Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

And don't forget about unit upgrade, buying resources, maps, maintaining a large military in foreign territory.

 

I don't understand what you mean. Can you explain this better (not that this isn't good, but I'm not very good at following complex thoughts without much experience) and give an example?

 

The Universal Suffrage civic allows you to spend gold to finish production in cities.

You spend X% of your per-turn gold income on research, culture, espionage. and the rest is gold. Default is 100% research, but if you have 0 gold and negative gold per turn (GPT) the game automatically changes it down so that you aren't losing money. You can change it with

THIS^^^ +/- button. Sorry if it's fuzzy, it's in the upper right corner of the screen.
if you have a large gold stockpile, you can afford to not take money out of your research for longer.

 

Not very safe. The level of damage they cause (equal to a nuke missile) and that they can cause the global warming mechanic to start is absurd and the chance of it happening are much higher than acceptable. I have seen AIs effectively wipe themselves from the game by building them in culture cities .
Even without the meltdown risk they aren't worth building, coal comes much earlier and is cheaper.

 

Thanks... So I stick better to Coal plants.. With 40+ cities chance is much much bigger than with 6-12... And with Sushi food is not a problem at all....

 

On many civIV screenshots i see there is some added stuff compared to my regular BTS. Such as great general and great person progress bar as well as an icon that looks like some kind of green dragon, right next to the game log icon. What tweak/mod is this ?

 

Probably BUG (BTS Unaltered Gameplay) just visual tweaks

 

@ajsciri4

This is the civics screen, and on the right I'm in universal suffrage. You can see that it says I can spend gold to finish production in a city.



This is a picture of a city, with two turns left in the security bureau. Note how it says "Rush security bureau for 660 gold" on the right and the orange thing in the city bar, next to the slavery thing, is highlighted.



This is a picture of the same city, and as you can see, my gold is down 660 gold, but I have the bureau in one turn



In the second thing I was talking about, you can see I have CoL in 4 turns, I'm at 60% science, and I'm making 1 gold per turn(GPT).



Now, I'm running the slider at 100%, I'm losing 49 GPT, but I have CoL in three turns.



There are much better uses of these tricks than the examples(i.e your economy's so bad researching barely does anything, so you save money, then burn the gold for alphabet to trade techs/build research), but this is how it's done.

 

eh, I should have used more screenshots in my explanation..

 

When I have tips turned on, and I have a worker near a city some of the squares will be circled, indicating the game recommends that I improve that square When I move the work to that square, one or more improvement options are usually highlights, indicating I should make that improvement. Simple enough. But sometimes, the game will circle a square that's already improved. When I move a worker there, none of the options are highlighted. It's like it wants me to change the improvement there, but doesn't offer a suggest as to what. Ideas?

 

That seems to be a quirk of the software. If a tile has already been improved, it doesn't highlight recommended improvements at all.

The main thing to keep in mind, however, is that the game rarely recommends the best tile improvements, mainly because the AI has no understanding of city specialization. I do keep the tile recommendations on just in case I miss an obvious improvement. But especially for non-resource tiles, I improve based upon the city's specialization, not what the AI thinks I should do on that turn.

 

Thanks. As I'm learning the game, I'm figuring out that all the tips rarely fit in with my goals or needs at the time. Just curious why it was highlighting squares that are already improved.

 

My understanding is that the AI only "thinks" on a per-turn basis--it has not long-term planning capability. Thus, it might think that a tile with a farm would be better off with a cottage. Or vice-versa. I think later patches/expansion packs improved on it, but I remember some games where I'd see the AI's workers changing a tile from a cottage to a farm and back again, over and over throughout the game...

 

Yeah so far ive learned to "trust" these automatic recommendations only so much. They can often clue you into something obvious and i keep them on just in case but many times these recommendations do not make sense in the larger picture.

 

Hi all,I have civ4 complete with warlords&bts.I can play bts without the cd in the drive but not civ4 or warlords is there a patch so that i could play civ4 & warlords without the cd?

 

My version of civ 4 complete allows me to run all three(vanilla, warlords, and BTS), without the disc in. Warlords/vanilla final patches are 2.08/1.74 respectively. Check to make sure that they're at these patches.

 

thanks gracchus,how do i check what patch im up to,also did your version play without cd right out of the box without patching up?

 

You have to be patched to version 3.19 to be able to play the game without the disc. Unless you downloaded the game digitally, I think you'll only be patched to v. 3.13.

 

Go to options, then "About this build".

 

AFAIK only BTS has a patch where you don't need the cd, vanilla + warlords come fully patched but you need the cd for them I'm afraid...