JujuLautre
Deity
Can't help you there, you should ask in the ffh forum
Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions
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OzymandiasII
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2008
- Messages
- 2
Hi. Is there a way to speed up the battle animation? In some of the other civs holding down the control or shift key did that. Thanks.
OzymandiasII
OzymandiasII
Roland Johansen
Deity
You can play without battle animations, but you can't speed them up. It's on or off.
And welcome to civfanatics!
thecrazyalaskan
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2008
- Messages
- 15
Is there a way to not really play a game, but to just sit back and spectate the AI? I'd like to do this for a game or two so I can get to understand how the AI works, especially since I'm starting to play a higher difficulty level.
No, that's incorrect. Click Ctrl-O and check "quick combat"
Roland Johansen
Deity
I know this is possible and have read somewhere how to do it. I have never tried it myself.
I just looked in the CivilizationIV.ini file and there are several options called:
I guess that these options will help you autorun the game.
This thread 'Is there are way I can make the AI play itself and do automatic turns' is also discussing your issue. One of the posters is talking about the cheatcode. The cheatcode is chipotle and it can also be set in the CivilizationIV.ini file.
Note that each version of civilization 4 (vanilla, Warlords and BTS) has its own CivilizationIV.ini file.
change the 0 into chipotle to allow the debug options (like autorun).
And guess what 'quick combat' does? It removes all of the combat animations just like I said. You can play with or without the combat animations but you can't speed them up.
In my current game, I am rather behind in research (Genghis, my most advanced and dangerous rival, has around five to six techs I don't, and I only have one tech he does not), and am having difficulty catching up.
I have a large empire and army, so I could conquer nearby weak rivals and extort technology, but then again this could exacerbate the problem by sending my maintenance costs through the roof (this has happened before). I could just stay at peace and focus on my economy, but it seems to me that I'm still playing catch-up, and I'm a little worried that Rome or England, two nearby civs that have armies nearly equal of mine, and a signficant tech lead, might overtake me militarily and invade.
What should I do? What might be some good ways to tweak my economy to speed up research?
I have a large empire and army, so I could conquer nearby weak rivals and extort technology, but then again this could exacerbate the problem by sending my maintenance costs through the roof (this has happened before). I could just stay at peace and focus on my economy, but it seems to me that I'm still playing catch-up, and I'm a little worried that Rome or England, two nearby civs that have armies nearly equal of mine, and a signficant tech lead, might overtake me militarily and invade.
What should I do? What might be some good ways to tweak my economy to speed up research?
AgentPendergast
Chieftain
I have a question about moving the palace. If I move the palace to city #6 for example, does the palace count as one of my national wonders? If so, can I move it to another city later and still build two natioanl wonders in city #6.
AgentPendergast
Chieftain
Thank you!
Roland Johansen
Deity
This is just a too general question given the amount of information that we have. I don't know how your empire looks like, how your economy looks like and what you consider large. If you are considerably larger than your opponents, then you should be able to create an economy that is also considerably larger than theirs. In the end when you're past the struggling economy of the starting eras of the game, the size of your economy should grow proportionally to the size of the area of land that you control (which is inside the BFC's of your cities). Of course, recently conquered lands have to be developed a bit, but they should become profitable quickly.
It seems that there are several civilisations that are slightly ahead of you. You could try researching technologies that they don't have and then trading such technologies with all of them. That way, you get multiple technologies for the price of one.
Note that you can't see whether civilisations have technologies that you can't even research. Thus a civilisation may be further ahead of you than you think.
If you want more detailed comments, then upload a savegame of your present game. If you do that, then I (and other posters in this thread) might be able to give you a few pointers about improving your economy or maybe further conquest.
friedonions
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2007
- Messages
- 26
Im sorry, but I've searched all over google for Vanilla and I cant find a download or whatever explaining what it is. Can anyone post a link for me?
Vanilla = core game without expansion packs - in case of this forum any iteration of Civilization (1-4) without expansion pack - e.g. Civilization 4 = Vanilla, Warlords = Warlords 
, Beyond the Sword = BtS 
, Beyond the Sword = BtS friedonions
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2007
- Messages
- 26
Ohhh lol thanks ori!
Sorry, I wasn't sure whether I ought to have posted that much info here or not (as this is the 'Quick Answers' thread), but I also felt that this question was not worth starting a whole new thread in the strategy section, so I came here.
Here, I'll post the savegame:
Some Notes, First:
New Sarai is quite a problem; It's very isolated, and the Mongolian culture around it is too strong for me to reconnect it with my land without a great artist, probably.
Speaking of Mongolia, they have been a bit weird this game; Yes, as typical they were warmongers and invaded me even though I shared their religion (that war was how I got New Sarai and N. Hsia), but they also founded their own religion, and they have been a tech and culture leader the whole time. I do not have random leader personalities turned on.
I had to wage several wars against China to reduce them to their present pathetic state; The little salient down south (with Giza) was a recent conquest
I'm forming an army near Beijing, for use against England or China, if I decide to use warfare to catch up
Newcastle was acquired in a culture flip, not through war
I was thinking of going for a domination win, but as it is already the 1700s, I may not have the time
I'm sure you can get all the other data (difficulty, map type, etc.) just from looking at the save (It's Vanilla)
Roland Johansen
Deity
The strategy and tactics forum is an excellent place to post savegames and ask for advice. There are lots of good players there who don't mind looking at a game and giving advice. But a savegame is really needed to give decent advice. Looking for a few minutes at your savegame gave me a lot more information than what you could have told me in an epic length post. A screenshot can also be useful because it is more easily accessible than a savegame, but a savegame will give far more information.
This thread is mainly used for quick tips so it's not really ideal for this type of game-analysis, but it's not a real problem if it doesn't happen too often.
Yes, but it's just one city. It's not really important in the big picture. There are a few tiles around the city that will likely go your way in the near future, so you might keep it, but the city isn't that important.
An AI leader is less likely to declare war when pleased with you, however it can still happen especially if the AI thinks it has a bigger army than you (power rating graph F9-screen). Maybe a bad roll of the dice for you although you won the war so it wasn't a real problem.
Talking about conquest, I usually explore a lot more so that I know where my troops are going and how many AI-cities are left. Just 2 or 3 explorers can show you the terrain and the city placement of your bordering nations. At this stage, you don't have open borders with some of your neighbours, so it's useless to send some explorers there, so you need fewer explorers. Still, it's a good idea that you're building one at the moment. I would have done quite a bit sooner though.
Domination is still very much possible. You have a good piece of land and are militarily stronger than your battered opponents. But you first have to get a decent economy and more powerful cities and that might take some time.
You have a good number of health and happiness resources. With the right buildings, the happiness cap and health cap will be above 20 in all of your cities and at the moment these caps aren't far from that (which is good). However, the average size of your cities is around 8 or something. That is pretty low in the 1700's. If your cities would be close to size 20, then your economy would be easily producing more than 4 times as much research (because costs don't increase that much with city size and momentarily your spending more than half your economy in maintenance).
The main reason that your cities are so small is that you're using few high food tiles and have created too few farms to be able to work many high food tiles. You need to take control of these workers and build a few extra farms and use them with your cities.
You also have a shortage of workers to change the land so that your cities can grow. Try to get a food surplus of at least 4-5 in cities with a granary so that they can grow quickly up to their maximum size.
Here is an example city of yours that will never become better if you don't do anything about it. The land is good enough, but it needs different terrain improvements.
City before improvement.JPG
I used the world builder to add a grocery to the city (for extra health) and added a lot of terrain improvements in a way I would be satisfied. The cottages of course don't start as towns, that takes time. But you can also see that you need quite some farms to be able to use the fairly dry land around the city. I also transferred one high food tile from a neighbouring city to this one but left another high food tile to another city as it can use it too.
City after improvement.JPG
I used the world builder just for demonstration purposes here. It of course takes quite some time to make these terrain improvements and grow the city. The city will become a lot better in the late game as biology means that you can change some of those farms into cottages or workshops as you see fit. And technologies like printing press and civics like free speech and universal suffrage will make those towns very powerful.
Hammer production went up from 5 to 14, commerce production from 14 to 41. A nice commerce city.
Just for fun and to show you what the late game civics can do, I used the world builder to give me the technologies printing press, democracy, liberalism and biology, switched to universal suffrage and free speech and used the extra food from biology to change some tiles from farms to towns.
City late game.JPG
The city now gives you 24 base hammers and 90 base commerce, pretty nice.
Note that the goal here was not to impress you with a high output city as I didn't add any multiplier buildings (forge, factory, bank, etc.). I just wanted to show that you need some more food to grow your cities and then the output from the land can become much much greater.
Attachments
Yeah, I recognize now that posting here probably wasn't the best course of action. I'll try and bring this discussion to a close soon so that this thread can be un-hijacked
. You've already given me some things to try, thanks!He he...yeah, I realized my mistake a little late; I usually tend to stop exploring after I've expanded past a certain point; it's a bad habit, I guess.
That's good to know.
Now here's something I never would have thought of (but of course, now it seems obvious that higher population = bigger workfoce = bigger economy)! This idea will certainly be a big help. I'd set most of my cities to emphasize commerce tiles to get some quick cash, but building up farms and population is a better long-term strategy.
Roland Johansen
Deity
Note that farms are just a means to an end. The farms themselves only give you food which isn't what you're aiming for. It's the extra population and the high hammer and commerce tiles that you want to use. So once you've reached the desired size for your city, I would convert some extra food producing tiles into hammer or commerce producing tiles. You can see that I did that if you compare the second with the third screenshot of my previous post. Thanks to biology, the food output of the farms increased which meant that I needed less farms to feed all of the citizens. I turned them into commerce producing tiles.
Now that you mention it, I noticed that you seemed to automate things a bit. That isn't necessarily very bad, but you usually can do a better job when you manage things yourself and choose which tiles to use instead of letting the governor make the choices for you. It's no use building a bunch of farms when the governor will not use them.
The biggest negative result of automating things is that it doesn't allow you to specialise cities. The idea behind city specialisation is that it makes your empire more efficient. Some cities don't need every single building and the national wonders can be build in cities that maximise their effect. A city with a science output of 100 will make far better use of the Oxford university than a city with a science output of 20. Also the mechanics behind great person generation favour focussing the production of great person points in a few cities (one with the national epic).
There are basically three types of specialised cities (with some variants):
1) The commerce city which you can see in the last screenshot of my previous post. These cities have a high commerce output, but the hammer output isn't that great. You want several of these cities as they will be the engines of your economy, they will be the main science generators and pay your bills. They need some hammers to build the necessary buildings to keep them healthy and happy and they need buildings to improve their science (and gold) output (library, observatory, etc.). They shouldn't be used to build many units and they shouldn't build your world wonders or space ship parts.
Most cities can be turned into fairly good commerce cities and you can't have enough of these.
2) The great person farm. This city focusses on producing as much food as possible and typically has several food resources and lots of flat irrigated land. All of this food is used to hire specialists. The main idea of focussing all of these great person points in one city is that you'll generate more great persons that way. If you need 300 GP-points for the next great person, then it isn't useful to have 5 cities with 100GP points, but it is useful to have one city with 300 GP points. The city needs the buildings that allow you to assign specialists which you can get by whipping them (slavery). The caste system civic can also be used to get specialists but conflicts with the slavery civic. There are some national wonders which enhance such a city and these cities need the maximum amount of happiness and health that you can afford as they will become big.
A city needs a high food output to be turned into a great person farm. You need multiple food resources and lots of flat land. A few great person farms (1-3 for me) is enough.
3) The production city. This city focusses on producing as many hammers as possible. It will be used to build your military units, to build your wonders and to build your space ship parts. When 2 civilisation invent a technology that allows a world wonder, then the one with the most productive city will win the wonder race. It doesn't need science buildings as it's commerce output is going to be fairly low.
This is probably the hardest city to find a suitable location for. You need hills for hammers and food resources to feed your citizens which are working hills with a low food output. You need a few of these to build your units and wonders and space ship parts. These are the cities which will be the backbone behind your conquests. If you get the expansion packs, then you will want to settle the great generals in these cities.
You can say a lot more about city specialisation and the subject usually leads to some discussion. The subject is also closely related to the type of economy that you run (discussions about specialist economies and cottage economies). If you specialise your cities like I outlined above, then you're running a somewhat mixed economy which is most effective in my opinion, but that is just my opinion and there are some who will disagree with me. Just check the war academy or the strategy articles forum for more discussion and articles on this matter.
Here are some links about city specialisation from the war academy.
(I didn't read them, so I can't vouch for their content, but war academy articles usually have a high standard. For instance, I don't agree with an often stated opinion that these specialised cities only need a small fraction of the total collection of buildings.)
Guide to City Specialization and Land Improvements
Specialization of Cities
City Specialization: WHERE I do it.
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