Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Roland Johansen]

thanks very much ju ju, /kwibus, i dont think i have a marathon setting ???

but thanks for the info

Have you installed the latest patch? If I remember correctly, the marathon speed setting was added in a vanilla civ4 patch, but I could be mistaken. Personally, I think the marathon speed is not that well balanced, but if you really love slow games, you might like it anyway.

Most people on this forum play at the epic game speed and about an equal number play at the marathon and normal game speeds. A lower number plays at the quick game speed.

I take it the game still finishes in 2050 ??? , thanks ive only finished 3 games so far , and aborted over 10, due to getting hammered by the AI

It sounds as if you're building too few units. The AI tends to attack the weakest neighbour that it doesn't like. The power graph (F9 menu) shows you the relative strength of the civilisations (NOT the score graph or the game score in the bottom right).

 

[DrewBledsoe]

The amount of total turns in the game has been radically rebalanced for BTS. Previously Epic had almost 2x the turns of normal, but only 1.5 x the build, train and research costs. Marathon had approx 2.5x the turns but 3x the research, build and 2x the train costs.

Now:-

Normal :- 500 turns 1x Research, Build and Train (where train is building units.)
Epic:- 750 turns 1.5x Research, Build and Train.
Marathon:1500 turns 3xResearch,Build, 2x train.

So now they are "true" speed multipliers, with the only disparity being units built at 2/3rds the cost on marathon.

Of course, the game is not linear, and small effects can have large changes (because of its nature of settle , expand, Civ tends to grow almost logarithmically at points, but that doesn't need analysis here)

Anyways, there are the BTS gamespeeds for comparison.


N.B. Sorry I forgot about quick speed, but if you like units becoming obsolete before they can even finish in the build queue, then Im sure thats for you.

 

[Hinka]

thanks very much , roland / drew, BTS? beyond the sword? is that a patch or addon

i assumed the score was a decider, now i realize, i usually only have a small army. but very advanced tech. then about 1000ad i always get hit by a HUGE stack of units.

one gripe i had is that the neghbour civ has hardly any units, yet when wars declared and your giving them a real kicking, a HUGH stack of units arrive from nowhere (usually 2 or 3 seige, and 6 or 7 mele units)

from what ive read on here so far large armys seem a must have, but that affects the tech/development speed,

i love this game, but i get headaches sometimes,

 

[Roland Johansen]

thanks very much , roland / drew, BTS? beyond the sword? is that a patch or addon

The second expansion pack for civ4, it contains the first expansion pack for civ4.

i assumed the score was a decider, now i realize, i usually only have a small army. but very advanced tech. then about 1000ad i always get hit by a HUGE stack of units.

It's clear that you need more units then.

one gripe i had is that the neghbour civ has hardly any units, yet when wars declared and your giving them a real kicking, a HUGH stack of units arrive from nowhere (usually 2 or 3 seige, and 6 or 7 mele units)

Why do you think your neighbour has hardly any units? You can only see the units in the cities that are close to your borders. Many more units can be in the fog of war. The AI will also start building and rushing more units when at war.

10 units isn't a huge stack of units by the way, at least not in my book. I start calling a stack large when they contain at least 30 units. I've once been attacked by a stack of 150 units. To all this, I must add that the AI has improved in the various expansion packs and thus the basic vanilla civ4 AI wasn't that capable at war. I also play on huge maps with the aggressive AI setting which results in the AI building more units.

from what ive read on here so far large armys seem a must have, but that affects the tech/development speed,

You'll have to make sure that you have a good economy then (big cottages in big cities) and build gold enhancing buildings (banks, markets, grocers) to improve the gold output of your civilisation if you're in gold problems. My army is seldom the main source of costs in my empire since a large number of units is free of upkeep.

After you've played a few games, you will be better at war than the AI and so you'll need less units than the AI to beat it.

 

[cabert]

in the early game, 10 units is a big stack.
In 1000 AD, it's a miserable stack.
I usually wage wars with rather small stacks, but it's pretty common for me to have 6 siege, 3 melee, 1 medic in a stack (more melee in BtS where siege cannot take cities)

 

[Michael Alan]

Sounds like you're sending your settler to an area that you have previously explored, but haven't visited in a while. Any tiles that are greyed out are no longer in your line of sight, so you cannot see what happens there.

Next time, try positioning (sentry/fortify) a unit near where you plan to settle ahead of time, or send a unit to patrol the area from time to time.

That's genius! Sounds about right. Thanks for the suggestion too.

 

[Michael Alan]

Do you know which nVIDIA core graphics card might be best for my PC to run Civ 4?

My Hardware specs:

Base processor
Athlon 64 X2 (W) 3800+ 2.0 GHz (dual core)

Chipset
GeForce 6150 LE (nVIDIA 256MB Integrated graphics)

Motherboard
Manufacturer: Asus
Motherboard Name: A8M2N-LA
HP/Compaq motherboard name: NodusM3-GL8E

Memory Installed: 2 GB
Speed supported: PC2-4200 MB/sec

Expansion slots
PCI Three (Two available)
PCI Express x16 One (One available)

Operating System
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2
Microsoft Service Pack 2

Power Supply
300 watts

Monitor
17" LCD screen

And is a card with DirectX10 ability something important to consider?

 

[NSPaintball]

Does any1 have parallel desktop? And if so can i just have the lastest version and just play games right off the back or do i need the PC harddrive with the graphic card and whatnot connected to my Mac? Thanks

 

[Roland Johansen]

Do you know which nVIDIA core graphics card might be best for my PC to run Civ 4?

My Hardware specs:

Base processor
Athlon 64 X2 (W) 3800+ 2.0 GHz (dual core)

Chipset
GeForce 6150 LE (nVIDIA 256MB Integrated graphics)

Motherboard
Manufacturer: Asus
Motherboard Name: A8M2N-LA
HP/Compaq motherboard name: NodusM3-GL8E

Memory Installed: 2 GB
Speed supported: PC2-4200 MB/sec

Expansion slots
PCI Three (Two available)
PCI Express x16 One (One available)

Operating System
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2
Microsoft Service Pack 2

Power Supply
300 watts

Monitor
17" LCD screen

And is a card with DirectX10 ability something important to consider?

First of all, I'm not an expert, but do know a bit about the newest Geforce video cards.

The Asus Geforce EN8800GTX is probably the best video card out there and thus also the best video card to run Civ4, but it is also very expensive. You don't need such a great video card for civ4. Civ4 is not a very demanding game for a graphics card. It does use masses of system memory, but you seem well supplied with that (2GB).

If you want to buy a new Geforce video card that you're going to use for a while, then I'd go for one of the EN8800 series. The EN8800GTX is the best one (and very expensive), the EN8800GTS 640MB is very good (and somewhat less expensive), the EN8800GTS 320MB is pretty good (and fairly expensive). Your power supply is probably too weak to support these cards with enough power. You probably need (at least) 400 Watt.

DirectX10 is only available with Windows Vista and not for Windows XP. I personally won't 'upgrade' to Vista yet as most games run slower when used under Vista and Vista is a memory hog. Also, most games aren't yet created to fully use all of the new abilities of DirectX10, so the graphical enhancements aren't that noticeable.

I would not upgrade to Vista soon, maybe in a year or so when most of the serious bugs have been fixed and performance has improved. And only when you upgrade to Vista will you get the DirectX10 effects of a DirectX10 compatible videocard. The three video cards mentioned above are DirectX10 compatible.

To get more expert like advice, you could go to the Civ4 - Technical Support subforum. My information is mostly from a games magazine that I read and has advice for gamers.

 

[Michael Alan]

I now see that DirectX10 is nothing I am going to worry about accommodating (thanks for that tip).
I am hoping to spend around $100 US or less and keep the rest of my system as is.
Maybe this is the wrong forum. thanks anyway.

 

[Abegweit]

Do you know which nVIDIA core graphics card might be best for my PC to run Civ 4?

I have played civ4 on many different graphics cards. It runs fine on: NVidia 6800/7800/8400 and ATI 1300. It is acceptable on ATI 200 and 300 and pretty good on 800. Warning: NVidia plays lots of games with their numbers. Do not expect a card to be more powerful just because the number is bigger. This being said, anything 6600 or higher should be quite sufficient. Civ IV is not especially demanding compared to other modern games.

DirectX is not necessary. IIRC, it requires 9.0C. Certainly not 10.

 

[Samson]

DirectX10 is only available with Windows Vista and not for Windows XP. I personally won't 'upgrade' to Vista yet as most games run slower when used under Vista and Vista is a memory hog. Also, most games aren't yet created to fully use all of the new abilities of DirectX10, so the graphical enhancements aren't that noticeable.

I would not upgrade to Vista soon, maybe in a year or so when most of the serious bugs have been fixed and performance has improved. And only when you upgrade to Vista will you get the DirectX10 effects of a DirectX10 compatible videocard. The three video cards mentioned above are DirectX10 compatible.

I really do not know what I am talking about, but I am supprised you do not rate the importance of "DirectX10 compatible". I was under the impresion that it meant that you had a number of very usefull hardware fuctions built into the card. If Micro$oft do not realease DX10 for XP and lots of people do not convert to Vista then surely games developers are going to start developing in open GL that has gicen access to these functions for some time.

If I was going toget a new video card I would get a DX10 compatable one,

 

[ori]

Does any1 have parallel desktop? And if so can i just have the lastest version and just play games right off the back or do i need the PC harddrive with the graphic card and whatnot connected to my Mac? Thanks

You should probably ask this question in the Mac Subforum, I suspect there are more people with experience with this there than here

 

[Roland Johansen]

I really do not know what I am talking about, but I am supprised you do not rate the importance of "DirectX10 compatible". I was under the impresion that it meant that you had a number of very usefull hardware fuctions built into the card. If Micro$oft do not realease DX10 for XP and lots of people do not convert to Vista then surely games developers are going to start developing in open GL that has gicen access to these functions for some time.

If I was going toget a new video card I would get a DX10 compatable one,

As not many gamers have upgraded to Windows Vista and the DirectX10 cards are very expensive at the moment (also because Nvidia is momentarily not getting serious competition from ATI in the top segment of the market), not many games are being developed which use all of the features of DirectX10. I think that a gaming computer with Windows Vista and a DirectX10 compatible video card momentarily is a computer build for using features in games of the future, not games that are being created now. And since a gaming computer is only able to play new games for say 3 maybe 4 years before it becomes too slow, that is not such a healthy investment.

Note that the newest Nvidia cards are not only DirectX10 compatible, but also extremely fast. So that would be a reason to get them.

Note that I'm not an expert in this field, so don't take my words as the 'absolute truth' or something.

 

[pyl16349]

I am new to installing mods. I have downloaded a few that I want to try. Specifically Vietnam and WWI. I have extracted them into the Mod folder and can see them when I select "load a Mod". After the game restarts in the mod mode, I do not see either the Vietnam or WWI under the play a scenario option. what am I doing wrong? thanks.

 

[ori]

does the install path look like:
...\program files\firaxis games\sid meier's civilization\mods\vietnam\ ? or does it look different?

Edit: and Welcome to CFC

 

[pyl16349]

Yes, it looks like that

 

[ori]

Yes, it looks like that

then it should load (in fact it should even be there even if it does not work, if you put an empty folder like this in your mods section it should show up). Next thing: did you install it there and try to open it in Warlords or Bts?

 

[pyl16349]

It appears to load because it shows the mod name in the upper righthand corner of the screen, however it does not show as a available "scenario" so I'm not sure how to begin playing it. any ideas?

 

[pyl16349]

then it should load (in fact it should even be there even if it does not work, if you put an empty folder like this in your mods section it should show up). Next thing: did you install it there and try to open it in Warlords or Bts?

It appears to open correctly because the mod name is visible in the upper righthand corner of the screen. However I'm not sure how to start the mod to actually play it because it is not visible in the "scenario" window.