a4phantom said:
Also, how does an attacking seige weapon (cat, arty, cannon) administer collateral damage (how is the amount determined, and how are the victims selected)? RJ said that it's independent of how the battle with the defending unit goes.
There's an excellent article about everything related to combat in the strategy articles section of this forum. You can find it
here.
You should scroll down to the collateral damage section to read about how it functions.
I actually think that it is very well written, but it might be a bit technical and does require a certain level of mathematical knowledge. The collateral damage section is however not the most complicated part. If it does prove to be difficult in some sections, then do not hesitate to ask about it.
A short summary (not complete, read the article for complete knowledge).
-You can only do collateral damage when you use the artillery piece to physically attack another unit. So no collateral damage is administered during city bombardments to reduce the defence bonus or when defending with the artillery piece.
-Collateral damage is administered at the start of the battle and totally independant of the result of the battle.
-collateral damage has a maximum of 5, 6 or 7 hits (depending on which unit does the collateral damage, artillery is better than catapults).
-The amount of hits is capped by the amount of defenders -1. If you attack a stack of 3 units, then 1 defends and only 2 collateral damage hits will occur.
-Collateral damage cannot damage units beyond a certain point (depending on the type of unit that does the collateral damage). So a stack of 5 units with 10 out of 100 hitpoints and 2 healthy units will only get 1 hit from collateral damage.
-Each hit typically does about 10 damage, more against weaker units, less against stronger units. The hits occur among the elligible units at random.
-You cannot damage the unit that is defending against the artillery with collateral damage. (This is important as it means that a city defended by 1 strong and 9 weak units is not weakened significantly by the collateral damage. The strong unit will defend and thus be immune to collateral damage and the weak units will be weakened further by collateral damage. The strong unit might get damaged by the direct attack of the artillery, but that is probably not the most efficient way to take it out.)
-defensive bonuses don't improve your resistance versus collateral damage. The unmodified strength value of units is used to determine the collateral damage.
Melhisedek said:
Ok just so I'm not dreaming here, was it possible to see if enemy was military stronger than you in Civ3, even see how many units he had (IIRC you had to have embassy or something over at his place).
Now is there such a feature in Civ4 as well?
In civ3, you could view the makeup of enemy troops by placing a spy in their nation. The expensive spy mission to reveal troop position enabled you to see every enemy unit on the map for 1 turn.
In civ4, you have the info screen (F9) that has an option called Power. This power is closely related to the number and strength of the enemy units. The graph thus should tell you a lot about the relative strength of you and the AI nations. Note that AI nations are more likely to declare war when their Power is greater than yours. The other graphs are usefull too if you try to assess the enemy's strength.
When you have spies, then you can use them to reveal enemy troop positions by entering an enemy city and selecting this option. Again, it's quite expensive and not quite worth it in most cases. Chances of success are better in the capital and the city with the forbidden palace and the city with the Versailles World Wonder.
daifuku said:
1) what do granary and harbour do, in plain english? i don't get the in-game description.
2) my cities are trading from cities in other continents- how are overseas trade routes established?
Your questions were already answered by a4phantom, but I would like to add something to the answers given by him to these two questions.
A granary did give you a half filled food box after growth in civ1, civ2 and civ3. In this version, they changed it slightly to the better. Now the granary stores half the food produced from the moment it was build and this food is added again when the city grows.
So if your city with granary was around for a while (it built the granary when it was size 3 and now is size 5), then it functions exactly as a4pahntom says. At normal speed a size 5 food box contains 30 food and all of it was produced with the granary in effect. So when the city grows from size 5 to 6, then it will start size 6 with 15/32 food (15 being half of 30).
But when the granary has just been build then you will observe a slightly different behaviour. Assume a city size 3 with 24/26 food growing at a speed of 2 food per turn. It finishes the granary. It then produces the final 2 food needed to grow to size 4. It then starts at 1/28 food because only 2 food were produced from the moment that the granary was present in the city.
In civ 1, civ 2 and civ3, people always wanted to finish the granary just before the city grew to profit from the half full food box. Now, the moment of production is not important anymore as the granary starts storing half of the food from the moment of construction. This game rule change thus reduced a little micromanagement and is slightly more logical.
The harbor improves trade route income by 50%. This means that if the city was having a trade route producing 4 commerce and one producing 6 commerce, then after constuction of the harbor, these trade routes would yield 1.5*4=6 commerce and 1.5*6=9 commerce.
Furthermore, the health benefits of clam, fish and crab are increased by 1. So if clam, crab or fish are connected to your trade network or obtained through trading with a foreign nation, then cities with a harbor get 2 health from each of them instead of 1.
The presence of a harbor is not needed for foreign trade routes.
You'll get overseas trade routes from the moment that you have discovered astronomy (you can trade through coastal waters before astronomy). You can see this by hovering your mouse over the astronomy technology in the tech tree. You only get foreign trade routes with nations that you have open borders with. When you use the Mercantalism civic, then you won't get foreign trade routes.
-Foreign trade routes are 2.5 times as profitable as domestic trade routes (this is huge!!!).
-A foreign city can only establish a trade route with 1 of your cities. So when you have open border treaties with many nations, then you'll get more foreign trade routes.
-Foreign trade routes are established with the cities that give the highest trade commerce yield first (your biggest cities preferably with harbors), the lesser cities get the lesser trade routes.
-Trade routes are one-way (counter intuitive, I know). Madrid can have a trade route with New York while New York doesn't have a trade route with Madrid.
and +1
(if state relgion, or any religon if you have free religon)
