Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

selfexiled said:
Total Newb question: what are you guys talking about when you say "shields" ?
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Reference to Civ III.

Shields = Hammers in Civ IV

:)
 
I can't find the pesky Greeks. I want to wipe them out and they only have 385 points left but I can't find them. Is there an easy way to find a civ or do you just have to comb the map?
 
If you've uncovered a fair portion of the map it should be fairly easy to eliminate by reasoning any places where they cannot be. So just look in other places. :)
sherrick13 said:
Is there any way to find out what military units another civ has?
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Sure, the best way is to found a religion and spread it around to the civs you want to "spy" on. You get unlimited viewing inside every city you spread your religion to, which is very nice for checking up on enemy militaries before an attack. Of course, you can also just explore with units using Open Borders, but it takes a lot of units to cover the same area as a well-spread religion, and those units could be better used elsewhere... plus they'll cost you for being outside your territory. Whereas a religion will actually pay you for viewing inside their cities (providing you've built a shrine).

In my current game, I'm playing on a Terra map on a lower difficulty level for a fun and non-militaristic game. I founded Judaism and have been very diligent about spreading it around... now all but one nation is Jewish (the only exception being Brennus, the founder of Buddhism who will either be Jewish or dead in the next few years ;) ). Currently (early industrial times) almost 50% of the world is Jewish, and I can see into all major cities around the globe. Very handy. :)

EDIT: Oh, I'm also at an insane 100-something + gold per turn even despite being at 100% research. VERY nice.
 
In Warlords, does the new Leadership promotion stack with GG generation? I mean, if you were going to get 2 xp from a victory, but instead get more due to Leadership, which number is added to your GG point total?
 
Hey ive been playing civ 4 for a few days now and ive penned down a few questions below:

1)How do "Trade Routes" work(the commere that is generated,no of trade routes each city can have inside my empire & the no of trade routes i can have with other countries).Would be delighted if there is a thread or an article on this forum for "Trade routes".
2)How do i get an "Obelisk" and how useful is it.
3)Finally how many civilians can work in a single tile.Im presuming its only one.Hoping to read ure replies.Thank you
 
floppymoose, I was wondering that myself. I can't say for sure definitively, but I tried to pay attention in a few battles in a current game I've got going, and it definitely appeared to me that the Leadership bonus experience was not applied to the GG progress bar (e.g. if my warlord unit got three experience for a relatively easy battle, the GG bar would only get the pre-50%-bonus two experience). That would seem to make sense, since otherwise dogpiling Warlords with Leadership would seem to result in a positive feedback loop. I'm not 100% certain, but it appears to me that the leadership promotion does not affect GG generation.

drag:
1) Here is an article on trade routes, which may go more in-depth with your inquiries (just FYI, there is a Google search function for the forums in the upper right, in case you need to look for specific articles in the future). From what I understand, in response to your specific questions:

A city will get a (single) trade route provided it is connected to your trade network (roads, rivers, or coast (post sailing) connecting it to your other cities). The Free Market civic, Currency and Economics technologies, and Castle buildings all will add one more apiece (with the castle bonus expiring with Economics, so I believe that four is the max outside of using wonders such as the Great Lighthouse). I'm not that well-versed on the voodoo that determines which trade routes are allocated to which cities, but in my limited understanding, larger (and more prosperous?) cities will get the better, more lucrative routes, and harbors (which give a 50% bonus to trade route income) seem like they may sway cities in favor of better routes as well. Foreign routes will yield more commerce than local ones (see link), and more distant routes to larger cities are better in that regard as well. You will have to have open borders with a civ to get foreign trade routes with them, but if either of you are running the Mercantilism civic this will be disallowed anyway.

2) An obelisk (now called 'monuments' with Warlords, or vice versa) is just the low-man-on-the-totem-pole culture generating building (i.e. you would build it in your city the same as any other building, like a granary or barracks - note that they do require the Mysticism technology, and will expire with the Calendar technology). It is a cheap way of getting culture going so that your city's borders expand, typically done so to snag good (and/or bonus) tiles in the outer edges of the city's 'fat cross' (the full 21-tile area the city can potentially work). Other options include religions, Stonehenge, and Creative civs. If there isn't a good reason to need to use tiles outside the initial 3x3 grid of your city, you may opt to delay this for more pressing concerns, or even forego it entirely in favor of a different city's culture absorbing that area or building something more useful later on to gain culture (like a library for commercial cities).

3) One citizen per tile only. In this regard, to make the most efficient use of your populace, it is often advisable to try to maintain a decent worker force such that your citizens are typically working improved tiles with better yields, IMHO.

Hope that helped some. Wandering around the forums a bit should provide you with more information than you ever knew you needed. ;) Good luck!
 
Thanks a dozen for being exhaustive and informative in ure reply sparta i have a few queries though.

1).Let me be more illustrative here,u have eighteen tiles in a fat cross rite,lets say i have 30 civilians in a city,since i have 18 tiles there is place only for 18 civilians.From what i understand even if my borders culturally expand my citizens can only stick to the 18 tiles that lie within the expanded boundry.Now out of the 12 citizens left i have say 5 specialists,now that leaves me with 7 citizens,What do i do with them???

Total no of citizens=30
Total no of workable tiles=18(tiles within expanded border on which civilians can work)
total no of specialists = 5
That leaves me with "7" citizens [30-(18+5)].

So does that mean ill have to focus on keeping them happy in order to avoid civil disorder.How can i better utilize the 7 civilians.

2)How does a civilian contribute to the growth yield of a tile.im unable to understand how to optimize the role of a citizen and how to use them strategically.Especially the role a citizen plays in the development of tile.For example a farmed floodplain tile gives me a base yield of 4F,does the civilian working on the tile add to that or is it the maximum i can get from the tile.
 
No problem, drag; glad to (try to) be of help. Here's the deal with citizens, as best I understand your inquiries (I'm going to start with your second question if that's okay, and after typing I am posting this in a spoiler box just because it got a bit long-winded and I don't want to clutter up this thread too much (I wasn't sure which aspects you needed help with most so I guess I just tried to touch on everything relevant I could think of)):

Spoiler rambling :
Citizens working the individual tiles are what bring in the resources that tile provides (in terms of food, hammers, commerce). Simply having a four-food farmed flood plains tile in your city's fat cross will not provide any extra food - working that tile with a citizen will. In this manner, you will be put to decisions often when you micromanage your cities' production: do you want to bring in more food for growth (/work more farms), more hammers for faster production (/work more mines), or more commerce to speed up your tech and maintain your economy (/more cottages)? This provides you with a lot of flexibility and options, but it will become more intuitive and easy to manage over time.

The net result of all this is that for a given city, the total yield per turn will be limited by the number of citizens you have and can therefore allocate to working tiles. As such, typically you want as many citizens as possible, up to the point where you reach your happiness (or in some cases, health) limits (i.e. the point at which the number of :) = the number of :mad: at the top of the city screen - more than that and you'll get resisting citizens, who bring in nothing but still eat two food per turn, the ingrates ;) ). The more [non-resisting] citizens you have, the more tiles you can work, and the more resources you will bring in per turn (please note that in this I am using the term 'resources' as a blanket term for food, hammers, and commerce, rather than the more common reference to specific strategic, luxury, or food bonus resources).

The caveat to all this is that you [typically] need to feed all of those citizens. Each extra person in your city will consume two food per turn. Therefore if you have say five citizens in your city, the city will be consuming ten food per turn just to stay fed (you can temporarily shortchange this in dire or unusual circumstances, but if you run a food defecit for too long you will start to lose population). The idea, then, is that you will have to balance your desire to work more productive or commercial squares with your need to work enough food to maintain, and preferably grow, your population. As you get more familiar with the game mechanics this will become second nature, but it will always be a decision you will be able to control if you wish. When cities are nearing their happiness limits, you may want the city governor to emphasize production or commerce (or both) rather than food; conversely when you are looking to grow a city quickly you may want the governor to emphasize food exclusively or some combination including it (you can certainly do this manually as well, but the city governors (lower right of city screen) can automate some of the process for you so you can focus on the big picture while still learning the game).

So essentially, regarding question two, the tile yields are what they are, and it's just up to you to determine which combination of tiles within your fat cross will provide the most direct benefit to your city at any given time. The one exception to this would be cottages, which do actually grow slowly over time, but only if/while they are being worked by citizens.

As to the scenario in your first question, you would probably avoid a setup like that for all but one city in your empire (unless you are running a specialist-based economy). For most cities, it would not be productive to have so much excess food that it would get to that point, as you'd be looking at almost exclusively farms and very little production or commerce. Typically (and this will get easier with time as well) you would try to balance things out (in the late game) such that you are bringing an amount of food either equal to or just barely over the amount necessary to feed the maximum number of non-specialist working citizens. An equivalent amount would suffice, but I personally like to try to have +2 food with all tiles worked, at least until the city caps out, so that growth is not quite so slow at the end stages and you have a slight buffer in case you get an angry citizen that needs to be fed.

One very high-food city in your empire can become a GPP (great person points) city, and run a lot of specialists in order to generate great people (and typically build the national epic in that effort as well), but running heavy specialists in multiple cities is less efficient in generating great people and therefore typically avoided unless a specialist-based economy is your specific aim. Outside of this city, most remaining cities will be focused on production-heavy tiles (for production-oriented cities) or cottages and commerce-heavy tiles (for commerce-oriented cities), and will not have a huge food surplus to overgrow the amount of workable land they have by much. Specializing cities is not necessarily something you need to focus on right away anyway, but just FYI for down the road you can potentially differentiate between focusing on production or commerce in order to get your empire up and running more quickly and efficiently (e.g. a high-production city can skip libraries, markets, and the like and just focus on producing troops (after building a barracks typically), whereas a high-commerce city can ignore a barracks and troops and focus on working cottages and whipping slaves to complete the commerce-boosting buildings).

Oh yeah, and 'pop', used around here, typically either refers to 'population' as you mentioned, or whipping citizens while running the slavery civic to rush prodution (via the upward-pointing arrow above the city governor area). In the latter instance, "pop & chop" refers to the two methods of early-game production rushing - either through slave whips or forest chops. It can also sometimes just generically refer to completing something ("just popped an axeman" might not imply slavery depending on context), or even getting a freebie from a goodie hut ("I popped 'Animal Husbandry' from a hut!").

Wow, did that get verbose - I'm spoiler-boxing this so as not to clutter up the thread too much. The lesson here is: "Don't ask open-ended questions to a bored engineer who's stuck at work". ;) Hope this helped some.


Have a good one, and good luck playing! :)
 
A few questions:

Where is the Great General experience bar I hear people talk about?

Can cities flip to barbarians?

What determines shields that a Great Engineer contributes to a building? I've noticed that the presence (or not) of teams, the current era, and game speed all seem to affect it. Possibly also civics, and the city location (some seem to get more shields from Great Engineers than others for some odd reason). So, can anyone explain the mechanics behind it?

What determines which squares will be controlled by whom via culture? I know the basics, that higher culture will usually prevail over lower culture, with the exception that older cities always get more of a bonus. Do the culture per turn rate and the total culture both contribute, or only one of these two factors? I'm looking for some mathematics here, if possible... something that can be calculated in-game (with a bit of effort perhaps).

What's the mathematics behind religion spreading? Obviously game speed, map size, etc must influence it. But aside from those things, what else contributes to the chances of a specific religion spreading to a city? How much "help" does a Shrine provide when it "helps spread religion"? Does proximity to the holy city and/or other cities of a specific religion contribute to the chance of it spreading? There is so much I'd like to know! :)

That's a lot of open-ended questions there, but I'm hoping that by throwing them out there I might be able to get some good answers to things that have been bugging me for a while. :)

By the way, am I correct in observing that trade routes seem to be more lucrative in Warlords? (Or perhaps it's just because I built the Temple of Artemis... by the way, does that wonder's effects apply to all cities or just the one where it's built?)

Thanks in advance for any and all answers.
 
Collateral damage has changed in WL. Could someone explain exactly how? Where as before each collateral damage battle was carried out in a similar way to a normal battle now, the collateral damage inflicted is standard. E.g. With catapults... an axe will always receive 0.5 (10%/hp) damage. A knight always 0.7 (7hp).

So simply put the amount of damage received goes up as strength increases however the hp lost decreases. Not well explained but i think u will understand ;).

And whilst on the subject of catapults. If a spear attacks a stack of catapults and elephants, it will hit an elephant. If a spear attacks a stack of archers and catapults it will hit an archer. If a spear attacks a stack of catapults and warriors it hits a warrior. Is there any rule or pattern to these discrepancies? I understand they will be taken out next patch.

This is probably best answered by Guru Roland: I am really struggling with how site from coastal tiles works. I know that you can see one tile beyond a coastal tile. but it seems u can't see an ocean tile beyond a coastal tile. Is that correct?

Oh and I worked out exactly how the sentry promotion works. It is much like a city, it is as though there is a standard unit stading on each tile adjacent to the sentry unit. So, if the sentry unit stands on a flat tile in the middle of a ring of hills he will see a long way. :D

And finally, I asked earlier about slavery. What i really wanted to know was (and I didn't make this very clear) How does the number of turns having an unhappy face work? It seems to me that if you slave again before the 6 turns elapse you will have another unhappy face for 6 turns plus another 6 minus the number of turns since you last slaved.

For example if u slave on the very next turn, it will last for 6 + (6-1) = 11 turns.

Thank you all for your stream of knowledge in advance.
 
No problem, drag; glad to (try to) be of help. Here's the deal with citizens, as best I understand your inquiries
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Ahh finally ive understood how to use my civilians appropriately....Thank you for ure time sparta...hoping to seek more of ure expertise in the future..lol...
 
Thanks for the response, Sparta. I'll post my own confirmation when I get the chance, but right now I have limited access to Warlords since I'm a mac weenie.
 
pixiejmcc said:
And finally, I asked earlier about slavery. What i really wanted to know was (and I didn't make this very clear) How does the number of turns having an unhappy face work? It seems to me that if you slave again before the 6 turns elapse you will have another unhappy face for 6 turns plus another 6 minus the number of turns since you last slaved.

For example if u slave on the very next turn, it will last for 6 + (6-1) = 11 turns.

Thank you all for your stream of knowledge in advance.
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Your other questions are good, and I shall be whatching to see if they are answered. I can do this one however;

I am guessing you are playing on quick? On normal 1 whip causes 1 unhappiness for 10 turns. If you whip again during this 10 turns (say at turn 5) you get 2 unhappiness for the next 5 turns, and then 1 unhappiness for another 10 turns.

You can think of it like the city can get rid on unhappiness at a rate of 1 per 10 turns. Every time you whiop you add 1 unhappiness, and this builds up until it can be got rid of.

HTH.
 
Draino said:
Can anyone either let me know why spreading religon is so important or point me in the direction of where I can find out?
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Welcome to Civfanatics!

Spreading religion to your cities can be important for i number of reasons.
If you have a holy city with a shrine, then you'll get one gold each turn for every city that has that religion founded in the holy city.
When you have a state religion, all your cities with that religion will get a +1 happiness bonus and a culture bonus. And with organized religion you'll get a +25% production bonus when building buildings. And with theocracy you'll get a +2 experience bonus in cities that have your state religion. And finally with free religion civic(no state religion), you'll get a +1 happiness bonus for each religion you have in each city of yours.
 
Don't forget the fact that without a religion, you can't build Temples, Monasteries, or Cathedrals. Another very good reason to get them. ;)
 
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