Civ 4 for a Civ 5 player?

Thanks for the responses, everyone! Greatly appreciate the community here.

Is there anything else crucial more experienced Civ 4 players have to say? I get all the other things you guys have said, but I feel there are a few more things missing. Particularly I would like to know more about how to efficiently go through the early game and city management.

I liked Civ 2 (didn't play much Civ 3 so cant remember) stacking mechanic where yes - you could stack and the units would cycle when damaged - but if you destroyed one - you would destroy the entire stack!

Civ revolution on the iPad got me addicted to civ

Civ Rev is based on Civ 4 but massively dumbed down, but the fighting mechanics and the different "pots" (gold, science etc.) you fill up are very similar - you could always start there as an introduction.

PringleBringle said:

Thanks for the responses, everyone! Greatly appreciate the community here.

Is there anything else crucial more experienced Civ 4 players have to say? I get all the other things you guys have said, but I feel there are a few more things missing. Particularly I would like to know more about how to efficiently go through the early game and city management.

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Build cottages on empty green grass tiles, so they will upgrade as soon as possible. Watch your health, by building granaries and looking for health based resources. Build enough units to keep the AI from attacking you, while going to the Hereditary Rule civic to keep your happiness up. Try to found a religion and go to the Organized Religion civic. Don't expand too fast, or your research will take a dive. Build courthouses when you can, to get the maintenance cost down.

There is a lot more to do in Civ IV vs. V, as production is much faster, so good luck and have fun.

Just uploaded Civ IV to give it a try and - I know it's unimportant but - god! how awful the graphic design is! Civ III is much better in that sense (somehow I've played CIv III and V but never tried number 4)

werothegreat said:

Also, all of that applies almost regardless of what era units are from. Three longbowmen in a city can hold off a stack of a dozen mechanized infantry and it is INCREDIBLY frustrating.

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Ermn, by the time you have infantry, you should also have some type of artillery support, and perhaps even bombers. Reducing a cities defenses, as well as collateral damage is critical in taking a city.

killmeplease said:

and vise versa, you can lose your 15-size walled city on a hill guarded by a highly promoted longbow to a stray barb clubman. (happened to me once). so its better to have several defenders in your cities

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The RNG can be a definite witch at times, in fact there are several angst threads dedicated to the RNG over in the Civ IV forums.

DarkestOnion said:

As much as I love Civ 4, I fear that going back to Civ 4 might be a series of headaches for someone who came into the series with Civ 5. However, if you are willing to make the effort to temporarily forget many things from Civ 5, then you may really enjoy Civ 4 because it is an excellent game.

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Agree. Also there are quite a few mods available that are continuously being updated, and are definitely worth time to investigate.

PringleBringle said:

Thanks for the responses, everyone! Greatly appreciate the community here.

Is there anything else crucial more experienced Civ 4 players have to say? I get all the other things you guys have said, but I feel there are a few more things missing. Particularly I would like to know more about how to efficiently go through the early game and city management.

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May I recommend you spend some time over in the S&T forums? there are several beginner guides that will make your playing more enjoyable.

rschissler said:

Build cottages on empty green grass tiles, so they will upgrade as soon as possible. Watch your health, by building granaries and looking for health based resources. Build enough units to keep the AI from attacking you, while going to the Hereditary Rule civic to keep your happiness up. Try to found a religion and go to the Organized Religion civic. Don't expand too fast, or your research will take a dive. Build courthouses when you can, to get the maintenance cost down.

There is a lot more to do in Civ IV vs. V, as production is much faster, so good luck and have fun.

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If I may clarify the above just a tad. Riverside cottages or flood plain cottages ( or even both if possible) are far superior than grassland cottages. Additionally, while MON/OR is good for early game (pre- REN era), you may want to study up on the merits of REP/FR as the game progresses (depending on your style of play of course).

zagosya said:

Just uploaded Civ IV to give it a try and - I know it's unimportant but - god! how awful the graphic design is! Civ III is much better in that sense (somehow I've played CIv III and V but never tried number 4)

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If I may make a suggestion. DL Blue Marble terrain graphics available in the Civ IV DL section. It is a terrain graphics enhancement based off of NASA satellite imagery and intergrated into the game ( quite a few mods use it as well), you may find it more pleasing than the stark graphics off the base game.

Now I am thinking of buying Civ IV.

tat501 said:

I liked Civ 2 (didn't play much Civ 3 so cant remember) stacking mechanic where yes - you could stack and the units would cycle when damaged - but if you destroyed one - you would destroy the entire stack!

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It was a Civ 1 mechanic as well. It's funny that everybody complained about stacks of doom from Civ 4 and that lead to the 1 UPS garbage of Civ 5 when the best solution to the problem was in the first two games of the series all along. Killing the top unit of a stack discouraged massive unit stacks. That's all they had to do was go back to it. Instead they went to 1 unit per square which imo caused more problems than it solved. Stacks of doom could get ridiculous, but they kept you on your toes.

The replay of IV is less than V, with the exception of the mods. If you wanna see how deep that rabbit hole can go, the C2C (Caveman to cosmos) mod for IV is AMAZING. you'll need a very powerful machine to avoid nasty MAFs and CTD's, but most recent (2yr or newer) systems can handle it.

The advantage of IV is it allows more micro management: cities, units, religions etc. If that is a turn off to you, V is the better platform. C2C mod embraces that fully and expands every aspect of the game: more units (1200+) more civs (50+) more religions (20+) more eras (10) more wonders (120+) more terrain types. More is more, is the philosophy. That really refreshed my love of the IV platform. Most of the modern and post era is still beta, but if you ever wanted to start a civ at 50000BC with the development of language, C2C is the mod for you.

Of course, I'm 120 hrs into a game and its still like 600 BC, and I'm in the industrial era (balance issues?) but super fun to play nonetheless.

Countmonte8242 said:

It was a Civ 1 mechanic as well. It's funny that everybody complained about stacks of doom from Civ 4 and that lead to the 1 UPS garbage of Civ 5 when the best solution to the problem was in the first two games of the series all along. Killing the top unit of a stack discouraged massive unit stacks. That's all they had to do was go back to it. Instead they went to 1 unit per square which imo caused more problems than it solved. Stacks of doom could get ridiculous, but they kept you on your toes.

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I couldn't disagree more.

I played Civ II until the CD eventually gave up the ghost. I loved it so much that I was even willing to wait up to 15 minutes for the AI's turn to complete in the late game (my PC was a massive 16MHz below the recommended spec, though the box doesn't actually list a minimum), and I can't even imagine going back to it now. Civ V is so much better in almost every way that I think I'd find II basically unplayable (I say 'almost', mostly because of the advisors). 1UPT is a pretty major reason for that, especially in combination with units that can move more than one tile per turn.

Countmonte8242 said:

It was a Civ 1 mechanic as well. It's funny that everybody complained about stacks of doom from Civ 4 and that lead to the 1 UPS garbage of Civ 5 when the best solution to the problem was in the first two games of the series all along. Killing the top unit of a stack discouraged massive unit stacks. That's all they had to do was go back to it. Instead they went to 1 unit per square which imo caused more problems than it solved. Stacks of doom could get ridiculous, but they kept you on your toes.

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I think going back to the "killing the top unit of a stack means they all die" mechanic would be a mistake. It's too painful, and too many people go back and reload, to get a better outcome. I'd probably go for limited stacking, like three or four units to a tile.

rschissler said:

I think going back to the "killing the top unit of a stack means they all die" mechanic would be a mistake. It's too painful, and too many people go back and reload, to get a better outcome. I'd probably go for limited stacking, like three or four units to a tile.

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I'd cautiously suggest allowing one melee unit, one ranged unit, one civilian, and a great general, all on one tile. (I know a great general is technically a civilian unit, but I'd treat them differently). On its own that would overpower ranged units too much though, so would probably need further balancing - it's not like they're too weak as it is.

I'd also allow some limited amount of stacking of units belonging to different civs, so long as they are not at war - probably something like allowing two civs to have a stack on a given tile. This is mostly to avoid the situation where an AI blocks your units indefinitely by randomly moving a handful of units back and forth in rough terrain for no reason, or when an AI with open borders sits on your roads, forcing your workers to waste turns. Not sure what I'd do if war broke out between civs with units stacked in neutral territory (non a problem in non-neutral territory since the foreign civ would get their units teleported away).

Drakarska said:

May I recommend you spend some time over in the S&T forums? there are several beginner guides that will make your playing more enjoyable.

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Where and what exactly are the S&T forums?

Also, just to clarify, y'all don't need to tell me whether or not I will enjoy Civ 4 or not because of micromanaging etc. I already know I do. Hell, with only a few games in I love it, and I suck too (which is expected).

Thanks again for the info. I am well aware of all the amazing mods such as C2C and FFH2. I want to wait until I am proficient at the base game to mod, tho. I must say, however, that this game has some of the greatest mods I have ever seen, and this is coming from a guy who would constantly play Fallout 3 and Oblivion mods .

Civ IV - Strategy & Tips: http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=155

Browd said:

Civ IV - Strategy & Tips: http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=155

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Thanks, but I have indeed already looked at that forum, I'm not that dull when it comes to civfanatics. However, at least from my first skim, I didn't find much useful (have been using a bit of the war academy as well as some youtubers). Also confused why there only a couple pages of strategy and tips ? The game is quite old by now, would expect a lot more submissions.

The slavery civic is your best friend in civ IV.

It allows you to sacrifice population to finish a current build, for a cost of 1 unhappiness for 10 turns. Each citizen is worth 30 hammers (except on a brand new build, where it's 20). If your build needs 50 more hammers, two citizens will be killed. The unhappiness does not increase if more than one citizen is killed. The excess 10 hammers aren't wasted either, they get carried over.

Why bother?
At low populations (say, up to 6), the amount of food needed to grow one pop is 30 on average. With a granary, it is 15. So you get a 1:2 food to hammer conversion. This is the best source of hammers early on. Even more so when you consider that usually your cities will have too much food and start becoming unhappy until you start hooking up luxuries.

At low populations, x extra food allows you to do x/2-population whip every 10 turns (roughly) without accumulating the unhappiness. It takes some work to line up builds worth more than 30 hammers if your x is 4 or 6, to coincide with when you want to whip, but it is worth it.

Most importantly, whipping gives you your settler, your library, your catapult NOW, which is much much better than LATER (especially for settlers, which convert food to hammers at a 1:1 ratio when being built, so you definitely want to whip them).

As your happiness cap increases, it is less worthwhile to whip, because #1 - the ratio is no longer 1:2 but closer to 1:1.5, and #2 - you do miss out on the yields that the killed citizens would have gotten till they grow back. Early on the cottage they might have been working is not as important as fast expansion or army or libraries, but later on it is. Also specialists become available, and are an excellent sink for extra food.

Slavery alone will drastically improve your early game if utilized properly.

PringleBringle said:

Also confused why there only a couple pages of strategy and tips ? The game is quite old by now, would expect a lot more submissions.

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Make sure your page is displaying more than a month's worth of posts. Also, I'd suggest playing in the Noble's Club games they post over there every couple of weeks. Can be very useful for comparing your decisions to others.

Also, make sure every city gets a granary. You should build other buildings to specialize (e.g. gold/science multipliers in commerce cities, barracks/forges in hammer cities), but granaries are the only true food multipliers in the game.

Amask said:

The slavery civic is your best friend in civ IV..

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One of the worse design decisions in the history gaming! Slavery really was OP compared to other SP choices.

PringleBringle said:

Thanks for the responses, everyone! Greatly appreciate the community here.

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Please come back to this thread, summarizing your experience. I would guess there are a good number of Civ players who started with V and wonder if IV is worth the bother.

So, since this post, I have won one game as Lincoln on Noble (felt bad having to go down so many levels after playing civ 5 on emperor :3). Speaking of Civ 5, its weird, I also won my first game as America on there, too. Since then, I have literally never lost a game as America. Must be the luck of being my home nation.

Anyway, I am not sure what I did that helped me win that game (diplomatic victory, btw) but I was able to launch a successful horse archer rush on Carthage early game so yeah. I guess what I need now is the knowledge on how to perfect the early game. Apparently I can't seem to work first 50-100 turns effectively. I understand there are probably countless guides on that, but I would just like some direct must-knows to help me at least perfect noble.

Oh, and again, thank you all so much. I really do love these forums. Y'all are great .

Thanks for reporting back! Mostly I am curious to learn your impressions (like or hate) of the different game mechanics, less about if you win or lose. But speaking of which, tell us about how you figured out you needed to drop down difficulty levels? There should be a good story to tell each time you lost!

Please remind me, is “Noble” below/at/above the default difficulty level? My biggest complaint about Civ3 and 4 is that the gaps between levels I found to be huge. At my best, I was only able to win at, I think, one level above default -- and those games were much too easy. One level higher, and I was just crushed, never able to progress -- despite these forums.

One of the things I like best about Civ5, is that I was able to slowly work my way up the difficulty levels, even without the forums, up to Emperor. Now I routinely play at Immortal. If I ever take on Deity, it will only be because of the forums.