In my current game, several AI's have become vassals of other AI's. Hate that, as it makes picking opponents to conquer more difficutl. With some of them, when I mouse over their name, I see the conditions of emancipation (x% of land, etc.). With others, I don't. Anyone know why?
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Lord Parkin
aka emperor
Although, I should point out that even for non-commerce cities, Libraries can be very useful at a certain point in some games (mainly pre-BTS, due to the Monument's obsoletion date) where they are the only cultural building available to expand borders.
But yes, in most cases there is very little point in building a Library in a city with little or no commerce output.
Illusion13
King
Do irrigated farms output more than unirrigated farms? By biology, unirrigated farmed plains only outputted 2 food....
Lord Parkin
aka emperor
Yes. Irrigated farms yield +1 food in addition to the original tile yield; so an irrigated farm will always (both pre- and post-Biology) give you 1 more food than an unirrigated farm.
Lord Parkin
aka emperor
In most games with more than a few players, yes, it is probably a bad strategy. This is because by refusing to open your borders with anyone you are shooting yourself in the back by denying your civ valuable income from foreign trade routes (this can get as high as hundreds of gold per turn in the later game). It is always useful to have at least one or two allies with whom you have open borders, even if solely for the economic benefit. In most of my games, I will sign open borders with every civ that I possibly can (without making relations too strained), since this maximises my possible income.
As for foreign missionaries, you will actually hardly ever see them in the early game, and even in the later game when you do see them, they hardly matter. Missionaries are not actually "nasty"; they really give little or no benefit to your opponent (perhaps 1 gold per turn if they own a shrine), but allow you much larger benefits (ability to construct monasteries and temples, +1 happiness, culture, and potentially hammer or experience benefits in that city with appropriate civics).
And you can concentrate on military with or without Open Borders; in fact with Open Borders you are probably better off, since with the extra economical help you will get to the important military technologies earlier, and will be able to save more money for upgrades.
The only time where it might not be so wise to sign Open Borders would be in a multiplayer game with human players, since humans may use the Open Borders to spy on your civ and prepare for an invasion. But in single player games with AI, there are no such potential penalties for signing Open Borders.
Hope that helps you somewhat.
Roland Johansen
Deity
If you have a problem with a certain mod, then the best place to get help getting the mod to work is the thread where you found the mod. The mod creator should know how the mod works.
JTMacc99
That's a paddlin'
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2008
- Messages
- 900
Thank you for the pointers on city specialization! With that term, I was able to find a couple of very useful articles on the subject in the strategy area.
The kick in the pants about it is that I fired up a new game, (after finishing my last one with a space race victory 6 turns from the end,) and on a Large map got an absolutely kick ass starting location for the city specialization concept. London is right in the middle of a winding river with hills (one with gold), flood plains, and grassland. The expansion area (my corner of the continent) has more river, lots of grassland and many luxury resources like silk, dye, and spices. I've also got a copper, an iron, a horse, and an elephant in the zone. THE PROBLEM is my neighbors are just about the worst I could have drawn for my first attempt at a new empire building strategy.
I'm in the southeast corner. (There is still a little room for expantion going towards the ocean in the southeast.) Directly to my west along the southern coast is Monty. Above him, and therefore to my WNW is Tokagawa. Slightly above him and wrapping around the top of me is Peter. The Russians haven't epanded too far around the North of me, because it is 80% Jungle.
All three are devout Buddhists, which is a problem with me being the founder and follower of Christianity. Monty has already declared war on me, which has been a real pain in the ass fending off, but other than lost time building workers, another settler, and a granary or two, no harm was done. He lost troops at about a 5-1 ratio before asking for peace.
Other than the war, the other problem with these three is that NONE of them will trade with me at this point, and even when Peter was a Christian for a while, he insisted on lopsided trades. Japan has not yet made a single technology available. This whole mess has dropped me from first to last place in the last 40 turns.
I just connected my elephants, and I picked up construction a couple turns ago and am about 15 turns from Civil Service. At this point I am seriously considering building a couple more improvements and one more city well out of the line of fire and then going full out war mode. I'm not sure if there is any chance of building peacefully until I get my riflemen.
Speaking of that, I think I also need to crank out a few monks and send them off to Russia to get his heathen ass back in my fold. I think I'd rather have him on my side given the timing of his special unit in relation to my special unit, not to mention that of the the three, he's the only one I have any hope of living with until the end of time.
Thoughts on how I should handle this situation? Should I just scrap this game and start a new one to refine my city specializaton techniques, or should I see this out with the war mongering as just a natural addition to what I'm trying to do anyway?
The kick in the pants about it is that I fired up a new game, (after finishing my last one with a space race victory 6 turns from the end,) and on a Large map got an absolutely kick ass starting location for the city specialization concept. London is right in the middle of a winding river with hills (one with gold), flood plains, and grassland. The expansion area (my corner of the continent) has more river, lots of grassland and many luxury resources like silk, dye, and spices. I've also got a copper, an iron, a horse, and an elephant in the zone. THE PROBLEM is my neighbors are just about the worst I could have drawn for my first attempt at a new empire building strategy.
I'm in the southeast corner. (There is still a little room for expantion going towards the ocean in the southeast.) Directly to my west along the southern coast is Monty. Above him, and therefore to my WNW is Tokagawa. Slightly above him and wrapping around the top of me is Peter. The Russians haven't epanded too far around the North of me, because it is 80% Jungle.
All three are devout Buddhists, which is a problem with me being the founder and follower of Christianity. Monty has already declared war on me, which has been a real pain in the ass fending off, but other than lost time building workers, another settler, and a granary or two, no harm was done. He lost troops at about a 5-1 ratio before asking for peace.
Other than the war, the other problem with these three is that NONE of them will trade with me at this point, and even when Peter was a Christian for a while, he insisted on lopsided trades. Japan has not yet made a single technology available. This whole mess has dropped me from first to last place in the last 40 turns.
I just connected my elephants, and I picked up construction a couple turns ago and am about 15 turns from Civil Service. At this point I am seriously considering building a couple more improvements and one more city well out of the line of fire and then going full out war mode. I'm not sure if there is any chance of building peacefully until I get my riflemen.
Speaking of that, I think I also need to crank out a few monks and send them off to Russia to get his heathen ass back in my fold. I think I'd rather have him on my side given the timing of his special unit in relation to my special unit, not to mention that of the the three, he's the only one I have any hope of living with until the end of time.
Thoughts on how I should handle this situation? Should I just scrap this game and start a new one to refine my city specializaton techniques, or should I see this out with the war mongering as just a natural addition to what I'm trying to do anyway?
Roland Johansen
Deity
In your case, I would have switched to Buddhism a long time ago. That way, you could have had more friendly neighbours with less risk of war and you could have traded with them. I would have spread their religion through my cities to get the religion civic bonus in all of my cities. I would still get the money from the holy shrine of Christianity in my cities if I would spread the religion.
Since Christianity is a religion which is available a lot later than Buddhism, I don't know why you actually switched to that religion at all. You must have realised the diplomatic repercussions.
Every game offers a different challenge and if your strategy can't handle these circumstances, then you know that you'll have to refine your strategy a bit. It might be a good learning experience. However, if you dislike continuing this specific game, then you should just do so. Don't let anyone tell you whether you should continue this game.
When you're close to aggressive neighbours (especially when you're using the aggressive AI setting), then you should build a few extra units to match their power (see Power graph, F9 screen). You might want to focus an extra city on unit construction. If you can become friends with them (by picking the same state religion and not irritating them too much and in general be diplomatic) and if you appear strong enough, then they might start a war among themselves. In that case, you can watch the war and pick sides after a few turns and attack a weakened neighbour. That would be a low-cost conquest.
Diplomacy is very important in this game and especially in such a starting position, you do want to get some friends.
JTMacc99
That's a paddlin'
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2008
- Messages
- 900
Indeed I did, but I didn't switch religion, it was simply the first to appear in one of my cities. Buddhism has STILL not spread to my cities. I'm not sure how this works, but it is possible that the steadfast refusal for open borders from the two original Buddhists (Japan and Aztecs) probably had something to do with it.
As far as I know, I can't switch until at least one city has it, right? When the Aztec war started, Russia was also Christian, so it was two and two and it didn't seem too bad to have it that way. Once I was in war mode, I really wanted the extra experience points for my units, so even if I could have swapped, I don't think I would have.
At this point, as I mentioned, I was hoping to convert Peter back, but if I get a Buddhist city, I will take your advice and change over myself. I doubt it will keep the Aztecs from another attack, but it should open up some opportunities with the other two (for now.)
As for diplomacy, I've been researching things that are generally useful for war making, and even if technology trading was possible, I'm pretty sure I don't want to give any of these other civs construction, iron working, and anything else on the path towards civil service. It's a real challenge here. I'm even thinking about making a quick line to get me a caravel and seek out the rest of the civs.
Ahhh, I finally find a good newbie topic to ask all my embarrassing questions.
I recently got Beyond the Sword and was really excited to play my first map. I got a huge map, continents, 16 nations, Prince difficulty (I believe, it is an upper middle skill), quick speed, and started in the future era (I have not found a way to edit the units, upgrades, and tech tree to my liking enough to play through from Ancient era). However, to my great dismay, I found that settlers cost a whopping 322 shields to make, more than some national wonders. This shocks me because, after playing on multiple maps with multiple factions in multiple types of maps, multiple number of players, and multiple tech eras, I discover that the price for settlers ranges from 64 to 330 shields and no matter what I do, I cannot figure what is up. This is on a completely unaltered set and I even went in and tried to lower the cost in the XTL files and cannot get any reaction. I saved my scenario and over multiple times on two days, have gotten a price range from 300, 303, 312, and 322 shields and it stays constant during the game, not varying through from turn to turn. I initially thought it was due to some settings I had and replicated these settings and got a different cost. I then thought it was due to number of cities (they give you three settlers) and I looked, that is not it because the price stays the same as I plant those cities.
I am completely at a loss as to what to do. I played about 50 turns and nobody else has built a city (checked World Builder). I would consider just going with it, but I am concerned that the incredibly high price would mess up the AI's strategy and make the game too easy for me. What on earth is causing this and how do I fix it? I did not have this problem on the original Civ IV when I played the exact same style of map and settings. Is this a bug or am I just missing a factor?
I recently got Beyond the Sword and was really excited to play my first map. I got a huge map, continents, 16 nations, Prince difficulty (I believe, it is an upper middle skill), quick speed, and started in the future era (I have not found a way to edit the units, upgrades, and tech tree to my liking enough to play through from Ancient era). However, to my great dismay, I found that settlers cost a whopping 322 shields to make, more than some national wonders. This shocks me because, after playing on multiple maps with multiple factions in multiple types of maps, multiple number of players, and multiple tech eras, I discover that the price for settlers ranges from 64 to 330 shields and no matter what I do, I cannot figure what is up. This is on a completely unaltered set and I even went in and tried to lower the cost in the XTL files and cannot get any reaction. I saved my scenario and over multiple times on two days, have gotten a price range from 300, 303, 312, and 322 shields and it stays constant during the game, not varying through from turn to turn. I initially thought it was due to some settings I had and replicated these settings and got a different cost. I then thought it was due to number of cities (they give you three settlers) and I looked, that is not it because the price stays the same as I plant those cities.
I am completely at a loss as to what to do. I played about 50 turns and nobody else has built a city (checked World Builder). I would consider just going with it, but I am concerned that the incredibly high price would mess up the AI's strategy and make the game too easy for me. What on earth is causing this and how do I fix it? I did not have this problem on the original Civ IV when I played the exact same style of map and settings. Is this a bug or am I just missing a factor?
Roland Johansen
Deity
You are right that open borders increase the speed at which religions spread. Religions can also only spread naturally to cities that don't have a religion yet, so if you've spread Christianity to all of your cities, then you can forget about a natural spread of Buddhism to one of your cities.
I always try to get good relations with civilizations at the start of the game. It's often very hard to change bad relations to good relations. For instance, once you have bad relations, you usually can't get open borders treaties and thus you can't get missionaries inside of their cities and thus you can't convert them. So you're stuck with different religions and that means bad relations. (You could use a spy to force a religion change upon them if they have a single christian city, but they're likely to convert back.)
At the very first moment that you meet a civilization, it's usually not that hard to get an open borders treaty except when you already have different religions or if you're a friend of their worst enemy (have a treaty with their worst enemy). When you open your borders to other civilizations, you will get a trade bonus inside your cities and over some time a diplomacy bonus will appear which will grow to +2 over time. These improved relations allow you to trade technologies and resources with them which will be good for your empire and further improve relations. If you have a city that has a foreign trade route with one of their cities with a religion, then this religion will quickly jump to your city which will allow you to get the same religion which gives a huge diplomatic bonus.
However, if you keep borders closed at the start of the game, then the other civilizations will open border among each other and become friends. They will trade technologies and resources and their religions will spread to each others lands. If you also refuse a few of their demands, then you will quickly be the most hated civilization on the continent and wars will erupt against you.
So a few small diplomatic decisions at the very start of the game can have a big influence on the remainder of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if you could replay the game and get excellent relations with your neighbours if that was your primary goal in that game. Of course, it often isn't the primary goal in the game and thus relations may suffer because you try to reach some other goal.
It will sometimes cost you something to get good relations. If someone demands an important technology from you at the very start of the game shortly after contact has been made, then it is very tempting to send them away with an insult. However, if you take into account all of the repercussions of this denial, you might find out that it is cheaper to give them a technology than to be the most hated civilization on the continent. It's very hard to oversee the consequences of some of the diplomatic decisions that you make at the start of the game. It's not a purely deterministic result; some of the effects are slightly random as there are some random factors in the AI decision making in order to make their decisions less predictable. There are also lots of uncertainties at the start of the game. Often you don't know all of the civilizations on your continent and you don't know which religions have spread in their cities. You don't know how the relations will form between them. If they start hating each other, then it's better to choose a side than to try to be friends with all of them. With some practise, you will be able to control your relations with other civilizations and become the puppet master of the world.
I don't have any experience with starting in an advanced era of development. Maybe this will increase the cost of settlers. I do know that the cost of everything is strongly related to the game speed setting. If you start a game at marathon speed, then the units will cost double the normal value and the buildings and technologies triple the normal value. You also have triple the normal number of game turns in such a game, so it balances out (somewhat).
Maybe someone familiar with starting in an advanced era could help you better.
You didn't mod the game, did you? You could have inadvertently changed something.
I did not mod the game at all. I had changed some of the movement points and attack strengths, but did not touch settlers. Restoring the original file was the first thing I did and it had no effect. I did not use the advanced start option, merely started in the modern era without any of the hyped up point buying stuff.
Roland Johansen
Deity
As I said, I had never started the game in an advanced era (I wasn't talking about the advanced start position options). So I just checked out how it worked. Apparently a lot of changes were made to the game whenever you start in an advanced era of the game. You only mentioned the cost of settlers. That is actually the only thing that costs more in the future era. Almost everything seems to cost a lot less, units, buildings, city growth, etc. You also start with several settlers, workers and units and any city that is founded starts with multiple buildings inside the cities and at size 5.
I don't know why all of these changes were made to the advanced era starts, but I guess that this was done to create a new sort of balance in the game. I could see things going out of control when all costs would remain the same as in an ancient era setup.
By the way, I think the game is nowhere as well balanced with a future era start as with an ancient era start. The game is mainly designed for the ancient era start and any radical changes to the game setup are naturally going to be less balanced. And naturally, the AI will be less capable to handle it. It might work for multiplayer though. Humans are more flexible and adaptable.
I looked around a bit in the file system and it seems that many of the game-era changes are located in the file CIV4EraInfos.xml. But I didn't recognise the increased settler cost in this file, just several of the other changes due to starting era.
@Mesousa, I am playing quick speed.
@Roland, thank you, at least you found somewhere for me to start.
The reason why I go into the modern era is because I don't like building up things beyond military. I played straight through from 4000 BC to 2050 with a completely normal game on default settings when I got CivIV and found several problems I would edit. I don't like promotion problems (why is explorer still around in the modern era???) and I don't like that no land unit goes more than 2 squares, a really big bummer considering cavalry go as fast as modern armor??? No logic in that. Plus, I like planes and modern ships and want to be able to build an army without having to always upgrade it. My army on the last map I finished was at about 800 modern armor, 400 mech infantry and an additional 500 other units including air and navy. My enemies had similar armies, so it was pretty balanced and they fought well (mass air bombing saved me).
I knew that cities start at 5 and got tons of buildings, but that happened in Civ IV, I am wondering why they mess up the settlers like that and am surprised nobody has mentioned it before.
@Roland, thank you, at least you found somewhere for me to start.
The reason why I go into the modern era is because I don't like building up things beyond military. I played straight through from 4000 BC to 2050 with a completely normal game on default settings when I got CivIV and found several problems I would edit. I don't like promotion problems (why is explorer still around in the modern era???) and I don't like that no land unit goes more than 2 squares, a really big bummer considering cavalry go as fast as modern armor??? No logic in that. Plus, I like planes and modern ships and want to be able to build an army without having to always upgrade it. My army on the last map I finished was at about 800 modern armor, 400 mech infantry and an additional 500 other units including air and navy. My enemies had similar armies, so it was pretty balanced and they fought well (mass air bombing saved me).
I knew that cities start at 5 and got tons of buildings, but that happened in Civ IV, I am wondering why they mess up the settlers like that and am surprised nobody has mentioned it before.
Roland Johansen
Deity
I'm not sure if they messed up the settlers. I think it's a thought through choice of the game designers. In a normal game of civIV where you start in the ancient age, the 150 hammer settler is extremely expensive and takes a long time to build. If the cost would be the same in a future start game, then the expansion period would be very short.
In a future era start, the cities also start with many trade routes and a courthouse and at size 5. This means that a city can easily make enough profit to maintain itself from the moment it is constructed. So in contrast to a normal ancient age start, there is nothing stopping a rapid expansion strategy.
The only way to keep expansion somewhat interesting is by dramatically increasing the cost of settlers. If you realise that you get a size 5 city with some 10 buildings, then the cost of the settler is actually fairly cheap compared to the normal ancient era settler cost.
The reason that civilization IV doesn't have 5 move modern armor (or something like that) is that this would result in 1 turn wars. At present the cultural borders result in wars where it takes time to conquer a nation and this keeps wars interesting and costly. Single turn wars would probably be bad for gameplay. Even 3 move land units are hard to stop with cultural borders. They can often reach the enemy city in the turn that they start from your own territory. And once you conquer the enemy city, the rest of your modern armor could use much of the enemies railroad squares.
I can imagine that 3 move land units might still work for modern armor without seriously unbalancing gameplay, but 4 or more would probably result in boring gameplay.
By the way, I noticed that in your description of the gameplay which you like, you're purposefully removing huge chunks of the game until you're left with a fairly straightforward wargame. Wouldn't you enjoy a pure wargame more than civilization IV? Such games often pay more attention to the balance and realism of war which seems to be something that you're looking for.
I play many war games and RTS's, but Civ is much more advanced in that it has diplomacy, trade, larger scale movement and tons of other stuff. I have played the full scale unedited stuff, but I play this way because I want to have the big war style game. I have won on every style except culture (though I could have on one if I left that checked). I guess I play this for the same reason people play WWII mods and other stuff. On Civ III, modern armor had three movement, I think, either that or four and it worked out well. here, even when you do conquer an enemy city, often times, the culture from the other cities remains and I can rarely gain any land or open squares. I also once played a super giant world map with all the CivIII Conquests teams from start in the ancient era to way post modern and, due to the size of the map, had about 300 cities and 2000 modern armor, 1000 mech infantry, and just tons of other stuff. LOL, each turn took about 10 minutes to let the computer cycle through it was so big, but that was almost entirely unedited (I think I removed global warming).
I did not know that settlers were that expensive to begin with (150). I don't remember them being that way in the original Civ IV and I did absolutely no editing whatsoever in my games. If they are that much, then why did I get several times when they were 63 and why does it constantly change every time I load up the game again? That is what is mystifying me, not that it is high, but that it is changing.
I did not know that settlers were that expensive to begin with (150). I don't remember them being that way in the original Civ IV and I did absolutely no editing whatsoever in my games. If they are that much, then why did I get several times when they were 63 and why does it constantly change every time I load up the game again? That is what is mystifying me, not that it is high, but that it is changing.
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