A new mod enters the ring - Introducing "Close to Home"

[BING_XI_LAO]

Not knowing things and having to guess is one of my favourite parts of computer strategy games.
Especially stuff like a military tech being something the enemy has to guess until there's actual units on the field.

thats all fine and dandy. HOWEVER.. Part of the reason Charriu added the feature was so that it wasnt a  (person with hours of timesink)> (person that can only really play the turn worth of time) Evens the playing field.

Other games where its an actual guess and not a "well, i had x amount of time to actually figure it out.."

Oh yes, I'm on the side of getting rid of leaky info from KtB or at least shifting that to Alphabet.

[Fabled]

IMO if something is trackable or calculable it should just be openly displayed somewhere. If leaking info pre-alphabet is such a problem the only real choice would be to remove the KTB entirely. I don't know what implications that would have on gameplay, and that feels like a drastic departure from BtS which goes against my understanding of the CtH philosophy.

[naufragar]

Id love to see a button to enable/disable flying camera on the screen somewhere. (if there is one already... thats cuz im dumb. Also i dont plan on using it basically ever, so moot point but still)

Flying camera instructions instructions in case anyone was curious about this feature. In spoilers because it's off-topic for this thread.

In your Documents/My Games/beyond the sword folder, there is a CivilizationIV.ini file. Open this with notepad.

Look for
; Allow Camera Flying
AllowFlying = 0

Change that 0 to a 1.

Now when you play civ4, you can press ctrl+alt+f to get a very unwieldy but very fun flying camera. It can be used to produce pictures like this:

[Charriu]

This looks very familiar.

[T-hawk]

The flying camera is also useful because it can zoom out farther for big overviews, at altitudes where the normal camera would go into the globe view with the clouds.

There's also a hotkey to make the flying camera position itself straight overhead looking straight down, instead of the normal slight angle, also useful for big overviews; I think it's Ctrl-Shift-F.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Is it an ambition to make all civs pickable? Do dutch need a bit of a rework because both their UU/UB are in the lategame?

[Charriu]

More or less yes. I don't want to change all the civs though, because that would require a lot of changes. But I don't want to start a big civ discussion about all the civs right now.

To give my thinking about the Dutch. They were taken 3 times by now and I think we just didn't encounter the right game for them to shine yet. Of course they are all in on water maps. Their starting techs are somewhat mediocre without a specific starting screenshot. But their UU and UB are actually fairly strong to a point, where their UU might actually need a bit of a nerf. The UU isn't actually that late. We reach the astronomy era frequently in our games and the Dutch get their UU galleon earlier then other civs, because they don't have the additional requirement of Paper. The only thing that's really late-game with the Dutch is their UB, but it is a strong one especially on water maps.

TL:DR I don't see a reason to change the Dutch right now, except for their UU maybe being to strong.

[civac2]

I fully agree with what you said about the Dutch. They would have been very strong in PB59 (shame about the dying thing). On the right map they are probably downright broken. But they are so specific and you can't tell from the starting screenshot if the map is suitable.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Given that map prediction issue, perhaps the Dutch and Portuguese should have one of their UU/UB switched to be land relevant instead, if it's a problem?
Two other late-oriented civilisations are the English and the Russians, perhaps the Cossack could become a Cuirassier replacement instead of Cavalry, and perhaps the Redcoat could be replaced by Yeoman (a Longbow UU, since there is no longbowman UU in the game at present).
Just felt like throwing out some ideas.

[Mjmd]

So I think the goal on civs should be that they CAN be all relevant map dependent. They should have a reasons people CAN consider them. English I consider a bigger map civ and I think they are very good for that.

The only civ that was really on my list was Arabia because they have garbage starting techs regardless and I'm not sure like Byzantium they make it up. I know changing starting is tricky though and has issues, but I would like to change them to fishing/myst.