Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Ginger_Ale]

Definitely trade away excess resources for resources you don't have, unless you plan on establishing a corporation (Beyond the Sword only) that uses those resources. For example, if you have 5 fish resources, it's a good idea to use those to trade for other health/happiness resources if you don't plan on founding Sid's Sushi, which uses seafood resources and rice to give a food and culture benefit. You don't get additional health for multiple resources.

 

[Endure]

Well I don't play BTS cause I'm on a mac so I'm limited to warlords...

So always trade away resources unless you'll take a relationship hit with your "allies" from trading with their enemies or to deny someone you plan on having a war with a strategic resource (like horses or oil)?

 

[Ginger_Ale]

Okay, maybe not always (nitpicker ). The point is that you don't get any benefit from multiple resources.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Is there a formula for the amount of gold you'll get from a captured/razed city? From experience, the amount seems to depend on (a) the age of the city (how long it has been held by that particular civ), (b) the population of the city, and possibly (c) the buildings that the city contains in it. The age of the city seems to be by far the biggest influence, followed by the population, and then possibly followed by some of the buildings (I'm not sure about that one).

Does anyone else know of a more specific formula or of factors I'm missing in the calculation? Possibly the culture of the city is another variable.

 

[TheRealBitter]

Alright so I have been playign single player a lot but I never tried playing multiplayer. So I tried to play an internet game, and it says to log in, fair enough. So I type in my login info, click the LOGIN button, and nothing happens. Is something wrong? Did I miss something?

Also, can someone explain how multiplayer works? Can I team up with someone for an awesome civ game? Or do I have to face other people in a match?
Thanks!




Bitter.

 

[Padma]

I can't tell you how to log in, since I don't play MP, but I can say that games can be set up to play as teams, or free-for-all, or whatever you want.

 

[smalltimer]

Question about grouping units. Once I conquer and take over a city, obviously I want to leave a defender or two and move the rest of the stack to the next target. The problem is I don't know how to easily, say, select 2 of ten units to stay and have the remaing 8 travel en masse to the next city. What's the easiest way to do that?

 

[Crowqueen]

You can't do it the way you want to, unfortunately. Break the stack apart and do it manually. .

 

[Endure]

Question about grouping units. Once I conquer and take over a city, obviously I want to leave a defender or two and move the rest of the stack to the next target. The problem is I don't know how to easily, say, select 2 of ten units to stay and have the remaing 8 travel en masse to the next city. What's the easiest way to do that?

You can actually do it quite easily.

If you have your stack that's all grouped up, hold down the shift key and click the units you want to take out of the stack. They'll be left out and you can move on with the rest of your stack.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Alright so I have been playign single player a lot but I never tried playing multiplayer. So I tried to play an internet game, and it says to log in, fair enough. So I type in my login info, click the LOGIN button, and nothing happens. Is something wrong? Did I miss something?

Also, can someone explain how multiplayer works? Can I team up with someone for an awesome civ game? Or do I have to face other people in a match?
Thanks!




Bitter.

For your first question, you should try giving it some time. It usually takes around 10 seconds to log into Gamespy from the "Internet Games" screen. Failing that, if it still doesn't work then you may need to change your firewall settings to allow you to play civilization - first of all, make sure that the game is "unblocked", and open the specific port (I think it's port 2054). I'm not sure on the exact specifics of how to do that, sorry, but I know a few people who do know so I could ask them if you wanted.

For your second question, yes, you can team up with people against other people or against AI if you so wish. However, it's often difficult to find the right kind of player for this kind of game in the games lobby once you login. From my own experience, many of the players there are after short, snappy (timed on the fastest timer), early war games. Also, often many are not good sports and will quit as soon as they are losing or as soon as they get bored. So I'd advise first checking around the multiplayer forums here and making a post if you want to find a person interested in playing a nice long "team" game, since people on the Civfanatics forum tend to be a lot more reliable in sticking to a game for the long haul (as opposed to looking for a 20-minute "blitz" game).

Hope that helps.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Question about grouping units. Once I conquer and take over a city, obviously I want to leave a defender or two and move the rest of the stack to the next target. The problem is I don't know how to easily, say, select 2 of ten units to stay and have the remaing 8 travel en masse to the next city. What's the easiest way to do that?

First of all: Welcome to civfanatics!

There are several grouping (stacking) commands in civilization IV.

Alt-click a unit: This will select every unit on that tile into a single stack
CTRL-click a unit: This will select every unit of that type on that tile into a single stack
Shift-click a unit while a stack of units is active: If this unit wasn't part of a the active stack, then it will now be added to the stack. If this unit was part of the active stack, then it will now be removed from that stack.

So in this case, you want to Alt - select all of your units on that plot and then shift-click two units to remove them from the stack.

Is there a formula for the amount of gold you'll get from a captured/razed city? From experience, the amount seems to depend on (a) the age of the city (how long it has been held by that particular civ), (b) the population of the city, and possibly (c) the buildings that the city contains in it. The age of the city seems to be by far the biggest influence, followed by the population, and then possibly followed by some of the buildings (I'm not sure about that one).

Does anyone else know of a more specific formula or of factors I'm missing in the calculation? Possibly the culture of the city is another variable.

You're really not a newbie, Lord Parkin and your questions therefore are typically very hard to answer. You might have some luck asking this in strategy and tips. Some players there are willing to look into the game code. It worked for me a short time ago when I wondered how the game mechanics behind the creation (spawning) of barbarian cities work. (Krikkitone was nice enough to look into the code for me.) You might want to do a search first as someone may have researched it before.

 

[TheRealBitter]

For your first question, you should try giving it some time. It usually takes around 10 seconds to log into Gamespy from the "Internet Games" screen. Failing that, if it still doesn't work then you may need to change your firewall settings to allow you to play civilization - first of all, make sure that the game is "unblocked", and open the specific port (I think it's port 2054). I'm not sure on the exact specifics of how to do that, sorry, but I know a few people who do know so I could ask them if you wanted.

For your second question, yes, you can team up with people against other people or against AI if you so wish. However, it's often difficult to find the right kind of player for this kind of game in the games lobby once you login. From my own experience, many of the players there are after short, snappy (timed on the fastest timer), early war games. Also, often many are not good sports and will quit as soon as they are losing or as soon as they get bored. So I'd advise first checking around the multiplayer forums here and making a post if you want to find a person interested in playing a nice long "team" game, since people on the Civfanatics forum tend to be a lot more reliable in sticking to a game for the long haul (as opposed to looking for a 20-minute "blitz" game).

Hope that helps.

I tried waiting, no luck. I checked my firewall, and I already had it set to allow anything from Civ4 so I don't think that is the problem. Not sure what else could cause this to happen.



Bitter.

 

[Lord Parkin]

You're really not a newbie, Lord Parkin and your questions therefore are typically very hard to answer. You might have some luck asking this in strategy and tips. Some players there are willing to look into the game code. It worked for me a short time ago when I wondered how the game mechanics behind the creation (spawning) of barbarian cities work. (Krikkitone was nice enough to look into the code for me.) You might want to do a search first as someone may have researched it before.

Yep, no problem, I'll check there again. It's definitely not a 'newbie question', but I was seeing if anyone had a 'quick answer', for instance in the form of a link to a discussion or article they'd read earlier. (I checked earlier myself to no avail.)

I tried waiting, no luck. I checked my firewall, and I already had it set to allow anything from Civ4 so I don't think that is the problem. Not sure what else could cause this to happen.



Bitter.

Hmm, so specifically what happens when you try to login? Does it "freeze", does the button "stick", or does the button "press in and out" but appear to do nothing? Just trying to determine if it is an error with trying to detect a connection or if it is not even attempting to connect.

 

[Mknn]

Is there any way to tell the number of soldiers in a particular unit? I am planning on starting a story/tale, and would like to incorporate that kind of information.

 

[AbuHab]

How can I increase my chance of generating a Great Engineer? I'm getting everything else, but no Great Engineers.

 

[JujuLautre]

Is there any way to tell the number of soldiers in a particular unit? I am planning on starting a story/tale, and would like to incorporate that kind of information.

Absolutely no idea

How can I increase my chance of generating a Great Engineer? I'm getting everything else, but no Great Engineers.

Do you know how the GP system works?

Each specialist (except the basic citizen) and wonder produce some great people points. They accumulate in a city, and once they go over a certain threshold, a GP is generated. The kind of GP depends on the sources that contributed towards it.

So to get great engineers, you should favor great engineer's GPP sources: pyramids, great wall (in warlords, not BTS), hanging gardens, hagia sophia, cristo redentor (in BTS), three gorges dam, and most importantly (because easier to get), engineers (from forge, factory, ironworks, indutrial parks (in BTS)...).

But because it's harder to get lots of engineers than all the others specialists, it's also harder to get great engineers.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Is there any way to tell the number of soldiers in a particular unit? I am planning on starting a story/tale, and would like to incorporate that kind of information.

In short no. And when you think about it makes sense too. Obviously the military units are already taken to a level of abstraction where giving them a number of soldiers would simply make users complain about innacuracies and unrealism (sorry for making up a word) etc. When you also consider that different mapsizes imply different areas for each tile you begin to see it would be fairly meaningless anyway, unless you went for a sophisticated approach and had the number of soldiers in a unit scale with mapsize or maptype etc. The other problem is that with damaged units are you meant to assume some of the soldiers have died? If so it would be quite strange that you could "heal" the remaining hitpoints.

My only suggestion would be to make up your own figures based on what the scale of the map appears to be. You could perhaps take into account the population of your cities, the landmass you cover, the size of your army etc.

 

[Mknn]

I agree with your reasoning, PieceOfMind. However, there is a total number of soldiers for each Civ. So that has to be calculated from somewhere, no?

 

[PieceOfMind]

Ah, yes I forgot about that. I'm not sure where that number comes from then. However I'm guessing it's similar to the military component that goes into the power graph calculation so that might be another thing to look into.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Ah, yes I forgot about that. I'm not sure where that number comes from then. However I'm guessing it's similar to the military component that goes into the power graph calculation so that might be another thing to look into.

The "number of soldiers" on the demographics screen is actually an amalgamation of several different things besides actual unit numbers - namely technologies, city population points, wonders and buildings. So you may want to exercise some caution in using these numbers for an actual "soldier count".

You can find a more complete explanation here.