Upcomming patch ruining the game?

[Lord_Phan]

The reason horses are revealed by Animal Husbandry has nothing to do with "Logic" per-se as you guys are arguing. It has to do with Gameplay. Specifically MP gameplay.
It is designed to stop people from building on top of a horse immediately then bee-lining to animal and arriving with Chariots or War Chariots before anyone else can SEE Bronze let alone have it hooked up. Just an attempt to stop a rush. Nothing more nothing less.

Now speaking as a top ladder player. I'll say they probably should have just made the change in MP. As I see no reason for it to be taken out in SP Epics.

Phan-man hath Spoketh.

Lord_Phan

Elite Member of the Nation of Domination Clan on the Civ4players Ladder.
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[Astax]

You Don"t Have To Install The Patch If You Don't Want To, Or You Can Easily Mod Your Game So You Can See Horses, So What Are You Whining About?!

I said this before, sure let me not patch the game and play with myself? Obviously everyone will apply the patch, I enjoy playing people not AI. Cant play someone with a different version of the game correct? Plus the patch will eb bundled with critical fixes, I would be a moron not to apply it.

 

[Astax]

before anyone else can SEE Bronze let alone have it hooked up.

In 90% of the cases anyone starting with mining goes for bronze first. Ontop of that they will have it researched before first worker hits the ground, let alone a settler. They can plant ontop of bronze too if they ant. Secondly I dont plant cities ontop of horses because its an uber tile to work. There are easy counters to war chariots especially on a map with jungle/forests. Jsut have to lvl your startign warrior to woodsman II and then upgrade him to spearman and you got a chariot killing machine that will catch most chariots before they reach your cities.

Also a point tot he thread, I NEVER USE CHARIOTS. Maybe agianst AI. I need horses for horse archers. I just like planing early. You need 3 techs to make chariots, you only need 2 for spearman.

 

[Astax]

Hey, Dude, you got some problems in language devices. "reveal", in the game, means "make useful of". Now, try re-reading the sentence.

I find this statement derogatory as English is my second language. Moderator action plz.

 

[Wlauzon]

Hey, Dude, you got some problems in language devices. "reveal", in the game, means "make useful of". Now, try re-reading the sentence.

Is that English?

And what the hell is a "language device"???

 

[local]

rofl english device

 

[dh_epic]

They can plant ontop of bronze too if they ant. Secondly I dont plant cities ontop of horses because its an uber tile to work.

You've missed the entire point of the exploit.

Because you can see horses in 4000 BC, you can settle on top of horses by 3960 BC. And by 3600 BC you can be finished researching Animal Husbandry, and producing a chariot. You don't need to produce a worker, you don't need to build a pasture, you don't need to build a road. Chariots fly out at 3600BC, before most people even have archers.

Because you can't see copper in 4000 BC, you can't settle on top of it right away. You can have bronzeworking researched by 3400 BC. Assuming copper is in your city radius and you built a worker right away, you can move your worker, build a mine, and build some roads -- which takes you another 10 turns to have copper hooked up. That takes you to 3000 BC.

Chariots in 3600 BC vs Spears at 3000 BC. 15 turns apart. It's a close call, right?

Now imagine that the other player didn't have copper in their city radius.
Or imagine that the other player decided to pursue a religion instead.
Or imagine that the other player didn't start out with mining.

Let me break it down for you really simply:

Right now, if you are lucky enough to have horses in your city radius, you have a good shot at killing anyone who doesn't beeline for spearmen before 2000BC. The end result is that the tech tree at the beginning doesn't matter. Either you have horses and you rush with them, or you don't, and you pray for copper.

Also a point tot he thread, I NEVER USE CHARIOTS.

Then you've missed the point again. Horse archers are more powerful, yes. But they also take another 20-25 turns to come out. That's enough time for someone to actually put together a decent defence. That's enough time to research a religion first, then grab bronzeworking. It's enough time to explore the territory.

The advantage of chariots is that they're a rush unit. You can use them to win early, if not keep your enemy busy until horse archers come out.

You play a certain way. Good for you. But you need to recognize that there are other players who have found killer exploits that are essentially ruining the game.

 

[Astax]

Is till dont see how seeing horses is the problem here? Obviously the way you put it the problem is #1 being able to attach resources without usign a worker by placing ontop of them, or #2 getting a benefit of a resource you plant a city on top of.

For a person to plant ontop of horses second turn, means they started with them int heir radius, so they are lucky. The game has luck component. If they didnt sdee the horses doesnt change the fact they started with the horses in their city radius does it? So mayeb they dotn see the horses, but decide to move the settler anyway, plant it on some grass tile enxt to a river. Start researchign animal husbandry anyway, to see if there are horses around. Boom, what's that? Oh I planted on the horses! YEY. So he'll still do exact same thing. At best it will lower the frequency of it, but it will still happen. Eitherway if someone did what you describe to me, maybe I woudl be more willing to take your point up. But as you describe it the problem isnt people being able to see it, you have problem with people starting near horses. Which BTW doesnt happen so often.

Maybe if someone did a sucessful chariot rush agianst me, I might be more willing to agree. But hasnt happened. I just see this change making me worry about one more thing, did I start near horses. Wheres before I had a guarantee. So now I could be a bunch of turns into a game and realize there's no iron no bronze no horses near me, and resign.

 

[Vulpes]

The kind of person who resigns if he doesn't have horses in his territory doesn't really deserve to be part of this discussion. Unless you mean single-player, in which case modding the horse discovery behaviour back to normal should be very easy.

The chance that somebody will accidentally settle on top of horses is very small - and in order to find out in time to make a rush practical , they would need to tech straight to AH, which could end up being a disadvantage if there aren't any horses. So it balances.

As it stands (pre-patch), the player knows exactly what he needs to do, and where he needs to build, making the whole strategy basically a gimme. Anybody who starts next to horses, wins. I don't see that as being beneficial.

 

[Astax]

Well if you play Egyptian you will probably go for animal husbandry right after Bronze working anyway. I think that will be my egyptian strategy from now on. Altough I dont play Egypt that much, only for arguments sake. I tries chariot rush yesterday, its very deadly, but its jsut as deadly if your second city is the one with horses. Using the river exploit you dont have to connect horses to your city either. And thout he rush comes later you have 2x the number of chariots. I attaked a guy with 16 chariots yesterday, I felt sorry for what I did it waas uber lame :/ But on a big map goign that route woudl have left me pretty much owned for the rest of the game. So the strategy is map specific, that's the balance.

So what I said before about resigning without horses, I meant that horses give you a guarantee incase you dotn have any metal. Which does happen on continent maps. Its terrible but I had a few games where I had no horses and no metals and its no picknic. Unless you up agianst a carebear or a newbie you are pretty much screwed. I won cause I managed to get feudalism ASAP and construction so I could mix war elephants, catapults and longbowmen. But elephants are terrible slow.

Anyway they pulled the patch last night. Did anyone catch the thing about Ivory? Is it not visible? Cause if not that would be even worse than no horses because Ivory is excellent hammer tile after hunting.

 

[Zhahz]

The point of the blind resources is not that you didn't know that horses were there pre-AH. It's that you didn't know they were useful. Thus, the presence or absence of the creatures wouldn't have infuenced your peoples' decisions on where to settle.

By this logic, you shouldn't be able to see water resources til you have fishing or food resources til you have agriculture. Icky.

But then, fish and rice and such aren't strategic resources needed to build units and horses are (like bronze, iron, etc). I don't really think it's a bad thing to make horses behave like the other strategic resources.

I'm hoping that the tradeoff for the horse/husbandry thing will be more horses. I often have games where there are NO horses anywhere in my empire, even sometimes when I have 10 cities before conflict is possible. I'd rather have a higher chance of SOME horses after husbandry over knowing I'll never have horses.

 

[lorgen]

"Some of the highlights include multiple AI improvements and tweaks, worker behavior tweaks, MANY game play improvements (ex Animal Husbandry reveals horses), promotion tweaks, a softer pillage sound (requested by many, many people), fixed diplomatic exploits (gold for gold, peace treaty exploit), multiplayer tweaks (Hot seat, Lobby, etc.), memory, caching and performance improvements, etc. There were also a number of video card specific fixes."

What's next? Agriculture reveals wheat corn and rice? I mean come on! This means you practically have to have animal husbandry before planting your second city I am out raged Way to nerf Warmongering!

That agriculture would be necessary to reveal corn and rice would actually be both historically correct and give a better balancing of game/play. The indians who discovered corn had it growing wild next to them for quite some time before realizing it was possible to both eat and cultivate it. With such a reaction to game/play/balancing, I would recon that the best strategy/game for you is Ludo.

I am more concerned about the programming in this game. Firaxis is not able to program a game which do not suffer from multiple CTDs. Its also a nightmare to install it if yoy have ATI graphic-cards. This was a huge problem in Pirates, and Firaxis are not ablo to learn from their mistakes. As a Sid Meier-fan: SID, please choose another company to release yor next game on...

 

[Cropper]

I can't believe this thread has been allowed to continue. This thread was awful from the very first post, and has gotten worse since. I almost hate to post this since it will just bump the thread to the top of the list again. I guess the best I can do is just vote it as bad.

The thread that won't die.....