Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[VollAufRisiko]

I am playing a game where my wife and I are on a permanent team. We share research, and can gift units easily. We have not been able to figure out how to gift cities or gold though. We can give them to the AI. I assume its possible and we just have not figured it out. Suggestions?

 

[Eco-Friendly]

What does LHC stand for? Its not in the abbreviations thread.

My guess is 'Lonely Hearts Club'.

I haven't been here in a while, but I'm sure someone will be able to tell you what it is.

 

[Eco-Friendly]

2) Beyond the Sword has everything that was in Warlords, right? I keep getting mixed answers about this.

Everything besides the scenarios.

3) Is there any sort of Mod to Civ IV (either vanilla or BtS (which I will be picking up soon)) that lets you either gives you the option to disband cities or use them as trading fodder to other civs? Maybe with Vassals this isn't as big of a deal, but I find myself, especially in smaller maps with lots of civs (which is what I love to play) taking over cities in horrible areas. Either they will be unaccessable to good resources/food tiles, or they will be so far away from my capital that the maintenence costs end up being a big pain. I'm starting to raze more cities, but I don't know... always seems like a waste unless it's a city with like 1-2 pop.

Not as far as I know..
4) To the "warmongers" out there (and even those who just play war when they have to) who is your favorite leader to beat down? I got such a pleasure out of whooping up Qin Huang the other day... oh and I also really love getting tribute from Ghandi XD

Anyone who usually kicks my ass.
Thanks guys!

Answers in BOLD.

 

[DMOC]

LHC is a series started by r_rolo_1 where the players always start isolated or semi-isolated, so it's good practice for isolated starts.

 

[duckstab]

I'm gearing up for a late-game war with HC and a few turns ago he finished the 3 Gorges Dam. Power in all his cities is giving him a significant production edge over me. I don't want to declare war until I've neutralized that advantage.

My thought was, if I find out which city he built the 3GD in I could send a spy in to blow it up, but I can't remember if "Sabotage Buildings" let you bomb wonders. So before I invest the effort and espionage points in that tactic, is it even possible? Or do I just have to start spamming coal plants to catch up?

 

[DMOC]

I'm fairly sure that you can't sabotage wonders. I think it's a similar situation with nukes, where you cannot destroy wonders.

 

[Carwyn]

3) Is there any sort of Mod to Civ IV (either vanilla or BtS (which I will be picking up soon)) that lets you either gives you the option to disband cities or use them as trading fodder to other civs?

A quick note - I noticed the latest version of the Rise of Mankind mod 2.62 is supposed to have included an Abandon city mod too. I haven't tried that yet, not even sure how to use it (it came out yesterday), but that's a possibility.

 

[dalamb]

Trebuchets are very effective at weakening defenders and with several city raider promotions, they will typically be victorious when they attack a city with removed defence bonuses.

So CR promotions are better than Bombard (collateral damage) for "suicide trebs"?

 

[Roland Johansen]

So CR promotions are better than Bombard (collateral damage) for "suicide trebs"?

That would be a too general statement.

Outside of city attack, the barrage promotions are of course better but barrage catapults are in that case even better.

For city attack, it depends on the amount of promotions available to the trebuchets and the promotions for the defenders.

For instance, it's very hard to get enough city raider promotions on your trebuchets to get a good chance against city garrison III longbowmen in a hill based city (still 150% defence bonus after city defence bonuses are bombed). So a city raider II trebuchet has a bad chance of victory against these longbowmen while a barrage II trebuchet will do more collateral damage. Both will likely lose while the barrage inflicts more damage. A city raider III trebuchet has a very high chance of victory against city garrison I longbowmen while barrage III trebuchets have a bad chance of victory against city garrison I longbowmen. The city raider trebuchet will likely be available for another battle while the barrage one will likely be lost.

Usually a city raider x trebuchet has a better than 50% chance of victory against a city garrison x longbowman. Especially after the first trebuchet attack, the following city raider trebuchets get a (far) better than 50% of victory against the wounded longbowmen.

So, it depends. Often AI longbowmen don't have the city garrison III promotion. If you assume that the AI won't have these promotions on their longbowmen, then you can be fairly effective with city raider II trebuchets and very effective with city raider II trebuchets. You can often delay the choice for the promotions until the moment that you will attack the first city.

 

[IAM]

So CR promotions are better than Bombard (collateral damage) for "suicide trebs"?

For a rule of thumb from my limited experience. For city attack I use city raider promotions. I bombarb mostly until the city is at 0% defense then suicide trebs. I don't promote with bombardment ever. For defense I ussually go with catapults with collateral damage.

 

[DMOC]

I don't spend time reducing defenses down to zero until I get cannons. It takes up an extra turn to bombard with trebuchets in which the AI will likely whip units.

 

[Roland Johansen]

I don't spend time reducing defenses down to zero until I get cannons. It takes up an extra turn to bombard with trebuchets in which the AI will likely whip units.

I find it doesn't really matter whether the defender has 3, 5 or 8 defenders in a city. Only the first few have a chance to defeat your trebuchets, the others will be too weakened from collateral damage. When you leave the defences intact though, you will very likely lose several trebuchets to the defending longbowmen.

When your trebuchets survive, they can get to city raider II and III and then you will regularly start capturing cities without losing any units to the defenders.

 

[i8thefat1]

how do u get downloaded units into a game
also now when i start civ4 it wont start and i get the folowing message.
this application has failed to start becauseD3DX9_32.DLL was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem. why did it say that every time now it has never happend before. but i went to multiplayer and it installed a patch. im really worried i just bought this game today

 

[Oddible]

What is "BUG" that seems to be mentioned a lot on these forums? Some mod?

 

[jmas]

Hello gang! Thank you for your help in the past. Two questions:

1) I'm trying to understand when "hammer decay/rot" kicks in. (By the way, I'm playing Vanilla). A post in a game thread said "hammer decay happens equally to all buildings, after 50 turns of not working on it. For units it's 10 turns." Does this mean the decay STARTS after 50 turns of not working on a building or 10 turns of not working on a unit, or that after 50/10 turns there are NO hammers left on that build? And is this dependent on a certain game speed, that is, different numbers of turns would apply for other speeds? 50/10 sounds like a lot of turns to me. I'm playing on Normal right now.

On a side note, I never know whether to trust the number of turns the game displays in the queue once I defer a build (with hammers in it). It shows one number next to the item, then if I mouse-over the item, it often has a different number in the pop-up box. I'm not sure if either one is accurate!

2) I'm playing my first game where I will build an Ironworks. Does it in fact give +50% hammers with iron AND +50% with coal for a total of +100% with both? That is my impression but a Wonder cheat sheet that I downloaded and printed out left me feeling unclear.

Thank you in advance!

 

[DMOC]

What is "BUG" that seems to be mentioned a lot on these forums? Some mod?

Beyond the Sword Unaltered Gameplay

 

[Oddible]

Beyond the Sword Unaltered Gameplay

OK that gets me a little bit closer - at least I have the acronym now... What does it mean exactly?

 

[Lord Parkin]

I am playing a game where my wife and I are on a permanent team. We share research, and can gift units easily. We have not been able to figure out how to gift cities or gold though. We can give them to the AI. I assume its possible and we just have not figured it out. Suggestions?

Easy - just go into diplomacy with each other, the same way you would with the AI. Click what you want to give to your wife, then click "Offer Trade". When it's your wife's turn, the offer will come up in her trade window, and she clicks "Offer Trade" to accept. (They screwed up on the naming in the latter case, but it works anyway. )

Any other problems, feel free to ask me. I frequently play hotseat games on a team with my girlfriend, so I have a lot of experience there.

how do u get downloaded units into a game

You might want to ask that in the Creation and Customization forum.

also now when i start civ4 it wont start and i get the folowing message.
this application has failed to start becauseD3DX9_32.DLL was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem. why did it say that every time now it has never happend before. but i went to multiplayer and it installed a patch. im really worried i just bought this game today

Try asking in the Technical Support forum.

Hello gang! Thank you for your help in the past. Two questions:

1) I'm trying to understand when "hammer decay/rot" kicks in. (By the way, I'm playing Vanilla). A post in a game thread said "hammer decay happens equally to all buildings, after 50 turns of not working on it. For units it's 10 turns." Does this mean the decay STARTS after 50 turns of not working on a building or 10 turns of not working on a unit, or that after 50/10 turns there are NO hammers left on that build?

The decay STARTS at this point. By the way, the 50/10 turns don't have to be consecutive - each individual turn that you don't work on the building/unit adds 1 turn to the total adding up to the 50/10 turns.

And is this dependent on a certain game speed, that is, different numbers of turns would apply for other speeds? 50/10 sounds like a lot of turns to me. I'm playing on Normal right now.

It's universal across the different game speeds. Really, one could argue that it should change - especially for Marathon speed, where 50/10 turns are really not very much in relative terms.

On a side note, I never know whether to trust the number of turns the game displays in the queue once I defer a build (with hammers in it). It shows one number next to the item, then if I mouse-over the item, it often has a different number in the pop-up box. I'm not sure if either one is accurate!

The number in the queue is the number of turns that unit will take to build once you restart that build. The number when you mouse over is the number of turns it would take you to build ANOTHER unit of that type (from scratch) after the current one has been finished. Hope that clears it up.

2) I'm playing my first game where I will build an Ironworks. Does it in fact give +50% hammers with iron AND +50% with coal for a total of +100% with both? That is my impression but a Wonder cheat sheet that I downloaded and printed out left me feeling unclear.

Thank you in advance!

Yes, it's a total of a +100% modifier when you have both iron AND coal. Remember that this doesn't necessarily mean a doubled build speed though, since other modifiers are often present - eg a Forge, Organized Religion and Bureaucracy in your capital gives a +100% boost to hammers, so with the Iron Works this would become a +200% bonus (effectively increasing build speed by 1.5 times, not 2 times).

OK that gets me a little bit closer - at least I have the acronym now... What does it mean exactly?

It's a mod - "BTS Unaltered Gameplay mod". Try checking out this link.

 

[Wulture]

How does choose religions work, and whats the earliest you can win a game? I won my game 1035AD with religious victory, noble

 

[dalamb]

"Choose religions" means that, when you are first to research a religion-granting technology, you get to choose what it's called.

I think the best way to see how fast one can win a game is to check the Hall of Fame.