AspiringScholar
Prince
Hello forum!
This is actually my first post here in over eight years. As many can certainly attest, this game has a unique draw to it that pleasingly keeps me coming back to a fresh experience, many hundreds of hours or however many years later, and recently I've gradually gotten back into it more seriously. I started with Civ 3 as a child when it was new and enjoyed the historical flavor, but did not have the critical faculties yet to appreciate or participate meaningfully with the strategic aspects of it. I am also an original Civ 4 player and proudly own a boxed copy of both the vanilla game and BTS.
Even though I ended up sinking a lot of time into 5, I slowly came to the realization that it simply lacks the dynamic cohesion and strategic challenge and depth of 4 (the presentation style and ambience of this game is a lot better too IMO, nostalgia aside). Have not bothered even to try 6 as it looked very silly and from some testimonials seemed to make even more of a departure from what was great about 4 and towards what was poor about 5. No intention of stomping on others' fun if that's what they enjoy, just not for me.
I've actually been reading these forums since the late 2000s and upon recent lurking am surprised and glad to see that some familiar names from that time are still active here! Relative to the amount of time I've put in, I'm actually not as good of a player as I should be (monarch), but I want to make it to emperor soon and then before too long immortal. Really, glad to find that people are still talking about and playing this game. I had guessed its community was pretty much dead.
That said, a couple of quick questions I have from some recent games:
- Does razing a city increase the AI's willingness to capitulate, relative to simply capturing it? In some modern/industrial wars, I had invaded a foe of near parity in terms of power and tech (usually right upon getting an edge with siege and quickly upgrading), wiped out a stack or two of theirs and taken a relatively insignificant border city. In one case it was Shaka, and he was of course unwilling to cap from just this, however, upon taking his next city which was a bit larger and deeper into his land, with the menu asking whether to raze or capture the city interrupting my ability to check for capitulation in the diplomacy menu, I decided that it might "scare" him more simply to destroy the city, which I did, and consequently he did capitulate. This is Shaka, as well, and while I'm not incredibly familiar with the XML values for AI behavior, I'm pretty sure he's up there on the stubborn list. It makes intuitive sense as a concept, and would be good to know for future wars weighing the cost/benefit analysis of vassalization, since eliminating that city in the case of the latter does entail a loss of sorts if that civ simply becomes your vassal, even if you can accelerate that outcome by doing so.
- Does placing spies in your cities entail any hidden espionage point accumulation? Usually I make a point to station a spy in every one of my major cities by about the time of civil service. I need to improve my offensive use of them, but eventually found that this is a relatively cost-effective counter on land maps where you'll be basically overrun by enemy spies otherwise. I also often leave the espionage slider at 0%, and prior to Constitution, only have courthouses and the occasional stray spy specialist I forgot to reassign generating actual EPs. Yet somehow I find that my actual point accumulation against the AI gets pretty high, and I'm wondering if the actual spy unit has something to do with this, since I do actually emphasize getting them built. I know Firaxis has hidden modifiers for leader disposition towards you, so I wonder if there's something similar going on here. Does anyone know?
Thanks
This is actually my first post here in over eight years. As many can certainly attest, this game has a unique draw to it that pleasingly keeps me coming back to a fresh experience, many hundreds of hours or however many years later, and recently I've gradually gotten back into it more seriously. I started with Civ 3 as a child when it was new and enjoyed the historical flavor, but did not have the critical faculties yet to appreciate or participate meaningfully with the strategic aspects of it. I am also an original Civ 4 player and proudly own a boxed copy of both the vanilla game and BTS.
Even though I ended up sinking a lot of time into 5, I slowly came to the realization that it simply lacks the dynamic cohesion and strategic challenge and depth of 4 (the presentation style and ambience of this game is a lot better too IMO, nostalgia aside). Have not bothered even to try 6 as it looked very silly and from some testimonials seemed to make even more of a departure from what was great about 4 and towards what was poor about 5. No intention of stomping on others' fun if that's what they enjoy, just not for me.
I've actually been reading these forums since the late 2000s and upon recent lurking am surprised and glad to see that some familiar names from that time are still active here! Relative to the amount of time I've put in, I'm actually not as good of a player as I should be (monarch), but I want to make it to emperor soon and then before too long immortal. Really, glad to find that people are still talking about and playing this game. I had guessed its community was pretty much dead.
That said, a couple of quick questions I have from some recent games:
- Does razing a city increase the AI's willingness to capitulate, relative to simply capturing it? In some modern/industrial wars, I had invaded a foe of near parity in terms of power and tech (usually right upon getting an edge with siege and quickly upgrading), wiped out a stack or two of theirs and taken a relatively insignificant border city. In one case it was Shaka, and he was of course unwilling to cap from just this, however, upon taking his next city which was a bit larger and deeper into his land, with the menu asking whether to raze or capture the city interrupting my ability to check for capitulation in the diplomacy menu, I decided that it might "scare" him more simply to destroy the city, which I did, and consequently he did capitulate. This is Shaka, as well, and while I'm not incredibly familiar with the XML values for AI behavior, I'm pretty sure he's up there on the stubborn list. It makes intuitive sense as a concept, and would be good to know for future wars weighing the cost/benefit analysis of vassalization, since eliminating that city in the case of the latter does entail a loss of sorts if that civ simply becomes your vassal, even if you can accelerate that outcome by doing so.
- Does placing spies in your cities entail any hidden espionage point accumulation? Usually I make a point to station a spy in every one of my major cities by about the time of civil service. I need to improve my offensive use of them, but eventually found that this is a relatively cost-effective counter on land maps where you'll be basically overrun by enemy spies otherwise. I also often leave the espionage slider at 0%, and prior to Constitution, only have courthouses and the occasional stray spy specialist I forgot to reassign generating actual EPs. Yet somehow I find that my actual point accumulation against the AI gets pretty high, and I'm wondering if the actual spy unit has something to do with this, since I do actually emphasize getting them built. I know Firaxis has hidden modifiers for leader disposition towards you, so I wonder if there's something similar going on here. Does anyone know?
Thanks