Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

Hi; sorry if this was already asked: can I turn the enemy's last city by culture? It has taken MUCH time and wonders to flip their cities to my cultural borders, but there's always the last city from each rival civilization to claim. Well, is it possible?
Thanks.

 

No.

Camps are a poor late game improvement and without the resource, there is little reason not to consider a better improvement.

Click on the button before the city name.

Sadly, yes. It is completely disabled in a game without diplomatic wins. This is also true for the Apostolic Palace in the expansion pack BTS.

You own SDI isn't related to your issues. Maybe you're targeting an area that also contains some of your own troops or friendly troops. This can even be an invisible spy (although I vaguely recall that the issue of invisible foreign spies blocking nuking was fixed in some patch, maybe BTS-only patch?). Anyway, you're forbidden to target friendly troops.

It is possible.
There is one major prerequisite for a cultural flip: you must control more than 50% of the culture of the centre city tile and that can be tough for a city that has been under the AI's control for such a long time and might be distant from your major cultural centres.

The odds of flipping go up when next to this major prerequisite, you also control several of the tiles immediately adjacent to the centre city tile and when you control significantly more than 50% of the centre city tile. If you have a different state religion than the owner than it helps to spread it to its city. However, military troops in the city (yours or theirs) will suppress any revolt when enough troops are present. This requires a significant number of troops (depending on the cultural pressure) but if the AI places more than 10 units in the city, then this might stop all flipping attempts.

When you have a spy in the city (in vanilla civ4 or warlords) or high espionage points against the civilisation (in BTS), then you can inspect the city to see the odds of a cultural flip. It's shown when you hover the mouse over the culture bar in the city.

Welcome to civfanatics, Altran!

Note that this thread is for asking questions, even questions that have been asked before.

 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Psimon
3. I find the Domestic Advisor very useful for a quick glance at what all my cities or doing. However, double clicking on the city's name gets me nowhere. What I want to do is to immedately go to that city. Even better, go to it and open up the city management screen. How?

if this doesn't work (and I often fail to click properly)
next try hitting the insert button while your cursor is pointing to the city

 

I wonder if we're talking about the same thing here. It seems that you're talking about the city bar visible below cities on the main map while I'm talking about the domestic advisor.

The screenshot below will hopefully clear things up. The buttons are indicated by the red oval line. The buttons take you directly to the city screen. When you're in the city, pressing the middle mouse button will exit the city again (as always) and bring you back to the domestic advisor. This is a modded version of the domestic advisor from the BUG Mod so it may look a bit different, but the functionality is also present in the unmodded game.

 

I wasnt talking about the domestic advisor
i was talking about on the main map, if you click on the city, sometimes that doesnt work
then hitting the <ins> key will bring up the city screen

 

I figured as much (and said so in my post), but it wasn't completely clear that you were talking about the main map. So I created another post to avoid confusion for the original poster Psimon and make clear how to use the domestic advisor.

 

What power ratio should you have with the enemy before you attack assuming that you two are on the same tech page? A.K.A Longbows on trebs, cats on archers etc.

 

Just go to the trading screen. You can see what techs they have that you don't and vice versa.

 

Nonono. The question is what ratio SHOULD I have not where to find it. But thanks!

 

That single value cannot tell you everything about your armies, their armies, the positioning of the units, the various tactical consequences of the terrain in between you, whether both of you are on the same land mass, the tactics that you use and the tactics that they'll use, whether one of you can get allies into the war, what both of you are going to research during the war, whether you're using the BetterAI mod, the production capabilities of your cities, the experience of your troops, the number of great engineers that you've settled and whether you concentrated them or spread them out, whether you're using war-civics, the wonders that you've build, everything...

That single value isn't even a somewhat decent approximation of all of these things. Even the AI uses more than that value to decide whether they can beat an enemy. It's just one of the values that you can use to see how strong the opposition will be, but it's by no means the only thing you should look at.

Any value that I would give you would be misleading. Of all things, it's mostly dependent on your capabilities as a tactician in civ4 combat and I don't know how good you are.

 

I am always glad to read your posts Roland Johansen. They are always helpful and not sarcastic. Thank you, I generally take it for that. A rough gage that is barely, barely accurate.

 

Just how effective is blocking off your opponents via expansion?

 

What do you mean? Like at chokepoints?

 

Yeah like for instance the end of the "boot" in italy, it is cut off.

 

Well, I suppose the only disadvantage to blocking them is that they can still have boats. Sorry I can't answer your question really well.

 

If you have open borders, then they'll prefer city sites at 'their side' of your cut of point except of course if the remaining sites on 'their side' are very poor. If you have closed borders, then there's an extra delay until the AI builds transport ships. But it knows how to do this (at least in the BetterAI mod).

So it can often be a good way to divide the land if you're not too greedy. If you're too greedy, then some AI's will walk through your open borders or sail around your closed borders.

I've also noticed that the AI settles jungles later than I do. I don't think it realises the potential of such land after the jungles have been cut. This means that you can often leave the jungle sites for a while and focus on the rest of the city sites and only later go for the jungle sites that the AI neglected to take.

Too get a good feel for such AI decisions requires playing a few games. I personally never find a reason to close my borders as it is too costly in lost 'foreign trade routes'. However, I always play on huge maps where the settling era is very long and you don't have the luxury to postpone the 'foreign trade routes' that long.

(Sorry that I sounded a bit sarcastic in my previous post. I wanted to make sure that you didn't overvalue the power ratio in your decisions.)

 

I just said that this very post was not sarcastic... I appreciate the quality of your advice is all I am saying.

 

Its situational. Sometimes it is advantageous to attack a more powerful civ. It depends on where their forces are. Also, power rating is not only number of military units.

It is far better to consider strategic issues (what do you hope to gain by war?) and tactical issues (can you get troops where they will be needed faster than your enemy?). As attaker, you benefit from element of suprise and you get to decide where. There are lots of tips in the War Academy in this forum that everyone can benefit from.

 

Now THIS Is an intimidating picture!

Just look at the minimap, and if you look closly, you will see that all the visible cities are settled by the Sumarians!

 

It's a huge map. To be competitive, you'll typically need some 20 cities. I've recently become a bit aggressive, so I'll be at 50+ by now. But that's far from a majority position on such a large map.

It's a no-tech trading game with aggressive AI's so the tech rate is a bit low compared to other games. I don't really like those games where the tech tree is fully developed by 1600AD.

I like huge map games as the game feels more epic. Instead of controlling a handful of cities, I actually think I'm controlling an empire. That's important to my game experience. But it takes a lot of time to play such a game.