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Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

The defense percentage comes from the culture in the city. Walls and castles act as a multiplier for the percentage and reduce the effect of attacking siege. Siege is needed to reduce (and eliminate) the defense percentage bonus, no matter what type of actual attack units you are using. Also, for some strange reason, the game developers decided that walls and castles become ineffective not when the attacker is using gunpowder units but oddly when the defender has discovered gunpowder.
 
Wait, what? I think you just confused me more. You're saying that walls are still effective for an enemy town until *they* research gunpowder and it doesn't matter at all if *I* am attacking with gunpowder units?
 
Sealion said:
Wait, what? I think you just confused me more. You're saying that walls are still effective for an enemy town until *they* research gunpowder and it doesn't matter at all if *I* am attacking with gunpowder units?
Click to expand...

Yes. It makes no sense at all but that is what the code divers tell us. Either it was too hard to code the other way round, someone screwed up and they never fixed it, or they decided to do it that way.
 
I think that's... the most unintuitive and misleading thing I have ever seen in a game ever. Thanks for informing me though. At least now I have better knowledge before going into trying to do some conquests at certain time periods in my games.
 
Re: walls and castles

I don't know everything about how they work, but I believe some of their mechanics have been misrepresented (or I'm confused--all of what I have said below has been confirmed by a quick world built test however)

Walls will give a city 50% defenses (unless the cultural defenses are already over 50% in which case they just reduce the effectiveness of siege weapons ability to reduce the higher cultural defense by a factor of 0.5. Walls do not give a multiplier to the cultural defense.

Castles will give a city 100% defenses (actually an additional 50% but since walls are prerequisite it adds up to 100%) and further reduce the effectiveness of siege weapons ability to reduce those defenses. Again it isn't a multiplier on the cultural defense. I believe it reduces the a siege' unit ability to reduce the cultural defenses by a factor of 0.25 though combined with the required walls, so a siege unit that normally does 8% per turn would do 2% per turn.

If you attack a city (with a castle) with a gunpowder unit the city will only have its cultural defenses which will almost always be less than 100%. This is true regardless of whether or not the civilization you are attacking has researched gunpowder or rifling.

Walls and castle after rifling is researched will be obsolete for the defending civilization. This means they can't be built anymore, but existing walls and castles will still reduce the bombardment effectiveness of siege units. And just tested, the existing walls and castles of a civilization are still effective against non-gunpowder units even after it has been researched by the defender.

Siege units in the gunpowder and beyond era are still effective against any city. If nothing else it can be used to attack and do collateral damage to several units. It will still be able to reduce the cultural defenses as well. Walls and castles even after they are obsolete will reduce the effectiveness of siege units (and planes!) ability to bombard.

Bombarding a city with siege units and gunpowder units will appear to be less effective I believe. This is where it gets a bit confusing. So if a city with 20% cultural defenses has a castle it will have 100% defenses against non-gunpowder units like a swordsman but will have 20% against a musket. If you bombard this city with a trebuchet it defenses would be 100% to the trebuchet and be reduced by 4% (0.25 * the usual 16%) to 96%. Now if you switch to your musket it will show the city as having 19% defenses since 96/100 * 20% is 19.2%. So the trebuchet is very ineffective against the castle and seems to be even more so if you bring it with a musket.

These mechanics work regardless of what research the defender has done or has not done.

Cannons would ignore the defense bonus of the walls or castle (since they are post gunpowder siege weapons) but would still be effected by the bombardment penalties imposed by them it seems. I'm not positive about these mechanics however.
 
There are a couple anomalies in a game I'm playing that don't seem to be explained in the Civilopedia. I have a fresh water lake that is producing 3 food and I can't understand why. All the others in the game are producing 2.

Also, I have an irrigated rice farm on grassland that is producing 5 food. Supposedly, rice=+1 food and irrigation another =1 food. Seems like that should total 4.

I'm sure this has been explained previously here, but my search can't find the explanation.
 
TenorePrimo said:
There are a couple anomalies in a game I'm playing that don't seem to be explained in the Civilopedia. I have a fresh water lake that is producing 3 food and I can't understand why. All the others in the game are producing 2.

Also, I have an irrigated rice farm on grassland that is producing 5 food. Supposedly, rice=+1 food and irrigation another =1 food. Seems like that should total 4.

I'm sure this has been explained previously here, but my search can't find the explanation.
Click to expand...

the fresh water lake is producing 3 food most likely because a city with a lighthouse is working the tile. A lighthouse adds 1 food to all water tiles including lakes. Unfortunately only cities that are adjacent to an ocean can build a lighthouse. So landlocked cities next to a lake will only get 2 food from it.

A grass land rice tile starts out producing 3 food when it is unimproved. The farm adds one more and irrigation adds another for a total of 5.
 
Anyone know if it's cheaper to upgrade 1 step at a time (musket->rifle->infantry), or skip generations (musket->infantry)
 
Skipping is cheaper. The cost of an upgrade is based on the difference in production cost of the units (the difference is tripled in BtS to get that contribution) plus a constant. If you skip, you pay the constant only once, if you upgrade twice you pay it twice (plus the same amount based on the difference in production costs). In regular BtS the constant is 20, so you save 20 gold by skipping one.
 
I'm still trying to find a map-type that I can feel good playing. I'm wanting something well-rounded so as many civilizations as possible have a chance to leverage what is unique about them so that eliminates pangaea and archipelago for me. I've tried perfect world and perfect mongoose, but I need to set those aside due to half the games having me start in the middle of a jungle. Does anyone have any suggestions? I mostly have been playing big and small, but that one has tended to produce near-pangaea maps anyway.
 
Give Fractal a try. The maps will always vary. Most will have more than one large land mass and several islands but you can also get only several large land masses without small islands, a pangea (not often), or anything in between. If you like the exploring aspect of the game, Fractal is a good choice for that, since the resulting map is a complete mystery until explored.

Regarding the defense question: bcool has detailed the effects. Based on his comments, I guess they did fix the gunpowder thing in a later patch and I did not notice, since I always bring massive amounts of siege anyway. If you are playing vanilla, it still works the screwy way there, they never fixed that one.
 
I cannot seem to upgrade my ships, i can build a battle ship, but cant upgrade to one. Same with mechs.
 
Nothing upgrades to battleships. Frigates, Ships of the Line, Ironclads, triremes, caravels, and any other early ones that I forgot upgrade to destroyers. Destroyers don't upgrade to battleships either. (FWIW, galleys upgrade to galleons, and both of them upgrade to transports.) If by mechs, you mean mechanized infantry, only infantry upgrades to them and you have to have robotics. Also, upgrades only can take place inside your own culture borders. Some unit types can only be upgraded when they are in one of your cities. There are only a few of these and I don't recall offhand which ones they are.
 
s.bernbaum said:
Nothing upgrades to battleships. Frigates, Ships of the Line, Ironclads, triremes, caravels, and any other early ones that I forgot upgrade to destroyers. Destroyers don't upgrade to battleships either. (FWIW, galleys upgrade to galleons, and both of them upgrade to transports.) If by mechs, you mean mechanized infantry, only infantry upgrades to them and you have to have robotics. Also, upgrades only can take place inside your own culture borders. Some unit types can only be upgraded when they are in one of your cities. There are only a few of these and I don't recall offhand which ones they are.
Click to expand...

Ok i see, thanks for your help.
 
How do I turn off huts before playing a game? I can't seem to find an option for it. I used to like the randomness they could provide, but I just played a game where I got 3 free techs in a row and that seemed to be way too overpowered.
 
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