Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

I think if you stress food, hammer and commerce all at once, then the governor will put all citizens at work even in the most extreme plots at the end. Yes, even tundras without forest. I haven't tested it yet, but Sirian (a developper of the game) mentioned that stuff in a non-related post.

In a score game where manipulating tons of cities, this could a nice trick.

 

Hi, how do i set all cities to place all the population into work tiles automatically? or do i have to do each city individually? This seems crazy! In civ 3 specialists were not created as a standard and only became specialists if the woked tiles were all used or you manually took population out to perform a specialist function.

 

Can anyone else help/advise re the above specialist allocation issue? Tachywaxon, ive set commerce,hammers & food all together in several cities and they are still auto allocating specilists even though there are still vacant city tiles to be worked. Cant believe this has not been discussed here before? With how anal some people are when it comes to micro management im sure there must be an explanation?

 

The best way I've found is just emphasize food as almost all tiles a city can work produces at least some food.
Altough I think the only solution to guarantee the city governor won't assign any specialist is to not build the buildings that lets you assign them ^^

 

Hi Saru, thanks for your imput, its very poor for the Civ guys, the hallmark of the Civ series is the control it gives you. It would just ruin the game if you avoided buildings that gave you slots though, it becomes very useful to assign specialists at times especially when all city tiles are in use, just want the ability to control them, very very strange!

 

I think it was just a joke. You cant always avoid all the buildings that gives you specialist slots. More to add - I have seen cases, where a CITIZEN is added - this is even not a full specialist. There was some trick I read somewhere - something like click automate citizens and then manually un-assign all the specialists or I dont know how it was. TMIT was the one who was explaining it. Maybe he can tell - post a new thread in the Strategy subforum - he reads there often.

 

If you have a few living vassals, and eliminate everyone else, do you win via conquest?

Also is there any possible way to kill your own vassals? Do you just have to hope they break it off?

 

Yes.

There may be some tricks I'm unaware of, but I think you have to wait for them to break it off - or work to satisfy the conditions where they'd break free (e.g. reducing your population... obviously not too desirable). Generally I avoid taking vassals in my games, as I prefer not to lock areas of land potentially unusable to my civ in the future.

 

Does vassal land count toward domination victory?

Also why does everybody use cuirassier over cavalry? Is the immune to first strike that good? I know cavalry is 20% more expensive, but its also 25% more powerful and has higher chance to withdraw too so those hammers should last longer.

 

Yes, but only 50% of it.

I think it's Cuirassier's bonus versus melee units that make them attractive to many people. If you get to them early, that bonus pretty much negates the only counter units your opponents can field against them (Pikemen, Macemen or, even worse, Spearmen). The only real counter to Cuirassiers is Riflemen, and you can romp around with Cuirassiers for a long time before you encounter one of those.

 

So I haven't actuallywon yet but I have abandoned a number of games as hopelessly won. Am up to monarch and might play this one to some victory condition but I see a snag. Eqypt has a ton of culture so on a huge marathon how does the legendary city scale up?

I am asking what exactly is the victory condition.

 

What are the parameters for allowable squares to drop paratroopers? I was playing around with them and I couldn't figure out any pattern as to which places were allowed and which weren't. Is there a maximum range, only certain terrain types?

 

@MisterCooper On marathon the culture needed for a city to become legendary is 150,000, unless you have no espionage enabled too in which case its 300,000.

Theres a max range and they cannot be dropped on impassbile terrain (mountains) or on an enemy unit or city.
The para range is shaped a lot like a BFC in that its a square with the corners cut off only its much larger.
The range 5 applies in straight lines in the cardinal directions, at straight diagonals its just 3.

 

^^Better said, the shape of the drop zone is the same as a BFC of the same cardinal size

Oh, and just to be complete, you can't paradrop in fogged areas

 

...and scouting with an air unit will reveal the fog until the end of the turn, which would enable the drop.

 

What is the BUG mod?

 

BtS (Beyond the Sword) Unaltered Gameplay. Probably the most popular Civ IV mod around here, it doesn't change the rules or anything, just puts a lot of things in the interface and controls that make the game easier and more fun to play. You can get it here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=274636

 

Is it possible to set the windowed mode as default for BTS? I have tried to tick off fulscreen mode and save the profile but everytime I restart my computer and start playing the full-screen-mode is on

 

Windowed mode works for me under XP and a reduced version of Win7 on a laptop. Which OS are you using?

 

How do I rename individual units in basic Civ IV/BTS?

I apologize if this was already answered, but all my searches ended up with renaming cities, not units.