Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[MrCynical]

1) I think most people use custom game, and if you're having trouble with the number of AI you'll need to use this method of starting a game to alter it.

2)If you want to delay the current production while you build something else you just click it in the building menu and it inserts it at the start of the queue.

3)Really too many variables to say when you should start building cottages, but farms cannot be built too early.

4)Not that I know of.

 

[Roland Johansen]

1) Lots of players probably use custom game. Each has his/her own preferences. If you like to have a more open map with less enemies, then you should use the custom game.

2) With SHIFT - click unit/building, you add the unit/building to the end of the queue. With CTRL - click unit/building, you add the unit/building to the start of the queue.

If you stop building something, it will retain the hammers invested in it for a while. After 50 turns, the hammers invested in buildings will slowly decrease, after 10 turns, the hammers invested in units will slowly decrease.

 

[Manty]

hi can anybody tell me is there a way to remove the display of units in a city, it was something you could do in civ3 so you could just see the city without its 1000ft unit

 

[KINGKONG123]

Just Got Civ Iv And Have Played Several Games And Have Saved Many Times, They Are All Still On The Games List, And Appear To Still Be In My Computer. How Can I Delete Them. Using Up Too Much Memory.

 

[Samson]

Just Got Civ Iv And Have Played Several Games And Have Saved Many Times, They Are All Still On The Games List, And Appear To Still Be In My Computer. How Can I Delete Them. Using Up Too Much Memory.

They are in C:\Documents and Settings\<USER_NAME>\My Documents\My Games\Civilization 4\Saves

Just delete the ones you do not want.

 

[oagersnap]

Just Got Civ Iv And Have Played Several Games And Have Saved Many Times, They Are All Still On The Games List, And Appear To Still Be In My Computer. How Can I Delete Them. Using Up Too Much Memory.

Oh, And This Is A Bit Off Topic, But You Don't Have To Capitalize Every Single Word. (Like I'm Doing Now.) It's Really Annoying When You Have To Read A Text Like That.

So don't do it, okay?
Thanks.

 

[JaeKayLMNOP]

Does increased health make your population increase faster?

I know that if you have more unhealthy citizens than healthy citizens, it makes your population grow slower. However, if the difference between healthy and unhealthy citizens is very large in your favor, do you get some sort of growth bonus?

I'm trying to see if I'd like to use the Expansive trait, which gives your cities +2 health and allows you to build Granaries and Harbors at half cost. I was thinking of using Cyrus, using a combination of Creative and Expansive to expand my cultural borders very quickly, and in the early game use a combination of Warriors, Swordsman, or something of that nature, and Immortals to quickly take some cities in my immediate neighborhood. So, I'll develop a good sized Empire early game with a lot of powerful cities, and rapidly expand my borders. Then I'd go for either a Cultural Victory or a Diplomatic Victory. Is Cyrus a good pick for this strategy?

Last question: What is the "favorite civic" aspect of each leader? Do they get this civic automatically or something?

 

[scienide09]

Does increased health make your population increase faster?

There's no additional bonus to having a super healthy city/civ, other than the fact that you can keep growing. There is the possibility of being able to trade away uneeded health resources, but I don't think that's what you're looking for.

Last question: What is the "favorite civic" aspect of each leader? Do they get this civic automatically or something?

No, they don't get it automatically. This is the civic that the particular AI leader will most often use, when given the opportunity.
If you, the human player, use the same civic and as AI's fovourite, it will often result in a +1 to relations for "you have chosen your civics wisely". This is especially true if the AI comes knocking and specifically asks you to adopt that civic.

 

[Roland Johansen]

If you, the human player, use the same civic and as AI's fovourite, it will often result in a +1 to relations for "you have chosen your civics wisely". This is especially true if the AI comes knocking and specifically asks you to adopt that civic.

A small addition to this excellent reply. The bonus "you have chosen your civics wisely" can grow quite large if you keep this civic for a while. How large depends a bit on the leader. Some leaders value their favourite civic highly and some value the religion highly. It depends a bit on the leader.

Their is a separate diplomacy bonus if they demand you to change civics and you comply. There is a penalty if you don't listen to them. The time until they ask you to change civics is variable and again dependent on the leader. The value of this bonus or penalty is always a +1 or a -1.

 

[Interweb]

On eachother IIRC.

Can anyone confirm this, or should I just take his memory as fact?

 

[Roland Johansen]

If you play with aggressive civs, then they are irritated sooner and will attack you and eachother sooner. Watch your back when playing with those settings.

 

[thadeus]

Thanks for the quick response Sci, I have so many questions, I guess I should thumb through all the threads to get more answers. My wife actually hit in on the head, she said I do not play enough, not that she wants me spending more time away from the family, but I don't know the game well enough yet. Once I get the tech tree memorized, and what each tech provides I will be able to repond to the AI's better.

I am looking for tips on every kind of victory, but diplo is the closest I have come.

Does every game end in a victory before the points victory in 2050? It seems like the AI's are pretty good at the space race on the lower levels. Is a cultural victory possible or should I focus on diplo and space race. Usually I try to keep pace in the points until ~1850, then plot out my best chance for victory.

 

[ChicagoCubs]

I tried to have the warrior fortified on the capitol, thenI produced another warrior. When that unit is finished, both of them stack together. It's confused to me that which unit should I move (1 fortified and 1 non). Is there a way to ease this? I am afraid if more same unit is being stack and it will be difficult to control them.

Thanks.

When the newly produced warrior becomes active, he is on the same tile as the old warrior; however, they are not grouped/stacked together. You can move them independently without without too much hassle.

The key to this is to look at the unit icons shown near the bottom-center of the screen just above the unit task bar. If all that you have in the city is the two warrior, then all that will be shown is the two warrior icons. Please note that one should be highlighted with a green border and the other will have a white border. Whichever one(s) is(are) highlighted in green are the active unit(s). If the units were grouped/stacked, they would both be highlighted in green. This is the easy way to tell which one you are moving.

Next, on that same icon, please note the colored dot on the upper left corner. It will be green, white, yellow or red. The meaning of these is as follows:

Green - Active with all of it's movement points left. Active means that in a normal turn this unit will come up while the game cycles through all of your units.

White - Inactive unit. The unit is inactive due to (A) you gave it a previous command like fortify, sleep, sentry or (B) you ended its turn with the space bar or skip turn. Inactive units may or may not have all of their movement points (for example, a horse archer that is moved one space on a road then fortified will be shown as inactive this turn, but it only has part of it movement left; however, the next turn it will be inactive will full movement available).

Yellow - active unit with partial movement left.

Red - active unit with all of its movement points used.

So back to your two warrior situation. When the second is produced, you should see one warrior with a white icon border and white dot signifying it is fortified, and a warrior with a green border and green icon signifying the active one.

 

[Hawker04]

When you look at a SAV. file for a game, what do you do? I notice you can hit SHIFT-TAB to look at the history of the game.. Is there another way to check out someone's game other than just that technique?

 

[scienide09]

Not really sure what you're looking for, Hawker04. If you're looking at someone's savegame, presumably you're doing it for one of two reasons: to get advice, or to give advice.

In either case, you need to analyse what you see. Things to think about:
How are the cities planned out?
Did the player make a good tactical decision by blocking off a large portion of land for later expansion?
What kind of units, and how many, are defending the major cities?
Is a city with the potential for a GP farm being wasted as a mediocre production city?
Is the research rate appripriate given the gpt bing earned?
Is tech progression soaring, or lagging? Why?
These are just a few of the many possibilites.

Sometimes you can see major good points easily, such as specialized cities, and a modern military. The same can be said for major blunders, like a undersized, ancient military, with a poorly defended capital.

If you're analysing the game to learn from it, you have to look at what is presented and ask yourself why the player did what he/she did. "Why was that a good choice?"
If you're offering advice, you need to look for common errors, and suggest to the player ways to fix and improve them. "In the future, you should try to avoid..."

Does that answer your question?

 

[smjjames]

well, here is a kind of newb question.

in Civ3, we could take a look at the city itself and the buildings in it. does Civ4 have this same feature? I liked that feature in Civ3

and I know I could have done a search, but I'm not sure what to search for and I didn't want to read through 100+ pages of this thread.

 

[TDK]

Anybody know what the tech preferences for great leader "discover technology" option are? Is it a fixed "tech tree" or is the tech discovered calculated when the great person is born?
Can anybody point me to a thread concerning this.

Thanks,

Anders

 

[aznjizz]

Hi everybody, I just got a couple newb questions.

1. Is it better to build my city on tiles that has
A) "1 food + 2 hammer" or
B) "2 food + 1 hammer"
...like, in what situation would i choose A) or B) ??

2. Is it wise to build a city on a mine tile?

3. If i build my city on a tile that has a special resource like Horses for example, do i lose the option to build a Pasture on it later on? Does my city serve as a free Pasture on that tile?

Thanks.

 

[ChicagoCubs]

1. Is it better to build my city on tiles that has
A) "1 food + 2 hammer" or
B) "2 food + 1 hammer"
...like, in what situation would i choose A) or B) ??

Excluding the situations below, when you build you city, it replaces the base terrain (1F 2H or 2F 1H) with the city default. Sorry I forgot what the default is, but I think it is 2F 1H.

2. Is it wise to build a city on a mine tile?

Building a city on a hill gives your defenders an added defensive bonus. It is unwise to build on a potential mine site if you don't have other production tiles available (i.e. other hills to compensate for losing this one). Also, there is a situation that if you build on a hill, you get a bonus hammer. I think it is if you build on a "hills/plains" tile. So this city would produce 2F 2H.

3. If i build my city on a tile that has a special resource like Horses for example, do i lose the option to build a Pasture on it later on? Does my city serve as a free Pasture on that tile?

Short answer: Yes, your city serves as a pasture and you will get horses.
Long Answer: Yes, an you get the benefits from that resource without having the necessary tech to create the improvement (like Animal Husbandry for Pasture). This comes into play for items like stone or marble. You can have stone/marble as a resource before you get Masonry for the Quarry improvement.

 

[ChicagoCubs]

Anybody know what the tech preferences for great leader "discover technology" option are? Is it a fixed "tech tree" or is the tech discovered calculated when the great person is born?
Can anybody point me to a thread concerning this.

Thanks,

Anders

Here is what I noticed...

Great Prophets will discover the next religion tech.
Great Scientist will discover the next education/research tech.

I have never looked at the other great people and after all the religions are gone, I just turn them into super specialists.