Hi again everyone; to manage expectations, I am likely taking a lengthy break from RI, at least until the end of January. Don't expect much in terms of SVN updates or patches before that.
Well 5 out of top 10 biggest cites are on the coast. And yes I agree that coast is more important for trade than actually fishing. But many were inland on big rivers that lead into the sea and could basically count as being on the coast for purpose of trade or shipping. I would just be happy that lakes could be be improved somehow or that the resource can spawn on them. I do not see why fish resource could not spawn on a lake tile. What would be good is not to avoid coast tiles like the plague, and it would also open up new builds. On a lake with fish resource inland and going for fishing first for example? Lake tiles are actually quite ok when you have city on coast when you use them and can be improved.
The trade aspect of rivers is already represented in RI. As for the rest, I will think about the best approach for freshwater tiles.
Above reminds me of one of my first games. I used my warrior to scout out the wilderness to find Goody-Huts and forgot all about babarians. Of course I saw and fighted some animals - but who cared about that? Well I didn't. Until my starting city - the only one I had - was razed by a babarian warrior....... I do not forget neither that situation, nor the feeling I got when I realised I had lost.
It's likely that warrior came from a goody hut, not spawned as a barbarian. AFAIK, even after they start spawning, barbs don't target cities for quite some time
While I agree with this in general, one difference that has to be acknowledged is that real life cities built inland rather than coastal were not restrained from coastal fishing industries, harbors, or naval construction docks. Civ IV cities lose much more than real life cities by going inland.
Sorry for being contrarian, but they actually were, in a major way. Before late XIX century, transporting fish/seafood inland was almost pointless. In Rome, for instance, fish was considered a 100% luxury food - something that only the richest could afford to eat with any regularity (in the interest of truth, though, I have to mention that Romans were, OTOH,
huge fans of fermented fish sauce - but that is a totally different story from logistics PoV). While fish could be salted/dried/cured, it did require either specific circumstances or costly ingredients (again, unlike modern times, salt was a rather costly good), and as such, it could supplement the inland menus only to a token extent. This changed substantially only with canning and refrigeration.
At the same time
1. The ban on privateering was more or less successfully observed against the background of a long peace between the powers that had at least some maritime capabilities. At the same time, anti-raider maritime law could not withstand the first "fundamental" conflict between states with serious fleets (WW1). Moreover, the failure was not up to a banal robbery, but much worse. I suspect that the Kaiser's Germans, with their unlimited submarine warfare, were deterred from distributing privateer patents only by the obvious inefficiency of the event.
2. The main an anti-privateer lobbyist was England, which had a rather unique combination of needs and capabilities.
3. And if we consider a purely political (not technical) alternative like "someone with naval ambitions became a hegemon in continental Europe in the 1880s and is at war with England", then the result would be predictable.
Then this basically brings us back to the approach of upgrading to the subs, as U-boats were the most iconic raiders of XX century. It's probably the most justified approach history-wise, but I feel the gameplay implications for that wouldn't be nice.
Hmm ... 1. Anyway, the auxiliary cruisers of the 20th century had more technical possibilities for masquerade than ever before. The Germans depicted not even an abstract neutral, but a concrete vessel.
2. At the same time, the proxy wars of the 16th and 18th centuries in fact differed little from the same conflicts in the twentieth century - the Madrid court knew perfectly well who was behind Drake and Co.
3. The fact that aviation massively flew under a false flag in several major wars, and the fleet behaved like a good boy, looks like the result of a rather random combination of circumstances: USA and England totally dominated the sea. But but the situation is different in the air and... there was quite a limited war under the carpet in the style of Elizabeth.
I daresay the proxy wars were still rather different to XX century, or at least similar to different bits of it. Privateers were more like private military contractors, and they were not under "control" of their respective states. Though I guess that distinction is moot in Civ 4 as the player directly controls all units.
There is a nuance here, which is really better to show on specific figures. As Google says, the grain harvest grew in 1950-1980 from 800 million to 1550. In 2000, 2060 million, in 2020 - 3000 Fish from 21 million tons in 1950 grew to 70 million tons by 1980 and 84.4 million tons by 2020. That is, in 1950-80, the share of fishing grew much faster than the share of the main grain crops. Then stagnation occurred in the sea, but the full effect of the fish jerk has not been reset until now. In general, we had a fishy "almost a century". At the same time, we are talking only about wild marine fish, without aquaculture and fresh waters.
Well, as I mentioned (did I?) before, this might merit another +1 food to water tiles at some point in late Industrial / early Modern tech tree.
By the way, I forgot to write. The same Iranian transport ("Delvar") is now part of the "sinister division" (c) of drone carriers, including strike ones. Large drones, apparently, are disposable – starting (from a catapult) is not a problem even in the case of a very compact ship, but parachute landing on water is difficult to implement.
That is, theoretically, there is a funny opportunity to get a drone carrier using ХML
Drone carriers are a cool concept (that has yet to prove itself in real action), but outside of RI scope, as it currently terminates at the end of XX century. While I added UAVs themselves in 3.6, they've been around for many decades.
Hi in my current game i met a Barbar "
National guard trained abroad" strength: 28 in turn 74 at 2520 bc.
Maybe thats a Bug?
Definitely a bug. Would love to know more about the circumstances, as I haven't seen anything like that myself.
And I have a question. Is there a reason why it is recommend to play with tech trade off. Can the AI handle it?
Tech transfer replaces tech trading in RI by default. You can turn it back on, but then disable tech transfer. Tech trading should work as well as it did in vanilla, but obviously no special attention has been devoted to it.
None of these fixes have worked either, unfortunately. My GPU is a Radeon 6700XT, and the drivers are up to date. I've also turned off AMD's special graphics things (e.g. "Image Sharpening" and whatnot).
That's a shame. We still don't have a working solution. That's just how it is for some users.
1) Heavy Privateers are AMAZING. One of my Privateers managed to get to 700+ xp, taking ALL promotions save for the last two "pirate hunter" ones. Ironic a pirate vessel would have a pirate hunter promo. The second Privateer is lagging behind because the stack attack favors the first ship.
Sounds like asking for a nerf.
2) Managed to found two religions with one tech. Choose Religion option was on and I somehow ended up with two prompts about founding a religion. Not sure how on Earth that happened, but it might be because I've clicked the pop-up windows a bunch of times with RMB to go to civilopedia, thus discarding the window and going to the next one (like game cycling through "what do you want to build next" and "choose a religion to found" windows).
Choose religion is highly recommended to be off, as religions have vastly different balance based on their place in the tech tree.
3) This happened. Radio with no radio? That's some cutting edge burger company.
Will check the event.
- When opening Civilopedia from main menu the Civic section is empty... Not too serious bug, but it's there.
Can't replicate. Has anyone else experienced this?
This might again be down to something specific to your circumstances. Have you modified the mod in any way (including renaming the folder)? Do you have anything in your CustomAssets?
* The improved (winning) AI is fierce, but still do weird stuff. Like running away with last city's last defender to the woods... Sure, the "complete kills" was on, but giving up last city just to hide out last unit in the woods is a bit faulty long term thinking
See directly below
I am seriously asking the author to do SOMETHING about the AI putting its units on Explore (Automated) order until the end of the game. First of all, the units do nothing useful - they don't take part in warfare, they don't defend cities, they don't counterattack, etc. Second of all, there's nothing to explore so the units end up doing circles somewhere between the AI's core cities, so it's completely pointless. Third of all, if it's a quick unit like a Light Cavalry, and the AI has railroads, and your "show enemy moves" option is on, and you have recently flown an airplane over your rival's territory or just have ships near his 5 tile island, you're in the world of pain. In the absence of any place to actually explore (no unexplored tiles or no way to get to those) units are stuck in a continuous loop of moving one tile at a time until they run out of moves, so you'll be looking at all these moves for a long time.
I've had a submarine blockading my rival recently and it just so happened that another nearby rebel civ located on a TWO tile island DOW'd me and every single turn I've had to watch a bunch of his irregulars walk into the woodland tile and back into the city, into the woods and back into the city, into the woods and - you get the point.
Also, honestly, I don't want to see worker moves either. When you're raiding the enemy coast in hopes of finding free exp and are forced to look how his 20 workers are building stuff - it gets old fast.
See directly below
On the topic of AI misbehaving - there's this finland rebel guy sitting on an island and he's at war with me and I'm trying to bait him to attack me with his ships (I need ship xp). And sometimes he does attack my stack of old Ship of the Line units i'm keping in his waters - but rarely. But any time my newer Dreadnoughts are passing by, this lad feels compelled to throw a sloop to die into them. It's amazing. I've seen this before with Man'o'Wars vs anything else - the AI felt it absolutely had to throw stuff into my Man'o'Wars, even against abysmal odds, but he would barely ever attack anything else.
Coming from me, very unlikely. I don't delve too deep into the AI. I'm not a good coder and since now I'm a team of one, we don't have any others.
Need some advice about the separatism Window. The "2" by culture means the City needs more culture right?
And what is the meaning of the black Icon with "-6"?
Separatism from culture and separatism reduction from units respectively.
1. For Line Infantry and Light Infantry, the 100% vs Melee seems a bit excessive. In the Renaissance, Melee Infantry still has a role in defending against cavalry and assaulting cities (Arquebusiers only has a +50% attack vs Melee, but not defense). This means racing to Flintlock Musket gives an overly massive military advantage. Maybe the bonus should be scaled instead (i.e. Line Infantry +25% vs Melee, Rifleman +50% vs Melee, Trench Infantry +100% vs Melee)? Also, Longbowman in cities tends to perform very well even against Rifleman. Maybe there should be some bonus against archers?
A valid observation from the balance PoV. I will consider this.
2. For the "Heavy Cavalry" line, would it be better if the +25% vs Melee is changed to +25% attack vs Melee (or +10% vs Melee & +15% attack vs Melee)? I often find that enemy Cataphracts and Knights in cities will beat my veteran Man-at-Arms because the combat odds skew in their favor. Also, I find that Spearman/Pikeman often significantly underperforms against heavy cavalry because of this bonus. While I get that they are not supposed to beat cavalry 1-on-1, I should at least be able to counterattack wounded Cataphracts with Spearman under favorable odds.
Seems the opinions are divided on that one. I'm not really sure myself of what to aim for here. I'll think about it.
3. Special Forces being classified as Gunpowder instead of Recon seems weird. IRL, Special Forces are mostly used for infiltration and recon missions. Would it be better if it is reassigned to Recon?
Valid observation; will change.
4. The War of Attrition doctrine may need to nerf its bonus vs Melee (or introduce some other nerfs)? While doctrines are supposed to be powerful, this doctrine in particular feels overpowered. It basically shuts down enemy Melee altogether and invalidates Spearman/Pikeman as counters against Cavalry. Looking at the other doctrines in Classical Age, Rites-of-Passage is highly conditional on the terrain, and Imperial Glory offers moderate bonus over Combat promotions. War of Attrition just seems out of place in how much of an advantage it offers in the early game.
Another doctrine bites the dust

Since they were first added, I did nothing but nerf them one by one.
5. Specific to the Turks, the Janissary UU seems strictly inferior compared to their Line Infantry. However, they are unlocked by Absolutism, a tech that cost the same as Flintlock Musket. Either they should be buffed as an alternative to Line Infantry, or they should be unlocked earlier and their strength rescaled accordingly (maybe at Administration?).
Will have a look.
I found some glitches in some idle animations of some units
Thanks, will fix.
Any way to remove Spices as a resource for starting position. It seems spices are the best resource in the game and half of starts are 3 spices or spices + clams. It is spices everywhere. It is a bit problematic when you play MP and somebody is granted to start with 3 spices start and he is pretty much screwed. And cows are i think just too good for starting resource. Food and more importantly production beats any resource. I just wish starting positions could be more balanced, or simply nerf cows so there is less difference between cow start and any other start.
Specific to a particular map script or globally?
I just noticed an option "Influence-Driven War" in my settings - can't remember selecting that at game start, is that an addition of the recent update ?
What does it do exactly ?
As others explained, combats influencing culture and cities with lots of culture drafting militias. It was in RI before 3.6, what's new is the option to turn it off.
there is no option to sign defencive pact (alliances) with other civ. this is bug or such option was intentionally removed from diplomacy?
Correctly explained by others. I do have plans to bring them back, but didn't have time to playtest properly for 3.6.
Thanks for answering my question about the separatism Window. Now i have two questions more:
What is the little man and the fist standing for?
The man stands for separatism from population amount (IIRC something like 1 per 5 pop currently); the fist stands for separatism from occupation timer (kinda useless currently, as it's totally offset from temporary buildings on conquest, so I should probably just remove it).
In my actual game on prince (dont know whats that in english) i conquered the france but the franceman are not dead. I need my hole army to preven the New cities from separatism. They already conquered back half off the french cities and I had to take them back.
Culture doesn't disappear when a civ is fully conquered, unlike vanilla. If you're playing with separatism, you should keep that in mind.
It primarily has to do with culture and population size, IIRC, although I can't remember the exact threshold for each. However, as partisans spawn, the defending civ's culture and population are both reduced.
The chance increases with culture, and the city must be able to draft (=being over 4 population).
Did i get the ahead of time science cost scaling right?
If i want to research a technology that has not yet been research es in real life at the time of the game, then this technology is more expensive right?
Almost; there are fixed "checkpoints" in time that make all technologies cheaper (down to their base cost).