Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[TheRedDarren]

Ok, so I have a settler unit and a caravel unit. I imagine it shouldn't be this difficult, but I cannot get the settler to board the boat!

 

[DroopyTofu]

Caravels only carry spies,missionaries, and great people. you need a galleon or a galley to load a settler onto (one exception, the Portuguese UU carries any units, and replaces caravels)

 

[GLRob79]

Question about how the game determines which city to pick as the holy city for a religion. I thought it just assigned the religion to the biggest/first built city that isn't already a holy city for another religion if possible, but now I'm not sure.

I just built my 5th city 3 or so turns before I founded Divine Right, but instead of going to that city (this would be my 5th religion to found), it wen to my 4th city instead. Is there something I'm missing in the city selection process?

 

[ori]

there is a random factor involved that is fudged against a city with another religion, against the capital and towards larger cities - but nothing in the code prevents the founding of the religion in any city.
The largest, oldest city that has no religion and is not the capital is just the most likely to found it...

 

[Roll_Red]

I just got civ 4 running up on my comp and started using it i played ofr a while when i was able to use nukes i just wanna now are they realy even useful if they make it so u can do anything in the tiles surrounding the impact?

 

[Gainy III]

hi roll red. ive never used them so no, though maybe it depends how perverse you are

 

[Sisiutil]

Nukes in the game are not the same sort of over-powered destructive nightmares that they are in real life; they're seriously nerfed so they're not much more than super-siege weapons. They badly injure enemy units but don't kill them. And they have the additional problem of making tiles useless until it's safe enough to have Workers come by and clean them up (requires the Ecology tech, too, IIRC). Nukes also have an additional limitation in that your own units can't be within a certain distance of ground zero. So even with the damage they cause, it will take you several turns to take advantage of it.

I think they may be useful only if you're going for a conquest win where you don't care about the quality of the land you're conquering, you're only trying to kill, kill, kill. And you want to see the animation, which is kind of cool.

I'd rather just rely on Bombers, frankly. And at least you can re-use those.

 

[LateGameWarMong]

I got aquainted with nukes on the 2nd difficulty level.
Took over my continent (aside from 2 states allied to me, who didn't dare challenge me)
Invaded the southern third of the other continent, was at war with everyone except the 2 states on my main continent.

Got tired of city after city attacks taking the continent, fortifying, etc, started burning them to the ground (all the while building up huge ICBM forces at home) - that took too long, so I nuked every city on the other continent in 1 turn.

I was unimpressed - though the resistance was already crushed, maybe the irradiation would dramatically slow enemy unit production.

I also heard there is a "kill check" and a certain % of units and buildings are killed, the other units damaged - don't know if it actually kills units.

A few turns later after I had 2 irradiated vassal states I re-nuked the surviving cities twice.

Global warming got really bad and all the cities were starving.

I wouldn't bother with them, I'd rather just get SDI and a few to retaliate.

 

[Roland Johansen]

I just posted in another thread about nukes so I'll repost that here:

Units get 30 hitpoints base damage plus a random value between 1 and 50 damage twice. Non-combat units have a 60% chance to die. Buildings have a 40% chance to be destroyed. The percentage of population that is killed is 30 plus a random value between 1 and 20 twice. Each tile has a 50% chance of getting fall-out. Everything in the base tile and the 8 surrounding tiles is hit.

Because the way damage to units is calculated, units have a good chance to survive the first nuke (with few hitpoints) but almost no chance to survive 2 nukes. I don't really like that part. They should lose a percentage of the remaining hitpoints when hit twice. On the other hand, units in civ fully heal after time, so maybe killing units after two hits is to stop them from fully healing.

To sum it up: to kill units, hit them twice. A city is halved in population, loses almost half of its buildings and loses half of its tiles, so its halved in three ways which is disastrous.

A bunker reduces the damage by 50% and the SDI intercepts 75% of all ICBM's and 37.5% of all the tactical nukes. You could say that the SDI is a bit too successful or too cheap to construct.


You can nuke units directly next to your stack, by hitting a tile next to the enemy units and 2 squares away from your units. Using nukes smart and against large troop concentrations should be a very effective way of killing the enemy. 2 nukes on an enemy stack of 100 units should virtually annihilate that stack.

 

[Crowqueen]

I've found that it's often the last founded city/last occupied city that gets it, and if you have multiple holy cities they are actually biased towards the periphery of your empire not the "metropolis" or central core.

EDIT that is @ ori re religions and not re nukes. I meant to quote but didn't tick the box next to Quote message in reply. Sorry.

 

[JujuLautre]

Determining the holy city:

Once the player has been determined, that player's cities are each checked in turn. A random seed is added to the city's population, which then has two negative factors applied to it - an 8x bias against the city with the Palace, and a smaller bias scaled with the number of religions already present in the city.

So while you cannot assign the holy city as you might wish, you can arrange circumstances so that the biases work in your favor (keep the population high, keep the population in other candidates low, refrain from spreading religions to your preferred city, aggressively convert the other cities).

(source: vocum sineratio))

 

[Charlie_B]

All my cities have a +10 happiness bonus because "we appreciate our entertainment!". I'm not complaining, but what's that about?

Edit: D'oh. It's the bonus for having a theatre and 50% on the culture slider (at +2 per 10%)

 

[Magness]

Other than reinstalling and loading my previous patch, is there any way to get games saved under patch 3.13 to work in patch 3.17? It only seems to affect saved games that "violate" one or more of the new rules.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Other than reinstalling and loading my previous patch, is there any way to get games saved under patch 3.13 to work in patch 3.17? It only seems to affect saved games that "violate" one or more of the new rules.

From what I've heard, games started in 3.13 should load fine in 3.17. If you've used the custom game option that disallows customassets and world builder use in the game that was started in 3.13, then you can't load that game in 3.17.

 

[Lord Parkin]

My experience was that all of my 3.13 games loaded fine in 3.17, even if they broke some of the new game rules. (For instance, in one game I had far more than 5 corporation executives, and that game loaded up fine... although in my city screens the executives were greyed out with "Number left = -3" or somesuch. )

 

[Romano]

Does the defensive bonus for a unit on a city only count for the tile at the centre of the city culture radius or will it work for every tile in the culture radius?
Does the city defense bonus work with terrain defence bonuses? E.g a unit in a city and on a hill will get more defence than the same unit in a city on a plain.

Thanks for answer

 

[CCRunner]

It only works when you're on the city itself. Just being in the city radius doesn't do anything. And yes, it does stack with other defensive bonuses.

 

[stunnerwhat]

I am such a noob....

Can you open the map edit mode without starting a game like in Civ III ?

In the map edit mode how do you assign a starting location for a Civ?

Thanks,

Stunner

 

[stunnerwhat]

Also, when I try to run the 1.61 patch, it says "no version of Sid Meier's Civ IV is loaded", and it is loaded for sure.

What is up?

Stunner

 

[dalamb]

Also, when I try to run the 1.61 patch, it says "no version of Sid Meier's Civ IV is loaded", and it is loaded for sure.

When I had that problem, a few months ago, I checked with the Windows Add/Remove Programs panel, and indeed it couldn't find Civ IV either. I eventually had to delete the old directories and reinstall everything from the beginning.