Questions Again
I meant to answer some more of these this morning, but I've been swamped with work this weekend. Still believe I got to them all here though...
Traxis said:
After capturing so many Indian cities, did it knock your maintenance costs through the roof? Is it feasible to win by conquest and keep every city? Or are the maintenance costs too high? Also, is it ever possible to move your Forbidden Palace?
Actually, in the late game the lid really comes off of the maintenance costs and conquest becomes readily doable. Once you get markets/grocers/banks in your main cities, you suddenly have a lot more income to play around with and can sustain a much larger empire. In this particular game, I was still running 100% research most of the time, and was never losing money at 90% research (occasionally I would have to up the luxury rate from war weariness, however). The point is that once you have some practice at developing a civ's infrastructure, it's quite possible to win a Conquest victory and build a huge empire. You just have to develop your civ a bit first - can't grab a million cities with no infrastructure in them during the Ancient age.
Aussie Lurker said:
Hiya Sullla, another question for you. Aside from losing units, is your War Weariness growth effected by such factors as whether you are fighting an offensive or defensive war? I always found it somewhat annoying is Civ3 that my people would get so peeved at me for defending them from foreign invasion-and it would be nice to know that defensive wars don't carry the same penalties any more. In fact, it would be nice if you had 3 kinds of War Weariness-defensive (the smallest, mostly unit-loss based), allied (going to war to honour a defense pact/help an ally-slightly higher than defensive, but still primarily unit-loss based) and Offensive (rises quite quick, based primarily on war length, with unit-loss added in). But perhaps this is only Mod territory !
I don't know exactly how war weariness is calculated in Civ4. I *THINK* that it's tied to whether your units are fighting in your own territory or in foreign territory (since that's the way that unit support works), but I'm not certain of that. Try poking around in the XML files to see for sure. For that matter, once I have some time next week, I need to summarize some of the game's info and explain what certain things like difficulty levels actually entail. Just have to find the time first...
Ekmek said:
Sullla,
Great walkthrough but a couple of questions:
1) when you showed the London screen it still said 100% Arabian, how come there as no english? Is nationality gone in Civ4 or did you build a worker?
2)The pace of the game seems fast, is this because you are just hitting the key points or is it that the game just keeps hitting you with stuff?
3) the AI didnt seem like it put up too much of a fight is that because you've been playing it so long?
1) I don't know how nationality changes in Civ4. I believe that over time the people in a captured city will slowly change into your nationality. Also, any new population points grown in a city will be your nationality. Since London grew from size 3 or 4 when I captured it to 20+ under my control, it makes sense that most of the people would be Arabs. And I guess the rest changed to my nationality over time (?)
2) A lot of people on these forums have been complaining that the game is slow, heh. Civ4 starts out a bit slower than Civ3, but the game soon assumes a nice pace and never really lets up until it's over. I have, of course, also tried to emphasize the more interesting parts of my game (lots of building turns summarized quickly in Part Five, for example) but I really can't remember the last time I felt bored once I got into a game. The lure is always very strong to keep playing more turns!
3) Gandhi didn't seem like he put up a fight? Well, he did the best he could, but longbows against rifles and infantry is a losing proposition. I was an entire age ahead of him on tech, so I'm not sure how much he really could have done. This is only Noble, remember... I've been spanked *HARD* on Emperor quite a few times, so you won't hear me say the AI "doesn't put up much of a fight."
Snoopy said:
+26 with Mansa Musa?! nice one..
I'm impressed the Romans found a way to take one of Hatty's cities, but I am also surprised Hatty didn't do a lot to protect herself, what was she doing?!
Good question! I don't know what Hatty was doing either. Caesar did, however, put together a nice stack and took down the city. Bombard, suicide damage, capture. Egypt probably wasn't ready for the fight, since I got Hatty to declare on Caesar, and got a black eye as a result.
Dargoth said:
Presumably Hatty had open borders with Caesar (which allowed the Romans to come through Egyptian territory and attack you) could you have asked Hatty to get rid of her open border treaty with Caesar instead of asking her to go to war with him?
No, this isn't it... As soon as you declare war on a civ, any Open Borders treaties are canceled and any units within that civ's territory teleported back to their own borders. If Caesar had any units in Egyptian territory, they would have been instantly moved back to his borders when Hatty declared war. No Right of Passage Rapes in Civ4.
And why should I ask Hatty to drop Open Borders with Caesar if I can get her to declare war at no cost just based on our positive relations?
JimMac99 said:
However you have mentioned something this time which is of some concern to someone who hasn't yet got the game, and I would be grateful if you could tell me something more about it. That is: when you mentioned "The one weakness of the Civ4 AI when it comes to war is capturing cities" and you expressed surprise at Ceasar capturing a city. Despite whatever improvments Soren has made, is the AI still very poor at taking cities?
Well I'm going to be honest when it comes to the AI in Civ4. It does a good job of fighting, but its biggest problem has always been capturing cities. That's not to say it WON'T capture cities, just that the AI tends to be weaker in this area. Of course, much of my experience is with an older AI that has since been improved. Caesar's capture of Heliopolis is one of the better moves I've seen from the Civ4 AI when it comes to war. I still need more experience with the release version AI before I can make any definite statements on it though.
ThERat said:
It sounds not very promising indeed. Another one was the Roman move leaving the Indian city instead of helping out. Guess the part that you can help an ally with units will be purely for the human to tke advantage of.
And I saw Sullla attacking in stacks, seems the catapults attacking ain't that horrible for the human to counter. In fact, the Indian town had only 1 pult, something we are so used to see in Civ3. That was in fact a game breaker, the inability of the AI to fight a artillery war.
In fact, as stated yesterday, the AI seem to be complete pushovers, but that might be the level of difficulty. I certainly hope so.
Hold on here a minute. You're looking at one game and reading WAY too much out of it. This is a game on Noble, the Civ4 equivalent of Civ3's Regent. I can whip the Civ3 Regent AI all day long, and by now I can do the same to the Civ4 Noble AI. This game shouldn't be any more revealing than reading about someone kicking around a Civ3 Regent AI in a war.
Furthermore, the Civ4 AI is *MUCH* better at fighting wars than the Civ3 AI *EVER* was. Sometimes they attack in stacks, sometimes they send in pillagers, they know how to use siege weapons and do *REAL* naval invasions (yes, I'm serious!) - well, I could go on. I had a huge tech lead in this game and spanked a backwards opponent. Gandhi's cats didn't hurt my stack much because it was a cat against a rifle - something would have been wrong if it had!
Is the Civ4 AI as good at fighting wars as a human? No, of course not. But they are not pushovers by any means. Try playing on Emperor if you don't believe me.
Harrier said:
You mentioned earlier that these were quite expensive. If so does that prevent the AI from upgrading units? Will we see Spearmen around when Tanks etc can be built?
In your walkthrough you avoided building Riflemen/Infantry until you wanted to go to war and the units you are fighting all appear to be earlier era units - Spearmen, Longbowman etc. Is that normally the case - or just the way this game panned out.
So does the AI upgrade older units and does it build more modern units in the game? Also if you go to war against an AI Civ will it switch research to military Techs? Will it switch production to military units?
Actually, the AI is pretty good about upgrading its units. The reason why Gandhi had so many old units is because most of the medieval units don't upgrade until you reach Rifling (they can all upgrade to riflemen), and he hadn't quite gotten there. Longbows can't upgrade to muskets, for example. You'll still see some outdated units, but the AI does a pretty good job with the upgrades. As for why I had some outdated units lying around... umm, I wasn't expecting to fight? Not the best planning on my part.
The AI definitely swaps over to military units if you declare war on them (I've tested this in debug mode) and I think that they'll be more likely to research military techs too (not 100% sure of that though).
Pragmatic said:
Why do the "cathedrals" have different requirements? For instance, the Buddhist "cathedral" requires you build 4 temples first. (I think... I founded every religion EXCEPT Buddhism. Don't ask how much cheating I did. ) The Hindu "cathedral," however, requires 12 temples. Since I only had nine cities, I never could build the Hindu "cathedral."
You need three temples for each cathedral. 2 temples = 0 cathedrals, 4 = 1 cathedral, 9 temples = 3 cathedrals, etc. You also need to keep the type of each one in mind: 3 Hindu temples required for 1 Hindu cathedral. If you start cheating in buildings, you may see some weird results.
Dargoth said:
Nope! Daylights Savings today here in the US. We're now finally back to GMT+5 again as we should be.
Matt G said:
Sullla,
How does settling on resources work in Civ IV compared to Civ III?
As you know, in Civ III settling on strat and lux resources didn't matter but you lost the food if you settled on a cow, or wheat etc.
Now it seems obvious that you still don't want to settle on cows and such because you wouldn't be able to improve the tile with a pasture, but I am curious as to how it works exactly.
Settling on a resource will connect it instantly if you have the requisite tech (if you have Animal Husbandry and you settle on a cow, you'll instantly have the resource in that city), but you give up the ability to build a tile improvement on it and get the big boost on that particular tile. Generally speaking, it's therefore better NOT to settle directly on resources. Sometimes though you may want to (like in MP to have a resource that can't be pillaged is sometimes very good!) There are no permanent rules in a game like Civ.
And that should be it! Part Seven is being posted as I type this. I want to thank everyone who replied with so many kind words over the past week - your sentiments were what made the project worth doing. I'll try to answer more questions tomorrow as they come up, but then the Walkthrough will officially be concluded. I hope you enjoyed reading it.
It's really appreciated. I am glad to hear that the pushover is due to the level of difficulty.
It's been a great walkthrough and I've learnt from it 
