Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Simple Simon]

click once were you want to start the river - then click on each tile you want it to connect next. Its a pain and the rivers are always only on one side of the tile (I forget which) so you have to test a bit, but definitely go one tile at a time

thanks - but that's not really what I wanted! They zig and zag and I get loads of river islands As you said: a pain! I was hoping there was a more detailed control through keys.

 

[ori]

none that I know of

 

[a4phantom]

Has anyone played Ethiopia? How are those Oramos?

 

[DrewBledsoe]

Has anyone played Ethiopia? How are those Oramos?

Excellent with those first strikes, however unless you play marathon, they suffer from the normal Musketman problem ie...

Ethiopian King:Excellent, I see we have finally trained that Elite Division of Oromo Warriors, we should send them into battle at once...
Advisor: Yes erm, but erm,well..
EK: Come on man, spit it out
A: Well, we have just discovered a new technology called Rifling, which will make them immediately obsolete..
EKGrrr...
A: Please sire, not The Guards!
EK:Hmm...no, roll me one of those Hemp cigarettes you've told me about, and let's chill instead
A: (phew) at once my lord

 

[a4phantom]

Yeah, I was thinking I could build a million Oramos and then have Drill4 rifles, infantry and mech infantry for the rest of the game. Also, according to wiki the chosen leader of Ethiopia was a murderous psycho, Bob Marley couldn't have chilled with him. But I wouldn't play with him anyway, Creative makes the Stele even weaker. Thanks for the answer.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

Yeah, I was thinking I could build a million Oramos and then have Drill4 rifles, infantry and mech infantry for the rest of the game. Also, according to wiki the chosen leader of Ethiopia was a murderous psycho, Bob Marley couldn't have chilled with him. But I wouldn't play with him anyway, Creative makes the Stele even weaker. Thanks for the answer.

Yes the Oromos upgrade and keep the first strike promotions, so if you can build (and use in anger) enough of them, they are well worth the upgrade cost.

Quick thought on Ethiopia, in the standard BTS game Ethiopia are Creative/Organized aren't they? This I always thought an excellent combo. As a huge map/marathon/highish lvls player, Creative is massive, in that it allows you to place cities in their optimum long term site. By this I mean that often that 2nd city Copper/Horses needs a border pop, and Creative means this is only 15 turns away. Without Creative, in may often be necessary to compromise the city location to take in the military resource before the huge unending stream of barbs arrive.
Organized, is I personally think the 2nd best trait after Financial. The higher the difficulty lvl, the better it gets..So Ethiopia aren't at all a bad nation to play by any means

 

[IanHarris]

Hi. I'm trying to play Civ 4 on Vista. It installs fine and starts up fine, but the image flickers quite violently with random colours and doubled images etc. I've tried updating my graphic card drivers (its an SiS Mirage 3), usuff etc)ing DirectX 10, installing and trying to run Civ 4 with the compatibility options (ie, running in windows XP sp2, disabling visual stuff etc). I've also tried the 1.74 patch, but then I get 'Error loading shader libraries' when I try to load it. So, is there anything I could do, or will I have to endure epiliepsy inducing flashing?

cheers.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Hi. I'm trying to play Civ 4 on Vista. It installs fine and starts up fine, but the image flickers quite violently with random colours and doubled images etc. I've tried updating my graphic card drivers (its an SiS Mirage 3), usuff etc)ing DirectX 10, installing and trying to run Civ 4 with the compatibility options (ie, running in windows XP sp2, disabling visual stuff etc). I've also tried the 1.74 patch, but then I get 'Error loading shader libraries' when I try to load it. So, is there anything I could do, or will I have to endure epiliepsy inducing flashing?

cheers.

Welcome to civfanatics!

I advise you to visit the Technical Support forum to see if people there can give you some help with these issues.

Good luck.

 

[IanHarris]

Thanks! I'll go there immediately.

 

[a4phantom]

Yes the Oromos upgrade and keep the first strike promotions, so if you can build (and use in anger) enough of them, they are well worth the upgrade cost.

Quick thought on Ethiopia, in the standard BTS game Ethiopia are Creative/Organized aren't they? This I always thought an excellent combo. As a huge map/marathon/highish lvls player, Creative is massive, in that it allows you to place cities in their optimum long term site. By this I mean that often that 2nd city Copper/Horses needs a border pop, and Creative means this is only 15 turns away. Without Creative, in may often be necessary to compromise the city location to take in the military resource before the huge unending stream of barbs arrive.
Organized, is I personally think the 2nd best trait after Financial. The higher the difficulty lvl, the better it gets..So Ethiopia aren't at all a bad nation to play by any means

You're right, and as a committed warmonger both of those traits are very handy for me (although not as *fun* as Aggressive or Charismatic). My problem with Ethiopia's Creative trait is that it makes the Stele fairly useless, since the point of being Creative is to not have to build Monuments/Stonehenge.
And I can more easily change the leader (and thus traits) than the Unique Building.

 

[Crowqueen]

You're right, and as a committed warmonger both of those traits are very handy for me (although not as *fun* as Aggressive or Charismatic). My problem with Ethiopia's Creative trait is that it makes the Stele fairly useless, since the point of being Creative is to not have to build Monuments/Stonehenge.
And I can more easily change the leader (and thus traits) than the Unique Building.

It is a problem indeed. I like playing Ethiopia, and I usually end up building SH anyway to keep it out of enemy hands (if I can do so at a lower level than you do), but you're right. Perhaps the Oromos make up for it though if in the long term you are going to have a lot of upgraded riflemen etc.?

Anyway, Creative is my third favourite trait after Financial and Organized. It makes anyone quite good at land-grab though I prefer to play Willem (Fin/Cre) or Zara (Org/Cre) than anyone else with it because of the way I play with revenue-generating strategies. I've tried Hatshepsut (Spi/Cre) numerous times (you'd have thought no anarchy would be good), though I quite like Gilgamesh (Cre/Pro) because his UB gives me early courthouses which makes up for the lack of a financial trait and because I am concentrating on the Oracle early on too.

 

[Piergiorgio]

Hi everyone!
i've a problem: when i downoload pathes of civ4 standard, warlords and BtS i cannot install them.
I have CIVILIZATION IV COMPLETE; maybe there are the game's patches good for my edition somewhere in the net.
If someone knows, please help! Without the patches I cannot play FfH II !!!!!!!!![/B][/B]

 

[ori]

welcome to cfc
complete is patched to date for civ4 and warlords - the bts patch 3.17 should install though...

 

[MustangRockstar]

Was a big fan of Civ 1 & 2 growing up, but the series kind of lost me with Civ 3.

Lately, I've had an itch to get back into the series. Had a few questions.

1. What are people's thoughts on Civ Chronicles? I'd like to get Civ 4 and replace my aging copies of 1 and 2. Is it worth it?

2. (An off-shoot of the first question) Are the games updated to run on XP. I've had some conflicting info on this.

Thanks.

 

[Sisiutil]

Was a big fan of Civ 1 & 2 growing up, but the series kind of lost me with Civ 3.

Lately, I've had an itch to get back into the series. Had a few questions.

1. What are people's thoughts on Civ Chronicles? I'd like to get Civ 4 and replace my aging copies of 1 and 2. Is it worth it?

2. (An off-shoot of the first question) Are the games updated to run on XP. I've had some conflicting info on this.

Thanks.

First off, welcome to CFC!

1. Civ Chronicles includes all Civ games and all their expansion packs with the significant exception of the expansion packs for Civ IV. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you'd still want to play I or II after getting into IV, and you just said you didn't like III, so why would you want to buy it and its expansion packs again? I haven't looked back since I started with IV--unless you're a dedicated gamer I'd be surprised if you do either.

So I'd recommend just getting Civ IV and the Beyond the Sword expansion pack. The latter includes all the Warlords content/features except the Warlords scenarios.

2. Civ IV ran just fine for me on my Windows XP box. It runs just fine on my new Vista machine as well. Just check the game tech requirements carefully. If you have a XP machine that's a little older, an upgrade or two may be necessary. Civ IV uses a 3D engine that can be very demanding--not as demanding as a first-person shooter, but demanding nonetheless. (I had to upgrade both my RAM and my video card on my old XP computer to get it working acceptably.)

 

[Roland Johansen]

Was a big fan of Civ 1 & 2 growing up, but the series kind of lost me with Civ 3.

Lately, I've had an itch to get back into the series. Had a few questions.

1. What are people's thoughts on Civ Chronicles? I'd like to get Civ 4 and replace my aging copies of 1 and 2. Is it worth it?

2. (An off-shoot of the first question) Are the games updated to run on XP. I've had some conflicting info on this.

Thanks.

First off, welcome to CFC!

1. Civ Chronicles includes all Civ games and all their expansion packs with the significant exception of the expansion packs for Civ IV. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you'd still want to play I or II after getting into IV, and you just said you didn't like III, so why would you want to buy it and its expansion packs again? I haven't looked back since I started with IV--unless you're a dedicated gamer I'd be surprised if you do either.

So I'd recommend just getting Civ IV and the Beyond the Sword expansion pack. The latter includes all the Warlords content/features except the Warlords scenarios.

2. Civ IV ran just fine for me on my Windows XP box. It runs just fine on my new Vista machine as well. Just check the game tech requirements carefully. If you have a XP machine that's a little older, an upgrade or two may be necessary. Civ IV uses a 3D engine that can be very demanding--not as demanding as a first-person shooter, but demanding nonetheless. (I had to upgrade both my RAM and my video card on my old XP computer to get it working acceptably.)

If any convincing is necessary: I fully agree with Sisiutil.

If you like playing on large and huge maps, then make sure that your XP-machine has quite a lot of system memory. That's the bottleneck on these maps (preferably 1.5-2 MB of memory at least for huge maps). If you like playing smaller maps, then it's not such an issue and the recommended system requirements are quite ok.

And also: Welcome to civfanatics!

 

[MustangRockstar]

Thanks for the warm welcome guys!

I've been looking to get back into Civ for a while. When I was younger, I could play those games all day and never get bored. Admitedly, I'm not really a huge shoot em kind of gamer and my tastes have always drifted towards more strategic games.

As for Civ Chronicles, part of me is interested in getting the series to

A. Go back and play the older versions (which I actually do, and my old CD's are getting a bit worn)

B. Possibly go back and give Civ 3 another chance. Though, I liked what I played of the Civ 4 demo.

 

[Lord Parkin]

I believe that you can pick up Civ1 and possibly Civ2 on the net for free (legally) now, so in my opinion those aren't worth paying for - especially if you still have working CD's. As for Civ3, if you didn't like it the first time around, then there's not a lot of guarantee that you'll like it the next time around. And for Civ4, you're really missing out on so much by not having the expansion packs. Beyond the Sword in particular is a wonderful expansion pack, and adds a lot to the core game. Of course you could buy Beyond the Sword as well as the Civ Chronicles pack, but then that'd be a lot of money compared to just buying Civ4 + BTS.

In the end though, it's your money and your decision. If you think that you'll enjoy having brand new CD's for all of the civilization games, then by all means go ahead. Regardless though, I still recommend that you get Beyond the Sword either way.

 

[a4phantom]

Will Civ1 and Civ2 play properly on XP or Vista if you're using one of those?

 

[DrewBledsoe]

Will Civ1 and Civ2 play properly on XP or Vista if you're using one of those?

I'm not 100% sure, but I think they were both DOS based games....I still play Colonization occasionally, using a free DOS Emulator I picked up some long while back...they would probably work fine in conjunction with that. You can find the Emulator here