Sulla's Civilization IV Walkthrough

[Khaim]

Anyone who hasn't looked at it yet, try unzipping this into the folder with the images. It should look nicer.

 

[Velvet-Glove]

Many thanks, Khaim... I got the pics but wasn't able to download the .doc earlier and I'm keen to read the final part. It's also a lot easier on my poor old eyes than the original white text on black!

Off to read it now...

 

[Harrier]

THANK YOU FOR THE ZIP!

Here's some tips to make reading the files locally a little easier.

Extract the Zip file to it's own folder.
Rename the word Document file so that it is not .doc, but .html
Open the renamed .html file in Wordpad.
Erase from the start of the file to the h2 align="center" part. (Don't erase the less than sign!)
Do a search and replace. Search for
http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/
replace with: nothing Leave the replace part empty. Hit the replace all button.
Save the file
Start Internet Browser, Using File Open, open the .html file.

Enjoy!

Thanks for the info.

For those who have not tried this tip - you get the text and pictures together. Just ignore the htlm bits and pieces.

Good job - Nomad_Wanderer

 

[KingSponge]

I put Part 7 into a single, self-contained PDF and can do the same with the whole enchilada if Sulla wants to send me everything. I can't host it but I'll gladly put it all into neat PDFs and send it to someone with some hosting resources.

 

[Sullla]

Update: Not surprisingly, the Walkthrough generated enough traffic to kill off my webshost's bandwidth, and so it had to come down. (Over 100GB of traffic in a week! You guys are monsters! ) Sirp has been a saint to put up with it for most of the past week.

I've had several offers of web hosting today (you guys are ALSO really kind! ) and I'm in the process of hearing back from some of them. Once I have a new site, I'll do my best to get the Walkthrough up and running again. So it may be a few days, but things should be up and running again at some point soon.

 

[Pragmatic]

You need three temples for each cathedral. 2 temples = 0 cathedrals, 4 = 1 cathedral, 9 temples = 3 cathedrals, etc. You also need to keep the type of each one in mind: 3 Hindu temples required for 1 Hindu cathedral. If you start cheating in buildings, you may see some weird results.

I may have cheated in giving myself a great nine-city starting position, but I didn't mess with buildings.

Could it be related to map size? I was playing on huge. And someone else was presumably playing on a smaller-than-normal size when they went for a six-city cultural victory, since they got a cathedral for every two temples.

 

[OliverTheGreat]

Thanks Sullla for your time!
Thanks to all the others helping Sullla!

 

[Spatzimaus]

Great read, but I came across something that got me thinking.

You won by Diplomatic victory, and noted that in Civ4 it now bases votes on population, so that given a little more time you could simply have voted yourself into the win. How, exactly, is this different than a Domination win, then? It's still the same basic effect; conquer as much as you can, and you can't lose. Only the percentages vary.

One of the things I liked about Civ3's one-civ-one-vote system was that if you went on a conquering spree as you approached the modern era, the other civs would all vote against you unless you took them all the way out. But in Civ4, it looks like once you get to 50%ish of the votes, it's impossible to lose at diplomacy. Because of this, I'd actually prefer Civ3's setup.

Or is this just me?

 

[azurefx]

That looks like you need 2/3rds of the world population to back you. If you've got 2/3rds of the world's population in your borders, you should've really won a domination victory by now ; )

 

[ParanoidPig]

It's not so much sullas civ4 walkthrough i'm missing ( excellent though that is), but his civ3 chronicles It's phenomenally inspiring stuff!. It's how civ should be played. Like reading through pages of history.

I tend to play disjointedly not really knowing what the hell i'm doing or researching. This has been a real eye opener. Just hope the site gets back up soon

Thanks Sullla

PP

 

[Shevek]

Sulla, thanks for your walk through.
It made me order my civ4 copy now instead of Xmas as originally planned.
Hopefully your site will be up again soon. This walkthrough is worth reading again when I actually have the game. Can't imagine a better introduction.

@Nomad_wanderer
Great tip, works like a charm and makes reading from the zip as easy as using the web site. Thanks a lot.

 

[tomcat885]

Thanks for the walthrough, it's been great. I live in Australia and it comes out in a few days. Can't wait to get it and start playing!!!

BTW this is my first post. I've been browsing civfanatics for years now, but only recently have decided to be a member

 

[Spatzimaus]

If you've got 2/3rds of the world's population in your borders, you should've really won a domination victory by now ; )

It goes both directions; anyone who wins the Domination victory in the Modern era could have, by definition, won a Diplomatic victory more easily. After all, which is easier: 66.7% entirely by yourself, or 60% once your allies are added in? The only way there'd be a discrepancy would be if your cities were so much larger than everyone else's that you didn't take up much land, or if you would have won Domination before the U.N. was built.

But the real point was, playstyles. With this change, the only consistent way to win Diplomatic would be to follow the same playstyle used for Domination or Conquest wins. You can no longer be that minor power that's managed to assemble a voting bloc against the warmonger; you now have to be that warmonger. (Especially true in multiplayer, since no one will vote FOR you there, but then again, that would be true of the Civ3 system too.)

 

[Pablitor]

Thank you, Sulla!!!! Super job!!!!

Just 4 days left to get the game and I can't wait!!!!!!

 

[Thrar]

Thanks for the writeup, it's great!!

If it's a static file (ie no PHP, ASP, whatever) I could offer you some webspace for it (also contacted you by PM).

 

[don_lahnum_jr]

Here's what we're going to do for now: I'm posting a pair of files here. The first one is a Word document with all of the text for Part Seven in it. I've cut and pasted from the html, but it should be easy to read (ignore the command tags). The second one is a zip file with all the pictures from Part Seven in it. If there are continued problems getting the website up and running I'll do the same with the other parts, but I hope we'll be able to resolve that and get things running soon. (It takes a lot of work to put these things into another format). Thank you for your patience, everyone.

Zip File

EDIT: OK, so apparently you can't upload Word Documents to the CivFanatics server. Weird. Anyway, I stuck the Word Document INTO the zip file, so it's all one download now. Hopefully that will fix things.

Sullla...I'm sorry, but I missed Parts 5-7...is there a way I could get 5&6 as well? Or do you think the site will be up soon? Great job by the way!

 

[TurkishFUN]

Hi there..ı cannt still get the avesome walktrough..please helpme about it

 

[Zed-F]

But the real point was, playstyles. With this change, the only consistent way to win Diplomatic would be to follow the same playstyle used for Domination or Conquest wins. You can no longer be that minor power that's managed to assemble a voting bloc against the warmonger; you now have to be that warmonger.

I would tend to think not. Certainly that's one way to do it. However, if you build the UN and are relatively small in population yourself, you can still win by lining up enough friends behind you. Certainly that seems to be the intent, at least.

Now Sulla did mention that there seemed to be some bugginess regarding the vote with respect to how Hatty voted. So it may not be the case that things will work as intended right now, but presumably that will get corrected sooner or later.

 

[bugmenot17]

How about zipping the whole thing and distributing it as a Torrent-file? There won't be much traffic if everybody keeps uploading it after finishing the download.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I would tend to think not. Certainly that's one way to do it. However, if you build the UN and are relatively small in population yourself, you can still win by lining up enough friends behind you. Certainly that seems to be the intent, at least.

But you see, it doesn't work that way in practice. If one overly-aggressive civ has more than 40% of the world's population, you simply CAN'T win a diplomatic victory, no matter how many buddies you line up, unless you get that one civ to vote for you. That's why I was saying the Civ3 one-vote system was nicer; it DOES allow for those sorts of wins.

Changing the threshold from 60% wouldn't be enough. If you raise it (the only way to keep it from precluding a Domination victory), it'd be even easier for a single aggressive civ to prevent anyone else from winning. If you lower it, it becomes easier for that single civ to win outright.

Maybe the solution is to have votes depend on Score, not just population. There's precedent; the influence of countries like France and Germany on the U.N. are far out of proportion to their actual population, and everyone's way behind China in population after all. Changing it to Score would overlap a bit with many of the other victory conditions (histogram, cultural, domination) without completely overshadowing any one. Plus, it'd be really easy to see how many votes everyone will get, since the score is right on your screen at all times.

And on a related note: why would anyone vote for you? Just in general, why would any actual players vote for anyone other than themselves or Abstain? Think about it from the multiplayer perspective; the only reason for player A to ever give votes to player B is if he'd rather see B win than player C. But a loss is a loss, and any strategy that guarantees you can't win is just dumb; you'd be better off abstaining, on the off chance that you could find some way to win yourself down the road, no matter how improbable that seems.