I've finally been able to play some Civ IV (and now have some time to write about it)! I hope to eventually go back and revisit my Civ website, and create a Civ IV section (Kudos to Sulla and Kylearan, BTW! ), I took some screenshots along the way, but haven't had time to edit them or anything, so for now I'll just post some thoughts.


I didn’t get the game when it first came out, my wife had pre-ordered it for me for my birthday (the 14th). I actually got it the 7th, I happened to be home the day it arrived in the mail, and talked her into opening it early! But with my current job, I couldn’t really play during the week. I finally got a chance to take it for a spin over the three-day weekend, though.

I jumped in at Prince level (just above the break-even level), and found it was a decent challenge. I played as Rome, just because the first time a friend talked me into playing the original Civilization I had played Rome, and since then I’ve played my first game on each version as Rome. I had intended to go for a space race, so I could experience the tech tree. However, I quickly learned (well, not quickly enough) that diplomacy is more complicated now, which is probably a Good Thing . I found that you can't just trade/buy whatever you need from the AIs and ignore their requests (which was possible in Civ III). It wasn’t too long before they were all mad at me, and trading became difficult. Then, my neighbor to the south, Mansa Musa, invaded! He initially only had a few units, but he avoided my cities and started pillaging my pastures. That’s different. My first counter-attack was pretty bloody, as my axemen took some casualties before taking a couple cities. The good news is he had founded Judaism and Hinduism, because the bad news is I had been sidetracked on worker techs and missed the early religions myself.


I was already starting to get too big for my economy, and had to downshift my research a couple times, but I was able to get back on track. By the time I finally decided to finish him off, my Praetorians came in handy, and I had some Cats by then also, so I took less losses. However, the other AI’s took it personally that I was attacking their friends, and soon America invaded me too! So, I decided to turn the tables and go for an aggressive game. I eventually conquered my way to a Domination victory, destroying everyone except China (who was the only country who never attacked me!) and the Incas, who had a couple island cities.

It was a little tedious here, trying to slog my way through to the final victory. Even though I had over 70% of the world's population and far more production, I was still at 50% of the land mass, so I had to keep playing. I finally hit the threshold just as I researched flight, so I never got to try the modern units. I did have to squeeze out a couple settlers to fill gaps, but the culture slider did help in boosting my borders quickly.

I like the new combat system, in that at least it requires you to use combined arms, selecting different units and combinations of promotions, rather than a great stack of 15-20 Cavalry to sweep everything before you. The interaction of the terrain modifiers, unit bonus vs. certain types, etc gives more depth to the tactics. In general, I think it favors the defense, as the computer always puts the best defender on top. At least, it seems to help the AI out more on defense, they are always defending with the best choice, whereas on offense they often would attack even when I had a defender to counter that unit. That, and the changes with how culture reacts after conquest (the city dropping to only a single square rather than the surrounding 9) seems to slow down offensives. I was disappointed, though, that it seems the variety of later units (naval in particular) have been reduced, rather than expanded. But as I said, I didn’t get to play with the late units much, and maybe more time to try out all the promotions would add the variety I was looking for.

2k games announcement

Hi,

I'm sure this question has been asked many times before, but as I gear up to start writing reports for the Civ4 Adventures and Epics, I'm in search of a good place to go for free webhosting. A decent amount of storage space would be nice so I can leave the reports up for awhile. Any help will be much appreciated!

Thanks!

Ok I am not a big mod fan but I do like to change a few things to make them a bit more intuitive.

I have started to work on a mod to show the Tool Tip at or just below your pointer, and I have it working. Well, that is to say, I have it where the Help Text area moves with the pointer. However not all tool tip text is showing.

If anyone has some ideas they would be of great help. You can post ideas in this thread or over at CivFanatics at this thread

Sorry for the caps in the title but I really was shouting when I said it.

Anyway, I am excited to find people who want to have fun with the game and not "require" a win.

About me:
Well I have played CivI, CivII, CTP, CivIII, PTW, and now Civ4. I never got Conquests nor even played a Multiplayer in PTW. My main deterent to playing a strategy game in MP was always the attitude fo some people that it was die! kill! destroy! and not having fun. So you can see my excitement in finding out about RB's focus on playing.

Because of the above I never really played much of CivIII/PTW. Only the occasional single player game. I only found out about CivFanatics about 2 years ago and lurked there until registering there earlier this year.

My skills may be lacking but I learn quick. I tend to be a bit slow in declaring war and try to keep peace. This is due to the fact that I gamble far too often in combat.

Anyway, Ill stop rambleing for now.

And to quote a dear friend: "It's not about the XP, it's about the experience"

Like many gamers, I have a stack of old games I haven't gotten around to playing, in my case mostly borrowed from my brother, who buys a lot more games than I do. Recently I installed a few of them, including Imperium Galactica 2. It's a pseudo-realtime galactic conquest game that's sort of MOO-esque. Has anyone else tried this one?

I found the colony management was simple, which in this case is good. How much money a colony earns per month is a function of how large the population is and how high you set the tax rate, and that's pretty much it. On a colony, you can build a variety of buildings, each of which requires a certain amount of population to staff and a certain amount of power, and which come in 4 main categories. Civilian buildings provide basic necessities like power, living space, and so forth, and then there are research/espionage facilities, tank factories/shipyards, and trade ports (which I haven't yet experimented with.) The nice thing is there is an auto-governer which you can set to automatically take care of building the civilian buildings you need, and he does a pretty good job so long as you have a bit of money kicking around. This means that you generally don't have to fiddle with your colonies unless you need to build some more research facilities or another shipyard/tank factory. Usually having enough money to do all the things you need to do is more of a constraint than having enough population to staff buildings.

The simplicity of colony management means you can leave day-to-day management largely in the hands of the AI, and only make decisions like where you're going to build research facilities vs. where you're going to build production centers, and so forth. That saves the player from the burden of a lot of tedious colony management that would otherwise have to be done over and over for each colony. I found myself thinking that the designers who worked on MOO3 could have benefitted from this example of a system that's simple enough that you can actually let the AI do most of the grunt work and not constantly need to go in and fiddle with things to get them to work well.

Unfortunately, other parts of the game that could stand to be more complex because they aren't quite so repetitious are equally simple. Research is one-tech-at-a-time and research rate doesn't depend on how many research facilities you have, which only helps determine what techs you can research. Instead you have 2 research speeds, slow and normal price or twice as fast and twice as expensive (thus draining money from your coffers at 4x the rate.) Combat is mainly a matter of who brings the biggest ships with the most tech, and there's little you can do to influence things except try to move ships that are getting hit hard out of the line of fire. Moreover, offense seems to trump defense quite thoroughly, since defensive ships and bases are not markedly better than their offensive equivalents, yet cannot be brought to bear on the point of conflict nearly as easily. In MOO this was countered in part by making bases upgradable but ships not; here, everything is upgradable to at least some degree.

The fact that offense is king combines with the mediocre enemy AI to ultimately bring down the game. At least in my test game, it was far too easy to surprise attack an enemy empire and rip their guts out. Do that a couple times and the game is over, even if the AI doesn't know it. The problem is, there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to convince the AI the game is over without actually going and wiping out all their ships and colonies... and since the maps are fairly large, that would take a while. So, while there are some good elements, and the beginning stages of the game where you're trying to juggle many different needs is interesting, ultimately it devolves into slog. Not interesting, challenging slog, just slog. As soon as you've built up enough capability to field a credible fleet, you can start blitzing AIs and the game is over. In that respect, the game is a disappointment.

Of course this is all after one partial game, and I haven't tried out everything the game has to offer yet. Perhaps someone else who has played the game can offer an opinion as to whether I've missed a key point. But at this point I'm thinking that the game won't have much legs for me.

Could you increase the avatar size slightly from 64 x 64 to 70 x 70? Most of the avatars I use are that size and I don't have a program to shrink it + keep transparency. If not, well, I'll just go avatarless.

Hi,

I've completed a 3CC game on Monarch going for a cultural victory, and wrote a report about it. You can find it here on my site - comments welcome!

-Kylearan

I went for a spin around GF with Kronin last night after work and my oh my was I ever in for a shock. I soon realized that the Stone Summit had woken up to the gradual damage release area effect spell Chaos Storm and were racing off out of the area after only a couple of seconds.

WTF?

There's definitely some degree of living, breathing player emulation in that, but there are also those times when one of my characters gets one of those spells dropped on his/her head and I check the damage, shrug and just weather it.

So I checked guildwars.com this morning . . .

Quote:

• Improved the character name and guild name entry dialogs.
  
• Improved AI so that henchmen and monsters can now detect and flee from area-effect damage spells.
  
• Improved AI so that monsters will eventually stop chasing fleeing players.
  
• Slightly reduced the power of the Doppelganger creature.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause certain animated ground cover to not be animated.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause two copies of Gwen to appear in pre-searing Ascalon.
  
• Fixed a bug with certain enemies not attacking players in the Gates of Kryta mission.
  
• Fixed an exploit which could allow players to create PvP characters with invalid armor. Thanks to Derek Ravenclaw for reporting this.
  

With hope, my fellow gamers will little share tidbits they learn as they play this game. Try to post repeat-able information, and how it is arrived, so others may self verify. Odd quirks in the game are especially welcome. Post what you learn, and be ready for discussion. I'll begin.

Instant city defense on recapture: [size=2](11/09/05)[/size]

Upon sieging an enemy city, bombarding its defenses to 0%, taking it, but leaving it loosely defended and recaptured, its defenses went from completely bombarded 0%, to recaptured, and up to 80% again (retaken before riots clear). It seems counterintuitive that a city just recently bombarded has 80%, but you'll have to watch out for recaptures. Conversely, your own units will be quicky protected by city defenses when taking back your cities in time.

I am unsure if city defense is applied when cities are still rioting. My gut says no... edit: show unit health bars confirms no city cultural? defense bonus when rioting with no culture.

Promoting units heals them:
Hold onto your unit promotions! Your units may be healed up to half or more when you spend your promotions. Watch as your damaged units become healed after battle through promotion.


What have you learned today?