Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Roland Johansen]

To be able to trade resources with another civilisation and getting the trade symbol next to their name, you need:

2) You need to have actually discovered this connection. It is not enough for the connection to exist. Your civilisation or the other civilisation needs to see the connection. It doesn't matter if it is in the fog of war, but it must be discovered at some point in the game.

---I am not sure what is meant by "discovered the connection" or "see the connection"---probably a stupid question, but I don't get it.

At any time there is a set of squares you have "discovered", by viewing them with one of your units, or by having your cultural borders expand into areas your units haven't seen, or by trading maps with other civilizations, or by getting a map from a tribal village. You don't lose "discovery" once the square is covered by the "fog of war" -- FOW only means you don't have a unit that can see the square right at the moment.

A trade route has to pass entirely through these "discovered" squares.

Dalamb has it right. This is what I meant with "discovered the connection".

Hi guys

Been playing Civ for ages but surprisingly I've no idea what the answer to this question is:

What tech(s?) trigger the start of the renaissance era? I'm playing BTS if that makes a difference.

In BTS, you can see that a technology will trigger a new age. It is mentioned in the tech tree once the technology is researchable by your civilisation.

You can also see the era a technology belongs to by checking the file CIV4TechInfos.xml in ...\Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML\Technologies
Each technology has an era. You can search the file for ERA_RENAISSANCE, to see which technologies belong to the renaissance era.

So please someone explain this:

I am America, facing Alexander, Cesear and Saladin. Two continents, one is completely mine and the other split between the three. I am into future tech 43 and the others have a destroyer here and there, but more frigates. They have the first kind of fighters, while I have jets and stealths. I assualted a city and brought its defense down to 0%, then watched as 10 of my 27 bombers get destroyed trying to attack and another 10 damaged. On top of that 4 of my 9 transports(gunships, tanks, mech infra.) have all their units destroyed. So how the hell does this game see a massive assault led by a way better civ, getting completely routed by the lesser civ?

Is this really a question or just a complaint?

In case you want an answer: the game is balanced in such a way that a small technological advantage will not let you be automatically victorious in every engagement. This balance is needed because otherwise gaining a small technological edge would mean that you could easily conquer the world and the game would boil down to trying to be the first to get a small technological edge.

If I read it correctly, they are defending with industrial era units against your modern era units, so the difference is one era. Whether you have future tech 43, doesn't matter at all. You don't get better units with future tech 43 than with future tech 0. The tech tree ends at future tech 0 and these technologies just give a little health and happiness boost. Allthough getting 43 of them means a huge health and happiness boost. Using all of the commerce spent on researching these future technologies to buy an army would have given you an army 100 times the size you have now. The losses would have been insignificant.

Then another important factor is combat tactics. Even if you have an advantage in quality of units (in this case, one era more modern troops), you still need to use these troops wisely. Just throwing them at the enemy is not the best way to win.

A decent way to do it would be:
1) Attack (bomb) the city with lots of jet fighters so that you control the skies. This way, you will destroy or weaken the intercepting enemy fighters and you won't lose your bombers. You might lose several jet fighters though if the enemy has lots of fighters. I didn't see you mention this, so I guess you skipped this step.
2) Bomb away the culture defence with bombers or ships.
3) Weaken the enemy units to 50% health with bombers.
4) attack with troops, directly from the ships (no problem if the enemy units are severely weakened, not wise when they're near full strength).
5) place defensive units in the city
6) cut the railroads around the city to avoid a direct and massive counter attack by the entire enemy army on your just captured city.

All of this can be done in 1 turn and should be done in 1 turn to keep the element of surprise.

7) Keep control of the skies with your jet fighters by attacking the enemy troops and destroying the intercepting enemy fighters. Bomb the incoming enemy troops and then destroy these weakened troops with your units. Only when the counter attack is stopped, advance further into enemy territory.

The above points are only the battle tactics. You also need some strategy. So you need to make sure that your units are well promoted and that you attack a city that is hard to reconquer for the enemy. You can also try to get a war between the 3 civilisations on the other continent so that you can attack weakened enemies. Depending on the specifics of your game, other strategies could help you.

An amphibious invasion in the industrial/modern age is the hardest type of battle in civilisation IV because you need to cross an ocean and they have direct reinforcements due to their railroads. You will have losses in such a battle.

It's not impossible to get a very good win-loss-ratio in civ4 with good battle tactics and good strategy. I once amphibiously invaded a large but backward civilisation with riflemen while they had musketmen (and older troops). Halfway the war, they got riflemen and I got infantry, so the difference was still one age. I captured some 10-15 cities and killed some 50-100 enemy units while not losing a single one of my troops. I admit, that was lucky. I actually expected to lose some of those fights. If you (for instance) attack 20 times with 90% chances, then you should expect to lose 2 units. You also have to make sure that some bad luck doesn't mess up your combat plans. So if you lose 5 of those 20 fights, then you should still be able to come out victorious in the end. But of course, it wasn't pure luck. I also used sound tactics and strategy and had well trained troops while my enemy was fighting a 2 front war because I bought another civilisation into this war.

When you become good at war in this game, then you'll see that war is one of the weaker points of the AI. It is very possible to get a good win-loss ratio in war in this game.

 

[Charlie_B]

In BTS, you can see that a technology will trigger a new age. It is mentioned in the tech tree once the technology is researchable by your civilisation.

You can also see the era a technology belongs to by checking the file CIV4TechInfos.xml in ...\Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML\Technologies
Each technology has an era. You can search the file for ERA_RENAISSANCE, to see which technologies belong to the renaissance era.

Cheers.
For anyone else interested, the 'gateway techs' for Renaissance are Nationalism, Printing Press, Education, Gunpowder and Astronomy.

 

[Stevepac]

Roland: I was semi complaining, but it was a question, I cant imagine how an army of my size was decimated by lower troops. I felt like Xerxes attacking Sparta. I did all your steps in attacking the city, except I attacked culture % first with ships then bombed, but they wiped out all my bombers.

So I have two more questions: Can I directly attackin plans in intercept mode? or do I have to just bomb the city and hope for an attack?

I upgraded to mechnized infantry, so can I really no longer make navy seals?

 

[DroopyTofu]

@Roland. that reminds me of some of my games on an Earth map.

1) I just got off of this game. I'm attacking Egypt (as germany, Greece and Rome are ...) They have 2 L.bowmen in each of their 4ish cities. Do you think a bunch of Riflemen and Calvery could win?

2) you talk about bad odds. once, playing as Greece (Earth Map again) I killed Rome, it's fun to kill Rome, with Warrior vs Warrior. Combat odds: 1.7%... I won... same game, i killed Germany egypt persia and india. i was at least 1 era ahead on all of them. I was playing on an easier level.

3) last, amphibeous landings. I killed the Incans as Spain. I had Marines and Tanks. they had axmen, possibly Musketmen? I rooted them.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Roland: I was semi complaining, but it was a question, I cant imagine how an army of my size was decimated by lower troops. I felt like Xerxes attacking Sparta. I did all your steps in attacking the city, except I attacked culture % first with ships then bombed, but they wiped out all my bombers.

So I have two more questions: Can I directly attackin plans in intercept mode? or do I have to just bomb the city and hope for an attack?

I upgraded to mechnized infantry, so can I really no longer make navy seals?

Hey, Xerxes had inferior quality troops, but many more soldiers and he defeated the 300 Spartans and 1000+ supporting Greek soldiers with his much larger army. The delay was important in the later Greek victory though. But I understand what you mean. You remember the waves of enemies who died on the Spartan wall of hoplites from the movie and had a similar experience with your units.

Fighters and jet fighters set on intercept will intercept bombing missions in range and the range is equal to their own range when bombing or scouting. This leads to a potentially large force of fighters covering the air above each single city. Fighters and jet fighters on intercept won't intercept 'intercept missions' from the enemy against friendly planes. Such a game-rule would lead to a series of intercept the interceptor and intercept the interceptor of the interceptor and so on which would cascade and potentially involve every single fighter on both sides.

So the only way to engage the defending fighters on 'intercept duty' with your own fighters and jet fighters is by bombing a target city or unit and draw out all the defending fighters which are running intercept missions within range of your target. If you bring enough fighters and jet fighters, then you can wear the defender out until all of their defending fighters and jet fighters have been destroyed. Only then should you use bombers and stealth bombers.

It sounds like you didn't fully understand the rules behind interception and this cost you a lot of bombers which were shot down by defending fighters. Then because the target wasn't successfully weakened by successful bombing missions, subsequent land based attacks found full strength or near full strength defenders which severely hurt your invasion force.

If this is the case, then your invasion would have been much more successful if you had first used your fighter/jet fighter force to attack. If you still have a savegame, I would reload. It was just a misunderstanding of the game mechanics.

Also never use wounded airplanes to attack (or any wounded units for that matter). They are far more likely to be killed when they are intercepted. A healer unit within your aircraft carrier force can be very useful.

In BTS (expansion pack), you can still build marines and seals after mechanized infantry is available. This was also true in vanilla civ4 version 1.00. But in one of the patches, or in the expansion pack Warlords, it was temporarily changed so that you couldn't build marines and seals after mechanized infantry is available. It is very easy to check this. If you can upgrade marines and seals to mechanized infantry, then these units will not be able to be constructed after mechanized infantry is available. If you can't upgrade them, then you can still build them after mechanized infantry is available. So check the civilopedia entries of marines and seals to make sure.

Note that with sufficient upgrades, many other units can get the amphibious promotion and then can become much stronger amphibious attackers than marines. And city raider promotion are also still very strong when attacking a city from ships.

@Roland. that reminds me of some of my games on an Earth map.

1) I just got off of this game. I'm attacking Egypt (as germany, Greece and Rome are ...) They have 2 L.bowmen in each of their 4ish cities. Do you think a bunch of Riflemen and Calvery could win?

2) you talk about bad odds. once, playing as Greece (Earth Map again) I killed Rome, it's fun to kill Rome, with Warrior vs Warrior. Combat odds: 1.7%... I won... same game, i killed Germany egypt persia and india. i was at least 1 era ahead on all of them. I was playing on an easier level.

3) last, amphibeous landings. I killed the Incans as Spain. I had Marines and Tanks. they had axmen, possibly Musketmen? I rooted them.

My game where I destroyed this backward civilisation without losses wasn't actually an easy game. Most other civilisations were about equal in the technology race. There was just one somewhat isolated civilisation which I took out after astronomy was available.

Seeing your reports in 2 and 3, you like to beat backward civilisations. I must admit, it can be lots of fun. But I also enjoy a serious war against an equal competitor. In the end, I like to struggle a bit in my games before I win. But if I encounter a backward civilisation in my games, then I will take advantage of the situation.

1) Can riflemen and cavalry win against longbowmen? Serious question? Of course they can. But 10 riflemen won't defeat 100 longbowmen and if you don't bring city raider units and bomb away the cultural defence, then a war could still hurt a lot. City raider cannons are especially useful against defending longbowmen in cities.

In BTS, you could alternatively use spies to cause a revolt in a city (which removes the cultural defence of the city for 1 turn) and then attack the city with flanking upgraded cavalry. These units will often win against longbowmen if there is no cultural defence and if they don't win, they will often retreat. It could give you a much quicker victory than an offensive with siege units. But it does take a significant amount of espionage points and will cause some losses among the cavalry force, especially if the enemy builds many pikeman. Pillaging or sabotaging the iron sources of the enemy is therefore important in such a war effort.

 

[a4phantom]

Hey, Xerxes had inferior quality troops, but many more soldiers and he defeated the 300 Spartans and 1000+ supporting Greek soldiers with his much larger army.

Hey now, the battle statistics speak for themselves, but some of the Spartan quality premium was situational. Leonidas' Hoplites were the best heavy infantry in the world (possibly excluding the Far East), which made them the best for fighting in a narrow pass like Thermopylae, but Persian cavalry were extraordinary. Just out of their element. That's an addendum to what you said, not a corrective


Oh, and to the guy who lost his shiny new army to a bunch of primitives, that usually happens to me when I get overconfident and divide my forces. Until the enemy is well and truly beaten beyond launching a significant counter attack, I think it's usually safest to keep your troops marching together in one Stack of Doom. This ensures the maximum number and diversity of defensive units, and means that all of your air power can always be brought to bear. Also you'll have all your siege units available to tear down city defenses faster. Real life tactics that involve multiple thrusts don't apply at Civ's level of tactics/strategy, mostly because you can't sever supply lines that don't exist. The only usual reasons I can think of to divide your forces are to take out a strategic resource (iron, horses, oil, etc.) or to speed up the capture of cities, but the second is getting greedy if the enemy's still got fight in him.

 

[a4phantom]

Fighters and jet fighters on intercept won't intercept 'intercept missions' from the enemy against friendly planes. Such a game-rule would lead to a series of intercept the interceptor and intercept the interceptor of the interceptor and so on which would cascade and potentially involve every single fighter on both sides.

Which would be awesome.

 

[Stevepac]

It sounds like you didn't fully understand the rules behind interception and this cost you a lot of bombers which were shot down by defending fighters. Then because the target wasn't successfully weakened by successful bombing missions, subsequent land based attacks found full strength or near full strength defenders which severely hurt your invasion force.

If this is the case, then your invasion would have been much more successful if you had first used your fighter/jet fighter force to attack. If you still have a savegame, I would reload. It was just a misunderstanding of the game mechanics.

Problem is I did understand everything you mentioned lol. I couldnt attack with stealths because it was a contintent away and there was no way to get them over their without first taking a city. So all my air attacks were by jet fighter and they were intercepted like mad.

In BTS (expansion pack), you can still build marines and seals after mechanized infantry is available. This was also true in vanilla civ4 version 1.00. But in one of the patches, or in the expansion pack Warlords, it was temporarily changed so that you couldn't build marines and seals after mechanized infantry is available. It is very easy to check this. If you can upgrade marines and seals to mechanized infantry, then these units will not be able to be constructed after mechanized infantry is available. If you can't upgrade them, then you can still build them after mechanized infantry is available. So check the civilopedia entries of marines and seals to make sure.

So can I download a patch to let me build seals and marines after I go mechinized?

 

[Amask]

hi
does anyone know if there is a way to make the game not hide f9 graphs of dead civs if you had sufficient espionage on them when they were destroyed?
or maybe it's bhruic's patch that does this?

 

[Roland Johansen]

Hey now, the battle statistics speak for themselves, but some of the Spartan quality premium was situational. Leonidas' Hoplites were the best heavy infantry in the world (possibly excluding the Far East), which made them the best for fighting in a narrow pass like Thermopylae, but Persian cavalry were extraordinary. Just out of their element. That's an addendum to what you said, not a corrective

Thanks for that information.

Which would be awesome.

Hmm, it would be a bit chaotic, disorganised and probably hard to understand for the player. Most real air battles also weren't across an entire nation, but fairly local, so I don't know if it would increase realism if a local air fight could result in an all out air war. Whether it would improve gameplay is also debatable. You couldn't have a local conflict.

But air combat could be made more interesting. An air superiority mission on a certain area which could be set for each fighter would be fairly interesting. This should also be able to destroy planes (bombers) on the ground.

Problem is I did understand everything you mentioned lol. I couldnt attack with stealths because it was a contintent away and there was no way to get them over their without first taking a city. So all my air attacks were by jet fighter and they were intercepted like mad.

Oh, so you did understand those mechanics and still lost a large part of your troops. Ok, that's tough.

It's not weird that they get intercepted. They will fight it out with the opposing fighter/jet fighter and if you have the technological edge (jet fighter vs fighter) then you're more likely to win most of those dogfights.

I know that in versions of civ4 before BTS, the defending airplanes had an advantage. But I also know that most interceptions weren't lethal. They would just result in damaged airplanes (if the airplanes started the fights healthy). In BTS, most interceptions are lethal to one of the airplanes.

If the enemy has lots of fighters (which could very well be if you were playing so long that you got to future tech 43), then you will lose some jet fighters trying to defeat them.

With jet fighters, it is also very hard to really damage the defenders. You will only hit one defender at a time, so I guess you couldn't weaken them very much before your land invasion. This of course makes the task harder for the land forces as they'll face fairly healthy defenders.

If you could have gotten an open borders treaty with another civilisation on that continent, then you could station your land forces in a border city of that civilisation and also place bombers in that city. That way, you could use bombers and you wouldn't need an amphibious invasion.

Hey, if you want some specific advice on the situation in your game, then you could upload a savegame and I'll take a look at it.

So can I download a patch to let me build seals and marines after I go mechinized?

I just checked. In the latest patched version of vanilla civ4, warlords and BTS, the seal doesn't upgrade to a mechanized infantry. The patch can be acquired by the automatic update function inside the advanced menu of the game. If you got your game from STEAM instead of a shop, then you should also get the patch through STEAM.

 

[buffalo6542]

How do i change the value of GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB from 20 to 0?

 

[Lexicus]

I put this under "noobie" questions because I'm sure it's been asked before.

Is it better to attack with big SoDs for concentration or to spread out your units so artillery can't get them all in one hit?

 

[Stevepac]

Ok so I see everywhere peope say "know how you want to win and research accordingly" but dont you research all techs anyway? so why does it matter?

 

[JujuLautre]

I put this under "noobie" questions because I'm sure it's been asked before.

Is it better to attack with big SoDs for concentration or to spread out your units so artillery can't get them all in one hit?

Usually (I say: usually) better to concentrate your forces, they're stronger this way (it's usually easier to wipe several mini-stacks rather than one huge)

Ok so I see everywhere peope say "know how you want to win and research accordingly" but dont you research all techs anyway? so why does it matter?

Well, let's just divide the world of civ in two: peaceful, and military. In the peaceful world, you want techs to develop your economy. In the military one, you want military techs. In either world, you will at the end get lots of techs from the other, either by trading or by self-research.
But the quickest you get the good techs, the quickest you can make use of them. So you shouldn't research military techs if you're peaceful, you just have no use of them, but would get much use from an economy one.

Obviously this is a very simplified vision, but the idea is here.

A more concrete example: You entered renaissance and want to take down your neighbour. Tech to rifling now! you don't want your opponent to get it before you, of your invasion plans could suffer greatly!

 

[a4phantom]

Thanks for that information.

Gates of Fire is a fantastic book about Thermopylae, and the Greeks and Persians in the time before. Of course now someone will go read it and come back and point out that I remember it incorrectly!

Hmm, it would be a bit chaotic, disorganised and probably hard to understand for the player. Most real air battles also weren't across an entire nation, but fairly local, so I don't know if it would increase realism if a local air fight could result in an all out air war. Whether it would improve gameplay is also debatable. You couldn't have a local conflict.

Yeah, I meant that it would be cool if game play mechanics allowed for a big monster dogfight. Obviously they don't. As for realism, point taken, though with Civ that's always opening a can of worms. Planes do have a bizarrely large radius of operation, but then again the turn based system puts the defender at such a disadvantage in that it's hard to reinforce before a battle's over. Also, in real life I'd do better sending over an aerial armada of bombers in a box formation and fighter escorts to attack your defended cities than I would sending them over one at a time, especially if I had a huge numerical advantage.

 

[MrCynical]

Ok so I see everywhere peope say "know how you want to win and research accordingly" but dont you research all techs anyway? so why does it matter?

While you'll generally end up with most of the techs eventually, you can get them in very different orders depending on the route you take through the tech tree. Going for a military victory? - Then you want to head for techs like Iron working, construction, rifling and so on that give military units, neglecting the more peaceful techs till later. Some approaches also won't end up with every tech - even a space race win doesn't necessarily need every tech. If you're going for a cultural win you could actually stop researching in the middle of the tech tree.

 

[a4phantom]

I put this under "noobie" questions because I'm sure it's been asked before.

Is it better to attack with big SoDs for concentration or to spread out your units so artillery can't get them all in one hit?

Until the enemy is well and truly beaten beyond launching a significant counter attack, I think it's usually safest to keep your troops marching together in one Stack of Doom. This ensures the maximum number and diversity of defensive units, and means that all of your air power can always be brought to bear. Also you'll have all your siege units available to tear down city defenses faster. Real life tactics that involve multiple thrusts don't apply at Civ's level of tactics/strategy, mostly because you can't sever supply lines that don't exist and being surrounded doesn't penalize you. The only usual reasons I can think of to divide your forces are to take out a strategic resource (iron, horses, oil, etc.) or to speed up the capture of cities, but the second is getting greedy if the enemy's still got fight in him. As for suffering from collateral damage, to reduce that you're going to have to divide your forces into very small stacks which will be easily overwhelmed. Remember that in Civ it costs nothing but time to bring even a nearly dead unit up to full strength, but if the unit is actually killed by another attack it needs to be replaced, and all the experience gained by winning the earlier fights is lost. A mega-stack ensures as much as possible that you won't have wounded units doing your fighting because there's always another to step up.

 

[Roland Johansen]

How do i change the value of GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB from 20 to 0?

You go to the directory where you've installed the game and then to:

Assets\XML if you wish to change the game rule in vanilla civilization 4

Warlords\Assets\XML if you wish to change the game rule in warlords

Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML if you wish to change the game rule in BTS

Then you find a file named GlobalDefines.xml
You open this file with an editor like wordpad or something else. You search for the variable GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB and you'll see the following two lines:

<DefineName>GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB</DefineName>
<iDefineIntVal>20</iDefineIntVal>

Changing the 20 into a 0 and saving will remove global warming from the game. It's wise to make a backup of the file before you make any changes so that you can go back to the situation before the change.

If you're making many changes to the game rules, then it's probably better to make a mod out of your changes and leave the basic game alone.

 

[Stevepac]

I just checked. In the latest patched version of vanilla civ4, warlords and BTS, the seal doesn't upgrade to a mechanized infantry. The patch can be acquired by the automatic update function inside the advanced menu of the game. If you got your game from STEAM instead of a shop, then you should also get the patch through STEAM.

I downloaded it...and I guess the fact that I ran Vista made it not work....so everything go bye bye....

Edit: So I reinstalled and went back to download your patch and an error comes up during extract.

Edit 2: So I fixed that, but now I want to do the auto update thing and I'm scared it will all screw up agian. Last time it said something was missing

 

[Roland Johansen]

I downloaded it...and I guess the fact that I ran Vista made it not work....so everything go bye bye....

Edit: So I reinstalled and went back to download your patch and an error comes up during extract.

Edit 2: So I fixed that, but now I want to do the auto update thing and I'm scared it will all screw up agian. Last time it said something was missing

I don't quite understand what went wrong, but if the automatic update method is giving you problems, then you could also try to download the patch from this site.

You can find the various patches here:

Patches