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

http://goireland.about.com/od/languagesofireland/qt/irish_pronounci.htm

'dune' is how we say it back home with my mum

Didnt know that some missionaries have such animation like praying

Just recently discovered (like since this thread was created):

1. Clicking on a spot on the Military Advisor's map will close the window and take you to that spot on the main map. (Very handy for tracking Boudica's armies around the board for future destruction.)

2. The converse of +1 "We influence other civilizations!" is that, apparently, my vassals get -1 "Down with foreign influence!" in all their cities. I never knew, 'cuz it can't happen to the human player. Poor li'l vassals.

That was discovered whilst finding out about Thing #3: One of my vassals is moving his stack toward his assigned target. The stack happened to stop a city that belongs to a different vassal of mine. That city had a +22 HR happy bonus... for one turn. Gotta figure out how to get my vassals to park all their units in my cities so my happy caps jump to 50.

EDIT: About the units having "down time"- there's a bunch, I see new ones pretty often. Impis do this weird little rocking-back-and-forth war dance, Jaguars have something similar, Workers wipe sweat off their foreheads, swordsmen jam their swords in the ground to stretch and twist, etc. Pretty cool little animations, sometimes I get distracted from playing and zoom way in to look at cities and forests and horses and stuff.

TheMulattoMaker said:

Just recently discovered (like since this thread was created):

1. Clicking on a spot on the Military Advisor's map will close the window and take you to that spot on the main map. (Very handy for tracking Boudica's armies around the board for future destruction.)

2. The converse of +1 "We influence other civilizations!" is that, apparently, my vassals get -1 "Down with foreign influence!" in all their cities. I never knew, 'cuz it can't happen to the human player. Poor li'l vassals.

That was discovered whilst finding out about Thing #3: One of my vassals is moving his stack toward his assigned target. The stack happened to stop a city that belongs to a different vassal of mine. That city had a +22 HR happy bonus... for one turn. Gotta figure out how to get my vassals to park all their units in my cities so my happy caps jump to 50.

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Good stuff!

rfcfanatic said:

In another thread I complained about not being able to define specialist priorities in civ 4. Well, I've discovered I was wrong. Are you familiar with the yellow boxes you occasionally get around some of your specialists? In addition to whip-protection, I've discovered that if you got a yellow box around a specialist, that specialist class would have higher priority than others. And if you got 2 yellow boxes in one specialist class and 1 in another, the specialist class with higher number of yellow boxes would be held in higher importance by the game engine.

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I suspected something like this but def. didn't know about the 2:1 prioritization. I wish a similar 'lock-down' could be done on city tiles worked...like a priority queue. Thanks for the post.

Michkov said:

How do you set the boxes?

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I think you just click on the icon of the specialist.

I believe I did this on accident a few days ago and the yellow box showed up. I didn't know what it was, so I just clicked again and it went away.

TheMulattoMaker said:

1. Clicking on a spot on the Military Advisor's map will close the window and take you to that spot on the main map. (Very handy for tracking Boudica's armies around the board for future destruction.)

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I was looking for a way to do that yesterday! I thought I tried clicking the map, though...oh well, thanks for giving me inspiration to try again!
-

Invisible naval units move out of the square to avoid incoming ships - so as long as there is no escape route, you can 'walk' an enemy submarine into the coast, which destroys it.
And you can do this with a workboat!

i have discovered i could do queueing. wow, i felt like a dolt after that. so many time sparing after that. i guess that's advanced strategy.

Earlier today, I popped a Great Artist. I was amused to discover that all this time I thought Kafka's first name was Franz- apparently in the BtS universe, it's Frank.

Even more humorous. I popped a great spy and the name was one of my co-workers. I later found out that he was on the testing team. It's a small world.

TheMulattoMaker said:

One of my vassals is moving his stack toward his assigned target. The stack happened to stop a city that belongs to a different vassal of mine. That city had a +22 HR happy bonus... for one turn. Gotta figure out how to get my vassals to park all their units in my cities so my happy caps jump to 50.

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In fact, I've noticed that any non-hostile military units provide HR happiness. They don't even have to be your vassal's.

that you can build the apostolic palace in a religion only you have, lets say taoism, and then change your religion back to one, that most AI's have.
then start spreading taoism,
consequence: everyone likes you, and only you will be proposed for religious leader, (as long nobody converts to taoism, which is unlikely), and you decide who has how many votes

najuris said:

that you can build the apostolic palace in a religion only you have, lets say taoism, and then change your religion back to one, that most AI's have.
then start spreading taoism,
consequence: everyone likes you, and only you will be proposed for religious leader, (as long nobody converts to taoism, which is unlikely), and you decide who has how many votes

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Yes. To AP cheese you have to spread the religion to all civs and spread enough so that your converted population represents less than 70% (?) of the total world converted population.

pomthom said:

Yes. To AP cheese you have to spread the religion to all civs and spread enough so that your converted population represents less than 70% (?) of the total world converted population.

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every leader needs 1 city with the AP religion, only then there is an election for a religious leader. (so to AI's who doesnt like me, i spread the religion in the smallest city, friendly AI's get the religion in every city. - with this tactic it should be pretty easy to win the elections)

But if you can vote yourself a diplo victory by yourself, the option won't be there.

Lennier said:

But if you can vote yourself a diplo victory by yourself, the option won't be there.

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Yep you must have less than 70% (I think) of the world's AP religion population

2-Also, there are leaders that are better in MP play than your FIN leaders, you just have to be more creative (though not necessarily CRE, though that can be a good trait). For example, Brennus is amazing.

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You're right that there is more to MP (and SP!) than financial, but Brennus? Definitely not a good example.

- Brennus starts with mysticism and hunting, two of the worst starting technologies.
- Brennus UU and UB, while not useless, rarely gives you the edge in an early war against human players.
- Brennus lacks anything that helps him run away over time.

One of the reasons Mali is so good is the UU. MM has FIN, but the skirmisher is extremely difficult to deal with in MP and is a major threat offensively and defensively. Egypt for example lacks FIN but is top tier in SP and not a bad choice in MP. Praets are strong. The Ottomans and Zulu are both strong also. Spain can be ridiculous in SP, since it's trivial to get CR III siege simply by avoiding economics for a while and you have arguably the best non-rush UU in the game.

One thing I've discovered is that muskets are a bit underrated. With the popularity of cuirassers, I'm surprised they're not chain drafted frequently. Even without cuirs, simply drafting muskets and whipping trebs you can easily have 20+ of either in a short period of time, and the window to use that is pretty impressive. Muskets get winning odds vs longbows in flatland cities with just bombardment if they have a few promotions, and need almost no siege help otherwise. They're not worth the to be hard-built, but you don't really have to hard-build them.

TheMeInTeam said:

You're right that there is more to MP (and SP!) than financial, but Brennus? Definitely not a good example.

- Brennus starts with mysticism and hunting, two of the worst starting technologies.
- Brennus UU and UB, while not useless, rarely gives you the edge in an early war against human players.
- Brennus lacks anything that helps him run away over time.

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Brennus ≠ Celts. Spiritual + Charismatic is a fantastic combo; on a Civ with better starting techs, unit and building Brennus would be awesome.

plastiqe said:

Brennus ≠ Celts. Spiritual + Charismatic is a fantastic combo; on a Civ with better starting techs, unit and building Brennus would be awesome.

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That's true, SPI/CHA isn't a bad combo. If we're talking unrestricted though you can have nonsense like protective skirmishers or aggressive praetorians ^_^. Heck if Washington had a better civ he might be able to make something of his MASSIVELY HUGE CITIES.

Charismatic + Mongol is fun too.