Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Sisiutil]

Most will say don't watch the AI cause they mess up. I disagree. I would play a game with teams Have 2 teams with 3 players each. So you'll have two AI's on your team. You can also world builder in a dozen great spys to use as scouts to observe your team and the other team. Good luck.

I like this plan provided it's combined with the Better AI mod. Not that it raises the AI to genius level, but without it, the AI's stupidity is, at times, astonishing (such as the way it will endlessly replace a cottage with a farm, then with a cottage, then with a farm...).

 

[Abegweit]

Is there a way to watch the computer play? When I'm trying to get better at other games I often watch replays of more experienced players to get a feel for "tried and true" skills and techniques. I thought it might be helpful for my early game micromanagement if I could watch the comp play or something similar. I know TMIT has some youtube vids and I've watched a few of them now and they have helped, but tbh he plays so quickly early game that I have some difficulty following things, especially tile improvements and build queues-- it doesn't help that I can't really read the finer details like science slider or unit upgrades, or events, etc.

I like watching TMIT but it's true that he plays fast, There's also another guy who put out a youtube in which he goes through his thought processes in detail (Emperor level I think). It's pretty good but I can't seem to find it. Maybe someone else can. As I recall, TMIT got the idea to do this from watching this.

 

[MSGT John Drew]

Ahh.. I just got back from CivIII retirement and got some questions with my first game on CIV Noble.

1. Does the 'Search this Thread' function work? It's taking forever, but maybe because this thread is 750+ pages long. Hope I don't bog down the server.

2. Re: Overlapping tiles (see SS)
How can I get Pasargadae to use the shared tile I've highlighted? because I can't. I read in some thread that a city owns tiles that are 2 tiles directly NSEW of it. Could that be it?

3. Re: Gifting Mechanics
Where can I find quantitative numbers for some of the game's mechanics (particularly gifting and effect to the AI). I remember in CivIII that there was a trick where you can continue gifting 10g for 10 turns and get a good boost in civ relations. In my current C4 (vanilla) game, I gifted a substantially complete map to the civilizations and I did note some '+1' effects to some of the civs, and just one '-1' to "you traded with our enemies".

4. re: The Chop
Why is it that sometimes a forest chop will deliver 250+ shields, and other times only 90+ shields?

Thanks all! If there's one thing to be said about Civfanatics, is that they're all a helpful bunch.

I find CIV to be... fascinating.

---CivIII Philibuster Awardee---

 

[Silu]

All the below for BtS, AFAIK most of it should apply to Vanilla as well (Side note: get BtS! )

1. Does the 'Search this Thread' function work? It's taking forever, but maybe because this thread is 750+ pages long. Hope I don't bog down the server.

It kinda works, but it's a bit sketchy sometimes, both in speed and recall 750 pages is nothing compared to searching whole forums, which shouldn't take that long either.

2. Re: Overlapping tiles (see SS)
How can I get Pasargadae to use the shared tile I've highlighted? because I can't. I read in some thread that a city owns tiles that are 2 tiles directly NSEW of it. Could that be it?

Go in Pasargadae's city screen and click that tile. There's no hard rules about a tile "belonging" to a city, just to a Civ.

3. Re: Gifting Mechanics
Where can I find quantitative numbers for some of the game's mechanics (particularly gifting and effect to the AI). I remember in CivIII that there was a trick where you can continue gifting 10g for 10 turns and get a good boost in civ relations. In my current C4 (vanilla) game, I gifted a substantially complete map to the civilizations and I did note some '+1' effects to some of the civs, and just one '-1' to "you traded with our enemies".

When gifting, everything is broken down to a single value calculated for the gifted item, which is then added to the "fairness bank", which controls how much the AIs like you due to gifts. Approximate values:

Gold ~ 1 point per gold
Techs ~ 1.5 points per beaker
Units = 0.2 points per hammer
Map = gold value (varies in regard to how complete your map is compared to theirs, usually 0-200, more in extreme cases)
Cities ~ 1000 - a lot (+ separate city liberation bonus for "liberated" cities)

This fairness bank total is then divided by the turns you have known an AI (x10). So on the turn you meet someone gifting 20g is enough for +4 (the maximum), but if you've known them for 200 turns it takes relatively much to impress them You might notice gifting units is basically useless.

You got different results for gifting your map around because you have known different Civs for a different amount of turns, and they had different completion on their existing maps.

4. re: The Chop
Why is it that sometimes a forest chop will deliver 250+ shields, and other times only 90+ shields?

Chopping inside a city's BFC will always yield 20 or 30 hammers (60, 90 on Marathon) depending if you have Mathematics or not. This amount gets the bonus production modifiers as normal, so if you are buliding Angkor Wat with Stone (+100%), have a Forge(+25%) and are in Organized Religion with the state religion present (+25%), with Math, a BFC chop will give 75 (225 on Marathon) hammers. Chopping farther away gives less base hammers per chop.

 

[MSGT John Drew]

Ooooh! I thought shaded tiles in City Mode meant they can't be worked. Lolz my mistake.

Thanks a lot Silu. Concise and fassst! Nice! XD

 

[CivilPatrick]

Hello,

Anyone knows why I can't my units and the enemy units in the Beyond the Sword?

 

[Tadzio]

Obviously, you can't because you accidentally the whole thing.

 

[Sisiutil]

1. Does the 'Search this Thread' function work? It's taking forever, but maybe because this thread is 750+ pages long. Hope I don't bog down the server.

An addendum to Silu's answer: Don't bother searching, just ask your question, even if you think it's been asked before. That's what this thread is for.

 

[ori]

Hello,

Anyone knows why I can't my units and the enemy units in the Beyond the Sword?

Welcome to CFC

I assume you cannot see them? in that case one of the buttons above the minimap toggles bare map mode on and off - try that

 

[dirtyparrot]

Raise your display resolution

I tried that unfortunately it didn't work. Now reading my previous post a second time, it might not be completely clear what I was trying to say.

I want to go from my stack (the unit icons) being displayed 9 per line in this manner (x for individual units):

x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x

To my stack being displayed like this:

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x

 

[MSGT John Drew]

Thanks! Here's another if you guys wouldn't mind.

re: Culture Bombing
I read about how the Great Artist's culture bomb is spread out over time and that each tile now has a culture score for all civs so culture bombing doesn't work the way it did in C3 where the cultural boundary expansion is immediate.

So I culture bomb a newly captured city but it didn't work and the city's cultural border eventually shrinks to a 1x5 vertical strip. I waited a long while to no avail - and ages later the opposing civ gets wiped. So I never get to see what would have happened had that gone for much longer.

Now I culture bomb another newly captured city but the cultural border is still pressed up to my city tile. How long would I have to wait for things to 'improve'? (if it ever will).

This has left me perplexed really. Again thanks!

 

[David7]

Thanks! Here's another if you guys wouldn't mind.

re: Culture Bombing
I read about how the Great Artist's culture bomb is spread out over time and that each tile now has a culture score for all civs so culture bombing doesn't work the way it did in C3 where the cultural boundary expansion is immediate.

So I culture bomb a newly captured city but it didn't work and the city's cultural border eventually shrinks to a 1x5 vertical strip. I waited a long while to no avail - and ages later the opposing civ gets wiped. So I never get to see what would have happened had that gone for much longer.

Now I culture bomb another newly captured city but the cultural border is still pressed up to my city tile. How long would I have to wait for things to 'improve'? (if it ever will).

This has left me perplexed really. Again thanks!

I'm not really sure how it worked in Civ 3, but in Civ 4 there are two up front things the Great Artist does to boost culture. One, the one that is usually called a culture bomb, gives an instant +4000 boost to culture. This has no long term affect though. The other option, settling him, does provide a spread out benefit of a smaller amount of culture per turn (and money). So what I'm saying is that your culture won't spread in the long term after a culture bomb. The settling may be what you have heard of though.




But for a question of my own,
I had a weird situation in a game I was playing today. I was playing a regular game, but for some reason my capital would not grow. It was stuck at I believe 4 population. I checked, and my happiness and health levels were still positive. I was making positive amounts of food per turn, and the city screen even said I was due to grow in 1 turn. However, I waited several turns and couldn't grow. I even tried whipping the city, and then it wouldn't grow back to the next size. Is this just some obscure bug, or did I miss something?

 

[Ghpstage]

I was making positive amounts of food per turn, and the city screen even said I was due to grow in 1 turn. However, I waited several turns and couldn't grow.

Sounds like you hit the 'Avoid Growth' button in the city management tab (under rushbuy etc), probably the worst automation feature in the game

 

[Sisiutil]

Sounds like you hit the 'Avoid Growth' button in the city management tab (under rushbuy etc), probably the worst automation feature in the game

I like that option and use it a lot, but yes, you have to remember it's on, and remember to turn it off!

 

[David7]

Sounds like you hit the 'Avoid Growth' button in the city management tab (under rushbuy etc), probably the worst automation feature in the game

Oh, so it stops you growing even if you make excess food?

 

[kcd_swede]

Oh, so it stops you growing even if you make excess food?

Yes. Click this tab and the city will not grow. Ever. Or at least until you unclick it. The city can still shrink, though.

I use the feature rarely, but find it convenient now and then - when I have high food city at happy cap in a big empire (where micromanagement becomes prohibittive from a time standpoint) and can't use the slavery civic to reduce population, nor hire any more specialists. Or I really need to work those floodplain cottages but am stuck at the happy cap and the growth would push me over. Its a waste of food that should be used in some way, so I'm never happy when I have to use the "Avoid city growth" function.

And I use it so rarely, I almost always forget to unclick it even after securing another source of happiness or whatever, and don't unclick it until I start getting irritated at why city X is stagnated.

Its a feature I love to hate, or hate to love. Not sure which.

 

[henrebotha]

Obviously, you can't because you accidentally the whole thing.

Hahaha, you beat me to it.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Chopping inside a city's BFC will always yield 20 or 30 hammers (60, 90 on Marathon) depending if you have Mathematics or not. This amount gets the bonus production modifiers as normal, so if you are buliding Angkor Wat with Stone (+100%), have a Forge(+25%) and are in Organized Religion with the state religion present (+25%), with Math, a BFC chop will give 75 (225 on Marathon) hammers. Chopping farther away gives less base hammers per chop.

I would also add that he may need to patch the game. Judging from the screenshot, it looks like he's playing regular Civ4 with no expansions (no expansion leaders). If he hasn't patched Civ4, then as I recall in the very early versions forests would give variable chop yields. Firaxis later patched them to give constant yields, because some of the random high yields were overpowered... plus it kind of sucked when you randomly got a weak yield after the effort of chopping.

 

[cml_nine]

Am running Bts but have just noticed that it does not require the disc anymore to play. Not bothered either way but does anyone know if anything loads from the disc during the game?

 

[vicentiko]

I have a question, probably moronic, but here it goes, i lost my old civilization complete box, whatever, doesnt matter really...

But now i want to play again

if i buy just the box of Civ IV beyond the sword can i play the game? or do i need, Civ IV + BtS expansion?

thx