Rounding. Say you are generating 15
. Now 100%
-slider generates 15
, 0%
-slider generates 15
, but 50%
-slider generates 7
7
.
Is that really relevant outside of the very early game though? Obviously, if you have 15 commerce, like in this example, your effective commerce is 14, which is a ~7% loss and very relevant. But once I have 100 commerce, I'd consider 1 commerce an acceptable price for not having to keep close track of the slider, let alone when I have 500 or 1000 commerce.
Or is the rounding city-based? I assumed it was empire-wide, and I do remember seeing things that seemed to back that up, but I'll admit I haven't crunched the numbers.
Usually, no. Though with the
-bonus they might be good in some situations, especially with PRO, especially on deity where tech stealing is a thing. On lower levels AIs tech way too slow to make stealing worthwhile.
I'll admit, I usually play with espionage off. The system is kinda clunky and while I can accept
some suboptimal decisions from the AI that handles citizen assignment in cities in exchange for less micromanagement, the priority it puts on Spy specialists is too much for me.
(and just to clarify, I don't simply ignore the citizen assignments; usually I make cursory checks whenever a city production is complete or I want to decide which of it's tiles to improve next, and I'll play with the prioritization or even manually assign when I'm unhappy with the way it is - it's just that at least half of all cases where this happens, Spies are involved)
Can't remember last time I actually built a castle. Key building is granary for growth. Maybe lighthouse and library in places. Most other builds a waste unless you play late game. Sometimes a market/forge in capital for happiness. Better to build wealth/research than most buildings.
Interesting. I tend to go for buildings by default, but you're saying it's better to go for wealth than, say, a Bank? The production required for a Bank could become 200 gold, but if you're averaging a 30% gold rate on your commerce, and you have something like 40 commerce, which seems like a reasonable number for a mid-game city in my experience, then a Bank would generate 6 gold per turn, meaning it'd accumulate 200 gold in just 33 turns, after which it'd turn a profit.
I always kind of assumed that building wealth and research (and culture I guess but there aren't a lot of situations where that's actually relevant as far as I can tell) was a production sink for if there was nothing left to built.
Where is your play level at with Civ 4? Noble? Higher?
I play on Noble but based on how easily I outpace the AI I'd estimate I can probably go 2-3 difficulty levels higher before getting into trouble.
I might run into some issues with getting attacked the first few times I'd play in those difficulty levels because I tend to build too few units if I'm not planning on a war (habit from Civ VI, I'd wager), but I think I'd adjust to that quite quickly. I'm
already adjusting a bit, even though the last time I got attacked when I wasn't expecting it (which is what prompted my adjustments) I managed to switch my entire economy to unit production and build up a sufficient army to stand against the AI in under ten turns.
Meanwhile, some techs you eventually tech will be teched by more AIs, and/or you will meet more AIs, which provides a bonus on techs.
Ah, that's something I wasn't aware of.
If I understand it correctly, techs get cheaper if civs you know have already researched the technology? In fact, I seem to remember that techs also get cheaper if you have more of the 'or' requirement techs (the ones with arrows). Does anyone know the numbers on these things (and any other tech cost modifiers that might exist) or alternatively a link to where that information can be found?
Also, I just realized I didn't quote any of the responses regarding Castles: Thanks for the information on that, I'll ignore them then, no matter how juicy +1 trade route sounds to my trade- and economy-addicted Dutch ears.
And I'm pretty sure I had a new question (apart from the cases where I was asking for clarification above), but I've forgotten it while reading the replies. I'm sure I'll remember it at some point if it was important.