...

Bit late I know, but if your still interested I did look into this some quite a long time ago when I was trying to figure out all the trade values.
The AI decides the religion to run based on its perceived value, which can quite easily be much higher for a minority religion in an AIs territory due to weights placed on it so it may never swp to an apparently dominant religion at all.

The game re-evaluates the religions in its territory periodically (i've not checked how often)
It starts by giving a religion a base value based on total population of their cities with the religion present, modified by the ownership or team ownership of the holy city, and if shrined in either case, the global strength of that religion.

ivalue = (number of owned cities with religion + population in those cities) * Holy factor
The Holy factor depends on the civ, or one of its teammates owning the holy city, and how much shrine gold they are getting.

IF civs holy city,
Holy factor = (3 + shrine gold*2) / 2

IF teams holy city
Holy factor = (4 + shrine gold*2) / 3

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The enormous bias towards shrines and team shrines already explains a lot of the AIs religion antics.

Following this, the it through a couple more weightings, a weighting towards keeping the status quo, and one for favourite religion.

IF state religion then
ivalue(2) = ivalue * 4 / 3
IF not then ivalue(2) = ivalue

IF favourite religion
ivalue(3) = ivalue(2) * 5 / 4
IF not then ivalue(3) = ivalue(2)

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Following that there's some weirdness I never got around to completely figuring out. Presumably its there to prevent Holy cities with large foreign followings but marginal domestic followings from taking the mick by rejecting religions that lack a certain level of purity.

int iBestCount = getHasReligionCount(eBestReligion);
int iSpreadPercent = (iBestCount * 100) / std::max(1, getNumCities());
int iPurityPercent = (iBestCount * 100) / std::max(1, countTotalHasReligion());
if (iPurityPercent < 49)
{
if (iSpreadPercent > ((eBestReligion == eFavorite) ? 65 : 75))
{
if (iPurityPercent > ((eBestReligion == eFavorite) ? 25 : 32))
{
return eBestReligion;
}
}
return NO_RELIGION;

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Even if no holy cities are involved a leader that's currently running its favourite religion will have a 5/3 bias towards staying the same, allowing it to stay the same despite being a rather small minority, but as you might expect shrined holy cities are clearly the dominant factor.

I'm a noob when it comes to random events...

If a quest tells me to build a certain amount of some building, does it count only buildings I built myself, or will captured buildings count as well? (Sports league quest, build colosseums)

elitetroops said:

I'm a noob when it comes to random events...

If a quest tells me to build a certain amount of some building, does it count only buildings I built myself, or will captured buildings count as well? (Sports league quest, build colosseums)

Click to expand...

just total empire count.....you big noob!

lymond said:

just total empire count.....you big noob!

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Oh noes... then I might have to raze some conquered city if they would break the colosseum limit before I've captured SoZ.

Thank you lymonoob!

1. If the AI and a human complete a wonder on the same turn who gets the finished wonder and who gets the gold?
2. Same as above but with AI and AI?
3. If a civilisation is destroyed before you make contact, will you learn of their presence before the game ends or do you need to reach the final game over screen?
4. Is the Cristo Redentor wonder utterly worthless if you are a Spiritual leader?

1. Each "person" whether human or AI takes their turn in the same order on every game turn. Whoever comes earlier in the sequence gets the wonder. Everyone else who was building the wonder gets gold. In single player the human is always first, so the human gets the wonder if an AI also would have finished it that turn.

2. It depends on which AI's turn came first. See my answer to #1.

3. There will be an announcement that civilization whatevername has been destroyed. If you miss the announcement, you won't know since the name will never appear on the scoreboard. However, later in the game, after you have met the civilization that destroyed them, you can figure it out because some city names will be wrong for the civilization. For example, one of China's cities will be Paris.

4. Spiritual lets you change with no penalty but you still have the standard wait before you can change again. Cristo Redentor lets you change with no penalty and no wait. So adding it to Spiritual removes the wait turns before you can change again.

Nice answers, thank you!

salty mud said:

Nice answers, thank you!

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One thing that sometimes confuses people, that I just thought of:

At the end of your turn you have 1 turn left and will receive the Wonder on your next turn. You hit end turn.

Immediately thereafter you see the announcement that an AI has completed the wonder. What happened was they were 1 turn faster than you. The AI had the 1 turn left at the end of its last turn, when you still had 2 turns left. So, the AI actually beat you to the wonder, it was not a tie on the same turn. I have gotten stung by this more than once, usually after deciding not to whip out the last two turns.

s.bernbaum said:

One thing that sometimes confuses people, that I just thought of:

At the end of your turn you have 1 turn left and will receive the Wonder on your next turn. You hit end turn.

Immediately thereafter you see the announcement that an AI has completed the wonder. What happened was they were 1 turn faster than you. The AI had the 1 turn left at the end of its last turn, when you still had 2 turns left. So, the AI actually beat you to the wonder, it was not a tie on the same turn. I have gotten stung by this more than once, usually after deciding not to whip out the last two turns.

Click to expand...

Are you sure?

It's my understanding that at the end of your turn, you do your research and city builds. then the other Civs take their turn. So if your wonder finishes that turn, it should be done before the AI turn.

Similarly if your city might be attacked and you complete a unit that turn, then the new unit will be there and defending when the attack hits.

---
oh, I think you are saying that the announcement is delayed; so the AI has actually already finished the wonder before your turn.
That makes sense. AI turn; end turn; AI finishes wonder; Player turn; end turn; Player finishes builds; AI wonder completion announced

Deckhand said:

---
oh, I think you are saying that the announcement is delayed; so the AI has actually already finished the wonder before your turn.
That makes sense. AI turn; end turn; AI finishes wonder; Player turn; end turn; Player finishes builds; AI wonder completion announced

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Yes. This is what I was saying.

Do naval units (galleys) get Vassalage +2 XP?