Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

It sounds like you should have no problems with installing and playing Civ4 on that computer. I do recall that a small number of people have found that Vista has some minor issues when running the game, but hopefully that should not be a problem for you. :)
Ok, thanks. :)
 
Is there any advantage to a city having multiple power sources (electricity / coal / etc) simultaneously? Or after you have say, a hydro plant, is it completely useless to build a coal plant?

Also, some bonuses apply "If a city's state religion is X". Is it possible for a city to have more than one state religion? Like I have one city that has the Judaism and the Hinduism icon below it, does this mean the state religion is both Hinduism and Judaism?
 
You only need one power source; multiple power buildings have no effect on production. However, if you have a "dirty" power source like a coal plant, you could build a "clean" power source later (like a hydro plant) which would reduce your :yuck:.

"State religion" refers to your chosen national religion that you pick on the F7 screen. You could have all seven religions present in a city, but can never have more than one official state religion.
 
On that note, simple question. What do I do if I don't want to build ANYTHING in a city when something is complete? Everything I build will cost upkeep that I'm not really prepared to spend since I have everything I need for the time being (until I finish researching a tech, for example). Is there any good answer here, or do you just keep popping out units in this case?
Certain techs let you turn part of your production (half, I think) into nonphysical stuff:
  • Alphabet lets you "build" research (beakers)
  • Currency lets you "build" wealth (gold coins)
  • Drama (edit: actually, Music) lets you "build" culture (music notes)
 
You only need one power source; multiple power buildings have no effect on production. However, if you have a "dirty" power source like a coal plant, you could build a "clean" power source later (like a hydro plant) which would reduce your :yuck:.

"State religion" refers to your chosen national religion that you pick on the F7 screen. You could have all seven religions present in a city, but can never have more than one official state religion.

So after a clean power source is built, dirty power sources will no longer have their effects applied?
 
After you capture a city, what determines how many turns it will take before the city stops being "unhappy" and you can start working the tiles and have the city producing?
 
# of turns for revolt from capture is determined by:
Code:
(3 + Population/2) * (100-YourCulturePct)/100
and there will be no revolt if your culture pct is already 75% or more.

Spoiler Actual code from CvPlayer::acquireCity() :
Code:
	if (bConquest)
	{
		iTeamCulturePercent = pNewCity->calculateTeamCulturePercent(getTeam());

		if (iTeamCulturePercent < GC.getDefineINT("OCCUPATION_CULTURE_PERCENT_THRESHOLD"))
		{
			pNewCity->changeOccupationTimer(((GC.getDefineINT("BASE_OCCUPATION_TURNS") + ((pNewCity->getPopulation() * GC.getDefineINT("OCCUPATION_TURNS_POPULATION_PERCENT")) / 100)) * (100 - iTeamCulturePercent)) / 100);
		}

		GC.getMapINLINE().verifyUnitValidPlot();
	}
So the higher the population and the less culture you have there, the longer the revolt will be.
 
Certain techs let you turn part of your production (half, I think) into nonphysical stuff:
  • Alphabet lets you "build" research (beakers)
  • Currency lets you "build" wealth (gold coins)
  • Drama lets you "build" culture (music notes)


Actually isn't it 100% of your production in Beyond the Sword? :confused: I recall it was 50% in vanilla though. And Music is the tech that lets us build culture in cities.
 
When you're storming an enemy's territory, is it better to just put a settler in your stack of units and build a new city immediately after razing a city? What I find is that every time I take over the city, the surrounding civilizations' borders immediately press out and by the time my unhappiness is over, I have almost no tiles to work. If I had a settler in my stack I could just rebuild immediately and at least get my fat cross out of it. Especially if running universal suffrage and I could buy a theater right off the bat and adjust my culture slider to 100% for one turn so that I could have expanded borders after 1 or 2 turns. Is this what most people do? I'm not really finding much reason to raze any cities. Maybe if it had a wonder in it, but how do you tell what wonders are in a city before its yours?

Also, I played my first game on Warlord today and found it much more difficult than Chieftain. I managed to win a score victory, although I think China was literally 1 turn away from getting a space victory, but it seemed like the opponents were keeping constant pressure on me militarily so that I had to neglect technology and building expansion. Is it better to build a fairly large defensive force (5-6 units) in every city early on so that if a war does come, you don't have to stop what you're doing to react to the enemies? Usually I just focus on research, expansion, and commerce early on and if someone declares war on me I scramble to crank out units with Universal Suffrage hurrying them in whatever cities need defense. But seems like that's what caused me to get behind in other areas.
 
Several answers:
- on the settler stuff: unless you want to place the new city nearer from your side, you will have the same problems with cultural borders. So if that's your reason, it's not worth it.
- on culture: running 100% culture won't really help a new city to pop its borders, since it will produce very few commerce
- on wonders: check the f9 screen, in the tab "5 best cities of the world", you also have the world wonders and their location (if you know it)
- on balancing economy/military/...: There's no real answer to this question. I think it's more a question of fundamentals (you could do better in general) than a question of balancing. Loads of people here can balance things at very high level, but they also mostly play better.
 
When you're storming an enemy's territory, is it better to just put a settler in your stack of units and build a new city immediately after razing a city?

For me, It would have to depend on my attacking force versus his defending force in the cities that generate those high culture
If I think I can take out/capture those high culture cities, Ill keep the city in question. I wont raze it just because of the culture or population issues. Unless of course the terrain in the BFC are crappy

Maybe if it had a wonder in it, but how do you tell what wonders are in a city before its yours?

In my games, I always have a paperpad right next to the keyboard. I jot down lots of information, including: who built wonders. You can also find out if there are wonders in a city by pressing the F10 button, but that only applies if it's a Top 5 City :D (which it usually is)

Is it better to build a fairly large defensive force (5-6 units) in every city early on so that if a war does come, you don't have to stop what you're doing to react to the enemies? Usually I just focus on research, expansion, and commerce early on and if someone declares war on me I scramble to crank out units with Universal Suffrage hurrying them in whatever cities need defense. But seems like that's what caused me to get behind in other areas.

You dont want to "build a fairly large defensive force [early]" because the (military)technological jumps from one to another is pretty fast
Instead of training 6 warriors early, why not wait till archery, and build 3-4 archers? or 2-3 axemen? Get those settlers out asap

The AI doesnt attack you THAT early, just because of your lack of military units. Especially at that difficulty

But what about post archery/BW?
You should have a city dedicated to producing military units now, and they should be the ones training units for ALL of your cities

These should be pumping out units, all the time. The only other thing you build here is a granary, a barracks, forge and a courthouse
 
In my games, I always have a paperpad right next to the keyboard. I jot down lots of information, including: who built wonders. You can also find out if there are wonders in a city by pressing the F10 button, but that only applies if it's a Top 5 City :D (which it usually is)

Not only; look at the list on the right
 
At first, I thought the upper right hand panel only showed wonders built by a civilization; not which city it was built in

But after checking, I saw that some wonders showed which city they were built in, and some wonders didnt show this

Could you please tell me why?
 
At first, I thought the upper right hand panel only showed wonders built by a civilization; not which city it was built in

But after checking, I saw that some wonders showed which city they were built in, and some wonders didnt show this

Could you please tell me why?

because if you don't know where the city is you can't know where the wonder is.
 
The city name only shows if the city is visible to you. I believe you have to be able to see the units and such of the city (like thanks to religion in vanilla or high espionage in BTS) which always seemed silly to me since if that city is simply revealed you can usually see the wonder just by looking on the map.
 
You should have a city dedicated to producing military units now, and they should be the ones training units for ALL of your cities

These should be pumping out units, all the time. The only other thing you build here is a granary, a barracks, forge and a courthouse

Thanks, perhaps this is my error. After I get a few units out, I build things like banks, markets, etc in my military city. I guess this isn't necessary.
 
I'm playing Lincoln on a Fractal Map - I'm on the right - Saladin is on the left. My quetion is where to settle??

I just completed Iron Working, so obviously somewhere near the iron. I'd be interested in hearing thoughts about which square....

2nd question...

Without the Iron, where is best? I was puzzling over that when the iron came in. South is a lot of desert, but two nice food tiles and stone.

I can get all of those in my fat cross if I settle 2 S - 1E of the iron, BUT that kind means I Will have to overlap IF I want to settle on the N or S coast as well....

Thoughts??
 
Also, I played my first game on Warlord today and found it much more difficult than Chieftain. I managed to win a score victory, although I think China was literally 1 turn away from getting a space victory, but it seemed like the opponents were keeping constant pressure on me militarily so that I had to neglect technology and building expansion. Is it better to build a fairly large defensive force (5-6 units) in every city early on so that if a war does come, you don't have to stop what you're doing to react to the enemies? Usually I just focus on research, expansion, and commerce early on and if someone declares war on me I scramble to crank out units with Universal Suffrage hurrying them in whatever cities need defense. But seems like that's what caused me to get behind in other areas.

In general, it's an extremely bad idea to get a large defensive force in every city. Reading your post, it seems like you wish that every city can defend itself without outside help. Whatever force happens to approach this city, it doesn't need outside help. That's not the strategy to defend a country. You shouldn't defend individual cities, you should defend a country.

Defending a country requires a force that can defeat the offensive army of your potential enem(y)(ies). This force needs to be situated in a location so that it can quickly react to potential threats. Its goal is not to defend your cities, its goal is to defeat the enemy threat. You don't want to counter a mobile enemy threat with multiple stationary forces in your cities, you want to counter it with a mobile force that can defeat the enemy threat. That's a far more cost efficient way to defeat the enemy force. I once faced an enemy stack of doom of 125 units of equal tech level as my own and we both had something like 20 cities. It would have been impossible to build a force in each of my cities to stop a 125 unit stack. It was however possible to defeat the stack by countering it directly (although even that wasn't easy in this case).

You do have several advantages when you want to counter an enemy stack of units within your own territory. You have the advantage of the roads in your territory which will help you to react quickly with your more mobile forces to the slow enemy stack of units. This higher mobility means that you can choose to hit the enemy stack of units with several siege units (collateral damage) and then hit it with your gathered units before they can do a lot of damage. You should have the ability to hit the enemy stack first before it hits your gathered units because you can use roads and they can't.
You should also be able to reinforce any city along your front line with enough troops so that the enemy can only use the slow way of bombing and then attacking your city and not the quick way of fast units without bombing. The fast way should be too costly for the enemy and the slow way allows you to gather your forces to hit the enemy force before it hits your city.

So instead of building a large defensive force in each of your cities to stop the enemy force, build a more mobile reactionary force to defeat the enemy threat.
 
2 questions when does the AI become part of my trade network? I have the little arrow symbol by two out of 7 AIs, one of which I have open borders with and one not - I am connect to neither by Road and one of them doesn't appear to have a coastal city.

And when can I trade resources with the AI? Is there a tech I need to enable it?

Thanks'
 
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