Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[IAM]

Wohoo! thats exactly what i meant, but much better wording, thanks @ ori.

I got another one, when building a large army, i prefer to set a rally point on the map,
is there a way to have all the units go to sleep/fortify automatically when they have reached their destination.

Not that I know of but as a side note make sure the rally point is in your cultural borders. Less maintenance cost for as long as possible.

and WELCOME!

 

[Roland Johansen]

How useful are Guided Missiles? I just realised that I've never actually used them in Civ4! I used to use them in Civ3 all the time, but I haven't seen reason to do so in Civ4 yet. Are they particularly useful in any situations? Seems to me that a few Bombers would be more useful than a stack of Cruise Missiles, but I might be wrong...

Guided Missiles have 2 obvious advantages over bombers:
- They can kill units
- They don't have a stacking limit (4 or 8 per city for fighters/bombers depending on the availability of an airport)

Of course, you can only use them once and they are fairly limited in range.

I do like to have a stack of them somewhere in case I need a rapid reaction to enemy ships. Once I see an enemy ship somewhere close to my borders that is (going to be) pillaging or bombarding or blockading something and I don't have my own ships nearby, then I can fly some bombers over to weaken it and some guided missiles to destroy it. It works best in combination with an early warning system of fighters/jet fighters which are constantly flying reconnaissance missions. This is a lot cheaper than having lots of ships everywhere around your islands and continents. It's of course not the cheapest way to destroy a large invasion fleet, but even that could be possible if you have enough of them and use them in combination with bombers.

This is of course more useful on larger maps where moving 10 tiles per turn is slow compared to instant moving by air.

I could also imagine that you might want to destroy the last already weakened unit in a city but not take the city because of an expected too strong counterattack. A guided missile could do the job.

There are various uses for them as a quick reaction force as they can quickly be moved in great numbers. But they of course shouldn't be the main unit in your army as they'd be too expensive for that job.

I did upgrade their range a bit to make them more useful and I also changed the stealth destroyer into an upgrade of the normal destroyer (no stealth and a bit better than a normal destroyer in aerial interception while keeping the first strikes and adding the ability to carry 2 missiles).

 

[WalkerBoh 1]

Erm... not directly, but why would you want to turn it off? This is the pop-up that prompts you to choose what you want to build next. If you don't build things, you won't advance in the game very fast.

One work-around is to set up queues for your cities, so they'll take longer before asking you what to do next. To set up a queue, double click a city, then hold shift while clicking (in order) what you want that city to build next.

Just a warning though, this is often not a good idea early in the game, because you'll be getting new buildings/units made available fairly quickly. So build queues will hold you up from being able to build that important building or unit that you've just obtained.

I use the quick build cheat and in the beginning of the game when I only have two buildings to build and Im not war like until I have won a cultural, dominate, or diplomatic victory so its pointless to build anything until a new building shows up or its time to amass my modern armor/marine army. Can I disable it from the .ini file or can i access the BTS civs in Warlords or Vanilla?

 

[Kjara]

Does anyone know how to have it save toggle settings in hotseat? Currently every turn, it turns off the toggle resources visible, was wondering if there was a way to make it keep that setting on.

 

[6K Man]

Checking out the Civilopedia, I guess they have 2 first strikes, which isn't too bad. The lack of any ability to detect submarines or shoot down planes makes them rather useless compared to regular Destroyers, though. Especially since they have the exact same strength as regular Destroyers.

I guess you could get the best use out of Stealth Destroyers by combining them with a stack of other units... but then, what's the point of them being stealth units if they have to tag along with a rather obvious stack? I guess we'll just have to write them off as a fairly pointless novelty unit for the late game.

Oh, another question while I think of it: How useful are Guided Missiles? I just realised that I've never actually used them in Civ4! I used to use them in Civ3 all the time, but I haven't seen reason to do so in Civ4 yet. Are they particularly useful in any situations? Seems to me that a few Bombers would be more useful than a stack of Cruise Missiles, but I might be wrong...

I use Stealth Destroyers as pillagers, scouts, and to deny my enemies the use of the sea. Obviously they work best when the AI doesn't have Stealth. Think about when you normally attack the AI's navy - you attack, your surviving units are damaged, and there's a good chance that no matter how well promoted they are, your victorious units will be exposed and attacked by the AI navy (unless you have a massive advantage in numbers). Due to the stealth ability, Stealth Destroyers are somewhat immune to counterattacks. They can kill off wounded AI ships and unless the AI has discovered Stealth and built its own Stealth Destroyers (and has them nearby), they can sit in the middle of the ocean and heal up. Plus, the innate first strikes help reduce the amount of damage they suffer.

A stack of 1 Sentry, 1 Medic, and a couple of Drill or Combat Stealth DDs can make it very hard for the AI to leave port. And if it DOES leave port, you can shadow it and position your own main fleet to intercept.

 

[garvoid]

How do you 'buy' units, how do you rush build?

thanks!

 

[dalamb]

Under Universal Suffrage, if you have enough cash to buy a unit (or building) in a city, you get a little orange arrow down in the lower left (oops - actually right) that you can click on to do it. To "whip" you have to be under Slavery, and there's another arrow for that. "Rush" sometimes means using a Great Engineer to finish a building; while that building is at the top of your queue, click on the clock icon in the orders when you have the GE selected.

 

[henrebotha]

Under Universal Suffrage, if you have enough cash to buy a unit (or building) in a city, you get a little orange arrow down in the lower left that you can click on to do it. To "whip" you have to be under Slavery, and there's another arrow for that. "Rush" sometimes means using a Great Engineer to finish a building; while that building is at the top of your queue, click on the clock icon in the orders when you have the GE selected.

Wrong, it's at bottom right. Just above the 'emphasise' buttons, to the left of the minimap.

 

[dalamb]

Fixed now.

 

[Lord Parkin]

I use Stealth Destroyers as pillagers, scouts, and to deny my enemies the use of the sea. Obviously they work best when the AI doesn't have Stealth. Think about when you normally attack the AI's navy - you attack, your surviving units are damaged, and there's a good chance that no matter how well promoted they are, your victorious units will be exposed and attacked by the AI navy (unless you have a massive advantage in numbers). Due to the stealth ability, Stealth Destroyers are somewhat immune to counterattacks. They can kill off wounded AI ships and unless the AI has discovered Stealth and built its own Stealth Destroyers (and has them nearby), they can sit in the middle of the ocean and heal up. Plus, the innate first strikes help reduce the amount of damage they suffer.

A stack of 1 Sentry, 1 Medic, and a couple of Drill or Combat Stealth DDs can make it very hard for the AI to leave port. And if it DOES leave port, you can shadow it and position your own main fleet to intercept.

Thanks a lot for this insight. That'd certainly be fairly useful in multiplayer - the ability to attack without worrying about anyone killing you on the defensive (at least if you're ahead in tech). Stealth Destroyers might have small a use in my current multiplayer game after all.

(Of course, it's probably better to have a stack full of Battleships rather than a few scattered Stealth Destroyers, but they're still cool. )

Actually, thinking about it, Stealth Destroyers would make excellent scouts in an inter-continental war in multiplayer, since they can't be detected if you're ahead in tech. You might even be able to "poach" Transports and Carriers that aren't defended adequately. That would be useful.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Is it possible to worldbuilder the Great Wall? Just wondering, as it keeps running into water and it looks ridiculous.

 

[CCRunner]

yeah, it's possible. I do it sometimes just to make the actual wall fit my borders

 

[Findanniin]

Another quickie (and newbish)question..

It's supposedly possible to use a spy to "spread culture".
Since I just lost my iron mine to cultural border spread.. how does this work precisely?

I sent a spy over to the enemy city, but I don't get the option to spread culture.
When I check the espionage tab to check points required, it's a blank.

I'm guessing this is normal, but can't wrap my mind around how it's supposed to work.

 

[_alphaBeta_]

Is it possible to worldbuilder the Great Wall? Just wondering, as it keeps running into water and it looks ridiculous.

yeah, it's possible. I do it sometimes just to make the actual wall fit my borders

So ... how does one do this?

 

[Roland Johansen]

Another quickie (and newbish)question..

It's supposedly possible to use a spy to "spread culture".
Since I just lost my iron mine to cultural border spread.. how does this work precisely?

I sent a spy over to the enemy city, but I don't get the option to spread culture.
When I check the espionage tab to check points required, it's a blank.

I'm guessing this is normal, but can't wrap my mind around how it's supposed to work.

You can only use this espionage option when there is some of your culture in the foreign city. So you can't use the mission in cities that are too far from your borders. In this case, the city must have been too far from your borders as none of your cities had any cultural influence in the city.

Note that the mission is also bugged in the latest (probably also last) official patch. You need the unofficial patch to get some good results from the mission. In the last official version, the mission is about a factor 100 too weak. But this is unrelated to the fact that you can't access the mission in your game.

 

[vincentz]

How do I make a spoiler section. Ie a hidden section on shown if clicked on spoiler.

 

[salty mud]

How do I make a spoiler section. Ie a hidden section on shown if clicked on spoiler.

You need to wrap spoiler tags around your text. To do this, either go into the reply to thread screen and press the 'spoil' button in the top right of the text box or wrap spoiler tags manually.

[spoiler]Like so.[/spoiler]

 

[IAM]

Another quickie (and newbish)question..

It's supposedly possible to use a spy to "spread culture".
Since I just lost my iron mine to cultural border spread.. how does this work precisely?

I sent a spy over to the enemy city, but I don't get the option to spread culture.
When I check the espionage tab to check points required, it's a blank.

I'm guessing this is normal, but can't wrap my mind around how it's supposed to work.

Since the culture mission isn't available have you considered: destroying cultural buildings, anarchy the city, forment unhappiness/poison water to reduce population and therefore limit the number of artist specialist that can be used, etc.?

 

[PieceOfMind]

How do I make a spoiler section. Ie a hidden section on shown if clicked on spoiler.

Use
[/spoiler]hidden text here

Spoiler :

but with the tags the other way round, if that makes sense.

That or press the "SPOIL" button that can be seen when you hit "Go Advanced" when making or editing a post.

 

[fenix_27]

Can someone explain to me exactly how cultural border clash works?

Do they make a check every turn, because I have noticed that some tiles will come under my dominion even though the cities borders haven't expanded anymore.

Anyone now in numbers how this works?