Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

Hi, I was looking at some mods and this one looks quite sweet http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=234779 . However, is there an "accurate" earth scenario made, perhaps with balanced terrain? (we all know some places on original earth maps can be quite crappy)

 

Often when I see screenshots of ppl playing higher lvl they always seem to go for 100% science slider, despite huge losses ... so my question is .. is this the way to go?

bank up some money boost slider for x amount of turns?

do you really make profit this way? only on high turn techs?

 

This is called "binary research" (having the slider on either 0% or 100%). There are some benefits to it:

1) Good trading opportunities might arise while you're banking up money and thinking of which tech you're going to tech

2) There's a discount for teching techs that some AIs have already, so you have a bigger chance of getting such a discount if you wait

3) If you complete science modifier buildings (Library, Academy, ...) during the banking phase, you get more beakers for your cash than with regular research.

Might be more, can't think of any right now.

 

Silu I didn't ask the question but thanks for that answer. I hadn't really thought about that before. I had figured poping the slider to 100% and taking a loss was more about grabbing Liberalism (etc.) before anyone else. And dropiing it to 0% was to upgrade units.

 

Yeah, that's what I'm after! I don't know where to look for them though.

 

Check the Creation and Customization forum, but you're probably going to have to do some serious hunting to find old mods, or ones that were never upgraded.

 

When will we see more Let's Plays? Not just from TMIT, but they are so helpful and it's boring to watch to the same thing twice. I would like to see a war game.

 

Does a revolt incited by a spy cause a city's defense to go to 0% if said city has Walls (and possibly a Castle)?

I ask because I thought that revolts only affected defense derived from a city's culture level culture. But TMIT and others have posted recently about using revolts in the medieval era (instead of siege bombardment), and I had the impression they meant, INCLUDING against cities with Walls and Castles.

Thanks in advance..

 

Yes, it does. But, unlike the other revolts, the defenders don't drop to half health.

 

^^ Okay, thank you.

 

What's a 'Let's Play'?

 

A series of video walkthroughs of Civilisation IV or any other game for that matter. There are a few Civilisation ones on youtube, TMIT has hosted 3 of them, Dap642 has one, and there are a few random ones.

Look here @ TMITS. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWAessUDwws

 

I can see that this might be a good way to teach new players about the game, although the quality of the teaching experience is very dependent on the quality of the comments by the 'teacher' during his/her game and of course also the quality of the gameplay of the player. ThemeinTeam knows what he's doing so that won't be a problem.

I was aware of such videos only not aware of the name 'Let's Play'. I haven't watched them myself as I'd rather play myself or watch a normal television movie. I've also never read one of the game reports on this site (tried it once but quickly got bored). It's not my cup of tea, I can't help you to other such reports.

 

It's okay! You reply to virtually every post on this thread! I don't blame you!

I was speaking to anyone who wanted to post one.

Btw, I still want to know if we'll be seeing one anytime soon.

 

Getting back into the swing of Civ, just had my first non-domination victory which was also my first attempt at Warlord setting.

I feel I've got diplomacy sorted, not perfect but i have some idea on the basics (and i finally stumbled across the "at a glance" screen which makes things a bucket load easier.

So whilst i'm enjoying the break from the domination win i'm hoping someone could please provide me with a link or 2 regarding a nice guide to Culture wins.
I understand the basics, get 3 cities with Legendary culture (50k as i play on normal speed / large map i think). I think it's the combination of the culture + SE as i'm usually running CE as it's less intensive.

Maybe i should have a few attempts on Cheiftan for a Cult win first.
One other little pocket of info is that i mainly play as Elizabeth of England simply because i watch too much Blackadder and playing as Queenie is just too tempting .

I've waffled a bit there, in short:
I'd appreciate a decent guide/link or 2 to Culture wins / tactics so i can increase my understanding

tyia

 

I was checking out the scenarios for Bts and most of them seem to be "era locked" from the descriptions given. Do, for example, scenarios that start at ancient times go all the way to the future or do they really and at, lets say, end of ancient era????

 

Do mounted units get terrain defense bonus? I know that most don't get any fortification bonus but what about forests and hills?

 

No, they don't. The only defensive bonus they can get is when the enemy attacks them from the other side of a river. I think that Immortals and Conquistadores get defensive bonuses.

 

There are 4 articles with "Cultural Victory" in their titles on this page, plus the "different measure of culture" article. I got a lot out of them. Though you may notice that, as with everything else with Civ, every writer has their own perspective and preferences.

By the way, the only cultural game I've actually played so far was one I played on Chieftain (and it was in Vanilla Civ4, before I installed BTS). It was on a Shuffle map that turned out to be an Archipelago. I enjoyed planning the culture accumulation, but there was really no challenge from the AIs. I don't think there was a single war in the game--certainly no one declared on me, and I didn't start any. Everyone sat around happy as could be on their own mini-continents. And one of the funny things about that was that it was, I believe, to date the only game I've played where Genghis Khan was present, and he was very very close to me! After playing that game, I figured I probably would have done better to have played on Warlord. If you're playing BTS, maybe that makes a difference, others probably know more about the differences in AI behavior than I do. Also, I think being on a landmass with an AI makes them at least a little more likely to pick a fight with you.

As I understand, Elizabeth is good for culture, having both the desirable traits of Philo (to rack up Great Artists, see the articles/threads by jesusin) and Financial (for commerce, a good source of ).

 

I'm not sure. If you keep looking through the forum, you might run into something. I haven't heard of anything myself though.

I'm not sure what sense of the word "accurate" you mean - whether it's having all the land and sea in the right places, or also having all the civs in the right places. Either way, you should realise that Earth maps are notoriously difficult to make such that they're both balanced and accurate. The land forms are simply not balanced: civs starting in the Americas will not have as many neighbours as civs starting in Euro-Asia-Africa, or if they do have as many neighbours then it'll be way more crowded in the Americas. And as for civs starting in their realistic locations, that's pretty much impossible to balance: Europe is always insanely crowded (and thus needs a lot of extra resources to compensate - which means conquering a few European cities makes you very powerful), while the American civs have vast areas of land to themselves to expand to.

I'm afraid that Earth, for better or worse, is always a map where some civs are going to be intrinsically better off than others simply due to their starting locations.

It depends on the scenario, so I really can't be any more specific. As far as I'm aware, some scenarios do indeed halt research at the end of a particular era, while others don't. If you wish to do so, I believe you can mod a "research halt" into a scenario yourself with a little bit of work - check out some of the modding tutorials around the place (sorry I can't be any more specific, I haven't done it myself).