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And they need to move chariots to a later tech too, for it's dumb to have them with the wheel and you can't even use them.

 

Archers are very easy to get up as well as spearmen, that will put a damper on chariots rushing to the city. Unless the cities are literary on top of one another, you should be able to get a couple of spearman up. Archery is less than Animal Husbandry to research. Even a couple warriors with a few promotions can put a fight with chariots, a mixture of experienced warriors and archers can hold their own. I dont see how it is overpowering as there is counters to it.

 

Bronze seems overly dramatic to me. All you need is archery to defend against chariots anyway. For those who don't want to defend themselves and concurrently are running up against those who would gladly bum rush them like that, this stops very little, because though you know not whether you'll have horseys, it doesn't slow you down to teching for them. At most, should you have horses in the city radius, this delays their allegedly overpowering attack 10 turns (two hexes to road 'maybe' and one hex to pasture [if it's four turns that is. It's four or six]). Of course if the civ with the horses gets two or more workers on the job they could half that delay.

 

From what I see, it looks like horse provide nothing until improved with a pasture. Corn will provide +1 food when worked, even without improving the site with a farm. Oil will provide +1 production after Scientific Method provides the knowledge and then with Plastics you can build an offshore platform for a +2 production and +1 commerce. Or with Combustion you can build a well for the +2 production and +1 commerce.

If you can get some value without special knowledge, then you should be able to see it for what it is. If you have no knowledge of its usefulness, then it should not affect your decisions until you gain the knowledge.

 

There's one problem with your perspective here. This game starts with the dawn of time, hence the "in the beginning" script. As such, you obviously don't know which animals are more suitable for eating "at all", so that you have to at least capture an animal of every breed to find out. You don't automatically know that cows are more suited for eating. In such a case all the animals should be visible since they all have the same potential. And since it really is, in the beginning, or so I think, then you also don't know right off the bat which ones are easier to capture or which ones will eat you alive. I mean a wolf is just a nice doggy, right? Elephants are too fat too overrun you, etc.

 

Stone provides +1 production when worked right from the beginning. It was used by the earliest known civilizations. After Masonry, putting a Quarry on it, working it will give +2 Production, and +1 Commerce, and will cut the cost of some wonders.

 

I also don’t believe that there is a major memory leak. But if there was a memory leak, your method might not reveal it. Memory leaks occur when code allocates memory and then fails to release it when done. If you never use the function that leaks memory, then you will never see it.

Your test will show a memory leak in something like the animation or other routines that are constantly in use without specific action on your part.

 

I disagree. I think the release time was appropriate. Yes there were problems. But what percentage of the user base experienced them? I went looking for solutions to a very minor problem that I was having. Otherwise it would have been another month or two before I went looking for strategy ideas. And before Civ 3, I played many games without every seeing a forum. I found a Civ 3 forum until I did a web search to find a problem fix and ran across a forum. If it hadn’t been for the problem, I wouldn’t have found the forums.

So again, what percent of the user base is experience problems?

 

Elephants were hunted for their ivory tusks before they were domesticated. Thus they provide +1 Production when worked and with camp, working provides +1 Production and +1 Commerce as well as being a strategic resource.

 

Im just happy the patch is coming out...not that i have any problems with my game (runs bug free from what i can see) but because so many people are and i feel bad for them as they cant get the enjoyment out of such a great game.

 

this is a big joke:

1) from my experience a player is more likely to find copper or iron in his territory than horses
2) the same of horses applies to Elephants but they are not being changed
3) animal husbandry is a must ANYWAYS to research among the first techs, because you will 99% have a cattle or sheep tile in your capital range, and not exploiting them is pure stupidity. It's not like knowing that you have horses before you research animal husbandry will favor you in any way that can be considered decisive. In you example, if on a very small map 1v1 a player has easy access to horses and the other one doesn't, the second will have an hard time in the beginning no matter if horses appear immediatly or with animal husbandry.
4) Hiding horses will be the first step in a race to hide early resources which I don't like because of several good reasons that IMO are more important than the one given by the "hide horses" supporters. The two most important being that your starting city is assigned some early resources that will help you grow decently, if they are hidden you can't take advantage from them; and the second the fact that the AI seems to know anyways where are the resources even if it can't see them (this already from Civ3).
5) last but not least, a chariot vs an archer placed strategically is dead meat.

 

com'on the hiding of horses is not a move done for realism but for apparent game balance. Talks about the history of hunting of horses or elephants are totally pointless here. The point is that some whiners who lost a coupla MP matches complained well enough to get it changed.

 

Actually there's a problem with your persepective here. The introduction is very clear and the game in no way starts with the dawn of (human) time, but with the dawn of civilizations, which is way, WAY different. By the time the game starts (what is it, 4000 BC ?) you can trust me that human beings knew exactly which animals to hunt for food.

 

Well, maybe, but I see no other point to including "in the beginning" if not for that. Besides, be they right or not, there's a lot of historians that for some reason like to pin human civilization starting at 4000BC (I didn't bother asking them if that meant they knew which animals to eat straight away). Maybe you're right though, as if this game were entirely consistent, because though you start out very meagre, not even having a village to call your own, you do have in many cases a warrior. Why else the warrior if prior experience didn't teach you to expect rival civs to attack you? If there were no warrior, just ignoring the "in the beginning" theme for a moment, I would on that factor alone conclude that it were backing up that idea.

To be more consistent again though, despite some civs having this tech, if all civs supposedly know which animals are friendly, and which to hunt, then why the hunting tech? Doesn't that say they don't know hunting in a sense? If they knew which to kill, as you propose, then wouldn't they know fishing techniques too? Nah, I'm shading more towards my viewpoint on this the more I think about it. I guess it really doesn't matter though, huh.

 

yeah in the end it doesn't matter what is realistic or not (we are agreed that the hunting tech is totally out of place), for the simple fact that Civ is a game
The problem of horses showing or not showing is of game balance and definitely not of realism. So the discussion should focus on this. I don't think that hiding horses 1 or 2 techs at worse away from start will balance what some players believe is unbalancing, while instead it creates more unbalances by "robbering" a player of one of its initial resources.

 

Well, isn't is kinda odd that with current ruleset you can get Chariots, pulled by horses, without having Animal Husbandry.

What's that, wild horse chariot racing?

 

???
AFAIK chariots need horses to be built, and to have horses you need a pasture, to make a pasture you need animal husbandry.

 

The problem I see with ancient era units is:

Chariots being useful at all, the same with elefants. They were little more than show and not even close to effective units. If they were to be kept in the game, they could just make the chariot UU, and skip elefants all together, because really... Also, elefants being a counter to cavalry? Also, horse archers are the first horseback unit. Okay? It took a great deal of training and excellent riding skills to be able to fight effectively from horseback like that. This also seems more like a UU.

Also, axemen are a bit odd in the sense that they are the counter to a unit that comes later as well as the contemporary spearman. I don't think axemen did very well against spearmen honestly.

I just don't know what they were thinking. Some units also get obsolete before they are ever being put to use (musketman).

Also, riflemen getting a bonus against cavalry? Aren't cavalry supposed to be used against them?

Also, musketmen were probably not more effective than longbowmen on the battlefield, but they were easier to train, and advancement in technology is a reason unto itself why they were used instead. Not because they were more effective, but because they were the latest thing I think. Also, modern 1800/1900th cavalry was probably a LOT less effective than knights against medivial melee units, but in the game they are a lot stronger. They were used against... riflemen, muskets.

There are just so many holes in their reasoning and unit bonuses and counters I can't help but wonder what they're thinking. If they are gonna have unit bonuses, make them reasonable and balanced and not just used because...

 

This is getting philosophical. The overwhelming odds are that humans evolved from other primates so we already had a pretty good innate idea of what was and wasn't edible/dangerous/etc..

 

Good - nice to know they got it right.

Um, even if this is so, you have all the time to research the tech, crank out the worker, build the road, build the pasture, deal with barbs, and crank out enough chariots to go and attack your opponent, wherever he is - are you playing two people on a tiny map or something? Seems to me you have at least 20 turns before you can even think about cranking your first chariot, if not closer to 30. In that time you have found your enemy on the map and just how to strike him?

Venger