There is a difference, though, between HAVING religions in your cities, and ADOPTING a religion as your state religion. People here are debating whether you should adopt a religion. Choosing “No” doesn’t prevent you from HAVING various religions in your cities, and getting all the happiness benefits of the religion’s buildings.
Regarding religion, one route I have experimented with is getting Buddhism and Hinduism at the start but adopting neither to keep the religion pool much smaller, then waiting to see what nations adopt what.
Given that religion is a huge factor in deciding whether 3-4 nations will dogpile on you and kick your ass as soon as you pull ahead, I have been reserving judgement until I can take one that keeps some of the stronger nations onside. This lets me run light on military for a while and focus mainly on tech and city building. Seems to have worked the last couple of games - nobody gets too pissed at me and declares war early on.
That said, I’ve only been playing on Noble while trying this out, so probably is not efficient enough at higher difficulty.
So…is there going to be an expansion pack any day soon? I would hate to get CIV IV now and very soon have a “gold” pack with the expansion pack for the same price as the expansion pack alone. (or something like that).
Well it’s not published by either EA or SOE so I think it’s safe to say an expansion is a ways off. It’s a fantastic game, you should get it ASAP.
Firaxis is taking “suggestions” from players about what they’d like to see in Civ IV, so an expansion pack is clearly in the works. Probably still a while off, though.
JMR is right. Don’t deprive yourself of a really great game.
Troy
Yes, it is just that I have played so many games of Civ III (with the conquests expansion) that I am burned out of Civ and …
I can understand that. Civ 4 is such a major improvement on Civ 3 though - so much has been changed and improved that a lot of feels like a whole new Civ. I’d even say it’s better than Alpha Centauri.
Troy
Narrated by Leonard Nimoy? Did anyone else notice before you saw the box?
Who are you talking to?
I didn’t notice that until now. I knew that voice sounded familiar.
I did notice that he says “increase of your kind” instead of “kine” in the Animal Husbandry description. That always bugs me when I get that tech. I think there’s some other one where there’s a mistake in the reading, though I don’t remember.
MOST annoying tech vocal has to be Satellites, though.
I thought it was hilarious.
There’s a number of occasions where he seems to be sight-reading, with no idea what the text actually says. eg “If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.” Here he puts the emphasis on “rabbits”, rather than the obvious “two”.
Greetings:
Okay, since this seems to be the “I can’t figure this stuff out” thread, I’ve got a few head-scratchers that I’ve run into.
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How do the Aztecs manage to stockpile so many military units so early? A couple of times, I’ve gotten into wars with them in the early stages of the game, and with only 4-5 cities, they’ll have 30+ military units. Even when I out-grow them by 2-3 times, I have a hard time mustering enough units fast enough to turn them back, much less take their cities. They don’t lag on technology, either, so I haven’t had much luck getting to better units faster. What lets them do this? It can’t just be the free experience they get for the Aggressive trait. I’m perplexed by how they can keep pace with both production and technology with so many fewer cities, on Noble difficulty.
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Is there any way to save a “custom game” setup and recycle it? It will remember some settings (land type & size) but not other things like allowed victories or leader choices. You can “regenerate map” on the first turn, but not after that.
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Has anyone else noticed that there are no leaders that are both Philosophical and Industrious? Is there any way to create a custom leader?
That’s all I can think of now, but I’ll probably have some more after the next session…
Michael.
- How do the Aztecs manage to stockpile so many military units so early? A couple of times, I’ve gotten into wars with them in the early stages of the game, and with only 4-5 cities, they’ll have 30+ military units. Even when I out-grow them by 2-3 times, I have a hard time mustering enough units fast enough to turn them back, much less take their cities. They don’t lag on technology, either, so I haven’t had much luck getting to better units faster. What lets them do this? It can’t just be the free experience they get for the Aggressive trait. I’m perplexed by how they can keep pace with both production and technology with so many fewer cities, on Noble difficulty.
The Aztec cities may have a lot of production tiles which could be why they can build so many. They may also have slaughtered their population with slavery civic to rush build units. They could also have chopped rush forests to build the units. Also the Aztec leader has aggresive as one of its traits so it can build barracks at half cost and also units get one free promotion.
Is there any way to save a “custom game” setup and recycle it? It will remember some settings (land type & size) but not other things like allowed victories or leader choices. You can “regenerate map” on the first turn, but not after that.
- I’m not sure, I think it can be edited in a .ini file.
Has anyone else noticed that there are no leaders that are both Philosophical and Industrious? Is there any way to create a custom leader?
- Most people seemed to say the reason their isn’t a phi/ind civ is because of balance issues where those two traits together may be a bit too powerful compared to others. Their is also another combo of traits that aren’t in either but I don’t remember offhand what they are. You can mod a custom leader into the game.
Not that I can find. I miss that feature, the ini covers the ones listed and the quickstart in the ini file does not behave like previous versions. It is just starts a game with no menu options, but you still cannot select leader etc.
Chet
I strongly suspect that the AI gets free military units, even on Noble… it’s not just the Aztecs, pretty much any AI civ tends to have a suprising number of units compared to the size and development of their civilization. I’ve seen single-city nations without bronze working (= slavery) that already owned multiple archers and warriors. Later in the game, six-city nations will sometimes stock 10-20 units per city. If these units aren’t free my strategy must suck because when I try to build such a large army I inevitably fall behind in every other respect.
Everyone who knew what I was talking about!
Can anyone tell me if the Aztec Jagaurs require steel? I could swear I was building them without it. Also, does anyone think that Aluminum is obnoxiously rare?
It’s really not to hard to pump them out around end game. I have about five cities that can do a tank every four turns, in a current game I’m playing.
The AI gets significant discounts to unit upkeep and unit upgrade cost even at noble. I guess the tons of early units are a result of forest chopping, because the AI doesn´t tend to build lots of buildings/wonders with it. I know that I can quite easily outproduce the AI with chop rushs.
I guess later the AI upgrades all those units and never disbands them, so that´s why you see those 10-20 unit stacks.
Is that already public knowledge? Are those discounts set in an XML file somewhere? I’d certainly like to know exactly what I’m up against…
In an interview somewhere, a Firaxian says this is deliberate - a beta tester showed them that such a leader was ridiculously powerful.