In Civ IV, production is lost if you don't finish the great wonder first.

[civzombie]

Sweet, I finally will have a chance to hand build some wonders on the higher skill level. If I can gain a lead in tech, I can assure myself that I will be able to get a wonder. I don't have to worry about those silly cascades.

 

[Urederra]

My impression is that now a winning strategy could be the creation of very specialized cities. Some of then could produce science, so you can discover a technology that allows a wonder first, others could be specialized in hammers production, so you can start building the wonders on those ones and be able to be the first one to finish them.

In the same way, you'll have to have cities with large gold production to support troops and cities with large culture/religion "production".

If you want to go for a specific type of victory condition, let's say cultural, then you'll only need three big cultural cities, and a few scientific ones to try to grab the cultural producing great wonder technologies first and build them in your cultural cities. I think that's what the Firaxis developers are meaning when they say that they have tried to reduce the importance of expansionism in civ IV.

 

[apatheist]

AI will probably be too stupid to check other cities building it and will then lose shields for gold.

I hope not. That's such a trivial thing to check. If they couldn't program the AI to do that, I'd have serious doubts that they'd be able to code a decent AI at all.

There are two assumptions, however. The first is that you automatically know when another civ is building a particular wonder. I don't think you should be able to know that automatically, and we don't know that you will be able to. The second is that cities' production is known. The AI should start a Wonder if it is confident it can build it first, regardless of whether it has been started elsewhere. Hopefully, it can do that without cheating. The flip side of that is that the AI should abort construction of a wonder if it guesses that some other civ will get there first (as should the player).

Actually, that method still has a few quirks, like what if you are building an archer, and stop building it...and before you stert it up again you get longbowmen (or whatever renders archers obsolete) does the production carry over in That case, the one time that would make sense?
or can you resume building of the obsolete unit and then upgrade it
Or is your investment lost to gold
Or is it lost altogether (although not necessarily ie start bulding a horsman...get chivalry...no more going back to that horseman built unless you lose iron)

Those are good questions. I'd be fine with most of those options, really. Carrying the production over to the upgraded unit is fine. If you imagine production as being partly about training, ordinary archer training ought to carry over pretty well to longbows. Ditto for horsemen and knights both needing to know how to ride horses. Finishing the unit and then having to upgrade makes sense also. Losing the production would be pretty harsh. I'm guessing that losing access to resources doesn't matter, as in Civ3, you just needed access to start, not the whole way through.

Can we start building the same wonder in all of our cities? I wouldn't suggest it, but, one city may be growing faster than your industrial city and eventually eclipse the other city's production. I might not be sure which city would build that Great Library quickest.

I doubt it. That's just a risk you'll have to take.

 

[Akka]

Ah, finally, Firaxis starts to use the good ideas that had already included in their previous games, six years ago.

Still a few more changes left to reach the polish of Alpha Centauri, though.

 

[mitsho]

I dunno, but I see some sort of 'early micromanagment'-thread in this 'halting the production'- thing.
If you want to build a settler, you start it, and when it only takes one more turn to finish it, you stop it, switch to the temple, and when the city some turns later is about to grow, you switch back. Then you build another settler in this city, and when you are about to finish it, you switch back to the temple until the city finally grows?
It'd piss me off to have to do this too many times, ... but we do not know enough atm really...

mitsho

 

[Urederra]

Mitsho, you found the fist Civ IV exploit. Now you can start building a settler, and stop it until the city reachs the correct amouth of population.


Edit: It seems that Brain and other guy were already discussing about that in another thread. Exploit #1 found, however.

 

[joethreeblah]

Mitsho, you found the fist Civ IV exploit. Now you can start building a settler, and stop it until the city reachs the correct amouth of population.


Edit: It seems that Brain and other guy were already discussing about that in another thread. Exploit #1 found, however.

This is commonly referred to as the JOETHREEBLAH Tactic in the new Civ IV War Manual or whatever

 

[apatheist]

I don't see how that's an exploit and not just a tactic. That's such an obvious consequence of that build mechanism that it has to be intentional.

 

[Brain]

This is commonly referred to as the JOETHREEBLAH Tactic in the new Civ IV War Manual or whatever

Stop gloating about it. It's not even a tactic. It's equivalent to using a cash rush.

 

[joethreeblah]

Stop gloating about it. It's not even a tactic. It's equivalent to using a cash rush.

Sour grapes.

It was a tactic until you noticed that I am 12 minutes smarter than you

 

[The Last Conformist]

To me this sounds like a good change. It is more realistic and closes a major cheezy exploit.

Indeed.

Additionally, it makes starting to build a wonder more of a gamble; you can't just start building a wonder in the certainty that in the worst case you get an expensive Bank, you risk getting nothing at all. This will encourage some extra thinking and agonizing on the part of players, which is a good thing.

 

[josephstalin]

Well, this wil make things definitely more interesting. But this will change my gameplay too much. I don't fell that I am really exited about this, but I will have just to wait.

 

[mitsho]

I know that my idea is not really an exploit, and it's probably wanted. What I was complaining about is the (imo immense) micromanagment that comes with it.

mfG mitsho