Okay, so here’s a question I have that I haven’t been able to get a good answer for: Under the Domestic Advisor screen that comes up when you press F1, the list includes a column for culture, detailing the amount of culture a city is producing each turn. Next to that is a number in parenthesis.
What in the name of God’s green earth is that number?!!??!??
The way it works for the Great Person column is that it gives you the number of Great Person points produced each turn, and the number in parentheses is how many turns until a Great Person is produced. But that’s definitely not what’s going on under the culture column.
The classic “axe rush” seems to be even stronger in some ways in BtS, or at least it is at Noble so far. The AI doesn’t seem to get the same production cheats at the start they used to, so you will frequently find early cities poorly defended. Heck, if you do it with warriors at the very start you’ll even sometimes find cities undefended. Could make the Aztecs (unique unit being a sped up warrior) a good choice on a crowded map.
Right, except that – as I noted in my post – it’s not. :)
If you open up the city in question and hover the mouse over the culture bar, you’ll note that the tooltip and domestic advisor are at odds with each other. So either something’s broken, which is entirely possible, or the domestic advisor is trying to tell me some other thing with that number in parentheses.
I think the math for the domestic advisor breaks a few turns in. It starts as number of turns, but then as stuff gets added (religion, buildings, etc.) it just takes the numbers (say 9 per turn to get to 500) and comes up with a figure assuming you were starting from zero. It stops tracking increases in culture you’ve already made.
You’ll note the number on the Domestic Advisor doesn’t always change from one turn to the next. I call bug.
I’m not sure, although I vaguely recall it’s simply a function of turn number. You can pretty safely ignore it entirely, as your income should grow faster than it.
Or perhaps it’s changed now in BtS, with the addition of corporations? That’d make a certain amount of sense, but I don’t recall reading anything along those lines.
Rather than chopping your axwmaen you might want to try adopting slavery and using the whip (aka pop rushing), the penalty for this in Civ 4 is pretty low, one extra unhappy face for 10 turns, and it saves your forests for wonders, settlers or future polluction control. It also means that you can easily hold back on population growth as any city with population over 5 or 6 is going to give you unhappiness problems before monarchy and calendar.
BtS introduces a new penalty for slavery, though: you get a fairly high chance of a “slave unrest” random event that will halt production in a given city and force you to kill off much of the population.
That’s good. They’ve slowly been paring back the cheesy strategies. I’m glad “Always chop and whip!” might not be the best advice any more. I think they also increased the maintenance costs for slavery.
Actually I had one just a couple of hours ago :) It didn’t seem that bad. something like one turn of anarchy in the capital and about 15 gold. It was worth the number of axemen, granaries, libraries and courthouses I whipped and I’m safely to thje point where I should switch to caste system and start spme serious great people popping. I had a surprisingly easy start for a Prince game though and the barbarians obligingly settled 3 nice cities for me.
Ok, can someone give me some advice. Combat seems completely wrong in this (I have BTS and Warlords.) and it seems impossible to win a war.
A classic example is at the beginning of the game I quickly get six archers and two warriors together to attack an enemy city and all eight units get beaten by the two archers situated inside the enemy city.
This can’t be right can it? This is on Warlord difficulty setting.
Whenever I’m hemmed in by the midgame I try to break out by attacking a weaker civ and end up spending the rest of my game in a stalemate until one of the other civs just steamrollers over me because the prolonged 500 year war has set me so far back on the tech tree.
It’s infuriating. It also seems that it is not just me. In the summary after the game you will see all the civs expanding until there is no more available landmass and that is it. It remains pretty much static until the end of the game.
How the hell do you win a war? It seems that city defense bonuses are just too high.
You really need to use siege weapons if you’re attacking a fortified city. If you’re too impatient to wait until you can build catapults, at the very least take the time to look at the ratings of your military units and choose some offensive units for your attacking.
If you are attacking with warriors, you’re clearly not in the mood to wait for axes or swords. So check the enemy archers. You’re probably missing something.
they are on a hill
they are behind a wall
the city has a big culture defense bonus
you are crossing a river to attack, so a 50% attack penalty
the Civ in question gets automatic military bonuses for there archers (city defense, drill, combat power, etc.); there are quite a few of these Civs, by the way.
And then there’s your units. Do they have any experience bonuses? Warriors without city raiding or the combat I will do very little damage to anything in a city. If you are attacking with archers, then you’ll really need the combat I.
Note that the first level of city defense gives a 20% bonus to defending while the first tier of combat power gives only 10% general strength. And archers can’t get city raider.
If you hold the right mouse button over the unit you are attacking, you are given the odds of success and a breakdown as to why.
Oh, and don’t complain about the city defense bonus too much. You’ll appreciate it when Montezuma comes looking for bananas.
Also, wiping out an entire civilization is usually not worthwhile. Grab a city or two, then leave them alone for a while to build up your core again. Once you’ve gotten up to speed again, maybe chomp down on another city or two.
I’ve gotten in that same situation far too often, where you spend a thousand years bitterly fighting some civilization, only to fall so far behind in the tech race that you can’t possibly catch up.
