If you could improve Civ 4 in any way, how would you do it?

@Tim you can change the names of your units including GGs by clicking on their name at the bottom left of the interface.
 
@Tim you can change the names of your units including GGs by clicking on their name at the bottom left of the interface.

I could (I think) go into world builder and change the AI great generals' names too, but I still think it would be a nice touch (and maybe even vaguely educational) if great people names were empire appropriate.

Of course I'm also mildly annoyed by the Hanging Gardens of Madrid being encircled by the Great Wall of Spain in my current game, so perhaps this is just me.
 
if great people names were empire appropriate.
Imagine my surprise when I saw a Great Spy with the name of a guy that worked for me.
I later found out he was one of the play testers and since there were so few ACTUAL well known great spies in history that they named most of them for the play testers.
 
You guys do know there are mods for that?
 
Imagine my surprise when I saw a Great Spy with the name of a guy that worked for me.
I later found out he was one of the play testers and since there were so few ACTUAL well known great spies in history that they named most of them for the play testers.

Play testers get to see the game before anyone else...hence great spies.
 
Imagine my surprise when I saw a Great Spy with the name of a guy that worked for me.
I later found out he was one of the play testers and since there were so few ACTUAL well known great spies in history that they named most of them for the play testers.

If anybody knows Great Spy name, (s)he isn't that Great Spy (invisible to everyone) anymore :D
 
Hence why they used the play testers. :)
 
I remember editing the city names list in Civ2 to add dozens (or hundreds) more city names when playing giga maps. I’d guess that’s easy to do in Civ4, but I don’t know where to go to put in Civ-specific great people names.

And if I could do that, I’d want to create lists of names for units, e.g.

American Fighters: Eddie Rickenbacker, Richard Bong, Thomas McGuire…
British Battleships: Warspite, Valiant, Nelson, Rodney…
German Submarines: U-1, U-3, U-4…

That would take forever… on second thought, don’t tell me how to do it 
 
That would take forever… on second thought, don’t tell me how to do it 
Are you sure you don't want to know? I could be persuaded to impart the secret knowledge. :lol:
 
Change the combat system so it isn't based on "luck" losing a 99 % battle is just stupid.

make it like civ 5 if you do 5 damage you do 5 damage
 
Change the combat system so it isn't based on "luck" losing a 99 % battle is just stupid.

make it like civ 5 if you do 5 damage you do 5 damage

This is more of a problem in the very early game where 1-3 improbable combat results can ruin your game. TMIT made this point a while ago, maybe in this thread, even.

So what about:

4000BC-2000BC – auto win if >50% combat odds, auto loss otherwise

2000BC-1000BC – auto win if >80% odds, auto loss if <20% odds

1000 BC and later – as things are now

Question is, how much damage should the “Auto win(ning)” unit suffer? Does that need to be tailored as well?
 
This is more of a problem in the very early game where 1-3 improbable combat results can ruin your game. TMIT made this point a while ago, maybe in this thread, even.

So what about:

4000BC-2000BC – auto win if >50% combat odds, auto loss otherwise

2000BC-1000BC – auto win if >80% odds, auto loss if <20% odds

1000 BC and later – as things are now

Question is, how much damage should the “Auto win(ning)” unit suffer? Does that need to be tailored as well?
:lol: I'm sorry, but this literally made me laugh.

I just played a pre-2000BC standard/mara/deity conquest victory. Auto wins throughout the game would have helped though. :mischief:

In all seriousness, the lower difficulties already have auto wins against barbs, that's good enough. Adding some auto win system for regular combat would be too easy to abuse.
 
How many of those 99% battles have you won though, say out of a hundred?

I really love this comment. :lol:

I'd try to guess and say 99 but looking at the rants it seems less than 30 would be the correct answer.
 
I would expand the medieval era and make castles more useful.

It's such an interesting time period with lots of different units, but on normal speed, techs go by so quickly that it's better to just wait for cuirs, rifles, or cannons before starting any kind of major war.

I would make castles go obsolete with artillery or flight. This seems more historically accurate as an early rifle or cannon doesn't seem like much a threat to a well-built castle.

A mechanic to simulate a proper siege would be a lot of fun. It could be similar to a naval blockade where the city is prevented from working surrounding tiles. Currently, it's too much hassle to go around pillaging everything and then sitting on top of the tiles to starve a city. Maybe a starving city should have an escalating chance of revolt to give the attackers an incentive to perform a siege on a particularly large or tough city? Units should be less effective when attacking from a sieged city so that you have to bring other units to drive away the attackers.

Tech-wise, I would experiment with making renaissance techs extremely expensive and removing the free tech from lib. You should have to hang out in the medieval era for a while instead of just completely bypassing it.

Lowering the cost of medieval units could incentivize warfare and make it more dangerous to ignore engineering and machinery in favor of education and lib.

Improving serfdom would be required as well. I would leave the current bonus, but add some kind rudimentary drafting system. Serfs were often called into war, so that should be reflected in the civic. Finally, a bonus to farms, like the +1 commerce in k-mod, could be considered.
 
Change the combat system so it isn't based on "luck" losing a 99 % battle is just stupid.

make it like civ 5 if you do 5 damage you do 5 damage
I think this is only an issue very early on. Usually your stacks are large enough that the randomness evens out, I hate excessive randomness but I've never had this issue in Civ IV .

I could write a damn essay on things I'd improve in Civ IV. If I had to pick a few it would be:

Reinforcing and upgrading units now costs money. Having a dominant army turn 50 shouldn't guarantee that you're still top dog turn 500, the stronger you are early on the harder you'll have to work to keep up later. This will also ensure that an army is actually weakened after a large war - at present a couple of turns in a city is all you need to take your army from "exhausted and near destruction" to "unstoppable behemoth".

Barbarian cities that aren't openly hostile. Ideally at the start of the game most of the world should be "barbarian" and you trade with them for money and resources, and eventually conquer/assimilate them. I realise there are mods that do something like this but they don't do it very well.

A full civics tree with different choices through the era. Civ IV's civics were one of the weakest aspects of the gameplay, they need a complete overhaul.

More information available on the interface. I want to know how much maintenance a city costs before I found it, I want to know how many military units I can afford, I know the BUG mod does some great work in this regard but there is so much more to be done.

I could go on but I'll leave it there.
 
  • Multicore Support
  • 64 bit
  • Full cross-platform compatibility (no DLL)
  • Hexes
  • Smarter AI
  • A modding API so extensive that I can do everything else myself :)
 
  • A modding API so extensive that I can do everything else myself :)
Correction: A Documented modding API so extensive that I can do everything else myself :D
 
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