After years of playing, what new things have you found in Civ 4?

pomthom said:

Corporate spreads can fail! Does anyone know the math behind that?

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Didn't you read our last SGOTM thread? I explained that in post 11529...

Anyway, the code is exactly the same as for missionaries:

iSpreadProb += (((GC.getNumCorporationInfos() - pCity->getCorporationCount()) * (100 - iSpreadProb)) / GC.getNumCorporationInfos());

iSpreadProb = 40 for own cities, 20 for AI cities. (Value <iCorporationSpread>40</iCorporationSpread> in Civ4UnitInfos.xml, is cut in half for foreign cities)

GC.getNumCorporationInfos = Amount of corporations in existence
pCity->getCorporationCount = corps present in city

Insert the numbers and you will see that with no earlier corporation present, it can't fail:

40+(((1-0)*(100-40)/1) =
40+1*60/1 = 100

With one or more corporations present, the success chance depends on how many have been founded yet and how many are present in the city.

I've seen many people claim that it could also fail with no previous corporations present in the city. The code does not support that claim...

elitetroops said:

I've seen many people claim that it could also fail with no previous corporations present in the city. The code does not support that claim...

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I might be misreading the code, but wouldn't having two corps in existence introduce a chance of failure even if there isn't one in the city already?


EDIT...Nevermind, that cancels in the math.

Thanks elitetroops

I recently learned that, well, you know when you mouse over a resource bubble? And it says like, +2 food with farm, and all that? Well I never knew what just the +1 Food was. Not the +1 Food WITH PASTURE, just +1 food (or commerce/hammers). I used to think that when you got that resource, any city with access to it would gain an extra food per turn, but then I learned it didn't. I finally realized it meant the difference between the unimproved tile and a bare tile of the same type. (An unimproved plains tile = 1 food and 1 hammer, an unimproved plains cow tile= 2 food and 1 hammer; when you mouse over a cow resource it tells you +1 food). I don't know if I was able to explain this very well without some screenshots, but yeah.

Permanent Alliances make the game much more interesting. specially if you purposely neglect getting in one yourself.

Pisskop said:

Permanent Alliances make the game much more interesting. specially if you purposely neglect getting in one yourself.

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How do you get in a permanent alliance? It never even shows up for me.

CaterpillarKing said:

How do you get in a permanent alliance? It never even shows up for me.

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Enter a Custom Game, check the option to allow permanent alliances on the left side, then once you and a friendly AI either have a defensive pact or shared war or both for a number of years and one of y'all must have the tech Communism. Then you can make a PA.

Oh so you have to enable it?? Cool thanks!


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hate the sound effect after I've lost a battle, annoying.
(own vanilla version only)

I found out that, when creating a scenario, it is possible to 'place' cities in worldbuilder by constructing them with one of your own settlers, and then painting another civ's territory on that city. This is very useful for creating barbarian cities.

I used to reload the game for each civ to place their respective cities. Then, I would have to remove some technologies from the earlier ranked civs...

An old coworker of mine used to say to our fellow coworkers "the more I teach you, the dumber you get". With that in mind, the more I learn about civ4, the more I realize I have more still to learn.

NiRv4n4 said:

I found out that, when creating a scenario, it is possible to 'place' cities in worldbuilder by constructing them with one of your own settlers, and then painting another civ's territory on that city. This is very useful for creating barbarian cities.

I used to reload the game for each civ to place their respective cities. Then, I would have to remove some technologies from the earlier ranked civs...

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You can place cities from any civ (or barbarians) in WB in the Player Mode menu. The second tab is "buildings", the top left button there is "add new city" or somesuch. If you pick Barbarian as the civ in the player mode menu, you can drop barb cities wherever you want.

I didn't find this out by playing, I found it out by CFCing. My original method was to WB some barb settlers where I wanted cities- and then get mad at them when the idiots just wandered back and forth on their little islands and never settled anywhere.

As far as cultural/castle defenses go, Galleons are considered gunpowder units, as in castle defenses are not shown (not that it matters in any way).

How to bulb astronomy. I back-doored it (ie it just happened) but now I know since looking it up as it was quite useful in my current game. Get optics, don't unlock paper (ie no theology or CS). A weird tech path, but it paid off immensely. Bulbing it I went from a slider % of 40 being break even to a slider percent of 70 being break even, with a near-tripling of bpt (many small continents, I was semi-isolated, caravels had already found almost everyone, I am expansive and organized, and harbors actually make a difference for once. Also, unlocks observatories, which is not too shabby on this game).
Info on game if anyone cares:
I was trying to move up to immortal again (took a long break from civ, and was only just starting to get kind-of competive in imm when I stopped) for the first time in a while, will win handily. Everyone in the world knows at most two other civs, and several are completely isolated. I was semi-isolated with ghandi, and thanks to boxing him in, and the GLH, I just researched a more expensive tech every time he researched something new, and was able to keep up with his techs/turn. Kept trading with him, and that pathetic level of trading (1 tech for every new tech I unlock) made me tech parity with the other top civ (darius of the.. something).
The game's a lock now, as I am the only one with astro (one other just got optics), spread my/Ghandi's religion to each heathen civ I ran into (and there were 5 of them!) so I'm in the largest religious block, killed ghandi and stole his shrine before any of his religious followers even got to meet him, and am going to win a super late lib (post 1000AD, and might be post 1100. However long I can hold out for. No one else has education...) for almost whatever I want.
Will get at least sci meth (sci meth isn't obsoleting anything for me except a single monastery, so it's a pretty good tech to get). I might not even finish this game, as space should be easy, dom would be easy with SP but tedious, conquest would actually be doable but super-tedious. Culture and diplo might be harder, but probably doable. So.. yeah. Woot, a legitmate immortal win! Kind of. I dunno. Each imm win will have now been on very watery maps, but at least this one isn't me as willem or darius of the dutch, which is actually very easy on imm.

traius said:

Will get at least sci meth (sci meth isn't obsoleting anything for me except a single monastery, so it's a pretty good tech to get).

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SCI METH

NEVER

NOT EVEN ONCE



...anyway, contributing: Workboats count as "military units" for Heroic Epic purposes. I knew settlers/workers/missionaries/execs didn't get the bonus, but I never realized workboats did until I found myself 1-turning them on Marathon before my HE city was even up to speed.

TheMulattoMaker said:

...anyway, contributing: Workboats count as "military units" for Heroic Epic purposes. I knew settlers/workers/missionaries/execs didn't get the bonus, but I never realized workboats did until I found myself 1-turning them on Marathon before my HE city was even up to speed.

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As they can be built all game long it used to be a very interesting way of getting overflow gold

traius said:

As far as cultural/castle defenses go, Galleons are considered gunpowder units, as in castle defenses are not shown (not that it matters in any way).

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As a side note oddly Privateers are not considered gunpowder in the same way!

And a somewhat related contribution is that while post gunpowder siege/ships/aricraft ignores wall and castle defense while selected or attacking, they still has to bombard from the maximum defense value, whether built or culture. So if the city has a castle a cannon has to bombard from 100% despite 'ignoring' castles, though it it doesn't have its bombardment rate reduced by them.

This causes really odd changes in defense values when bombarding cities with these units, such as cannons only appearing to cause a 2-3% reduction in defense against cities with 20% culture but an invisible 100% due to a castle. In this case 4/5ths of the damage go to the invisible castle defense while only 1/5th goes to the culture you can see.
Basically, castles still manage to slow down the bombardment rate of late game siege units.

Lennier said:

I know it's been three months since anyone found a new thing, but in my current game, I found that if you gift a UU to another civ, it stays as the UU

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Yeah, they changed that after we worked out that friendly players could create powerful units by swapping - say giving a Celtic Swordsman to the Aztecs or visa versa.

Of course, you can get around it either by promotion, or gift workers to someone about to be invaded by India and have them become Fast Workers when captured.

I'm playing with BTS 3.19. So either it's only the human player who can't do that, or it's another way Firaxis made sure that Mac version was 100% compatible with the PC version.

1 gold beg works even when threatening others (they are cautious). At least sometimes. I guess I don't know that it always works...

traius said:

1 gold beg works even when threatening others (they are cautious). At least sometimes. I guess I don't know that it always works...

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Functionally demands are almost identical to begs, if they still remember a beg or demand they will refuse (the forgetting is random), the value available even comes out of the same pool.
The only differences are that demands cause a diplo hit and are auto refused if the AI your bullying has more than 4/3 times your power.