(Rant) Why I love and hate Civ IV

[Tapani]

Dear diary (or random reader of Civ IV forums),

I suspect my relationship with Civ IV is unhealthy
There is a repetitive pattern of missing the game when I have not played it in a while, and feelings of irritation and annoyance once I do play. Maybe it is a me problem, maybe there are standard ways to deal with some of the irritable parts. I'll let you guys be the judge.

About me and my games: I am not a very seasoned player. Maybe played 30-40 games, but have won on immortal level. My usual settings are:

• Vanilla (no bts)
  
• Marathon speed
• Ancient start
• Noble--immortal level
  
• Crowded with civs. The real world is crowded. To get 5-6 cities should require some conquests.
  
• Raging barbarians
• Aggresive AI (hoping for some action on that crowded map)
  
• No tech trading (otherwise the AIs just tech together?)
  
• No cheating whatsoever: no reloading, no regeneration of maps, no worldbuilder, ...
• Not using mods, mainly because I don't know which ones to use

Creating a game. First slight sense of irritation comes already when creating a game:

• How to select a map without knowing anything about it? Maybe pangaea, maybe terra, maybe a few continents ... like in civ 1
  
• The UI is a bit cumbersome. Once I set all slots to AIs, but change something and it resets all the slots again. Any way to change parameters without having to open all the AI slots again?
  
• Selecting my leader/civ.. many civs have special units that require, say horses. But most maps I have played seems not to contain many at all! (Same goes with some other resources, like silver and sugar -- is this a known bug?). Meaning many unique units are useless, but I cannot know when selecting civ.

Early game. Once the game starts, there are early game issues:

• Scouting early on I have discovered other players sometimes manages to produce a worker within a few turns (less than 10?) after game start. What is the trick that I am missing?
  
• Also other players manage to discover hunting and archery and build 2 archers within maybe 10-15 turns. How? Here the stupidity of the AIs show, the correct move for them is to attack me before I get archers.
• The culture concept is another difficult part of the game. How to fight culture early on? Say a creative neighbour aggressively settling close to you, or a worse example: building their 2nd city two steps from your capital and founding a religion there the turn after (this has happened twice). The culture push will crush you!
  
• Another example is trying to get hold of critical resources outside my cultural borders. Example: I wanted to get hold of the only horse on the continent (planet?), which was located like this: Me <-------> Mongol <-> Horse <-----> Germany. The Mongol had only one city and the horse was a square away from it on the far side from me. So I conquered the city but once the cultural zones realigned the horse ended up the German zone! (who was too strong to take on in a war). I did not even want the darn mongol city, just the horse! What would have been the proper procedure to get the horse? Even when the Mongol had one injured archer left against my horde of swordsmen, he refused to talk. Was willing to give him peace for the horse.
  
• Making peace with the barbarians? Witnessed a barbarian walking past another player's city without attacking and heading for my capital. I thought they would attack anything next to them?
• A minor head shaker is also the style contrasts between the epic "baba yetu" and voice of Leonard Nimoy, and the not so statemanlike conversations like: "care for some salad ..." or "call me little corporal ... ". Make the game serious or a cartoon comedy, but don't mix!

Middle game:

• The reason I do not play the higher levels is that I suspect the AIs cheat with production, tech and maybe combat. In the only immortal game I played, the AIs could out-tech and out-produce my 6 cities with a single city. Another example is seing Mao building 7 archers in 8 consequtive turns without city population shrinking (going from 6 to 13 defenders in his only city). I have 6 swordsmen, and I just cannot produce enough to conquer his city (this was not even immortal, emperor level maybe?)
  
• Despite me choosing aggressive AI, they are not fighting enough. Some 80% of the wars are with me. Any way to encourage them to fight more - with each other? Typical middle game relation graph is all AI players having open borders with each other.
  
• When the other players end up in a war with each other, both sides invariably keep nagging me for assistance. This is a major problem. If I agree, everyone hates me for having declared on their friend (and the player asking for assistance immediately settles for a peace, leaving me with a war for a long time). If I disagree, both sides will ask again and again and again - and hate me more for each refusal. It seems like they do not ask anyone else but me? Or how do the other players react to their pleas without getting hated?
  
• Demands of tribute. Example: I mined my 2nd gem, and immediately 5-6 players demand I give that gem to them for free (even if I am many times larger than them). If I refuse, they hate me forever. If I agree I cannot trade the gem for something I want, and canceling the tribute trade will cause them hating me forever.
  
• Demands of civics/religion. Example: I have one religion in each city - and is my state religion, and then a heathen superstition spreads into one of my cities. Immediately a bunch of other players demand I change my state religion to the new religion. If I refuse they hate me forever, and ask again later. Any way to get rid of a religion in a city? The Romans fed christians to the lions ...
  
• One sided open borders? The UI is buggy and added open borders to both sides of the deal, and I could not cancel it! I refuse to give anyone access to my territory, but sometimes need to walk through theirs.
  
• How can I refuse to talk (or listen to their demands), like the other players do sometimes?
  
• Open borders and war. Typical scenario: someone far far away (at least 2-3 nations away) walks with an army all across the continent using open borders to me, and then declares war. There is no point to that war, they will lose all their army but pillage me in the process. Even if they conquer a city it would kill their economy. How to deal with them using fast units (chariots) to raid in and out of my territory using their open borders to escape?
• How can I demand things? Like in the situation above or with the mongols and horse above? Say "stop giving X open borders or it is war". And mean it.
  
• Sometimes another players cultural zone grows where I have troops (due to them building cities or the like). This causes my troops to teleport to all kind of weird locations. It is impossible to cross water or peaks even when your life depends on it, but perfectly possible to avoid any diplomatic embarrasment? I would want to be able to declare war instead of having my army jump to another island. And what technology does that jump use anyway?

Late game:

• Choice of defender in a stack. This is another annoyance. I have a stack of (say) riflemen on a tile. One is a swordsman upgraded with all city attack upgrades, the rest are fresh inexperienced ones. They all defend equally. Someone kamikazes on the stack, and of course it is the precious upgraded swordsman that takes the fight and dies (despite having 90%+ to win)! Any way to influence the order in which equal defenders are chosen?
  
• Boring after gunpowder. Discovering gunpowder temporarily cures me of any longing of the game. When this happens I am usually ahead in tech, production, food, GDP etc. I start playing sim city, building every city improvement I can, upgrading my defenders from archers --> longbowmen --> musketeers --> riflemen --> SAM infantry ... and nothing more happens. My cities are too many to conquer new ones, and the cultural part makes it pretty much impossible anyway. Somehow the game just stops, I get bored after some 24h of micromanagement and don't finish the game. Pretty much every game I do finish is by conquest, and ends before 1000 AD.

If anyone read here, thank you or maybe I am sorry is more appropriate. It is a rant.

But if anyone has advice about the diplomatic issues maybe that helps a bit.

 

[AcaMetis]

Late while-making-post-edit: I just noticed you're playing vanilla Civ IV, not Warlords/BTS. Whelp...maybe most of my advice still applies? Spend too much time to toss everything and I would advice you to play with the expansions anyway, so...close enough? I guess?

Anyway, in order:

Not using mods, mainly because I don't know which ones to use

Bug+Bull is what I'd recommend. It doesn't change gameplay overly much, instead it adds a bunch of nice features like automatically pre-chopping forests (though that only works if you've got a single worker on the job), giving an indication how much production you need for maximum whip overflow, shows hidden diplo modifiers, etc. You can grab it here.

• How to select a map without knowing anything about it? Maybe pangaea, maybe terra, maybe a few continents ... like in civ 1
• The UI is a bit cumbersome. Once I set all slots to AIs, but change something and it resets all the slots again. Any way to change parameters without having to open all the AI slots again?
• Selecting my leader/civ.. many civs have special units that require, say horses. But most maps I have played seems not to contain many at all! (Same goes with some other resources, like silver and sugar -- is this a known bug?). Meaning many unique units are useless, but I cannot know when selecting civ.

• It might be a Bug/Bull feature, but for me there is a RandomScriptMap at the very bottom of the map selection that can choose between a number of different scripts. It might not be exactly what you're looking for, but it's the best idea I've got.
• Not that I'm aware of.
• You can check the Civilopedia for what UU/UB a given civ has and what resources they need, if any. Whether they're useful depends on many factors. Quechuas, for instance, no one would argue are a bad UU...but on Noble they're significantly less useful than, say, Deity. As for resources being scarce, that's intentional. Strategic resources are rare to force players to adjust their strategy to what's available or make a play for someone else's resource, either militarily or trying to get them to pleased/friendly and trading for them. Other resources like Silver can generally only spawn in certain areas of the map, and in the case of Silver that's the Tundra, so it'll seem rare if you don't thoroughly explore and expand into that area.

• Scouting early on I have discovered other players sometimes manages to produce a worker within a few turns (less than 10?) after game start. What is the trick that I am missing?
• Also other players manage to discover hunting and archery and build 2 archers within maybe 10-15 turns. How? Here the stupidity of the AIs show, the correct move for them is to attack me before I get archers.
• The culture concept is another difficult part of the game. How to fight culture early on? Say a creative neighbour aggressively settling close to you, or a worse example: building their 2nd city two steps from your capital and founding a religion there the turn after (this has happened twice). The culture push will crush you!
• Another example is trying to get hold of critical resources outside my cultural borders. Example: I wanted to get hold of the only horse on the continent (planet?), which was located like this: Me <-------> Mongol <-> Horse <-----> Germany. The Mongol had only one city and the horse was a square away from it on the far side from me. So I conquered the city but once the cultural zones realigned the horse ended up the German zone! (who was too strong to take on in a war). I did not even want the darn mongol city, just the horse! What would have been the proper procedure to get the horse? Even when the Mongol had one injured archer left against my horde of swordsmen, he refused to talk. Was willing to give him peace for the horse.
• Making peace with the barbarians? Witnessed a barbarian walking past another player's city without attacking and heading for my capital. I thought they would attack anything next to them?
• A minor head shaker is also the style contrasts between the epic "baba yetu" and voice of Leonard Nimoy, and the not so statemanlike conversations like: "care for some salad ..." or "call me little corporal ... ". Make the game serious or a cartoon comedy, but don't mix!

• That the AI cheats like crazy. Even on Noble AIs will start by producing a Warrior that's already half-finished, because magic, and on higher difficulties AIs will start with extra units, including a Worker on very high difficulties (I want to say Immortal/Deity, but don't quote me on that).
• Again, massive cheating. Monarch+ (I think) has AIs start with the Archery tech for free, even if they don't start with Hunting, and archers are a frequent part of their free unit package. And it's true that on higher difficulties the only reason you can win is because the AI graciously allows you to win, because their flood of archers could easily overwhelm you even if you blindly settled on metal and rushed for axes. But the AI isn't programmed to do that. It'd be real bad if they were, since that could render some games unwinnable.
• You don't, really. The only way to fight culture is with more culture or with military. Since you can't out-culture a creative holy city, the answer is to declare war and take/raze the city to the ground. Mind you that while aggressive culture pushing can render a city less than useful, it can't actually flip a city unless it goes into revolt twice, and you can station military in a city to suppress revolts. Of course there's exceptions, and said exceptions can be further changed by custom settings, but that's the general gist of it.
• What happened is that the German city was pouring it's culture into the Horse tile, but the Mongol city had a greater cultural presence in part due to the distances involved, so they owned the tile. But when you took the city the Mongol culture ceased to count, so it was your non-existent culture versus established German culture to determine who gets the tile. And of course, that goes to the Germans. The way you could have played that situation was to either focus on culture in that city, build culture buildings, run artists and the like, or capitulate the Mongols. In the latter case you can gift back the Mongol city, restoring their dominant culture and ownership over the Horse tile, and than trade for the Horses. Vassals will always trade any resource to you, even if it's their last one, but be prepared for them to charge you an arm and a leg.
• Making peace with barbarians is impossible. As to why they didn't attack AI cities, no clue. My best guess is that whatever fight they could have picked with the AI would have been too suicidal even for a barbarian, so they continued moving. AIs do get bonuses to fighting barbs, same as the player on Settler, so their odds are always better than a player.
• You could modify the leader introductions I guess, that text ought to be located somewhere, but I've got no clue where.

• The reason I do not play the higher levels is that I suspect the AIs cheat with production, tech and maybe combat. In the only immortal game I played, the AIs could out-tech and out-produce my 6 cities with a single city. Another example is seing Mao building 7 archers in 8 consequtive turns without city population shrinking (going from 6 to 13 defenders in his only city). I have 6 swordsmen, and I just cannot produce enough to conquer his city (this was not even immortal, emperor level maybe?)
• Despite me choosing aggressive AI, they are not fighting enough. Some 80% of the wars are with me. Any way to encourage them to fight more - with each other? Typical middle game relation graph is all AI players having open borders with each other.
• When the other players end up in a war with each other, both sides invariably keep nagging me for assistance. This is a major problem. If I agree, everyone hates me for having declared on their friend (and the player asking for assistance immediately settles for a peace, leaving me with a war for a long time). If I disagree, both sides will ask again and again and again - and hate me more for each refusal. It seems like they do not ask anyone else but me? Or how do the other players react to their pleas without getting hated?
• Demands of tribute. Example: I mined my 2nd gem, and immediately 5-6 players demand I give that gem to them for free (even if I am many times larger than them). If I refuse, they hate me forever. If I agree I cannot trade the gem for something I want, and canceling the tribute trade will cause them hating me forever.
• Demands of civics/religion. Example: I have one religion in each city - and is my state religion, and then a heathen superstition spreads into one of my cities. Immediately a bunch of other players demand I change my state religion to the new religion. If I refuse they hate me forever, and ask again later. Any way to get rid of a religion in a city? The Romans fed christians to the lions ...
• One sided open borders? The UI is buggy and added open borders to both sides of the deal, and I could not cancel it! I refuse to give anyone access to my territory, but sometimes need to walk through theirs.
• How can I refuse to talk (or listen to their demands), like the other players do sometimes?
• Open borders and war. Typical scenario: someone far far away (at least 2-3 nations away) walks with an army all across the continent using open borders to me, and then declares war. There is no point to that war, they will lose all their army but pillage me in the process. Even if they conquer a city it would kill their economy. How to deal with them using fast units (chariots) to raid in and out of my territory using their open borders to escape?
• How can I demand things? Like in the situation above or with the mongols and horse above? Say "stop giving X open borders or it is war". And mean it.
• Sometimes another players cultural zone grows where I have troops (due to them building cities or the like). This causes my troops to teleport to all kind of weird locations. It is impossible to cross water or peaks even when your life depends on it, but perfectly possible to avoid any diplomatic embarrasment? I would want to be able to declare war instead of having my army jump to another island. And what technology does that jump use anyway?

• AIs cheat like crazy on any level, even Settler. In fact, it's best to assume that AIs aren't playing the same game you do.
• You can bribe AIs into wars with each other, and AIs can bribe other AIs to join their wars, but without tech trading it would take many turns of running 0% slider to gather the money needed to bribe them. And AIs never intentionally gather enough money to do that. Further, AIs take into account things like military strength when choosing who to DoW, and on high levels you cannot maintain enough military to discourage DoWs like that while also keeping pace in the tech game and expanding and whatever else. So you need to have a solid diplo game to avoid getting DoWed, and good military tactics to survive with minimum units if you get DoWed. Especially without tech trading, since you can't bribe someone off or someone else in easily.
  
• AIs cannot request other AIs to join their wars, they can only bribe other AIs. And yes, joining in with another AIs war is a fool's errand, because they'll immediately chicken out and leave you to fight their war for them. Just keep refusing and eat the diplo penalties, they're not insurmountable and they'll eventually fade away.
• Size is irrelevant in terms of whether AIs demand tribute, that's purely based on military strength. And as I said, high levels cannot maintain enough military to dissuade this without falling behind too much. Judge the situation and see who you can afford to refuse and who you can't. If Gandhi on the other side of the world demand it, just tell him to go jump in a lake, because he won't do anything in response. If you neighbour Monty demands it? Just give it to him. An extra gem isn't worth someone plotting war on you, and some AIs can start plotting war on you over a refused demand - some can even immediately DoW! Incidentally, the refusal to give tribute penalty should go away after a while as well, and you can cancel a tribute after 10 turns without penalty. Just create a reminder with Bug/Bull if you think you'll forget.
  
• If you're Spiritual, you can just switch and later switch back if you need to. Otherwise, be careful with who'd get seriously upset if you refused to switch religion (Gandhi? There's the lake. Isabella? Yup, totally going to convert now). You can't get rid of religions in a city, unfortunately.
  
• Open Borders are always two-sided, you can't have one-sided open borders in this game. There are units that can scout rival territory without OB, but I'm 99% sure they're all boats of some variety. Further, you cannot cancel OB (or basically any trade deal) for 10 turns after it's made. After that you can cancel it.
• You can't. It's one of the things AIs can do that they player never can.
• Kill all their units, bribe someone else in on them, or negotiate a stop-trade against them (this cancels Open borders). Whether the latter two are possible depends on the diplo situation, but you can try to do something like gift gold or, especially if you're Spiritual, switch religions real quick to try and get someone to Pleased to do some wheeling and dealing.
  
• If you open the trade menu and put something on the Mongol table without putting someone on yours, you'll get the option to either beg (if you're relatively weak militarily) or demand (if you're relatively powerful) whatever you've put on the table. Mind you that if you cannot put something on the table (like negotiating a stop trade) you can't demand or beg for it, they just won't go for it, and making an arrogant demand incurs a minor diplo penalty. As for "meaning it", if they don't go for it you can cancel out of the trade window and DoW them right than and there. Note that everything is put on the table during a peace treaty no matter how much they wouldn't do something normally, though it might cost more war success than your target has ass that can be kicked. Also note that AIs aren't going to learn that you mean it even after kicking their ass multiple times, sadly.
  
• That's is purely a gameplay thing to prevent players from being able to march armies through someone's borders without fear of getting counter-attacked and DoWing once the army is in place to take every city on the first turn of the war. It's completely unrealistic of course, but to have it be realistic would massively change game balance with regards to opening borders and the like.

• Choice of defender in a stack. This is another annoyance. I have a stack of (say) riflemen on a tile. One is a swordsman upgraded with all city attack upgrades, the rest are fresh inexperienced ones. They all defend equally. Someone kamikazes on the stack, and of course it is the precious upgraded swordsman that takes the fight and dies (despite having 90%+ to win)! Any way to influence the order in which equal defenders are chosen?
• Boring after gunpowder. Discovering gunpowder temporarily cures me of any longing of the game. When this happens I am usually ahead in tech, production, food, GDP etc. I start playing sim city, building every city improvement I can, upgrading my defenders from archers --> longbowmen --> musketeers --> riflemen --> SAM infantry ... and nothing more happens. My cities are too many to conquer new ones, and the cultural part makes it pretty much impossible anyway. Somehow the game just stops, I get bored after some 24h of micromanagement and don't finish the game. Pretty much every game I do finish is by conquest, and ends before 1000 AD.

• The game automatically picks what it thinks is the best defender of a stack, which, demonstrably, doesn't always work. The best way to prevent that is to give your other units some promotions, since if they have better odds they'll get picked instead. This is the reason why many people prefer their Great Medic to not be an actual military unit, because they will get chosen to defend eventually and they will inevitably die despite 90% odds.
• If you don't want to win via space or culture or the like, keep the conquest train rolling. You should always be able to make cities profitable once you get State Property, you've got tools to deal with culture in the mid-late game (including murdering any offending culture cities or making vassals of their owners), otherwise try and find things to shake things up a bit. Play a different map script, different leaders, different setting, etc.

 

[6K Man]

The UI is a bit cumbersome. Once I set all slots to AIs, but change something and it resets all the slots again. Any way to change parameters without having to open all the AI slots again?

There is a value that can be set to change the default number of AIs on a particular map size. I’ll see if I can hunt down the location of that value.

• Selecting my leader/civ.. many civs have special units that require, say horses. But most maps I have played seems not to contain many at all! (Same goes with some other resources, like silver and sugar -- is this a known bug?). Meaning many unique units are useless, but I cannot know when selecting civ.

If you have a map with no tundra/ice, you might not have any Silver or Fur or Crab. Sugar may have a requirement for tropical terrain or temperature settings. Not sure about Horse.


Understand that the harder levels of Civ4 are all about AI bonuses or penalties for the human. At higher levels, yes, the AI needs fewer hammers to produce things, fewer beakers to learn a tech. They start with extra units and extra techs. They get a higher base happiness per city than you do. Et cetera. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. The AI is no smarter on Deity than it is on Chieftain – it just gets more advantages, to make it harder to beat.


Aggressive AI and Always War settings need a subtext “with you”. As in, the “Always War” AI isn’t at war with each other, just with you.


You can beat tribute demands by swapping your surplus Gem before hooking up the second one. If you only have one of the resource, a fun trick is to give in to the demand and then farm over the Gems/Stone/whatever. This automatically cancels the tribute without penalty (since you no longer have the resource to trade it).


You absolutely should swap to the dominant AI religion, FYI. The diplo benefits are huge.


Open borders can’t be one sided. Why would any AI agree to that?

 

[elmurcis]

There is a value that can be set to change the default number of AIs on a particular map size. I’ll see if I can hunt down the location of that value.

Yup, there is, I have 18 players "default" for Huge map (any other world size AI number is default).
Assets->XML->GameInfo->Civ4WorldInfo (file name), have to change value in line (number is total number of players) <iDefaultPlayers>18</iDefaultPlayers>

 

[rah]

You can beat tribute demands by swapping your surplus Gem before hooking up the second one. If you only have one of the resource, a fun trick is to give in to the demand and then farm over the Gems/Stone/whatever. This automatically cancels the tribute without penalty (since you no longer have the resource to trade it).

Learn something new every day. Thanks

 

[Tapani]

Thanks for the replies.

@AcaMetis, thank you a lot! Your response is more thorough than expected! Learnt a lot! Much of my issues can be summarized that the AIs cheat, but try to maintain an illusion of playing by same rules you do. Especially for Monarch level it really says it is "just plainly smarter" than Noble (while Emperor and up mentions production bonuses).
And your advice certainly applies to Vanilla too (except the recommended Mods, they seem to be BTS only?)

• You can bribe AIs into wars with each other, and AIs can bribe other AIs to join their wars, but without tech trading it would take many turns of running 0% slider to gather the money needed to bribe them. And AIs never intentionally gather enough money to do that. Further, AIs take into account things like military strength when choosing who to DoW, and on high levels you cannot maintain enough military to discourage DoWs like that while also keeping pace in the tech game and expanding and whatever else. So you need to have a solid diplo game to avoid getting DoWed, and good military tactics to survive with minimum units if you get DoWed. Especially without tech trading, since you can't bribe someone off or someone else in easily.

• AIs cannot request other AIs to join their wars, they can only bribe other AIs. And yes, joining in with another AIs war is a fool's errand, because they'll immediately chicken out and leave you to fight their war for them. Just keep refusing and eat the diplo penalties, they're not insurmountable and they'll eventually fade away.

• I have always wondered how it is possible to have so much money. Upgrading a unit to another kind costs 100+, and I seldom have 20. Expanding until my science rate is 30% or so, and if I would keep a deterring military I would end up having my army on strike (which can happen after I get DoWed).
• The dilpo penalties can be hefty. They ask over and over again. In my current game I have -8 with Roosevelt (-2 You refused to help us! -3 You refused to help us during war time! -3 You refused to stop trading with our worst enemy!), and -7 with Alexander (Roosevelts worst enemy). And they keep asking again and again and again ... increasing the penalty every time. Did not know it faded though.

@6K_Man, thanks for the tip that things can be changed in the XML files! Seems to be a lot of good stuff there
@elmurcis, thanks! Actually I found it myself exactly at the time you posted the location

Also, you guys know what iTargetNumCities mean? It is set to 3-6 depending on map size.. maybe AIs change behaviour once they reach that number of cities, and my AIs misbehave because the map is too crowded for them to reach that number?

You can beat tribute demands by swapping your surplus Gem before hooking up the second one. If you only have one of the resource, a fun trick is to give in to the demand and then farm over the Gems/Stone/whatever. This automatically cancels the tribute without penalty (since you no longer have the resource to trade it).

Ah! Actually I have tried to pillage my resource improvement for that purpose, but somehow did not think about swapping it to a cottage or something. Facepalm.

You absolutely should swap to the dominant AI religion, FYI. The diplo benefits are huge.

Open borders can’t be one sided. Why would any AI agree to that?

Because my Stack of Death is going to walk through that AIs territory regardless. Its choice is whether my stack will raze and pillage on their way or not.
Or that Stack of Death already is in that AIs territory. Its choice is whether they should continue to raze and pillage.

 

[AcaMetis]

And your advice certainly applies to Vanilla too (except the recommended Mods, they seem to be BTS only?)

Yes, Bug/Bull are BTS only (maybe they require Warlords too? Not sure). As I said I only noticed that you're playing vanilla Civ IV late, and I didn't edit that bit.

• I have always wondered how it is possible to have so much money. Upgrading a unit to another kind costs 100+, and I seldom have 20. Expanding until my science rate is 30% or so, and if I would keep a deterring military I would end up having my army on strike (which can happen after I get DoWed).
• The dilpo penalties can be hefty. They ask over and over again. In my current game I have -8 with Roosevelt (-2 You refused to help us! -3 You refused to help us during war time! -3 You refused to stop trading with our worst enemy!), and -7 with Alexander (Roosevelts worst enemy). And they keep asking again and again and again ... increasing the penalty every time. Did not know it faded though.

• The exact cost is dependant on the difference in hammer cost between units (turning a Warrior into a Spear is cheaper than an Axe, much cheaper than a Sword, etc.), plus a flat surcharge. Though keeping promos can definitely be worth it, especially if you end up with City Raider rifles. You'll want to do a trade mission with a Great Merchant if you plan on upgrading an entire army, though.
• I suspect that this is something that was changed in Warlords/BTS, because I don't recall any AI being that demanding. I think the most I've seen is Cathy make 4 demands in rapid succession, and that's across dozens of games?

Also, you guys know what iTargetNumCities mean? It is set to 3-6 depending on map size.. maybe AIs change behaviour once they reach that number of cities, and my AIs misbehave because the map is too crowded for them to reach that number?

Not sure what that variable means, but in terms of AI changes, not that I've noticed. AIs will happily continue settling until they run out of land, whether that's 3 cities or 20 cities, and then decide whether or not to continue expanding through conquest. Of course that depends heavily on the map situation, too. I've gotten DoWed by a 2 city Monty before because I refused a demand from him, and on the flipside I've seen Gandhi stay at 1 city for seemingly forever because he was spamming Missionaries like he could win the game that way.

 

[ZeekLTK]

• That's is purely a gameplay thing to prevent players from being able to march armies through someone's borders without fear of getting counter-attacked and DoWing once the army is in place to take every city on the first turn of the war. It's completely unrealistic of course, but to have it be realistic would massively change game balance with regards to opening borders and the like.

The older games let you do this, and is why it was changed. I think even in Civ 3 you could have open borders with someone, put troops all around their cities, and then declare war on them and wipe them out. That was dumb, so in Civ 4 they made it so that if you declare war on someone, your troops are automatically "exiled" from their territory, and the same thing happens if you don't have open borders - if borders expand to cover your troops, those troops are then "exiled".

Most of the time they just get moved one spot over, but in some cases where there isn't a spot to move them to it is wonky and throws them onto an island or something - I guess you just have to pretend it's part of the theme, maybe the locals put them on rafts and shoved them out to sea. lol

 

[ArchGhost]

I have only played BTS so I'm not sure what may not apply here:

Selecting my leader/civ.. many civs have special units that require, say horses. But most maps I have played seems not to contain many at all! (Same goes with some other resources, like silver and sugar -- is this a known bug?). Meaning many unique units are useless, but I cannot know when selecting civ.

Selecting the "balanced" option for resources will makes it so all civs (the AIs too) will start with the basic strategic resources nearby and at least one in the BFC IIRC

• Scouting early on I have discovered other players sometimes manages to produce a worker within a few turns (less than 10?) after game start. What is the trick that I am missing?

• Also other players manage to discover hunting and archery and build 2 archers within maybe 10-15 turns. How? Here the stupidity of the AIs show, the correct move for them is to attack me before I get archers.

In BTS on any level above Noble the AI has handicaps on everything: hammer cost, city maintenance, unit costs, upgrade costs, an era-based economic bonus (so they tech faster the more advanced they are by default). I would assume at least some of it was carried over from the base game:
-AIs start with 10 hammers to use in their city towards first build
-Starting at Monarch they start with Archery tech and Archers replace their starting warriors.
-All higher difficulties add free techs, I don't remember the order but they get 4 by Deity.
-Starting at Emperor they get a free worker (and Scout, I think)
-Deity AI has a total of of 2 Scouts, 2 Settlers, 2 Workers, and 4 archers, and has the techs Agriculture, Hunting, The Wheel and Archery for free. This was toned down from Warlords I've heard (where they started with 3 settlers?) but I have no idea what Vanilla is like.

Making peace with the barbarians? Witnessed a barbarian walking past another player's city without attacking and heading for my capital. I thought they would attack anything next to them?

Barbs have a courage threshold -- they won't attack if the odds are hugely bad in their favor unless given a City_Attack designation (basically suicide mission). Instead they'll often choose to pillage instead since the AI is quick to get archers, though the AI can be really lazy about cleaning them out.

• When the other players end up in a war with each other, both sides invariably keep nagging me for assistance. This is a major problem. If I agree, everyone hates me for having declared on their friend (and the player asking for assistance immediately settles for a peace, leaving me with a war for a long time). If I disagree, both sides will ask again and again and again - and hate me more for each refusal. It seems like they do not ask anyone else but me? Or how do the other players react to their pleas without getting hated?

• Demands of tribute. Example: I mined my 2nd gem, and immediately 5-6 players demand I give that gem to them for free (even if I am many times larger than them). If I refuse, they hate me forever. If I agree I cannot trade the gem for something I want, and canceling the tribute trade will cause them hating me forever.

• Demands of civics/religion. Example: I have one religion in each city - and is my state religion, and then a heathen superstition spreads into one of my cities. Immediately a bunch of other players demand I change my state religion to the new religion. If I refuse they hate me forever, and ask again later. Any way to get rid of a religion in a city? The Romans fed christians to the lions ...

You only really HAVE to consider demands for tribute -- I don't know for sure but all my time with the game the only demands that ever generate war plots are demands for resources/tech/gold. Everything else just cause diplo hits that can come up later, if ever at all.

That said, you can mostly ignore war join and civic/religion demands; they'll make them regardless of anything you do and you just have to deal with it. It's designed to make it hard for the player to make friends with everybody, and there's no real winning unless trying for Diplo victory.

Consideration should be paid to "stop trading" demands though, and generally refusal is the best choice (considering normal tech trading games) -- the AI won't DoW you over the refusal itself. If you decide to give in, the AI that gets embargoed HATES this much more than the demand-maker will being rebuffed! Sometimes that AI will refuse to talk ever again until you vassal them! On the other hand you evaluate whether it matter to keep them as a trading partner or whether they like you or not matters in the first place --on one map a hopelessly backward Tokugawa may not be worth your time, or on another a Gandhi with a target on his back from everybody else is too dangerous to deal with. In such situations it's often better just to not make deals with them in the first place though (close borders, stop resource trades, etc) and leave them to their fate. Use the time they serve as a distraction to ready yourself for the other AIs, or attack them yourself.

On that note, it's perfectly fine to actually jump into a war with an AI you don't have any associations with --in fact it's a great way to boost relations with the guy demanding your help. An impotent AI across the map, a small guy on his way out, etc. are perfect for this kind of stuff. Just be sure to read the situation correctly and don't jump in with the likely loser of the fight, as that just leaves you down an ally and still facing the pissed off winner, or sometimes they'll just buy out if not winning, and leave you alone in the war.

How can I refuse to talk (or listen to their demands), like the other players do sometimes?

Hit ESC when you see a face Automatically denies whatever the AI wants and assigns the appropriate penalty though.

Open borders and war. Typical scenario: someone far far away (at least 2-3 nations away) walks with an army all across the continent using open borders to me, and then declares war. There is no point to that war, they will lose all their army but pillage me in the process. Even if they conquer a city it would kill their economy. How to deal with them using fast units (chariots) to raid in and out of my territory using their open borders to escape?

You can try to get the guy letting them walk through to embargo them (this would be very hard.a lot of gold in no tech trading game). Other than that you can't force them to close borders unless they go to war (AP resolution can in BTS too).

If you are reading the diplo correctly and know they are walking to you by monitoring their units (something easy to do with a missionary/scout/chariot or even a worker), you can just DoW them first and hit their stack in transit. So long as the other AIs don't care or won't jump in on you with bribes, you're free to duke it out away from home.

The easiest way to ensure an AI leaves you alone is to get it into war with someone else. This is the other most important use of diplomacy as a tool after trading techs to speed up. Tech trading is WAY easier to make bribes with than gold, and AIs at war instantly close borders. Now, they can still walk through, and in some cases (refused tribute war) will still try to declare on you, but they can't use the road network and the other AI will harry them the entire way. In most cases they will just immediately forget they were planning a war with you and fight the other dude.

Another easy way to prevent this kind of easy access to you is to take vassals that buffer your borders and everybody else's. Even if they are stupid enough to try to DoW you from the vassal's border, they will get teleported outside of BOTH of your nations the instant they declare, and have to fight through the vassal's territory to reach you. Buffers are big part of who I choose to attack in what order in my games, as even if the vassal is weak and sucks, or problematic in diplo terms, they can still act as a buffer or staging area for future wars.

 

[Tapani]

Not sure what that variable means, but in terms of AI changes, not that I've noticed. AIs will happily continue settling until they run out of land, whether that's 3 cities or 20 cities, and then decide whether or not to continue expanding through conquest. Of course that depends heavily on the map situation, too. I've gotten DoWed by a 2 city Monty before because I refused a demand from him, and on the flipside I've seen Gandhi stay at 1 city for seemingly forever because he was spamming Missionaries like he could win the game that way.

My experience is the latter, when the map is cramped they just sit with like one city forever. I would wish to encourage them to build a stack and go knock on any neighbours door to grow. The real historic world did not have lot of good space to colonize but was full of tribes and cultures ... most we never heard of

Another easy way to prevent this kind of easy access to you is to take vassals that buffer your borders and everybody else's. Even if they are stupid enough to try to DoW you from the vassal's border, they will get teleported outside of BOTH of your nations the instant they declare, and have to fight through the vassal's territory to reach you. Buffers are big part of who I choose to attack in what order in my games, as even if the vassal is weak and sucks, or problematic in diplo terms, they can still act as a buffer or staging area for future wars.

Vassals ... that might require Feudalism or smth, and my problem is way earlier than that. By the time of feudalism the game seems completely static. Nobody declares war on anyone, the AIs just stand pat and do nothing.

The older games let you do this, and is why it was changed. I think even in Civ 3 you could have open borders with someone, put troops all around their cities, and then declare war on them and wipe them out. That was dumb, so in Civ 4 they made it so that if you declare war on someone, your troops are automatically "exiled" from their territory, and the same thing happens if you don't have open borders - if borders expand to cover your troops, those troops are then "exiled".

That scenario is exactly why I have never granted open borders ... thanks for letting me know it is not as huge risk as it obviously appears.


(more rant follows -- one can stop reading here )

If you allow an enemy army onto your soil, a backstab is a risk you take! That is why no country in the world will voluntarily grant unlimited access to foreign troops! The game should not have magic technologies just to enforce a way of play Firaxis prefers. Instead maybe limit the open borders (to a negotiable number) X units at a time or something. Same goes with the city maintenance costs, inflation and many other concepts that have been added only to enforce we play it certain way.

While I might adapt to to some of the illogical/inconsistent rules of the game, it will annoy me, often to the point I stop playing for a while. What I enjoy with civ4 is the (crude) embedding of the real world and the immersion. Firaxis forcing their way of playing onto us (making the game more linear) is not fun, and magic jumping units completely breaks the immersion. Also, I should not have to have done something before (like tried a backstab with open borders) to be able to predict somewhat what will happen. The rules should be consistent. Like: I have never conquered a city with a spearman. I should not have to have done it in order assume (and count on) it will do it just like any swordsman or axeman, and will not pop up a message saying it is not how Sid wants cities to be conquered.

Simplicity. Consistency. Emerging phenomenons from basic principles. Just because something can be added to the game, one has to think whether it should.

 

[AcaMetis]

Selecting the "balanced" option for resources will makes it so all civs (the AIs too) will start with the basic strategic resources nearby and at least one in the BFC IIRC

It's not guaranteed, but the odds of generating a map without some strategic resource at least nearby is very low. Even on Deity, where the AI literally has a second Settler ready to go from turn 1.

My experience is the latter, when the map is cramped they just sit with like one city forever. I would wish to encourage them to build a stack and go knock on any neighbours door to grow. The real historic world did not have lot of good space to colonize but was full of tribes and cultures ... most we never heard of

I'd suggest turning off Aggressive AI and seeing if that helps, because if not something that was changed in BTS I suspect that's the issue.

That scenario is exactly why I have never granted open borders ... thanks for letting me know it is not as huge risk as it obviously appears.

For the record, the AI is aware of this mechanic and will DoW the turn their army walks into your borders, not the turn their army is next to your capitol or something. Vassals or defensive pacts they're less intelligent with, but if you're on your own they'll never fall for the trap of marching into your borders, getting exiled because of the DoW, and than marching their way back to where they were before starting to actually attack.

 

[vucode]

If you want to not know what the map will be, pick Fractal. I haven't seen it be Pangaia often, but it's still somewhat random.

 

[lymond]

I... Fractal.....

For my personal/casual games, I play that map exclusively.

 

[Major Tom]

lso, you guys know what iTargetNumCities mean? It is set to 3-6 depending on map size.. maybe AIs change behaviour once they reach that number of cities, and my AIs misbehave because the map is too crowded for them to reach that number?

This value determines how many cities getting the happiness bonus with Representation civic and also something to do with how far apart map generator tries to set starting locations. Nothing to do with AI behavior.

 

[dohh_]

Having few thousands of hours play-time... I read Your complaints and at some point they are hard to understand. You say, game at higher levels is too difficult (unfair), but too boring at lower levels. I think You should try to change game settings, that somewhere mean difficulty from 0,5 to 2 levels.

Dear diary (or random reader of Civ IV forums),

I suspect my relationship with Civ IV is unhealthy
There is a repetitive pattern of missing the game when I have not played it in a while, and feelings of irritation and annoyance once I do play. Maybe it is a me problem, maybe there are standard ways to deal with some of the irritable parts. I'll let you guys be the judge.

About me and my games: I am not a very seasoned player. Maybe played 30-40 games, but have won on immortal level. My usual settings are:

• Vanilla (no bts)
  
• Marathon speed
• Ancient start
• Noble--immortal level
  
• Crowded with civs. The real world is crowded. To get 5-6 cities should require some conquests.
  
• Raging barbarians
• Aggresive AI (hoping for some action on that crowded map)
  
• No tech trading (otherwise the AIs just tech together?)
  
• No cheating whatsoever: no reloading, no regeneration of maps, no worldbuilder, ...
• Not using mods, mainly because I don't know which ones to use

Vanilla is more boring and less balanced, than BTS, marathon speed is much easier but also much more boring, than normal speed. The main reason for that is, that its is much easier to be a tech leader with healthy gold balance. Earning of gold beaker is same, but techs are much more expensive. Also, units lose their significance much slower at relatively early stages - You can easily clean out map with upgraded rifles or earlier if You are good player.

Growded with civs makes again game easier: more trade = more ROI of tech lead. Also more choices for backstabbing aggressives.

Overall: seems You limit Yourself too much for having fun, as games turn out to be completely different (yet quite balanced) with different settings. thats the magic of civ 4.

Early game. Once the game starts, there are early game issues:

• Scouting early on I have discovered other players sometimes manages to produce a worker within a few turns (less than 10?) after game start. What is the trick that I am missing?
  
• Also other players manage to discover hunting and archery and build 2 archers within maybe 10-15 turns. How? Here the stupidity of the AIs show, the correct move for them is to attack me before I get archers.
• The culture concept is another difficult part of the game. How to fight culture early on? Say a creative neighbour aggressively settling close to you, or a worse example: building their 2nd city two steps from your capital and founding a religion there the turn after (this has happened twice). The culture push will crush you!
  
• Another example is trying to get hold of critical resources outside my cultural borders. Example: I wanted to get hold of the only horse on the continent (planet?), which was located like this: Me <-------> Mongol <-> Horse <-----> Germany. The Mongol had only one city and the horse was a square away from it on the far side from me. So I conquered the city but once the cultural zones realigned the horse ended up the German zone! (who was too strong to take on in a war). I did not even want the darn mongol city, just the horse! What would have been the proper procedure to get the horse? Even when the Mongol had one injured archer left against my horde of swordsmen, he refused to talk. Was willing to give him peace for the horse.
  
• Making peace with the barbarians? Witnessed a barbarian walking past another player's city without attacking and heading for my capital. I thought they would attack anything next to them?
• A minor head shaker is also the style contrasts between the epic "baba yetu" and voice of Leonard Nimoy, and the not so statemanlike conversations like: "care for some salad ..." or "call me little corporal ... ". Make the game serious or a cartoon comedy, but don't mix!

At immortal level worker and two archers come with start (thats why You see them so soon, Deity starts with 2 settlers) and yes, they produce much faster, than You, But thats a good thing, because that is what difficulty level means.

Culture meter is shown inside city, every time this meter fills up, borders expand by one square. There is no way to be faster with expanding borders early, than cultural AIs can do - this is their strenght. I would say myself, in middle game the strenght of Japanese Samurais is much bigger.

Solutions for Your problems:

If You think AI is too passive, use ALWAYS WAR setting on. Quite cool setting is ALL AI teamed up and then always war. Very hard from Monarch on (same archers issue).
If some ressource is blocked, try not to take it as a faulty game but a challenge - You need to come up with new idea. You may try to beeline feudalism + construcion and try to take something over with longbows + catapults.

Middle game:

• The reason I do not play the higher levels is that I suspect the AIs cheat with production, tech and maybe combat. In the only immortal game I played, the AIs could out-tech and out-produce my 6 cities with a single city. Another example is seing Mao building 7 archers in 8 consequtive turns without city population shrinking (going from 6 to 13 defenders in his only city). I have 6 swordsmen, and I just cannot produce enough to conquer his city (this was not even immortal, emperor level maybe?)
  
• Despite me choosing aggressive AI, they are not fighting enough. Some 80% of the wars are with me. Any way to encourage them to fight more - with each other? Typical middle game relation graph is all AI players having open borders with each other.
  
• When the other players end up in a war with each other, both sides invariably keep nagging me for assistance. This is a major problem. If I agree, everyone hates me for having declared on their friend (and the player asking for assistance immediately settles for a peace, leaving me with a war for a long time). If I disagree, both sides will ask again and again and again - and hate me more for each refusal. It seems like they do not ask anyone else but me? Or how do the other players react to their pleas without getting hated?
  
• Demands of tribute. Example: I mined my 2nd gem, and immediately 5-6 players demand I give that gem to them for free (even if I am many times larger than them). If I refuse, they hate me forever. If I agree I cannot trade the gem for something I want, and canceling the tribute trade will cause them hating me forever.
  
• Demands of civics/religion. Example: I have one religion in each city - and is my state religion, and then a heathen superstition spreads into one of my cities. Immediately a bunch of other players demand I change my state religion to the new religion. If I refuse they hate me forever, and ask again later. Any way to get rid of a religion in a city? The Romans fed christians to the lions ...
  
• One sided open borders? The UI is buggy and added open borders to both sides of the deal, and I could not cancel it! I refuse to give anyone access to my territory, but sometimes need to walk through theirs.
  
• How can I refuse to talk (or listen to their demands), like the other players do sometimes?
  
• Open borders and war. Typical scenario: someone far far away (at least 2-3 nations away) walks with an army all across the continent using open borders to me, and then declares war. There is no point to that war, they will lose all their army but pillage me in the process. Even if they conquer a city it would kill their economy. How to deal with them using fast units (chariots) to raid in and out of my territory using their open borders to escape?
• How can I demand things? Like in the situation above or with the mongols and horse above? Say "stop giving X open borders or it is war". And mean it.
  
• Sometimes another players cultural zone grows where I have troops (due to them building cities or the like). This causes my troops to teleport to all kind of weird locations. It is impossible to cross water or peaks even when your life depends on it, but perfectly possible to avoid any diplomatic embarrasment? I would want to be able to declare war instead of having my army jump to another island. And what technology does that jump use anyway?

AI is not cheating, You are handicapped, and how much is that depending of difficulty, is a open information. Google it.
AI have different "peace scores". AIs with very different score and religion are very probable to attack each other. This also imprives with moving to BTS.
AI hating You for refusing single ressource is rather rare in BTS. You can always soften relationship with overall diplomacy. If You deny everything, have totally different peace score and run Your own religion, then its perfectly normal, everybody hates You.
You should have a certain defence force always ready to turn back those "walkers" at any time. Even if Your big plan is to tech-tech-tech and war tomorrow. This is inevitable, that CIVs attack You.
If AI is ready to give a ressource, You can demand it from regular dialog. Happens very rarely tho... with exception of vassals or very good relations (Friendly).

Late game:

• Choice of defender in a stack. This is another annoyance. I have a stack of (say) riflemen on a tile. One is a swordsman upgraded with all city attack upgrades, the rest are fresh inexperienced ones. They all defend equally. Someone kamikazes on the stack, and of course it is the precious upgraded swordsman that takes the fight and dies (despite having 90%+ to win)! Any way to influence the order in which equal defenders are chosen?
  
• Boring after gunpowder. Discovering gunpowder temporarily cures me of any longing of the game. When this happens I am usually ahead in tech, production, food, GDP etc. I start playing sim city, building every city improvement I can, upgrading my defenders from archers --> longbowmen --> musketeers --> riflemen --> SAM infantry ... and nothing more happens. My cities are too many to conquer new ones, and the cultural part makes it pretty much impossible anyway. Somehow the game just stops, I get bored after some 24h of micromanagement and don't finish the game. Pretty much every game I do finish is by conquest, and ends before 1000 AD.

The soldier with best odds defends. I cant recall if it was indeed differently in vanilla, but i doubt. 90% win rate is nothing extraordinary. At higher levels You HAVE to fight at this rate, because either way You dont make up what You lose in productivity. Me for example - in tightest games, I consider VERY MUCH if I hit with my few best veterans on only 90%, or I rather try to softne the defence further. And when You constantly fight at 90%, its normal, You lose 1 out of 10.

While some micromanagement is important, You can still win even at immortal with only minimal amount of micro. get used to queue for example. It very much OK to produce wealth or science.

Your last paragraph is Your best one! That means, You should increase difficulty, or game mode. Or both! Some ideas:

* at landmass map, set all AI allied and always war mode ON. If all is too many, leave some slots open. The good thing here is, that their development times increase accordingly number of civs in ally (they share science) but every city still produces accordingly to difficulty level. If still too hard, try it on naval map.
* pick tiny islands + high water percent. You wont be winning with muskeeters, You would only meet the AI with musketeers.
* leave marathon speed behind. that is part of why You get bored with the pace.
* try a bit smaller map and dont overpopulate it. increase difficulty instead.
* try always PEACE mode.
* definitely try BTS. AI behaviour is more optimized.
* try earth18 huge with Incas, then Americans, then europans, then japanese. completely different games. I have played earth18 at least 20 times, does not get boring if difficulty is correct.

 

[Tapani]

Thank you dohh for taking the time to respond. Did not see your post until now.

I appreciate the creative suggestions you make, how to make the game more interesting. Will consider several of those.

AI is not cheating, You are handicapped, and how much is that depending of difficulty, is a open information. Google it.

Tried at some point, but could not find it. But it is beyond the point.
Wouldn't it be a bit boring to play if before you attack a city you get a popup dialog asking "What defenders do you prefer there to be?" and you get to select how many and what kind?
Selecting difficulty is akin to that, since it is pretty much that dialog. But not only for defenders, but for all aspects (nof cities, techs, ... ).

Another point where the AI cheating annoys me is that they do not have any fog of war. When I conquer a neighbour, the cities are in anarchy for several turns, often like 10-11 turns. During this time, AIs from different continents rush there with galleons and settlers, and build cities on the temporarily cultureless areas before the existing cities come out of anarchy. How do they know where to go and when? Cheating.. and a pain since they settle on the resources I went to war for to begin with. Would just like to be able to put my army on a square and tell them "dont let anyone else enter the area".
Which begs the question, why does the AIs even bother to trade world maps? They know it all already!

If You think AI is too passive, use ALWAYS WAR setting on.

My concern was that the AIs dont fight each other much at all.
Playing always war is something I have considered, but I thought it ment that the AIs are always in war with me, but never with each other, and war weariness would probably reach 100% of my population after the first 100 turns or so?

Speaking of war weariness ... that is another annoyance: the civilopedia says war weariness should only happen in "prolonged wars", but it certainly starts from first turns of warfare, and seems to increase 1-2 pop per turn. Conquering a neighbour can take 10 turns or so, and by then I have 12-16 unhappy (and massive starvation) in each city.

If some ressource is blocked, try not to take it as a faulty game but a challenge

I have done so, tried to play on with out iron and bronze. One or two games, it can be a challenge. But if in 30+ games I have never built a horse unit (no horse archers, cavalry, knights .. ) because there pretty much there are NEVER any horses on any map, there is something buggy. It appears a large part of game revolves around cavalry somehow (including special anti-cav units like pikemen and spearmen). A civilization having a horse based UU is a disadvantage if horses are around only 10% of the time.

definitely try BTS. AI behaviour is more optimized

This is a common suggestion, but the catch is that I am playing under Linux - and directX games and dvd copy protection are often problems. All I have now is vanilla, and it seems to work well enough using wine.
Also, my usual take on add-ons and successors for any content (games, TV, ... ) is that new content will be made until it gets so bad nobody pays for it anymore. Maybe BTS is an exception, people seems to like it, but it was the last add-on after all.

leave marathon speed behind. that is part of why You get bored with the pace.

Won't units go obsolete before they even reach the battlefield? I play marathon since I even then units get obsolete too quickly. After swordsmen, I manage to build a few longbows, even fewer macemen and by now I have learned to never build musketmen or grenadiers. Riflemen come so soon after gunpowder. And even they get replaced too soon on marathon speed, but I still try to modernize my army to rifles. Maybe some of this is because of my crowded maps: all civs are smaller, with fewer cities so paying to upgrade a unit is prohibitively expensive, upgrading a single swordsman to a rifleman costs several turns of national income, so usually I have to build brand new units instead.

try earth18 huge

You can still win even at immortal with only minimal amount of micro. get used to queue for example. It very much OK to produce wealth or science.

Never dared to play a huge map, the micro management kinda kills the games already on standard.. the micro that I find taking the longest time is workers, not cities. Where to go and what to improve next ... and every turn there are several workers needing attention. And game speed crawls down to 30 turns per hour or less.

I would expect worker micro management being the same ordeal on faster speeds, the number of decisions to be made depends on the number of tiles to improve ( = even worse on huge maps!) not on game speed.

Another micro annoyance is unit control. It seems impossible to select 10 units out of 60 on a square. Even if I shift click, it sometimes selects multiple units, and the selection method where you have to "scroll" the units (one by one) to find the unit you want to add to the group is ridiculous. And after you selected eight, the shift click fails and selects all units on the tile. Start over. Maybe BTS has fixed this nuisance?

 

[AcaMetis]

Another point where the AI cheating annoys me is that they do not have any fog of war. When I conquer a neighbour, the cities are in anarchy for several turns, often like 10-11 turns. During this time, AIs from different continents rush there with galleons and settlers, and build cities on the temporarily cultureless areas before the existing cities come out of anarchy. How do they know where to go and when? Cheating.. and a pain since they settle on the resources I went to war for to begin with. Would just like to be able to put my army on a square and tell them "dont let anyone else enter the area".
Which begs the question, why does the AIs even bother to trade world maps? They know it all already!

This sounds like another thing that BTS fixed. Another few things, even. For one, how long a city is in anarchy following a conquest is dependant on how large the city is, and to get 10+ turns of anarchy the city needs to be absolutely gigantic. Further, I've never had an issue with AIs quickly sneaking in a settler in areas I conquered before. I have seen an AI capture a Barb city that I popped up when I was razing Kublai Khan's land before and not bothering to prevent barb spawns, and I've had an AI quickly settle into an area that was previously occupied by barbarians after I smashed the barbs and didn't care to bring my own settlers to take the land, but I've never seen them sneak in a settler in someone else's territory that I conquered.

Incidentally, one thing you can do (in BTS at least) to get a city out of revolt instantly is to have a Great Artist create a great work there. Not that that's enough to justify getting a GA over getting a GS to bulb something or a GM to do a trade mission, but if you've got one and you've no need for a Golden Age (IIRC they're not as good in vanilla Civ IV?) it's an option.

My concern was that the AIs dont fight each other much at all.
Playing always war is something I have considered, but I thought it ment that the AIs are always in war with me, but never with each other, and war weariness would probably reach 100% of my population after the first 100 turns or so?

Speaking of war weariness ... that is another annoyance: the civilopedia says war weariness should only happen in "prolonged wars", but it certainly starts from first turns of warfare, and seems to increase 1-2 pop per turn. Conquering a neighbour can take 10 turns or so, and by then I have 12-16 unhappy (and massive starvation) in each city.

"Always War" means "The Player automatically DoWs every AI when they first meet, and cannot make peace without killing the AI outright". AIs themselves are free to make peace or war as they please (though peace is more likely, since few would enter a double-front war and their shared war with you gives them all +diplo points with each other), but you'll be at war with everyone the entire game.

As far as I know, War Weariness is dependant on how many units you've lost, how many of your cities have been taken, etc. No clue if turns passed since the war started adds to it at all, but I don't think it does, or at least makes a meaningful impact if it does. Killing units and taking cities also doesn't negate that penalty. This sounds like something BTS rebalanced, because getting 12+ unhappy from war weariness would take an absolutely massive slugfest against an AI with the Statue of Zeus (+100% War Weariness for anyone attacking the civ who has the wonder, not sure if it's in vanilla Civ IV). Even then, you can build Theatres in your cities and run the Culture slider to counteract the unhappy temporarily. War weariness doesn't degrade instantly after the war ends, but unless you re-DoW the same civ it won't cause unhappiness either.

I have done so, tried to play on with out iron and bronze. One or two games, it can be a challenge. But if in 30+ games I have never built a horse unit (no horse archers, cavalry, knights .. ) because there pretty much there are NEVER any horses on any map, there is something buggy. It appears a large part of game revolves around cavalry somehow (including special anti-cav units like pikemen and spearmen). A civilization having a horse based UU is a disadvantage if horses are around only 10% of the time.

That sounds like either bad luck or a BTS rebalance, because while I don't see horses all the time I definitely see them more frequently than 10% of the time. Also, while mounted (and later tanks) have their advantage of having 2, this also means that siege units cannot keep up with them, so in terms of taking cities you either ignore their advantage or you attack cities without siege. Cavalry can punch through fortified Longbows, so it definitely works if your target is at a tech disadvantage, but against Muskets it becomes a little more dicey, and Rifles hard counter any kind of mounted unit.

Though IIRC siege in BTS works differently from siege in vanilla Civ IV, so I can't vouch that enough Cannons backed by a mix of Muskets can take out an AI that has Rifles and Cavalry. They definitely can in BTS, so Iron is actually a greater priority than horses outside the early game.

This is a common suggestion, but the catch is that I am playing under Linux - and directX games and dvd copy protection are often problems. All I have now is vanilla, and it seems to work well enough using wine.
Also, my usual take on add-ons and successors for any content (games, TV, ... ) is that new content will be made until it gets so bad nobody pays for it anymore. Maybe BTS is an exception, people seems to like it, but it was the last add-on after all.

I definitely wouldn't say that of Warlords and BTS. My theory would be that by the time BTS was released the focus was put on Civ V and it's attempt at grabbing a share from the casual crowd, however successful that attempt was or wasn't in the end. Never played Civ V (or VI for that matter), so I can only go off of what I've heard. And what seemingly every other game developer has done for the past I don't know how many years, but...that's a different discussion.

Won't units go obsolete before they even reach the battlefield? I play marathon since I even then units get obsolete too quickly. After swordsmen, I manage to build a few longbows, even fewer macemen and by now I have learned to never build musketmen or grenadiers. Riflemen come so soon after gunpowder. And even they get replaced too soon on marathon speed, but I still try to modernize my army to rifles. Maybe some of this is because of my crowded maps: all civs are smaller, with fewer cities so paying to upgrade a unit is prohibitively expensive, upgrading a single swordsman to a rifleman costs several turns of national income, so usually I have to build brand new units instead.

Units are only obsolete insofar that they cannot defeat the enemy, and that's the big problem with relying on cavalry. Without siege you need strong units to punch through healthy defenders from one or two eras back, or overwhelming numbers if you're going fighting at a tech parity. But with siege you can reduce their strength until they have less fight in them than Archers, and at that point even a Sword is going to obliterate them. You'll need stack defenders, of course, but for wiping out critically wounded defenders you only really need bodies, and everything better than a Spear can do that. If you bring enough siege.

Another micro annoyance is unit control. It seems impossible to select 10 units out of 60 on a square. Even if I shift click, it sometimes selects multiple units, and the selection method where you have to "scroll" the units (one by one) to find the unit you want to add to the group is ridiculous. And after you selected eight, the shift click fails and selects all units on the tile. Start over. Maybe BTS has fixed this nuisance?

Not entirely, but there is one thing you can do if you want to only select a group of units: First select all the units, than click the button that says something like "separate the stack", should look like a circle splitting off into multiple circles. What happens with randomly selecting groups of units is that the game remembers which units were groups before you merge a stack, and if you shift-click a unit belonging to such a group the game defaults to selecting the entire group. But if you first select everyone and separate the stack the game will forget the previous groups, and you can choose units individually. It's not a perfect system, but I'm afraid it's the best you're going to get out of Civ IV's at times wonky UI.

 

[Tapani]

Thanks AcaMetis for chipping in.

to get 10+ turns of anarchy the city needs to be absolutely gigantic.

Actually sizes around 15 can do. My guess was that the number of turns depended on the amount of culture in the city.

I've never seen them sneak in a settler in someone else's territory that I conquered.

Highlight mine. This has actually only happened when I wipe someone out. Since one has to kill them fast (or the war weariness kills you) it is not unusual that the 4-5 last conquered cities are still in anarchy (due to the long anarchy times) when the wipeout happens. This is when the settlers sneak in. Guess all terrain that belonged to the extinct civilization is somehow marked "unowned" inside the AI. It is still annoying.

War Weariness is dependant on how many units you've lost

This would very much explain what I see. My strategy has been to build a horde (40?) catapults before an invasion, and sac them en masse to wear out the defenders. Thought I had to kill them off quickly to avoid the war weariness, and by sacing hordes of cats an enemy city is barely a speedbump.

getting 12+ unhappy from war weariness would take an absolutely massive slugfest

Yup. But on the other hand.. what would be the point of the Jail building if war weariness is limited to only a few unhappy?

 

[AcaMetis]

Actually sizes around 15 can do. My guess was that the number of turns depended on the amount of culture in the city.

Perhaps it's just the difficulty I normally play on (Noble, not really a fan of the whole "competition through massive cheating" thing, and I play games to just chill and relax anyway) that AI cities never reach that size, than. Though I thought that higher level AIs were more on the ball about whipping their pop into units when they were being invaded.

Highlight mine. This has actually only happened when I wipe someone out. Since one has to kill them fast (or the war weariness kills you) it is not unusual that the 4-5 last conquered cities are still in anarchy (due to the long anarchy times) when the wipeout happens. This is when the settlers sneak in. Guess all terrain that belonged to the extinct civilization is somehow marked "unowned" inside the AI. It is still annoying.

That would have to be a function of Plot Culture than. When a civ gets wiped out all of their plot culture is wiped out, which is why you'll see cities that used to belong to them go from something like 99% Mongolian/1% German right to 100% German after you wipe out the Mongolians - plot culture determines those nationality values. By the same token, any far-off tiles that used to only have their plot culture on them will get wiped and revert back to unclaimed tiles, which AIs might think are viable settling spots.

As for preventing the settler sneaking, aside from DoWing the offending parties and wiping out their settling parties before they settle (or letting them settle and wiping out their cities, though keep in mind that pop 1 cities will get auto-razed and give you a -2 diplo penalty with the city's owner) you could go with the Great Artist method of getting cities out of revolt quickly or bring a few settlers of your own and settle the area before the AI has a chance to. You can't settle cities within 2 tiles of another city, so that's one way to keep a lockdown on a conquered area.

This would very much explain what I see. My strategy has been to build a horde (40?) catapults before an invasion, and sac them en masse to wear out the defenders. Thought I had to kill them off quickly to avoid the war weariness, and by sacing hordes of cats an enemy city is barely a speedbump.

Oh yeah, that's how you get insane amounts of war weariness right there. Do you bombard city defences down at all? Because if not I would definitely recommend setting aside a few Cats with Accuracy promos to bombard them down faster. Of course that might leave you with less powerful cats to finish weakening the defenders, but once they've taken a few cats to the face City Raider tends to not matter so much anymore. The game never points it out, but Combat promotions add to your unit's , whereas other promotions reduce the bonus that a defender gets added to their because they're, say, fortified in a city. But once their has been catapulted into the ground, literally, that bonus doesn't matter so much anymore, so City Raider doesn't matter so much anymore.

Yup. But on the other hand.. what would be the point of the Jail building if war weariness is limited to only a few unhappy?

In BTS it also produces quite a bit of and allows you to run +2 Spies, for what it's worth. It's better to not have to build those buildings in the first place, though. Especially because Jails don't unlock until Constitution, and if you're fighting with catapults you definitely don't have that tech yet.

 

[elmurcis]

Highlight mine. This has actually only happened when I wipe someone out. Since one has to kill them fast (or the war weariness kills you) it is not unusual that the 4-5 last conquered cities are still in anarchy (due to the long anarchy times) when the wipeout happens. This is when the settlers sneak in. Guess all terrain that belonged to the extinct civilization is somehow marked "unowned" inside the AI. It is still annoying.

From pattern (experience - no code diver) how AI settle cities (blue circles high priority - if have own settler near, can even predict where AI will settle) and move settlers - if "Spot" to settle allow city to be built, unit will go there. As soon as I settle that spot (or near it), unit usually turns around and go back (unless there is another location near that AI would take). Actually even human could see in dark area of map if there is good place to settle (by AI "thinking") - when start new game, with settler selected can hold right mouse button and move around black tiles (undiscovered) - "build city" will highlight if there is good spot to settle (not every land tile though but can "read" size or configuration of land etc). So even human can "cheat"