Walter Hawkwood
RI Curator
Very lively here; I won't interject much and will generally leave you all to it. I'm aiming to release 3.71 by the month's end.
Edit: a question to all anyone who tried out multiplayer, especially with more than two human players - any issues? Do you go OOS a lot? What did you use to set up multiplayer?
I must second this - quite a heated exchange, which is surprising to me especially since a) most of you have been here for quite a while already and b) I already commented that I didn't really like the early tech balance myself and would make the ancient era somewhat cheaper, while classical somewhat more expensive.I'd appreciate it if there was more cooperation in your posts rather than putting up an attitude of "well I like it, so you just have to deal with it and change how you play".
Probably rounding down to zero before and up to one after.EDIT: Okay so I let it grow just to test, and it did indeed become unhappy - "we resent being ruled by a foreign culture" due to the barbarian culture. So this causes more unhappiness with higher population?
To add to what others posted, there is one notable exception - you can only have one Great Work of Science per city per scientific era (not quite equal to game era, but similar - the "sets" of great works unlock once per era early on, and then twice per era starting with Renaissance).- early game I had the impression that there was a hidden cap on GW either my civ or a specific city could build. Does this exist?
I'd say cavalry in general is something that is nice to have but not 100% critical unless you're supposed to be very cavalry-focused, like Mongols. Also, Conqueror trait allows one to circumvent the restriction on Knights if one absolutely must have them. Bear in mind also that while all civs' unit trees follow the same general layout, not all unit classes are available to all civs (as Egypt, for instance, you won't have longbowmen or pistoleers).- Knights have always been in all other civ games I played, a pretty crucial military unit. I noticed that in RI it can only be built with a certain civic, which comes with other global implications. Can I reasonably expect to run through my game without a single knight or is that a bad idea?
I would personally recommend trying some random maps. There are some bundled random map generators that produce very nice geographies.- other maps and scenario, in particular Europe map, Crusades and Deluge. Any specific feedback on those? Balanced? Fun? Attention to map details, resources placement, realistic terrain features etc...? That huge earth map I find is amazing in the quality of its geography.
It's not as much as it seems. One has to remember that each new "column" of technologies costs from 10% to 40% more than the previous one, so a 10% increase is not that big in the grand scheme of things. Due to how resources and cities work in Civ 4, the benefits of a new city are more often than not multiplicative in nature, being not just the output of the city itself, but also the benefits it "brings to the table" for all the other cities in a civ.+10% science cost for each extra city is really a lot. Right now, about mid-point of MA, tech cost must be around 6,000 SC, my empire's science output is around 600 SC per turn. So essentially with every city I conquer, each science tech takes one more turn to discover. That is quite a lot, more crippling than the gold impact I find.
Always cool to read how vastly different people's viable strategies can be. I personally am 100% serfdom guy, beelining to it and switching ASAP.I tend to build my empires with a big focus on commerce and trade routes, so City Rights and the civic it unlocks have a lot to offer me. I prioritize getting there fast, especially to have a better chance at building the wonder it unlocks. So in practice that means I either get City Rights before I even access Serfdom, or the window between accessing serfdom and getting city rights is so small, that it's not worth switching to it and building manors which will soon be obsoleted.
Edit: a question to all anyone who tried out multiplayer, especially with more than two human players - any issues? Do you go OOS a lot? What did you use to set up multiplayer?
Last edited: