Realism Invictus

[RamsesII]

I'm guessing Memphis is in the north on the Nile Delta. I believe flood planes also have an increased effect on the epidemic chance. If you hold the mouse over a cities epidemic % you'll get a pop-up that breaks down the +/- effecting the city.

As far as the game slowing down/crashing. If you have an older system, you can turn off watch Friendly/Enemy moves. And don't use high def terrain or display city buildings. Or even single unit graphics etc. can all help reduce the stress on your PC. You'll find the point when you hit the Age of Exploration that your system will be tested. This is when you'll start to see the world map and all the other nations turns.

Yes indeed Memphis is about in its real life location. In the screenshot below epidemic ratio is at 0 but that is because the city just underwent an epidemics.

Spoiler :

On another note this is the border face-off between Egypt and Ethiopia... another war is looming!

Spoiler :

 

[Takofloppa]

Dang, you're making me want to play Egypt again

 

[Jaded1]

Yes indeed Memphis is about in its real life location. In the screenshot below epidemic ratio is at 0 but that is because the city just underwent an epidemics.

Yeah you can see the break down. your pop is +10 and your reduction is -9 and - base rating. the +14 is coming from those 4 swamp squares on the Nile Delta. Even with Aqueducts and bathhouses you'll still have problems with Memphis. It won't be until late medieval that you'll be able to clear those swamp squares. This is why it's best in the early game to use all that extra food to make Warbands and not let your city grow till you can compensate for the epidemics.

 

[RamsesII]

Yeah you can see the break down. your pop is +10 and your reduction is -9 and - base rating. the +14 is coming from those 4 swamp squares on the Nile Delta. Even with Aqueducts and bathhouses you'll still have problems with Memphis. It won't be until late medieval that you'll be able to clear those swamp squares. This is why it's best in the early game to use all that extra food to make Warbands and not let your city grow till you can compensate for the epidemics.

I am not sure I should have left Memphis at a smaller size (say 5) up to now. Epidemics usually last 2 turns during which the city loses 25% production and either one or two pop. And they happen (in Memphis)... well I guess once every~15 turns or so, since the % chance to get infected is around 6% or 7% at my insalubrity level. The city goes back almost immediately to size 9 and quickly back to 10, because its food output is incredible. That means all in all I still enjoy the yields of a size 10 Memphis for, say, 2/3 of the game's time. It's a lot, and it's my second city so it was built early on and has very good yields overall (horses + fish + quarry in its radius, 3 floodplain plots with kemet farms and one mine). Now if the epidemics were spreading often to connected cities then the maths would be different; but it's happened only once (in my capital Thebes) over 500+ turns.

That said, I can't wait to have the technology to clear those Nile delta swamps!

 

[AspiringScholar]

Oh no, it looks like my hard drive is kicking the bucket... I most likely won't be able to play RI for a while, at least while I deliberate on whether or not to make the (probably foolish) choice of fully upgrading my PC to something modern and capable of running any contemporary game without a second thought. Maybe I'll just get something optimized for this though, since I don't see myself getting much into anything else particularly recent or new.

 

[RamsesII]

The flavour of this mod ... just as I was launching my final large scale assault on the Ethiopian kingdom, Aton himself blessed our troops sending a prophet...

Spoiler :

And the great pharaoh in person arrived on the battlefield and led a battalion of axemen to victory!

Spoiler :

Egypt is spreading wide, just sparked its second golden age and is finally about to get access to the Indian ocean, which should propel her as one of world's global powers!

 

[Rorda86]

Hi guys, do you please know if there is a downloadable graphic pack for great general for each of the military eras? I don't like seeing army of fusiliers and grenadiers and cannons led by a dude in chainmail with a sword and shield. Is there a way to upgrade this in RI? Thank you.

 

[Jaded1]

Oh no, it looks like my hard drive is kicking the bucket... I most likely won't be able to play RI for a while, at least while I deliberate on whether or not to make the (probably foolish) choice of fully upgrading my PC to something modern and capable of running any contemporary game without a second thought. Maybe I'll just get something optimized for this though, since I don't see myself getting much into anything else particularly recent or new.

I bought an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics, 3801 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s) so I could play more modern games.. But mostly so I could run Realism late game with less delay I also have a 250GB SSD C; drive that runs my system and a 2TB SSD to store my games.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

So nice to see lots of discussion here - as usual, I'll leave the gameplay advice to actual players.

I just built the Great Wall and ... amazing feature on the map, I did not expect this ! (I guess this is from vanilla game?)

Can't take credit for that one! This is vanilla. Funniest when you're on an island and get a 1-2 tile long "not so great wall".

On another note this is the border face-off between Egypt and Ethiopia... another war is looming!

You're missing out on some unit variety by running single-unit graphics. Those shiny shields on the Ptolemaic phalanx among the recent ones I did and I'm quite fond of how they turned out; in this (and many other, though not all) unit, each of the three figures has a different shield design (and usually some other minor details), as pre-modern armies aren't supposed to look too uniform.

Oh no, it looks like my hard drive is kicking the bucket... I most likely won't be able to play RI for a while, at least while I deliberate on whether or not to make the (probably foolish) choice of fully upgrading my PC to something modern and capable of running any contemporary game without a second thought. Maybe I'll just get something optimized for this though, since I don't see myself getting much into anything else particularly recent or new.

Oh no! I hate it when it happens. By this point, I think I've had half a dozen HDDs die on me, often without any forewarning, and it's always a gut punch. My sympathies.

The flavour of this mod ... just as I was launching my final large scale assault on the Ethiopian kingdom, Aton himself blessed our troops sending a prophet...

That, on the other hand, I (and others who worked on RI), can definitely and proudly take credit for. Literally thousands (close to 2000) splashes for great people.

Hi guys, do you please know if there is a downloadable graphic pack for great general for each of the military eras? I don't like seeing army of fusiliers and grenadiers and cannons led by a dude in chainmail with a sword and shield. Is there a way to upgrade this in RI? Thank you.

I wish! I'd simply take it and incorporate it into RI. It's not that simple unfortunately, as units can only change looks two times - between Classical/Medieval and between Renaissance/Industrial. Changing that is possible, but is rather involved, with some new dll code, so it's one of those "one day" projects for me.

 

[RamsesII]

@Walter Hawkwood : I did not know about this single-unit graphic, will test it to see the shields.

I also noticed recently as I progressed through my game, that the model of most of classical era units (spearmen, composite bowmen, horse archers - but not the galatikois which makes sense as they are classical era unique units) changed as I entered the Medieval era ! Going from ptolemaic to islamic graphic flavor. Again amazingly immersive, well done !!

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

I thought you turned on the single unit gfx to spare your video memory, and it has some merit, but only when/if you start hitting MAF crashes. Before that why not enjoy the extra eye candy

 

[RamsesII]

Apart from display resolution to run on full screen mode properly, I don't think I turned on or off any option or setting when I first launched RI. I will have a look. The MAF issue is already haunting me ... I am having so much fun through this game, am taking my time and enjoying every minute of it. Had not taken so much pleasure gaming since the glory days of civ3 and Baldur's Gate (1&2).

Anyway. I am past 500AD with Egypt, I control one quarter of the African continent (from modern-day Algeria to southern Sudan and Somalia). Just landed an army to conquer Arabia. File size is now 3.1MB, AI turns take 10 seconds at most, everything works so smooth... and yet I know at some point on this huge map it is going to crash! (but I knew it from the start).

 

[Takofloppa]

Have you tried using Process Lasso? It helped me a lot to at least delay these issues since it forces the program to release unused memory, so Civ can live longer without crashing. Charms of a 32-bit app

 

[RamsesII]

Have you tried using Process Lasso? It helped me a lot to at least delay these issues since it forces the program to release unused memory, so Civ can live longer without crashing. Charms of a 32-bit app

No but I have read about it. Let's see when I run into the issue. If you have any link on how to install/use Process Lasso, would be great.

 

[RamsesII]

Also... for a future game, is there any other great Mediterranean centered map, with TSL starts and careful terrain features and resources placement, that works well with RI?

 

[Takofloppa]

Link to download: https://bitsum.com/download-process-lasso/
Here someone described what to change in settings so you can try:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CivIV/comments/1aei044/shoutout_to_the_realism_invictus_creator_it

 

[RezerCuid]

Well, Walter, now there's nothing stopping you from adding more unique graphics for the units)

 

[RamsesII]

Thanks a lot @Takofloppa !

 

[AspiringScholar]

Those shiny shields on the Ptolemaic phalanx among the recent ones I did and I'm quite fond of how they turned out; in this (and many other, though not all) unit, each of the three figures has a different shield design (and usually some other minor details), as pre-modern armies aren't supposed to look too uniform.

Actually somewhat recently, I had to take some pause to admire the light glinting on these in particular, and was surprised that that was somehow doable within Civ IV's engine and after all of the descaling necessary when porting a lot of the higher quality unit models. I'm not sure how you managed that but they look great!

I also like the touch of irregularity that you get with multiple figures in the unit, such as with men at arms each holding a different weapon, or as mentioned the different insigniae painted onto shields. Really adds something nice.

Oh no! I hate it when it happens. By this point, I think I've had half a dozen HDDs die on me, often without any forewarning, and it's always a gut punch. My sympathies.

It was possibly an anomaly, but alarming enough for me to back everything up on an external drive just in case. Seems to be working alright all of a sudden currently, just was sporadically really slow with basic functions even after multiple full restarts. Either way, I might still take it as a warrant to buy and build something a bit excessive anyway, however.

 

[sazhdapec]

After trying to start several games I also think that the ancient era has become a slog. Technologies are being researched so slowly that there is nothing to do. I've been just skipping turns a lot. IMHO we had a good balance of research, food and hammer production so that different starts felt viable but required slightly different approaches.

However I kind of agree that before 3.7 the early game (ancient+classical) used to be over quite fast. But it seems that the starting technologies that give options to do and reveal resources need to stay relatively cheap. Maybe revert the ancient era tech costs back but increase the costs of classical era techs or revert the costs of just 2-3 starting rows of techs?

Alternatively as proposed recently make some early game "quests" that give when completed. Though I'm not sure if this should stay as an ancient era gimmick or extended through all time.