By the way, I made a non-trivial discovery for myself about the difference in cultures. A "bearish service" - originally from the fables of La Fontaine. And I thought that if the "meme" was spread from the Rhine to Russia, then it had definitely crossed the English Channel. In reality, even the French themselves do not use the idiom – their reference to the same fable sounds like "the bear's cobblestone".
The British, obviously, lived by the principle mentioned above: "we don't need these French things. We are reading a moral novel in ten volumes here". It is curious that it is in the idiom that English speakers read instead of irony / self-irony. A threat to eat with bones?
And La Fontaine shamelessly stole that particular fable from Indian sources, where it was a monkey instead of a bear, or more likely from Rumi
who stole it from India.
If I were La Fontaine and saw this particular illustration, I'd be pretty sure this "monkey" is in fact a bear! I think Rumi's (not personally his, this is a XVI-century illustration) illustrator somehow was already more familiar with bears than monkeys! This guy looks much more like a bear to me. I should also note that most other animals in that particular book are actually quite realistically (and even often skillfully) drawn - for the curious, the whole book can be downloaded as a pdf here:
https://art.thewalters.org/detail/14438/collection-of-poems-masnavi-3/
Admittedly, though, the default textures are quite primitive, and I'm not sure that real ICBMs have Christmas lights on the top, either. I was quite candid in looking forward to seeing how they were addressed...
I'm tempted to do away with the Christmas lights altogether, especially since they somehow produce an ugly effect in the unit selection interface (lower left window). Currently I kept them for stylistic consistency with the default one, but I might take it away from that one too.
Then "a first impression is NOT, in fact, a lasting one" it seems...
Well, it does last for a whole given game... But otherwise no.
I often play with the music off myself, but (speaking of generative AI) YouTube's new recommendations are terrible in my recent experience, and generally just rehash my literal history instead of recommending anything new along similar lines, so I've often just switched back to the in-game music because suggested songs are the same handful ad nauseum.
I'm an old-school guy when it comes to music, myself. Might be my age, but I never really got into streaming services. I have a proper music library (which is stored locally, no clouds for me) from which I manually pick stuff I want to listen (and it mostly gets there from me reading actual human reviews of stuff that I haven't listened to before). I wouldn't trust algorithms to pick the music I want to hear. From what I understand it's a generational trait
Is it actually contingent upon you knowing the tech to build either unit, though? It could just be a statistical outlier, but since I literally couldn't build Swordsmen but could build Axemen, I'm wondering if it pays heed to that.
Not really, no. The event itself is contingent upon, among other things, your ability to build axemen (and having metal casting and iron working techs), but barbarian swordsmen don't care about your ability to build swordsmen. So outlier.
Hmm, yeah I didn't spoil my game by opening the WorldBuilder, but there was no notification that I saw about the event being completed by anyone, so unless I missed that, there was no way for me to confirm without doing so.
You might have missed it, failed quest notifications are rather easy to miss. Did you know that there is a tab in the log that lists active quests?
Sure, but if I may ask, what's wrong with that? Do we want the player to never be able to beeline when history itself offers no counterargument conceptually? I fully understand things like not being able to have aircraft if you don't already have something not immediately relevant but implicitly prerequisite like Machine Tools, but isn't it otherwise just restrictive to strategic choice in sheer gameplay terms, and also somewhat damaging to historical immersion to try to imagine why you would need to have a Greco-Roman knowledge of classical republics to build the swordsmen which actually did physically overrun this society with this heritage in lieu of such?
The logic of military techs in Civ 4 is that you research them if you need better units, and generally, you research them to the best immediately available upgrade. If there is no outside link for Armor Crafting, there will be a far far smaller time window (if any at all) where people use spearmen and axemen and skirmishers but no swordsmen and cataphracts. And by current design, axemen represent ~1500 BC military tech while swordsmen represent things around 300 BC - 300 AD. I'd want them to have a tech gap in-between.
Huh, there might then have been a bug with the tooltip over the action. I'll keep a mental tab open and let you know if I can replicate this.
Yeah, keep me posted - especially if there are particular notable conditions under which it occurs.
So, what actually determines the flavor of slave that you do in fact capture, then? I'm actually not sure where the Asian ones were coming from, since my neighbors were the Sahelians and Egyptians, and the only properly Asian civ (Japan) was far away. My second thought would be that my early Avar flavor was providing this, maybe, but then that begs the question where the "European" ones were coming from at the same time.
Disregard the Asian bit, I double-checked and it was a sloppy copy-paste, the number there was still checking African units. Generally speaking, mechanically, the flavour of slaves depends on the visual citystyle of the target civ.
Ah, I did not realize that the Colosseum doubled this! Ok, that makes sense, then. I actually think that slavery is in a good place, personally, as it has built-in drawbacks that have to be accounted for and oftentimes Tribalism is simply better just because it lacks these, while Caste System can likewise be more lucrative if isolated or militarily spread thin.
It even says so in the tooltip and the pedia entry
I was actually not aware of the Hudson Bay Company at all.
It still exists! IIRC, it's the oldest currently existing business in the Western Hemisphere. Another fun fact is that, until very recently, the company was required to give two elk skins and two black beaver pelts to the English king (starting with Charles II), whenever the monarch visited Rupert's Land. Last time that happened was under Elizabeth II, and the pelts were still attached to (very much alive and well) beavers - which were promptly donated to a zoo.
Elusive indeed! I just saw it in the in-game Pedia and snagged a save real quick afterwards, thinking it would capture the bug replication. I guess not.
Yeah, since it (or the conditions causing it) is not saved anywhere, what I need to meaningfully catch it is a set of reproducible instructions that lead to its occurrence.
This is quite bland, but how about something like "Merchant Hostel" which doesn't identify itself as something land-specific? Also, why not just leave it Caravan House for Asian/African civs and then make a separate Inn for European ones, much like the Aqueduct which has similar regional variations?
I guess making a flavour Inn for European civs would work.
This gets into a big question that also has to be answered: From where do you derive your difficulty? There are two sources of difficulty in Civ: The difficulty level, and starting circumstances. Starting circumstances includes the area in which you start (both for your capital and your immediate empire), neighbors, etc. All the randomly-generated impacts on your game. Playing a game where both the difficulty level and the starting circumstances are against you is incredibly challenging, much more than either of those would be on their own.
My own unbidden take on that is that the starting circumstances influence is a major part of Civ 4 experience. Like a good card game (bridge, for instance, or even CCGs like MtG), there is a major element of strategy involved, but not all "hands" are born equal, and players can't expect to perform equally well regardless of a hand they were dealt - and therein lies a part of the charm. It's less about what you do with an ideal hand and more about how you make out of a non-ideal one.
I'm not giving exact numbers because they will change for sure after rebalancing, but as a quick summary should be ok.
And to elaborate on that a bit, the numbers are currently set to rather mild values - to have a meaningful impact, a really major nuclear exchange has to occur. 5-6 nukes on a standard map to just start feeling the impact on food production, and if one truly wants to render the world even temporarily uninhabitable, one has to really go out of one's way.
for all plots and +1 
in all cities
