[PB75] Newbfragar and Rusty's Beginner's Guide to Civ4

[Tarkeel]

(I should clarify that I'm talking about queue-upgrades. I'm so dang broke; I've got no money to spend on gold upgrades.)

Pikes, crossbows and maces all upgrade to rifles and grens, muskets and LBs only upgrade to rifles.

Is this true about pikes? I'm 80% sure that pikes don't upgrade to rifles, just grenadiers, although I've been burned before. I remember some game I tried to queue-upgrade triremes to caravels and that blew up in my face. Will probably make a good beginner lesson in a bit. (The Civilization wikia lists both rifles and grens as upgrade paths, but I'm skeptical & want to check for myself.)

My source is the in-game CivOpedia, which is sorely missing from your lesson-plan sensei.

Note that this means you need to unlock rifling in order to have your pikes queue-upgrade into grenadiers. For a queue-upgrade to happen you need to unlock all of the options, and the unit will be upgraded to the right-most unit. Ie, a warrior says it upgrades to axe and spear, which means it queue-upgrades to spears.

[naufragar]

Harumph. Yes, you're right. I had it in my head that Pikes didn't upgrade to Rifles, just Grenadiers.

And you're absolutely right about the Civopedia! Let me do a lesson on that after this turn report.

Because this one was a doozy:


Wait, why is Mjmd offering me a ceasefire? We aren't at war? And he's offering a ceasefire instead of a binding peace treaty? Did someone ask him to declare war on me? Huh??

Oh, I see, Mjmd is just a paint-huffing lunatic:


The entire time that GT had these workers undefended you chose not to take them, but then when I took them, you attacked me? Why? Your calculus was "Two free workers is good, but taking them from GT is bad, but declaring war on naufragar for them is fine?" What makes taking them from GT, the guy with one city nowhere near you, so much worse than taking them from me?

I said this last turn report, but Mjmd is playing this game actively suicidally. Mjmd, you have 15 cities to Superdeath's 30. You have no military. You have no military traits. What's to stop Superdeath from continuing into you after Gav and taking your wasted Pyramids to show you how to use Police State? Ah, that's right. Me. I'm the thing holding him back because he has to worry about his north. "But naufragar, I can build Knights or muskets or something!" Can you? Have you? Will you build an army from scratch in time to give Superdeath a second's hesitation or will you build banks because econ feels nicer? I despise passivity, but at least passive players don't try to throw the game to someone else. Mjmd trying his damnedest to give the win to Superdeath is going to make me crack a molar.

Gav for his part is broken, logistically and emotionally.


He's sending individual horse archers and catapults to die to Superdeath's pikes, rather than pulling them back and making an army to defend. I can't blame him. Being backstabbed by a pair of self-immolating so-and-so's is enough to make anyone through up their hands. But boy did I bet on the wrong horse. Should've gone in immediately.

P.S. In the above pic, you can see my cities on wealth builds. This is bad, but since I can't upgrade Pikes to Grens, I need to shorten my time frame in some other way. I've also asked Superdeath for a loan.

[naufragar]

And you're absolutely right about the Civopedia! Let me do a lesson on that after this turn report.

A week after, but I've been as busy as a thousand apiaries.

Lesson Twenty: Civilopedia

By pressing F12 or clicking the book in the upper right corner of your screen, you can access the Civilopedia! This is a wonderful, indexed look at just about everything in the game.


Here you can see the technology screen. All lists are in alphabetical order. Most have their associated icon. You can navigate with the chapter titles on the right.

There's a touch of bloat here. Wonders vs. Projects feels like it could be collapsed, since they both involve big special buildings. Game concepts vs. Beyond the Sword Concepts is obviously left over from when the expansion pack shipped. Base terrain vs. terrain features, etc. Unfortunately, the designers really knew their game and there are important conceptual reasons why these categories can't be combined. We can ignore all that for now.

Navigating through the units screen, I can look up the Roman unique unit, the Praetorian:


One neat little thing some vets might have forgotten: on high enough graphics settings, you can click and drag the unit image to spin him around and admire his 3D model. (By high enough, I mean "comparable to a 2018 smart phone." This level of juice is still beyond my poor little travel laptop.)

Let's go down in columns.

Requires contains icons, but these can be moused over or clicked on for more information. The left icon is the Iron Working Technology. The right icon is the Iron resource itself. Caveat Imperator! The civilopedia will save you from mistakes that the tech tree will lead you into. On the tech tree, if a technology says that it "unlocks" a certain unit, it might be a little full of itself. Click on the icon on the tech tree to pull up the civilopedia to see if there are unlisted additional requirements.

Special Abilities for the Praetorian are sparse. Here we just see that it's a Roman unit and that Rome builds these instead of swordsmen. Hyperlinked conveniently.

Promotions I will talk about in a future lesson. Not all units can take all promotions. Melee units can't take certain defensive promotions. Archery units can't take certain offensive promotions, etc. You can click on the promotion icon to go to the page describing it.

Upgrades To is either irrelevant or super, super relevant. If you have unlocked one of the units pictured, you can pay gold when the unit's in your territory to upgrade it. Don't do this often. Use your money to tech. If you have the ability to build all the units in this pane, then you lose the ability to build the original unit. If you are currently building any of the obsolete unit in your cities, they switch to the upgraded unit farthest on the right, keeping however much production you've invested in building them already. [Lurker questions in which I briefly admit my ignorance: I'm correct that it's the ability to build not the technology to build? As in, if you don't have the resource to build on of these units, you can keep producing the older version.]

History is adorable. It's a lovely little note on the unit's historical significance and a capsule summary of what it does.

If you were to click on one of the upgrade units, Civilopedia would take you there. Here I click on the furthest right unit:


Here you can see the Grenadier. It requires only a technology. No resources. It has a special ability, which is +50% attack against riflemen. You can also see that its promotion list is different. Interestingly, gunpowder units can take promotions making them more effective against gunpowder units and melee units can take promotions making them more effective against melee units, but the two types can't cross-promote.

This has already been a hefty bit of text for a beginner lesson, so I'll put the last little bit in spoilers for people wanting a little more utility from Civilopedia.

In the above screenshot, you can see that the Grenadier is a Gunpowder unit. You can actually click on this category, and the Civilopedia will bring you to a list of Gunpowder units.


I love Civ4. I don't know if that comes across through my constant bitching about maps, game states, opponents, etc. But I freaking love Civ4. And whoever made Civ4 loved it, too. On this page, which 99% of the players who've ever played the game will never touch or need, you can sort the units by their stats. Click on the Arm, Foot, or Hammer, to sort by strength, movement points, or production costs. You can do this in ascending or descending order. The polish on this game is incredible. (Riesengarde are last because they were added by our balance mod and the order starts from the XML order, I believe.)

"But naufragar, why would I ever need that?" Maybe you don't, gentle reader. Here's one way I would use it. A musketman costs 80 hammers for 9 strength. Building a musket costs your empire 8.9 hammers per point of strength. A Grenadier costs 100 hammers for 12 strength, which is 8.3 hammers per point of strength. So, by volume, Grenadiers are a better investment. Rifles are even better at 110h for 14 strength. 7.86 hammers per strength point. And then, blowing them all away in its efficiency is the Praetorian from before. 50 hammers; 8 strength. 6.25 hammers per strength point.

SD - Kublai Khan of Rome
Rome is notorious for having an awesomely strong swordsman. When we talk more about Civ4’s combat system, we’ll talk more about the specifics, but what makes this unit so strong is its “strength to cost” ratio. For what it gives you, it’s quite cheap.

Did you think I had forgotten the lesson plan?

There are reasons why this analysis is crude. Different units can take different promotions or have different special abilities. Cheaper but less efficient units can beat smaller, elite forces while being produced from lesser cities. Etc., etc. But isn't it neat that the Civilopedia can faciliate this analysis?   

Since you've made it this far, enjoy some Civilopedias from fan mods:

Dune Wars

Fall from Heaven

Final Frontier (Not technically a fan mod. Made by the guy who went on to design Civ5 and shipped with Civ4:BtS.)

Planetfall

Edit: Nesting spoilers broke for me or it never worked and I imagined it.  As penance have one more 'pedia.

[Tarkeel]

Good post, but I think you only hinted at the most important part: Every mechanical part of it is 100% accurate, because it dynamically reads from the same files as the game itself. The only customized text is the history fluff.

[naufragar]

GT, want to take over my civ by any chance? There would be some cosmic justice in it, don't you think?

Well, shucks, Gav, I was kind of planning my strategy around you playing and not some random other player. That is worrying.

Anyway, we have our first Grenadier!


Praetorians still beat Grenadiers, but at least these guys look cool.

America is a broken, overpowered civ. I'm dead last and still one of the tech leaders.


Actual last place is Gav with 7 cities, but discounting him, I with my 21 am last. (Seriously, I'm like #3 in city count and I'm dead last in every metric. My land suuuuuuuuucks.)

[Tarkeel]

And here I was thinking GT would cover for you so I could get back to reading threads after covering Mjmd this weekend :P

[naufragar]

And here I was thinking GT would cover for you so I could get back to reading threads after covering Mjmd this weekend :P

I posted in the tech thread. It would be pretty funny if he ended up piloting one of the civs he attacked.

[naufragar]

Superdeath seems to think I should attack him:


This offer means "you go fight in the east and I will....do nothing?" Superdeath can't fight Ljubljana or Ginger, so all he's suggesting is that I fight somewhere else. Even he knows that the unstated second part, i.e. "you fight Ljubljana/Ginger and I eat Gavagai" is deeply unappealing to me. If he had a reason why I should focus East instead of West, he would've said it.

So he's preparing for war. He recently researched Guilds for Knights and just this turn (I think) he got Gunpowder. Nothing changes. Praets were still his best answer to Grens.

On the other side of the world, the Southern and Eastern players heard I was teasing them for being inactive, so Greenline has declared war on Dreylin in order to make Ginger's conquest of Dreylin easier. Ginger has this game sewed up, by the way. Oh well.

[naufragar]

Gosh, fine, Gav, if you're going to beg.

Declared war on Superdeath. Moved as you see below:


That lone grenadier is probably our first casualty.  Had him pop a spear on that tile. Two praets trade super efficiently, as I've been saying. Oh well, this war was never going to be easy.

But Superdeath's crimes are just too numerous to count. Chopping forests in what would be my territory, letting his borders grow over my cottages, the murder of poor Ricketyclik, the torture of poor, sweet Gavagai, and just this very turn, he put some 265 Espionage points into me, which must represent an entire turn's worth of tech. You know we can't live with this level of aggression.

By the way, Ginger is researching Astronomy. We're all so dead.

Pseudo-edit: when I have more time, next lesson on battlefield movement to come. Hopefully.

[Commodore]

But Superdeath's crimes are just too numerous to count. 

1...2...3...
4...5...6...
7...8...9...
10...11...12...
13...14...15...
16...17...18...
19...20...21...
22...23...24...
25.