Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Dier]

Hi, I tried the system requirements lab mentioned in post #185 of this thread, and it says that my system meets the minimum requirements except for this:

Video Card
Minimum: 64 MB 3D Video Card with Hardware Transform & Lighting (NVIDIA GeForce2+ / ATI Radeon 7500+)
You Have: Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset Family (Intel(R) 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset)

I played the downloadable 100 turns version without any problems, and was wondering what the deal is here. I'm considering buying this game, but my laptop is hardly upgradable. Thanks!

 

[Waterchan]

I have the Civ 4 original without expansion. When I first start up a game and zoom-out to a certain level, the music continues playing. But later on in the game, when I zoom it out to the same level, the music cannot be heard unless I zoom in very close on a city.

Does anyone know how to configure Civ 4 so that the music will play constantly, as long as you are not too zoomed-out?

 

[Roland Johansen]

Do you mean, later at the lower difficulty levels? Or do you mean earlier? ("Lower" when talking about years is a little ambiguous.)

The percentage will be lower in 2050 AD.

In a normal speed game, corruption will stay at 0% for the first 120 turns. After that, it will increase by 0.3% per turn.

Until 125AD (turn 120), the percentage will be 0%.
In 1550AD (turn 220), the percentage will be 30%.
In 1900AD (turn 320), the percentage will be 60%.
In 2050AD (turn 460), the percentage will be 102%.
In 3050AD (turn 1460), the percentage will be 402%.

At settler difficultly level, the inflation is only 60% of normal. So
in 1550AD, it will be 18%, in 1900AD, it will be 36% and in 2050AD, it will be 61%. Inflation is at 100% at Monarch level and higher levels. At the higher difficulty levels, the AI pays less for inflation.

 

[frankcor]

Video Card
Minimum: 64 MB 3D Video Card with Hardware Transform & Lighting (NVIDIA GeForce2+ / ATI Radeon 7500+)
You Have: Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset Family (Intel(R) 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset)

Dier, you may not be happy with the performance of your laptop in later staqes of games using larger maps -- you won't hit troubles in the first 100 turns on any map, I suspect. But as more of the map is revealed, even the fastest video cards start to struggle on Large or Huge maps.

Intel Chipsets don't support the transform and lighting (T+L) requirements of Civ4. Read more about it here.

 

[a4phantom]

Does anyone have any info or observations on how the AI deploys its military during peacetime? Spread evenly over cities, on borders, prioritizing? If he's not about to declare war on you, does having a bad relationship increase his deployment to your common border?

 

[Sisiutil]

Does anyone have any info or observations on how the AI deploys its military during peacetime? Spread evenly over cities, on borders, prioritizing? If he's not about to declare war on you, does having a bad relationship increase his deployment to your common border?

Pre-patch, the AI tended to place its largest collection of units in the capital. Post-patch, I've noticed the AI tends to spread them out more evenly between cities. I haven't really seen the AI massing units on the border unless it was going to declare war in a turn or so.

 

[linzamin]

I just purchased Civ IV and Warlords and have both of them loaded on my PC. If I want to play vanilla Civ IV, can I just put in the Civ IV CD and will it give me the vanilla version without the Warlords enhancements?

 

[Sisiutil]

I just purchased Civ IV and Warlords and have both of them loaded on my PC. If I want to play vanilla Civ IV, can I just put in the Civ IV CD and will it give me the vanilla version without the Warlords enhancements?

Yep, just make sure you click on the right icon.

 

[mattieray77]

Hey everyone, I am new to this web site so please forgive me if this is the wrong place for this question or if this question has been answered earlier. My interest is in senerios for civ 4. I would love to play a WWII senerio...or even a few of them...example - Western Front, D-Day and French Liberation, Pacific Theater, etc. I am working on my own but the senerio builder for civ 4 is proving difficult for me to work with...is this just me? any advice for making it easier? Most important is there anywhere or anyone who has WWII senerios I can download? Thanks everyone.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Hey everyone, I am new to this web site so please forgive me if this is the wrong place for this question or if this question has been answered earlier. My interest is in senerios for civ 4. I would love to play a WWII senerio...or even a few of them...example - Western Front, D-Day and French Liberation, Pacific Theater, etc. I am working on my own but the senerio builder for civ 4 is proving difficult for me to work with...is this just me? any advice for making it easier? Most important is there anywhere or anyone who has WWII senerios I can download? Thanks everyone.

First of all, welcome to the civfanatics forum!

This is the right place to ask all kinds of questions until you know your way around the forum and even then you can ask all kinds of questions here. And it doesn't matter if the question was asked before or not.

This question would best be asked in the Creation and Customization forum. That's where all the modders reside. I haven't heard about a finished WW2 scenario, but maybe they're making one and you could join a team. It's a lot of work. You can make a map with the ingame world-builder (CTRL-W inside the game, don't use locked modified assets). But to make a true WW2 scenario, you'd have to change the tech-tree and add different units and buildings and remove other units and buildings. To accomplish that, you need to edit many xml-files. TheLopez just created a tech tree editor that will make changing the tech tree a lot easier. You don't have to edit xml-files for it anymore.

Just look around the creation and customization forum a bit. There are modding guides, utilities to help modding and modding projects in development and finished modding projects. I hope that you can find something that you like. Just don't think that you can create a WW2-scenarion in a day or two.

 

[ggganz]

I have the Civ 4 original without expansion. When I first start up a game and zoom-out to a certain level, the music continues playing. But later on in the game, when I zoom it out to the same level, the music cannot be heard unless I zoom in very close on a city.

Does anyone know how to configure Civ 4 so that the music will play constantly, as long as you are not too zoomed-out?

Sorry for the delay.
Do you mean the city music (the music you would hear if you contacted the same leader you're playing as) or the soundtrack music? This may be an issue with building Stonehenge or discovereing calendar, because before you do either of these, default zoom is 9 down mouse-wheel turns (by turns I mean every time it snaps into place) from all the way zoomed
in, and after you do either it is 7. When either happens you are put at what 9 would be if 7 is default.

 

[cabert]

Hey everyone, I am new to this web site so please forgive me if this is the wrong place for this question or if this question has been answered earlier. My interest is in senerios for civ 4. I would love to play a WWII senerio...or even a few of them...example - Western Front, D-Day and French Liberation, Pacific Theater, etc. I am working on my own but the senerio builder for civ 4 is proving difficult for me to work with...is this just me? any advice for making it easier? Most important is there anywhere or anyone who has WWII senerios I can download? Thanks everyone.

there is one in built WWII scenario with vanilla.
It's called desert war.
I'd think the easiest way to build another one would be to start from there, but i'm not a modder, and better ideas may be somewhere on the forum.
RJ gave you a good link for a start.

 

[tomart]

Actually, I consider the chance to kill an airplane as bugged as it almost never happens to healthy airplanes.

Just jumping in to comment - "an airplane" in Civ is much more, perhaps a squadron (dozen) or more, so "killing" that whole unit would be an extreme event. I think it's just fine the way it is; you have to let it sit out a few turns (depending on the number of Healers in that city) for repairs. Plus if it's intercepted at all, it did zero damage to the target, which I think is oversimplified. But Civ4 is a nicely streamlined, elegant package, so I'm not gonna quibble with minutiae.
Apologies if I've jumped into the midst of a complex discussion.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Just jumping in to comment - "an airplane" in Civ is much more, perhaps a squadron (dozen) or more, so "killing" that whole unit would be an extreme event. I think it's just fine the way it is; you have to let it sit out a few turns (depending on the number of Healers in that city) for repairs. Plus if it's intercepted at all, it did zero damage to the target, which I think is oversimplified. But Civ4 is a nicely streamlined, elegant package, so I'm not gonna quibble with minutiae.
Apologies if I've jumped into the midst of a complex discussion.

Every unit in civ4 is representing a whole bunch of them. Yet land units and ships just die when they lose. Only airplanes don't die, they just get damaged and have to heal for a few turns. It has nothing to do with realism but with game balance. Units that cannot get destroyed (or only get destroyed very rarely) are just unbalanced.

It also prevents any sort of air superiority to be feasible. You can have 10 times the number of fighters of the enemy, yet the only way to take out the enemy fighters is by entering the cities in which they are garrisoned with ground troops.

But the real problem is that you can bomb an enemy city to death in one turn with a large number of bombers and then take the city with the ground troops stationed next to it. It doesn't matter if the enemy has a number of fighters stationed there. Yes, a number of your bombers gets damaged and maybe one or two destroyed. But you'll not lose any ground troops however many ground troops are stationed in the enemy city because those enemy units are reduced to half strength and don't stand a chance. After you have a critical mass of bombers (say 20-25), there's no way the AI can stop you and you'll lose very few units in a war against an equal strength AI opponent. Maybe 5-10 bombers get intercepted by the fighters stationed in various cities but the other bombers can just bomb away. And of those 5-10 that get intercepted, only very few die (0-2). It becomes even better if you first send out of few fighters to fight the enemy fighters since they're cheaper and die even less.

A unit that dies only rarely when defeated is unbalanced in civ just because healing is (almost) free of cost.

 

[tomart]

Does anyone have any info or observations on how the AI deploys its military during peacetime? Spread evenly over cities, on borders, prioritizing? If he's not about to declare war on you, does having a bad relationship increase his deployment to your common border?

Playing fully patched Civ4, I've noticed a couple of AIs stacking their 'main armies' (sometimes two, and rather well placed, one in the north and one in the south, neither in the capital) kinda far away from my borders (I was quite stronger at the time.) This was in addition to the normal couple of good units in each city, of course.

When Mansa Musa got Transports, however, he stacked one huge army in a coastal city, apparently loaded on board, but were never sent anywhere.
That must've been very unhealthy, all those men and horses living on boats for several decades...

 

[cabert]

Every unit in civ4 is representing a whole bunch of them. Yet land units and ships just die when they lose. Only airplanes don't die, they just get damaged and have to heal for a few turns. It has nothing to do with realism but with game balance. Units that cannot get destroyed (or only get destroyed very rarely) are just unbalanced.

(...)
A unit that dies only rarely when defeated is unbalanced in civ just because healing is (almost) free of cost.

I totally disagree.
It's not unbalanced because of this very specific twist : air units don't kill ground units.

So you still need more ground troops than the enemy to take a city/destroy a stack.
And about air superiority, it is a wrong notion. This never existed.
The german hit england. England hit germany. No air superiority.
If the AI wants less damage to his land troops, it should build bunkers (play desert war, you'll see what i mean).

 

[tomart]

Every unit in civ4 is representing a whole bunch of them. Yet land units and ships just die when they lose. Only airplanes don't die, they just get damaged and have to heal for a few turns. It has nothing to do with realism but with game balance. Units that cannot get destroyed (or only get destroyed very rarely) are just unbalanced.

It also prevents any sort of air superiority to be feasible. You can have 10 times the number of fighters of the enemy, yet the only way to take out the enemy fighters is by entering the cities in which they are garrisoned with ground troops.

But the real problem is that you can bomb an enemy city to death in one turn with a large number of bombers and then take the city with the ground troops stationed next to it. It doesn't matter if the enemy has a number of fighters stationed there. Yes, a number of your bombers gets damaged and maybe one or two destroyed. But you'll not lose any ground troops however many ground troops are stationed in the enemy city because those enemy units are reduced to half strength and don't stand a chance. After you have a critical mass of bombers (say 20-25), there's no way the AI can stop you and you'll lose very few units in a war against an equal strength AI opponent. Maybe 5-10 bombers get intercepted by the fighters stationed in various cities but the other bombers can just bomb away. And of those 5-10 that get intercepted, only very few die (0-2). It becomes even better if you first send out of few fighters to fight the enemy fighters since they're cheaper and die even less.

A unit that dies only rarely when defeated is unbalanced in civ just because healing is (almost) free of cost.

Wow, you're raising a lot of complex issues, some of which were dealt with in different ways in previous Civs. Remember the heated discussions of artillery back in Civ3? I was in the Conquests beta and it was a hot topic - should artillery be able to kill units, or just cripple them? (The "critical mass" was a large stack of artillery, protected by ground troops.) Should bombers kill or just damage other units? What about ships? Remember the specific anti-aircraft unit to handle the bomber threat?
Air superiority can be handled by sending your fighters first. They'll be intercepted and then the bombers can get through.
I'm not sure I agree about losing very few units vs an equal strength AI. For one thing, the AI has gotten better with each Civ. Now i see it sending individual attacks against my flanks, and by the time my units have gotten adjacent to the target city, we've been weakened, and our air force has been weakened too - when more than half is sitting there healing, it's not very effective. Yes, healing is free of cost, but those few turns could be when you need them most.
Note that fighters can intercept from nearby cities too, so that's a force multiplier, and it's not just fighters: SAM Infantry and Mech Inf intercept too, so a well-prepared enemy can do a lot of damage to your air force.
Granted, with enough bombers, it'll be easy, but then you're not talking about "an equal strength opponent." That sounds more like "a significant edge."

 

[Roland Johansen]

I totally disagree.
It's not unbalanced because of this very specific twist : air units don't kill ground units.

So you still need more ground troops than the enemy to take a city/destroy a stack.
And about air superiority, it is a wrong notion. This never existed.
The german hit england. England hit germany. No air superiority.
If the AI wants less damage to his land troops, it should build bunkers (play desert war, you'll see what i mean).

No air units don't kill ground troops. But they weaken them to such an extent that you'll lose 1 unit for evey 20 of them. That's about as close to killing them that you can get.

Air superiority never existed??? Tell that to the germans at the end of WWII. Tell it to the Iraki's in both Gulf Wars. Tell it to Japan at the end of WWII. Where were their planes? They were just shot down. The whole military today tries to obtain air superiority first before anything else is considered. And you say it doesn't exist?

There was no air superiority during the battle of Britain, but the Germans did lose a lot of planes and pilots there and it cost them later in the war against Russia and in the North-Africa theatre. Germany had completely lost control of the skies before Dday which made it easier for the amphibious operation to succeed without early detection (next to some stupid moves by Hitler who was sleeping and thought it was a diversion allthough his generals new better).

But all of that history doesn't matter a lot. Game balance is the issue. And having a unit that can dramatically change the outcome of ground combat results while not suffering any sort of meaningfull losses is not balanced.

What would be so wrong about fighters actually killing eachother regularly instead of only damaging eachother. Clearly that would not be unbalanced.

 

[cabert]

What would be so wrong about fighters actually killing eachother regularly instead of only damaging eachother. Clearly that would not be unbalanced.

I cut "air superiority" out. You're right, although there is still a little room for arguement.

About fighters killing each other : it happens.
Not a lot, but it happens. Often enough when you're on "equal" terms.
What almost never happens is saminf shooting down planes AFAIK.
But if you try to have "air superiority" from the ground, you're obviously wrong, don't you think?

 

[Roland Johansen]

Wow, you're raising a lot of complex issues, some of which were dealt with in different ways in previous Civs. Remember the heated discussions of artillery back in Civ3? I was in the Conquests beta and it was a hot topic - should artillery be able to kill units, or just cripple them? (The "critical mass" was a large stack of artillery, protected by ground troops.) Should bombers kill or just damage other units? What about ships? Remember the specific anti-aircraft unit to handle the bomber threat?
Air superiority can be handled by sending your fighters first. They'll be intercepted and then the bombers can get through.
I'm not sure I agree about losing very few units vs an equal strength AI. For one thing, the AI has gotten better with each Civ. Now i see it sending individual attacks against my flanks, and by the time my units have gotten adjacent to the target city, we've been weakened, and our air force has been weakened too - when more than half is sitting there healing, it's not very effective. Yes, healing is free of cost, but those few turns could be when you need them most.
Note that fighters can intercept from nearby cities too, so that's a force multiplier, and it's not just fighters: SAM Infantry and Mech Inf intercept too, so a well-prepared enemy can do a lot of damage to your air force.
Granted, with enough bombers, it'll be easy, but then you're not talking about "an equal strength opponent." That sounds more like "a significant edge."

The human recognizes that the bomber can make ground combat easy when applied in sufficient numbers. The AI does not. So the AI might be equal in power but it will not combine its bombers in one big force to attack a single point and the human will.

Of course this reply will lead to the often heard counter argument: improve the AI. But that is actually not the full extent of the problem. A stack of 20 bombers + 8 fighters can redeploy everywhere, so you don't know where they will hit. Thus you can't have 28 air defence troops protecting every city. If the enemy air force hits one of your cities that has a combined protection of say 8 units (SAM + Mech Inf + fighters + fighters from other cities), then you might shoot down 1 attacker. The other 7 airplanes are wounded and your city is in ruin by the bombing of 20 bombers. Just because the AI is incapable of doing this and the human is capable of doing this, doesn't mean that it is ok. You should be able to defend against this kind of attack and if the AI has 8 anti air units protecting a city, I would like to lose 4 of my units, while the AI loses 2 fighters or something like that. That would stop me from attacking heavily anti-air defended cities. Losing only 1 air unit will not.

What's wrong with losing air units. We lose ground units and ships, why not airplanes?