Hi,

when generating a great person, the buildings and specialists in a city decide which kind of great person that city will give you. If you only have sources of one kind of great person in the city, for example only having the Great Library and one scientist specialist, then you are guaranteed to get a great person of that type (a great scientist, in this case). If you have sources of more than one type in the city though, it's more complicated. You can mouse over the great people points bar in the city screen to get info about the current odds of generating each type of great person.

Until now, I thought the game would sum up all great people points generated from all sources, and the number of GPPs of each type would yield the chance of generating a great person of that type. Example: If you have a scientist specialist (+3 great scientist points) and the Colossus (+2 great merchant points) in a city, then I believed that you would have a 3/5 = 60% chance of getting a great scientist, and a 2/5 = 40% chance of getting a great merchant.

(The city "remembers" which sources of GPPs you had each turn, so having only the Colossus in the city and then adding one scientist one turn before generating a great person will still give you a nearly 100% chance of getting a great merchant. Without loss of generality, I'll ignore that here.)


I just found out that it's different than I had previously believed. When calculating the odds, the game only counts how many sources of each type of GPPs the city has, ignoring how many GPPs each source actually provides. So in the above example, both the scientist and the colossus would count as one source, giving you a 50%/50% chance, even if the specialist generates 3 GPPs per turn, 1 more than the Colossus.


Maybe you knew that already; I did not, so I thought I should share my observations.

-Kylearan

No, you haven't slept through the past three years! We're going to start the new Epics off in much the same way that we did for Civ 3. With that in mind-

Special Invitation - Players who participated in and reported for the opening game of the Civ3 Epics tournament are hereby cordially invited to join us for the first Civ4 Epic and be showered with flowers and affection! :hippie: You will be enshrined as Epic Heroes for being an integral part of building the future. (If none of you had showed up way back there in 2002, there wouldn't have been an Epic Two, much less a Civ4 Epics tournament!) Come and join us as the new era dawns. We would love to see you all again!
[url="http://www.realmsbeyond.net/civ/civ-epic1.html"]
[/url] Epic One - The Honorable French now open!

Hi,

Arathorn's "passive aggressive" variant rules have been one of my favorite for Civ 3, so I tried to play a similar game with Civ 4. Would a domination victory be possible by flipping cities alone?

I played on the lakes map on Emperor, and switched on the "always peace" option. I used Louis XIV (creative/industrial), focused my capital on generating great artists for culture bombs, and built culture on my border cities like mad, even founding "aggressive settlements" (cities close to enemy cities).

I failed miserably. I got my first two flips in the 17th century. I culture bombed those two cities - which did nothing to the borders! Whoever said culture bombs are too strong should try them out with mature borders, where they do nearly nothing!

So advancing by subsequently flipping more cities is nigh impossible, now that tiles "remember" culture and you won't have the time to build up enough culture in flipped cities to flip even more cities. Heck, I've cash-rushed all cultural buildings in my two flipped cities, and had difficulties even getting access to the first ring tiles! Also, you're no longer allowed to found cities in enemy territory (even without "always peace"), or cities two tiles away from enemy cities, which makes passive aggressiveness even more difficult.

The final nail in the coffin is the lack of propaganda, though. It would really be nice if spies could incite revolts in enemy cities! Propaganda was rarely used by most people in Civ 3, but I liked the concept. I hope they add this feature in a patch or the expansion.

Maybe it was because I played on Emperor (should try it on Prince or so sometimes), but I don't think passive aggressiveness can win you a domination victory on mormal maps anylonger. Too bad, one variant less - but given all the new toys abd options in Civ 4, I'm sure more variants will come up as a compensation.


Some observations I've made during that game:

-The AI is not very good at handling "always peace". They still build huge stacks of military, and while having some units can be nice with hereditary rule, they overdid this.

- Have they tweaked the AI regarding religion in 1.09? I've spread my state religion in every Persion, Egyptian, German and English city - and nobody converted! Funny thing though was that they didn't dislike me as much as in earlier games because of our differing religion - only a -1 and a -2 malus in the late game, and "pleased" relations.

- Could it be that the AI specifically asks for a tech that enables a wonder if he has a great engineer? I had this happened to me two times now: A great engineer was born, the civ asked for the tech (demanded it one time, asked for help the other time), and then immediately rushed the corresponding wonder. Could have been coincidence, but it would be a great move!


-Kylearan

I just had the most thrilling game of Civ 4 (prince difficulty). I also now make any renounciation of any claims that I am anything other than a cruel, evil heartless bastard. I was playing as the Incans, and grabbed Hinduism first. Ghandi, to my north grabbed the other two early religions. I had a lot of land that needed grabbing, so I bent my will around securing as much of the continent as I could. I also found Egypt had started on the same continent.

To cut a long story short, I managed to grab around 50% of the continent, with Ghandi grabbing around 40% and the Egyptions getting a meager 10%. I was absolutely broke paying maintanance costs. Trying to reach currency I had to spend probably 10-20 turns without any science at all to break even (too many cities really hurts!). I built way more cottages than normal, particularly around rivers (which gives the bonus +1 gold for financial civs straight away).

Meanwhile Ghandi built nearly every wonder in the game. I kid you not, he built more wonders and generated more leaders than all the rest of the AI and me put together. He also maintained a tech lead on me throughout the entire game of a minimum of 3-4 techs (well until right at the end). Never was I in any position to threaten him militarily. However, I kept him a close ally throughout the game, and by the end he had around +15 relations with me. I wanted to attack Ghandi as soon as I got tanks, but the moment I had the tech for tanks, he had mech inf in every city . The game went right to the wire. He built the UN and neither of us could win the vote (we were 1 and 2). With about 3 parts left for his ship, I decided that it was time to get some spies into his land.

The next turn 2 parts finished. The stasis chamber was all Ghandi had left to build. And he was nearly done. I was still missing genetics. This was going to be close. I saved my pennies and risked a sabotage. Success! I also managed to get genetics. I investigated his city. 6 turns until completion. I started the stasis chamber in my best city (my only part left to build). 7 turns. I microed to get every single sheild I could out of the city and still it came to 7 turns. I was not going to be beaten by 1 turn if it killed me!. I saved my pennies again and risked a second sabotage attempt...

Success!! The spies had saved my game. I'm glad I built them, they were worth every sheild, and gold I spent on them. Sometimes it truly is better to be both lucky and good . If the spy had have failed I would have had 1 more shot at the sabotage, and if that failed I was going to have to try and disable the city with bombers in the one turn I had left to play before he built the part. In 1973 I built the stasis chamber and flew off into the stars. So like I said, I'm a cheating backstabbing bastard .

-Smegged

I downloaded the patch this afternoon and took it for a spin on a solo Prince game as America. The AIs all swept the early religions (which is to be expected if you don't start with Mysticism and don't prioritize the beeline to Judaism), but once I got my research machine underway, I ran out ahead in the Classical/Medieval eras and took Confuscianism, Taoism, and Islam. What was remarkable, though, was this:



Now, I was under the impression that a city that had already founded a religion could no longer found subsequent religions under 1.00 (unless, of course, it was your only city). This obviously is not the case with New York (which was my second city to begin with, but managed to found both Confuscianism and Islam), so it seems that restriction has been lifted with the patch, making it possible (if less than certain) to found multiple religions in the same city after building your second city.

Is this indeed a new effect, or did I misunderstand how holy cities were doled out in the release version of Civ 4?

I may use this new thread to ask technical questions about Civ4 when I'm left with no answer after thinking and talking with some people about it.

So I've just started my very first game of Civ4 tonight with the 1.09 patch (European DVD, English language), a solo game on Noble with everything standard, and picked Louis XIV. I founded Paris in 4000BC and started on Animal Husbandry. I'm not familiar with the game, so I'll precisely describe what I saw. According to the mousing-over effect, this tech costs 140 beakers. It costs 100 beakers in the standard Civilopedia (from the main menu), as well as in my French tech tree poster. I drew a start with the city on river grassland, and some pigs around. I put the citizen on the pigs (3 breads and 1 gold coin), and so it gave me 10 beakers (1 gold from pigs, 1 from city tile, and 8 from palace) at 100%. Oddly, the game says I need 11 turns to get the tech (I should need 14 turns obviously). Why ?

I hit Enter, and the citizen was remotely changed from the pigs to a 'citizen' specialist (the one adding 1 shield) during the IT, changing the math in the process. :mad: No growth at all ! Why ?

So I reloaded the turn, messed with some stuff in the city screen, and then hit Enter once again. This time the citizen was left on the pigs. ( and ). But I now have 13 beakers : 13/140 !?! It fits the math : 10*13 = 130, but 11*13 = 143 > 140, yeah, right. So, there are 3 additional beakers coming from somewhere, and I really have no clue about it. When I mouse over the city of Paris, it clearly says 10 beakers per turn. Any idea ?

Thanks to help me only if you know what I am missing... or if you really have the feeling it is a bug. I can provide a screenshot and a save by email (PM) if needed.

Hi all,

My website is up, with 4 brief reports from some of my single player games, with a few more on the way soon.

Kylearean, Speaker, you guys mind if I like to your pages? You can link to mine if you like!

http://www.geocities.com/pacerdart/

Greetings to the Realms Beyond community. You may not know me by name, but I'm probably known around here as "that mentally-deranged person that hosts Sirian's website".

The re-issued patch (version 1.09) was released earlier tonight. As you can imagine, 2K's update servers are getting hammered. I couldn't even get the auto-updater to go, I had to find a RapidShare link off CivFanatics and grab it there. Anyway, to spare you all the horror of that, and since I have a ton of bandwidth at my disposal now -- 1500 GB a month, which will probably need an upgrade once Sirian deploys his Civ4 site -- I've gone and mirrored the patch (and given it a slightly more descriptive filename). You can grab it here:

http://www.warpcore.org/patches/Civ4-1.09-patch.exe
24,834,449 bytes
MD5: 49a982ee75b9460ebdc538fde9ba4e96
SHA1: 8c2a39dd1944c1631c9f3be9ce61950a08244deb

Enjoy!

Ah, Civilization. No, not indoor plumbing and electricity, I mean the series. ^_^

I was SO excited when my friend told me it was out, that I went and started to drool over it on Game Spot. I begged my parents for it, and was able to procure jobs from them to get it. When I FINALLY got it, I installed and tried a peaceful game as Russia (on Cheiftain). I loved it. I won a Diplomatic victory as well. ^_^

On some of my other games, I seem not to do as well. For example, on Civ Fanatics, I made an SG where we have to win via culture. Now, we are being invaded by Mansa Musa who has elephants and the like, and we are being owned quite frankly. We are on Noble. @_@

Apparently, the biggest problems I make are these:

1 ) Not a big enough military.

2 ) My tendency to decide to switch to Christianity from Hinduism when I have 3 Hindu allies. >_> Damn you IRL religion bias, DAMN YOU!

3 ) My total failure to succeed at war. At all. My skills at war in this game are a sin against Sid.

4 ) My ineptitude at diplomacy. You see, I am not a bad diplomat in negotiations, I just *accidently* trade with an ally's worst enemy who proceeds to PMS all over me.

>_>
<_<

Tips? Advice? Training games? I would appreciate any help, any educational comments, and any advice whatsoever. Thanks in advance.

P.S What really sucks is when I was Eygpt and I was doing awesome, I was always top in score, but barbarians kept attacking me until I got horse archers and slaughtered them. Then Alexander declared war on me and he had swordsman. *sobs*

The patch is out!

Details are on the civfanatics main page