Newbie Questions - Ask here and get Answers!

[JMK]

I am playing Archipelago, have built the Light House and met all civs.
I can commerce with four civs so far. the three remaining civs will require Magnetism before I can commerce.

So, I was selling some great Wine to one civ, when another Civ requested me to offer a free Tech !
When I said 'NO' to there request, they declares against me.
Well I though there is no problem as they could not sail to my island anyway, on the other hand I can send them a few pikes just to pillage a bit there nice land.
Everythings seamed to be great until I realized that I broke the trade I had with another Civ !
The trading route was going through sea squares controlled by the bloody civ who declare against me.
Now I got a reputation hit. Sometimes this game is realy unfair

What should I have done ????

 

[Grille]

In that case, give them the tech.
Though I don't know if the demanding ai would generally use such special circumstance as base of their trial (i.e. they realize your rep would get bad when you deny the demand and they declare war).

 

[Ailing Penguin]

Hi, just four questions.
1. How do you send an envoy without rightclicking a unit, ..blah blah.
2. How do you find out your rep
3. what things give you a rep hit?
EDIT: and how do you chat in MP?

Thanks again!!!

 

[Gainy]

1. Press Shift + D, or look down the bottom right hand side of your screen and click on the "d"

2. There is no real way to find out your reputation, although if it is bad, civs are less likely to do Gold per turn delas with you

3. Breaking deals with people before the 20 turns is over, declaring war on people while your units are inside their territory, and not abiding by deals ie not attacking someone when you sign a military alliance against them

4. No idea, i dont play multiplayer

Hope it helps

 

[pdescobar]

Originally posted by Ailing Penguin
Hi, just four questions.
1. How do you send an envoy without rightclicking a unit, ..blah blah.

Type Shift-D or click the little 'D' button next to the info box and you will get a list of civs to choose to initiate diplomacy with. Pick the one you want and off you go. I believe you can also double-click their picture on the f4 screen but I always use the keyboard.

2. How do you find out your rep

You don't, really. You get clues when you try to initiate deals that used to be OK and aren't anymore. Often, if you try to do the deal anyway, you'll get a response like "We know what you did to the zulu," which indicate that you have been blamed for breaking a deal with the zulu. In general though, once you understand what causes a rep hit, you can avoid them 95% of the time, which leads to...

3. what things give you a rep hit?

Breaking a trade deal by pillaging the resource you are trading, declaring war with units in the "victim's" territory, declaring war with any active deals, etc. A lot of this is probably covered in Bamspeedy's excellent AI Attitude article.

EDIT: and how do you chat in MP?

Don't play it so I don't know.

Apparently, I'm a slow typist

 

[cromagnon]

not abiding by deals ie not attacking someone when you sign a military alliance against them

Actually, you don't really have to attack them. You just can't make peace with them until the alliance is over and cancelled.

Btw, every deal lasts 20 turns; you can see how many turns are left either by looking at the foreign advisor F4 and clicking on Details, or by calling the person up on diplomacy, and clicking on Active at the bottom to see what active deals you have.

 

[Ailing Penguin]

Thanks everyone!

 

[blahz]

Press ~ to chat in-game.

 

[kintaro]

Hi,

In the foreign advisor screen, I've noticed some civs which I'm sure have met each other (I traded communications with both). But they have no treaties between each other: neither war, nor peace. How is that possible?

If I understand correctly, a peace treaty is really just another 20-turn deal, which usually goes on after turn 20 if it hadn't been broken before.

So maybe the AI's consistently end peace treaties between each other after 20 turns, as opposed to treaties with the human player. But that would put them at war, wouldn't it?

(Cause when I invoke "active deals" and remove the peace treaty and leave, I'm asked if I want to destroy the scum.)

Another explanation would be that they never bothered to contact each other after I traded communications, but that seems unlikely, as I have science every 4 turns, and the others seem to progress just as fast (always only 1 or 2 techs behind on me), so they must be agreeing on who is to research what, and swapping like crazy.

And I think I've read once that in civ3 you initially always have a peace treaty even before meeting.

Anyway, I remember in civ2 and even civ1 this was buggy; sometimes I had peace with an AI while they were at war with me, or when asked to attack another player, they "had no contact" where they had before.

Something else: are research labs really worth building? By the time you have computers, you're almost done with science and they would only help one gain score with future tech, no?

 

[Gainy]

Firstly, you may not have embassies with the Ai's you are looking at. Unless you have an embassy with a civ, you cant really see anything about them.

Research labs also produce 2 Culture points per turn, so if you are going for a cultural victory, one of these in all of your cities could do the trick. But yes, i dont really see much point building them either.

 

[pdescobar]

There are only 3 reasons (that I know of) for there to be neither a war nor peace line between 2 civs:
1) They don't have contact. Once you trade communitations, there is instant contact, so that's not it.
2) Neither one is selected on the F4 screen. You only see deals involving the currently selected civs. The selected civs have a colored ring around their pictures; to select more than one, you must hold shift when clicking on them.
3) You have no active intelligence gathering with either civ. In order to see deals between two civs you must either have an embassy and be at peace with at least one, or have a spy in at least one.

 

[AlanH]

Originally posted by kintaro
Hi,

In the foreign advisor screen, I've noticed some civs which I'm sure have met each other (I traded communications with both). But they have no treaties between each other: neither war, nor peace. How is that possible?

If you don't have an embassy with either of them then you won't know anything about their treaties or wars or trading.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Originally posted by pdescobar
There are only 3 reasons (that I know of) for there to be neither a war nor peace line between 2 civs:
1) They don't have contact. Once you trade communitations, there is instant contact, so that's not it.
2) Neither one is selected on the F4 screen. You only see deals involving the currently selected civs. The selected civs have a colored ring around their pictures; to select more than one, you must hold shift when clicking on them.
3) You have no active intelligence gathering with either civ. In order to see deals between two civs you must either have an embassy and be at peace with at least one, or have a spy in at least one.

This is definitely not correct. I've seen what kintaro reports: civilizations which don't have either war or peace lines between them.

 

[pdescobar]

DaviddesJ, then one of the 3 things I stated was true, or you should provide a save so I can see what I missed

 

[ivory]

Short tip: once embassies and all the other correct things that pdescobar and others said, have been taken care of, you can see the relations of more than one civ by holding down SHIFT while clicking on the heads.

Another explanation would be that they never bothered to contact each other after I traded communications

As said, if you traded contacts, they know each other. I was once walking past some blue borders, not yet knowing who lived there, when I discovered I could trade contact with Babylon to a third party. Babylon? I had never spoken to Hammurabi, so apparently somebody had sold them contact with me.

 

[ajil]

Hey I have a quick question. I am playing v1.29 with the babylonians and fighting a war with persian. When I take over their cities, the cities are razed automatically without giving me the option to keep the city. Whats up with that? I got to keep zimbabway(sp?) when I took it over. Help me out here please!

 

[pdescobar]

If a city is size 1 and has not expanded culturally (*) it will be "auto-razed" instead of you having a choice to capture it. You can either wait for it to grow or expand, or just deal with it

(*) In some patches, the city only needs to have at least 1 culture point to prevent auto-razing, while in other patches it has to have 10 points and the first-level border expansion. Usually (and I believe in 1.29f) it has been the latter, but I can't keep track of stuff like this that well.

 

[Ultraworld]

I really don't understand the difference between climate and temperature.
Couldn't find articles about it

 

[Darkness]

Temperature is about how many cold (tundra) and warm (jugle, desert, flood plain) tiles there are on the map.

Climate: wet means more jungle and arid means more desert....

 

[Dr Alimentado]

To nicely see what difference climate and temp have on a map - generate a map in the Editor and lock the seed. Then regenerate only changing the climate and/or temp parameters. The map stays the same shape and size and you can watch the terrain on the minimap changing colour as deserts and jugles creep back and forth. It's pretty too