Civ4 pet peeves

[Archon_Wing]

I hate that ancient age sound effect when you lose a unit.

 

[s.bernbaum]

Yeah, late game performance is an obvious one. As is often the case in software development, performance does take a back seat to other quality aspects of the game.

As for "waiting-for-other-civs" time, disabling the two game options to show enemy moves and show friendly moves will help. Also disable battle animations.

Sure does. Also disabling animations, background sounds, and music in the late game shortens those "waiting-for-other-civs" times noticeably.

 

[yturk39]

There's no point in adding a tile improvement that's never worth working anyway. You don't give the game more depth by adding non-viable options.

Still, deserts and mountains have a purpose in the game. Not only because of tile yields, but strategical importance such as border tension, city settling, choke points, barbs spawning and so on.

Mountains within your cultural borders give you a greatly improved line of sight. If you settle right next to one, that's one less direction from which a ground attack can advance upon your city.

Desert tiles can be useful for what they DON'T do...forests will never grow on them. If tha's a tile adjacent to your city, look at it this way: you'll never have to worry about an attacker entering that tile and getting a 50% cover bonus from a forest that might decide to grow there at an inconvenient time.

 

[uat2d]

Desert tiles can be useful for what they DON'T do...forests will never grow on them. If tha's a tile adjacent to your city, look at it this way: you'll never have to worry about an attacker entering that tile and getting a 50% cover bonus from a forest that might decide to grow there at an inconvenient time.

Are you serious?

Did you know that you can (and should) chop forests? Did you know that grassland and plains also give no defensive bonuses? Did you know that there are also hills (to which archers and longbows get defensive bonuses) that can't be chopped?

Oh my, that's just plain stupid. Forests didn't grow on deserts in Civ3 either and that didn't made them useful. In fact, ou could mine or irrigate them, and Agricultural civs could even farm them as if they were Plains, those were the times were all tiles had usefulness!

Desert tiles in the past have been both useful in the sense that they're not useless and also useful in your twisted logic that forests are somehow dangerous because they can border your city and an enemy can get on them and get a defensive bonus.

 

[strijder20]

Desert tiles can be useful for what they DON'T do...forests will never grow on them. If tha's a tile adjacent to your city, look at it this way: you'll never have to worry about an attacker entering that tile and getting a 50% cover bonus from a forest that might decide to grow there at an inconvenient time.

Forests don't grow onto improved tiles either.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Honestly I've never seen a Forrest grow by the time I'm involved in a war.

Only use of desert tiles is late late game when my workers have nothing better to do and they'll build forts on those tiles. Well, you can build a fort on any other tile, but usually you're better off building something else. They're nice for basing extra planes as close as to the enemy as possible so I can pound on them with as much air power as possible.

 

[yturk39]

Are you serious?

Did you know that you can (and should) chop forests?

Yes, I know you can. Whether or not you should and when you should is debatable.

Did you know that grassland and plains also give no defensive bonuses?

Yes.

Did you know that there are also hills (to which archers and longbows get defensive bonuses) that can't be chopped?

Yes.

Oh my, that's just plain stupid.

Your questions, do you mean? Yes. This is, after all, a forum for CivFanatics...

...in your twisted logic...forests are somehow dangerous because they can border your city and an enemy can get on them and get a defensive bonus.

That's not twisted logic, that's actually how the game works. If an enemy stack reaches a forest that borders your city, they'll get a nice defensive bonus which will make your counter-siege a lot more difficult.

I'm not saying I LOVE desert tiles, or that I go out of my way to settle near them for the rather situational benefit I mentioned above. I'm just saying that they can be of some meagre benefit, and not completely useless.

 

[strijder20]

Yes, I know you can. Whether or not you should and when you should is debatable. Yes. Yes. Your questions, do you mean? Yes. This is, after all, a forum for CivFanatics...

That's not twisted logic, that's actually how the game works. If an enemy stack reaches a forest that borders your city, they'll get a nice defensive bonus which will make your counter-siege a lot more difficult.

I'm not saying I LOVE desert tiles, or that I go out of my way to settle near them for the rather situational benefit I mentioned above. I'm just saying that they can be of some meagre benefit, and not completely useless.

That's not a lot of use, considering you can just improve the grassland/plain/tundra if you don't want a forest to grow on it.
A road is enough.

 

[Akka]

1) I've never had much of an issue with load times. Usually anywhere from 15-30 seconds or an advanced game. What kills me is the need to exit Civ IV and reload the entire game, then load the save, a process that takes 2 or 3 minutes. You need to do this every 5 or 6 turns once you get to the industrial age. The infamous memory allocation error that truly is the bane of this game.

From my experience, just returning to the menu is sufficient, you don't need to completely quit the game.

But I DID notice that reloading a game is extremely long if you just Ctrl-L from the game after a while. If you make "return to menu" then load the game, it's near-instantaneous.

#1 was the reason I stopped playing Civ 4. I've just assumed that the people who play Civ 4 normally have some kind of super computers or something like that.

See above : if you want to reload a game, go back to menu and then load game. It's much quicker than loading it from a game you've player for a while.

My biggest problem with Civ 4, besides the technical ones, is tech trading. It's possible to get a tech from an AI civ that not all other civs have, and then just trade it around for profit.

Check "Disable tech brokering" in the options at the start of your game.

 

[vicawoo]

Considering people really don't like plains tiles and similarly don't work tundra (or ice), I'm surprised people would single out desert tiles. People don't even bother with non-riverside grassland for awhile.

They're sparse enough that you can fort them all to get instant oil when it gets revealed. Maybe they should be worth 2 commerce. You still wouldn't work them except in very special cases.

Load times are the worst. For all the whine about balance, civ would be much much better if it reacted instantly.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Considering people really don't like plains tiles and similarly don't work tundra (or ice), I'm surprised people would single out desert tiles. People don't even bother with non-riverside grassland for awhile.

They're sparse enough that you can fort them all to get instant oil when it gets revealed. Maybe they should be worth 2 commerce. You still wouldn't work them except in very special cases.

Load times are the worst. For all the whine about balance, civ would be much much better if it reacted instantly.

God yes. It's really bad when you can actually out-move the game during your own turn, and have to wait for it to actually count that you shift-clicked 5-6 units...that is assuming that command even works in such a glitchy mess.

I wouldn't generally advocate forts on all desert tiles; usually sci meth is way before combustion and you can just fort the relevant ones. Although...I guess one COULD just fort-spam all non-BFC tiles if the workers would otherwise be completely idle. IIRC only the culture owner gets the defensive bonus, and it could allow for some serious air power or just choke annoyance .

 

[Steve the Noble]

Some minor pet peeves not related to game performance:

1. A city unintentionally working an unimproved tile for a long time. Even with tile yields shown on the map, those tiles are easy to miss.

2. Not being able to queue a building that requires another building that is ahead of it in the build queue. (e.g. Library and University)

3. Not being able to click on a unit because there's an enormous war elephant standing in the tile below it that gets selected instead. (Solution: zoom out a bit.)

4. Resource bubbles or units obscuring the info in a city bar.

 

[demon123]

No zone of control; I wish there was a zone of control- that would allow us to defend against stacks of doom on the borders of our territory rather than at the walls of our cities. I would also make forts useful; as it stands, forts are useless

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ forts are not useless currently as they count as cities for trade network purposes, can allow naval channels, and can base fighters, paratroopers, and nukes (!) as well as give access to strategic resources the same way an improvement does (but easier to D up against pillage).

That said, I'd like to see them be more useful outside of the niche scenarios.

 

[uat2d]

^ forts are not useless currently as they count as cities for trade network purposes, can allow naval channels, and can base fighters, paratroopers, and nukes (!) as well as give access to strategic resources the same way an improvement does (but easier to D up against pillage).

That said, I'd like to see them be more useful outside of the niche scenarios.

What do you mean?

Also, forts would be much more useful if they were faster to build and could be upgraded to barricades (+100% rather than +50% defensive bonus and, when outside of friendly territory, units only had one movement per tile, regardless of that unit's movement), like in Civ3.

And I'm not even asking for Zone of Control or the possibility to have both Forts and infrastructure like mines or farms in the same tile, as it also did in Civ3.

 

[Archon_Wing]

If you fort a resource, it connects it to your trade network.

Though honestly, being able to place extra planes is good enough for me. I hardly use it to actually use them to defend anyways, as they can be bypassed fairly easily.

 

[AJ11]

Though honestly, being able to place extra planes is good enough for me.

This is why I build forts. In every spare space that can be reached that isn't worked and will never be worked. Also, a fort every so often along the coastline is a good thing. The fort has a limit of number of aircraft it can hold. There is no limit to the number of aircraft carriers you can stack in it, however...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Fort ZoC would be crazy. They'd go from being useful but not great for most games to ridiculously good in most games! Could you imagine a hill forest fort guerrilla II longbow? Now the opposing forces would either have to attack that...or expose themselves on flat ground and get destroyed. Or maybe they'd simply be forced to attack sometimes

Hill (for longbow) 50%, forest 50%, fort 50%, city (for longbow) 25%, fortify 25%, g ii 50%

6 + 6(2.5) = 21 strength...and the attacker wouldn't even be able to bombard defenses away . A handful of such longbows would shred deity stacks .

 

[strijder20]

Fort ZoC would be crazy. They'd go from being useful but not great for most games to ridiculously good in most games! Could you imagine a hill forest fort guerrilla II longbow? Now the opposing forces would either have to attack that...or expose themselves on flat ground and get destroyed. Or maybe they'd simply be forced to attack sometimes

Hill (for longbow) 50%, forest 50%, fort 50%, city (for longbow) 25%, fortify 25%, g ii 50%

6 + 6(2.5) = 21 strength...and the attacker wouldn't even be able to bombard defenses away . A handful of such longbows would shred deity stacks .

Crazy, yes, but the current system is a bit... unrealistic. Units can just walk past your units. If you would try that in real life, you would usually get an arrow through your head.
If you would add fort ZoC, you would need more 'strategic' things : archers and gunpowder weapons capable of firing, more flanking chance, siege attacking without risking dying...
Can anyone make a mod?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Crazy, yes, but the current system is a bit... unrealistic. Units can just walk past your units. If you would try that in real life, you would usually get an arrow through your head.

They're only truly impractical due to AI bonuses.

Otherwise, forts can force invading forces onto flatlands, or to expend tremendous resources attacking the fort that has a handful of units inside (IE losing 2:1 or much worse generally, just don't put too much in the fort to be vulnerable to collateral and they'll have to throw away a ton)

Of course, moving onto flats as an invader is SUICIDE unless you have a big tech lead or are just way far ahead in power. The only reason forts seem bad is the AI metagame of "derp stack go" + bonuses.