Realism Invictus

[AspiringScholar]

You realize you can just revert to the version before that change was made, right?

 

[globosud]

true, and even better option exists - I can play something else.

I play version 3.4, everyone can use the version they prefer

 

[Drakarska]

As a general comment, can I please ask everyone to be more civil? It might be partially a language/cultural barrier thing, but ultimately, you're all discussing personal opinions here, and you wouldn't be here if you weren't discussing something that you, ultimately, like. That said, more specifically, can all native English speakers please mentally append "in my opinion," to posts of Central/Eastern European people - I know full well that they often come off harsher and more categorical than they intend to. And, of course, the mentioned people are kindly encouraged to use more qualifiers and softening statements so as not to come off as more confrontational than they really are.

Reposting

What if there is +1 evil resident in every city in the world, for 80 nuclear points, 4 nuclear strikes?

Again, why?

Long time no see guys! How's it going? Did invaluable balance change number 567 from AlltheBS was implemented by our polite servile Walter?
Seems to me a bunch of other longtime RI players are not very satisfied but Walter has a soft spot for a nerd who scrutinizes every digit instead of effing playing a game. I can get it. He saves his sarcasm and newfound teeth for RezerCuid replies.

BTW Walter I know it s not as important as to hastily reply to every whim of AlltheBS and I am not sure I'll ever play RI again, but maybe some other guys would enjoy if you'll include American leader who can form CSA ffs. You know, very insignificant state in Americas.

Just FYI, see top repost.

true, and even better option exists - I can play something else.

An excellent option, and perfectly viable solution.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

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.

 

[TheBirdMan]

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

Good post!

 

[Hafenguy]

I play with low Resolution. Is there a way to make all units visible?
The military adviser cant always help. there are oppoetunities where the swordsman for example cannot assigned exactly.

Why cant my Drakars reach the english boat?

 

[[Y]]

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.

True, but there are a few things that also need to be considered:

1. A game of bridge or MTG may last between 10-30 minutes. A game of Civ can last days. Getting a handicap in a short-timeframe game isn't a big deal since you'll be starting a new one soon enough, you can make the most of that bad setup and quickly move on. Getting a bad start in Civ is committing to an uphill battle for a very long duration (assuming you do well enough to not die beforehand).

2. The higher the game difficulty, the more impactful the quality of the starting hand. I don't mind challenging circumstances on lower difficulties since the setup in general is more "human vs nature" than "human vs human", but as the AI civs accumulate bonuses, the "human vs human" aspect becomes disproportionately more relevant, and there is a need for a minimum starting hand quality in order to be competitive long term. In a perfect world where higher difficulty means the AI made better decisions rather than getting artificial bonuses this wouldn't be the case, but even OpenAI can't dream of an intelligence system that efficient.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

I play with low Resolution. Is there a way to make all units visible?
The military adviser cant always help. there are oppoetunities where the swordsman for example cannot assigned exactly.

Unfortunately no. The stack tooltip is mostly hardcoded - I'd love to be able to change the way it works, but it's one of the interface bits I can't really modify to any real extent.

Why cant my Drakars reach the english boat?

The boat is on an ocean tile, and coastal units can only traverse ocean tiles that are inside one's borders (and not inside any other civs' borders).

The higher the game difficulty, the more impactful the quality of the starting hand.

I'd refine that statement a bit. It's more impactful on whether you win or lose if the difficulty is high enough for you to be able to lose and not high enough for you to be unable to win. So yes, at one's optimal difficulty level, the starting location has a lot of impact on whether you'll win or lose. That's, of course if one is thinking in win/lose terms. But to give a counterexample, I usually play on a difficulty level that allows me to win most of the time, and for me, the "hand" I was dealt means the difference between winning comfortably and winning barely. I don't generally play to test my mettle, but rather to have fun - and losing is simply not fun for me. Neither obviously is going to space when everyone else is experimenting with gunpowder, so there needs to be some difficulty involved - but generally speaking, in my case almost all difficulty is derived from starting conditions.

 

[RezerCuid]

It should be pointed out that at the level of difficulty where humans and AI are absolutely equal, at the end of the game I was ahead of the best rivals by 1.5 epochs. Although our territory and population were about the same.

 

[[Y]]

but generally speaking, in my case almost all difficulty is derived from starting conditions.

This is getting at what I was saying earlier of having to choose where you source your difficulty. For some it's controlling the starting hand, and letting the AI level determine the challenge (my own preference) and for others it's controlling the AI level and letting the starting hand determine the challenge (your preference). I apologize if I came off as saying one is more significant to the other. My original intention was to make sure that people asking "how do you do well on Emperor?" were absolutely sure they wanted to play on emperor or higher, because if they prefer to control the AI than to control the starting hand, then raising the AI level is likely to spoil their play experience, not enrich it.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

It should be pointed out that at the level of difficulty where humans and AI are absolutely equal, at the end of the game I was ahead of the best rivals by 1.5 epochs. Although our territory and population were about the same.

I'd struggle to name any civ-like game where that isn't the case.

This is getting at what I was saying earlier of having to choose where you source your difficulty. For some it's controlling the starting hand, and letting the AI level determine the challenge (my own preference) and for others it's controlling the AI level and letting the starting hand determine the challenge (your preference). I apologize if I came off as saying one is more significant to the other. My original intention was to make sure that people asking "how do you do well on Emperor?" were absolutely sure they wanted to play on emperor or higher, because if they prefer to control the AI than to control the starting hand, then raising the AI level is likely to spoil their play experience, not enrich it.

No-no, I wasn't trying to contradict you, just offering my perspective, as I mentioned initially - and to add to the "how do you do well on Emperor" question, my take would be, in addition to yours, "are you sure you want to really struggle to win"; I know there is a certain type of players absolutely need to play at the highest difficulty accessible to them, but I also know that many others could actually enjoy a more relaxed playstyle.

 

[[Y]]

No-no, I wasn't trying to contradict you, just offering my perspective, as I mentioned initially - and to add to the "how do you do well on Emperor" question, my take would be, in addition to yours, "are you sure you want to really struggle to win"; I know there is a certain type of players absolutely need to play at the highest difficulty accessible to them, but I also know that many others could actually enjoy a more relaxed playstyle.

Oh, I get you now! Absolutely in agreement.

 

[RezerCuid]

The Almogawars had helmets

 

[RezerCuid]

In 3 civilization, in this case I was only 2-4 ahead of technology

 

[shkitur1]

Not all archers after nerf their str from 3 to 2 received bonus city defense 100%.
Ayt (siberian), judean (israel), khmer loeu (khmer), luba (bantu), nomadic (hungarian and hunnic) archrs still have only +50% city defense. Unfair for this civs. Also savage (barbarian) archer have 50% city defense, probably he also should receive 100% bonus

 

[Hafenguy]

I dont expect this to be possible.
But I would like to know whether it is possible to see the whole civopedia on Smartphone.
I would like to use afk time to inform myself about some aspects of the game.

 

[Takofloppa]

I dont expect this to be possible.
But I would like to know whether it is possible to see the whole civopedia on Smartphone.
I would like to use afk time to inform myself about some aspects of the game.

Some time ago I was thinking about making a web version of RI civilopedia, something like https://www.civilopedia.net/ that would be generated based on XMLs - unfortunately I already have too many ongoing projects to do it myself, but it certainly sounds like a possible and interesting thing to make.

 

[[Y]]

Some time ago I was thinking about making a web version of RI civilopedia, something like https://www.civilopedia.net/ that would be generated based on XMLs - unfortunately I already have too many ongoing projects to do it myself, but it certainly sounds like a possible and interesting thing to make.

I thought of doing something like this as well, but considering that all the art would need to be loaded as well, it gets pretty heavy. I also don't know how much information is pulled from the game docs directly and how much is available in just the XML.

 

[AspiringScholar]

Some time ago I was thinking about making a web version of RI civilopedia, something like https://www.civilopedia.net/ that would be generated based on XMLs - unfortunately I already have too many ongoing projects to do it myself, but it certainly sounds like a possible and interesting thing to make.

I made a short effort to find it which came up short, but somebody actually made a PDF of the tech tree, reformatted to show all prerequisites and not just linear paths, which I found quite interesting. That is of course just a minor part of the Civilopedia, but I imagine Hafenguy would be pleased with it along the lines of the question.

 

[Hafenguy]

Uh yes may you load it up?