Building the War Academy for Civ4

Thunderfall

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Hi everyone,

I plan to create a Civ4 War Academy section like the one we have for Civ3 soon. The articles will be selected from the best ones from here, and I would need your help in selecting them, as well as putting them in categories.

Any suggestions or ideas are welcomed. :)

EDIT (9/7/06): The Civ4 War Academy is here!!! Check it out and post your feedback!
 
sweet!

thank you very much, we have needed one of these for a bit!
 
I found that I keep referencing certain articles for my own education, or sending others to these articles for theirs. After a while I finally decided to just keep them all handy by including them in my signature. Check my sig for what I consider to be some of the most informative articles.
 
Good Idea I was actually waiting for this.
 
Well I'd say have two sections
1. Strategy articles with Strategies (ie slingshots, triangle diplomacy, city specializations, etc.)
2. Calculation articles with exactly how feature X works (for those who don't want to dig through the SDK)
 
I think the Combat Explained thread should be number 1 on the list, but it needs to be updated to the current patch.
 
Take all the threads that got 4+ stars. Oh, and make them sticky, too. Please? :)
 
Zombie69 said:
I hate the Deity Guide and HoF stuff. They have nothing to do with playing the game, and everything to do with choosing artificial settings so that you can say you beat deity / scored high.
I agree that those don't belong in the War Academy. They are good articles for their particular purposes, but those are niche purposes not related to overall strategy or learning the game.

Sullla's Walkthrough and the OCC guide, however, I agree with. Good choices.
 
Zombie69 said:
I hate the Deity Guide and HoF stuff. They have nothing to do with playing the game, and everything to do with choosing artificial settings so that you can say you beat deity / scored high.
So what other Deity walkthrough article do you suggest? Since Deity guide is the only current walkthough I think the choice is obvious.

Tell me 1 game that you don't choose settings. Even "Random" is a setting chosen by player.

And choosing the right settings is a skill. If you don't have that skill of course you can't win deity.
 
Zombie69 said:
I hate the Deity Guide and HoF stuff. They have nothing to do with playing the game, and everything to do with choosing artificial settings so that you can say you beat deity / scored high.
The same thing. Who cares about micromanagement. I play for fun not for micro every move i make. What's wrong with choosing the right settings? I rather choose the best settings to give myself the perfect start so i don't have to micro later rather than play 10 minutes each turn microing every single detail. There's no point in that and i see no fun in that. So before you hate other guides look at your own. If you don't like rigged settings you will hate rigged games!
 
mudd said:
The same thing. Who cares about micromanagement. I play for fun not for micro every move i make. What's wrong with choosing the right settings? I rather choose the best settings to give myself the perfect start so i don't have to micro later rather than play 10 minutes each turn microing every single detail. There's no point in that and i see no fun in that. So before you hate other guides look at your own. If you don't like rigged settings you will hate rigged games!
Well said mudd! If I waste 1 movement point of my worker what will happen? Nothing, and your own article is extremely rigged up settings. So do you know what you're writing? Are you arguing sagainst yourself. Rofl.
 
Since combat and early strategies have changed a bit due to patches, is there some way the nominated articles can be chosen, but then go through some sort of peer review process - like a special thread maybe - to edit them to insure that they remain consistent with 1.61?

After a certain period of time, the thread could be closed and the suggested edits could be integrated into the article for a final posting to the academy.

And once the academy is up an running is there a way to re-open the editing threads to update the articles once again? I've learned quite a lot from some articles, but then sometimes stated details don't seem to be consistent with game play - only to see that this is due to a rule change from a patch.

All of the articles suggested so far I've found to be well written and helpful to game play, but I do now check the dates of the article and see what patch version they were considering. But then this is what one would expect in a dated thread; however, if there is info posted to an "official" war academy that contains incorrect info, one would start to doubt every article in the academy.
 
Shigga said:
Take all the threads that got 4+ stars. Oh, and make them sticky, too. Please? :)
True, all 3 star or less should get out. :goodjob:

I just checked, it's true that only 4+ are good. The rating show how good the threads are.
 
1. There is zero skill involved in reading a thread and applying the settings suggested in that thread, then winning the game easily because the settings make it easy.

2. There's a huge difference between playing a game that's too easy because of the artificial settings, and playing a game that's so hard that it requires you to micromange everything to stand a chance.

3. I never pretended that micromanaging is for everyone. The very first sentence of my article clearly states that it isn't.
 
Hello Thunderfall,

Great idea to make a war academy. Many people suggested good ideas some of which I also had in mind. I will summarize for you what I think should be done.

Krikkitone's suggestion to split articles into 2 main groups is very good, but as far as strategies and calculation articles are concerned, there has to be some sort of review that these articles are uptodate with 1.61. Many authors dissappear and don't update their great article. If they are not around, someone knowledable (with your permission) can do a few fixes in the main article to include changes of the 1.61 patch.

Combat explained is a very good article and the change necessary to make it uptodate with 1.61 can be found in the last few post of its thread. People discussed what has changed and how it affects the article. Someone only has to change a few lines in the main article to mention what 1.61 has changed firepower calculations and rest of the calculations can remain the same.

Apart from Combat explained, there are great articles that explain the mathamatical systems of Civ4. I think those should be definitely put into the war academy as well, of course after some fine tuning for 1.61 patch. You could assign knowledable persons on the forums to update the articles if the authors are not around. Many people know what has changed for 1.61 and the discussion is already inside the thread of the article. Even if you are not gonna update the article, still keep them in the war academy, because people will discuss what has changed for 1.61 in the approriate thread.

More problematic are good articles that are pre-1.61 and favor chopping. The articles are great, I think you should include them no matter what to show the progression of civ4 thought, but there should be a note that this article might need rework by another person(no need to fix it yourself this time, because the work to fix the article for 1.61 is pretty large in some cases). One of such articles is optimum growth before 1000AD. He analyses whether to build a settler or worker first or chop something first etc. He put great effort into that article, someone else can be inspired from that article to write something similar for 1.61.

I would seperate the strategy section into 2 or even 3 parts; one where it talks about general, non-race specific strategies(slingshots, diplomacy, city specializations, etc.), and one where the author talks about a strategy with a certain race under certain settings or at some specific difficulty level. All HOF winner articles(i.e. ATurkishGuy 500k point writeup, hendrickzoon GOTM writeups should go there.
Deity guides should go to same place. These sort of articles can be very advanced tough and don't target newcomers. There are some newcomer guides which I think you should definitely include.

To keep both HOF fanatics and dislikers happy, consider including a variety of articles, not just only that of HOF winners. For example, I know some people have some tolerance to a little bit of save&reloading in their games, some people don't. Try to include articles that would address both audiences, not only one.

There are great articles on the forums(some of which have 0 stars), again hopefully people can point out to those.

Overall, if you need any help fixing out some articles for 1.61 you can ask some people in the forums we can gladly do it.
 
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