So, back to Civ IV

You can look in your game folder. It should be something like:

Sid Meier’s Civilization 4\Assets\XML\GameInfo

Found it, thanks! There’s a big honking file called CIV4HandicapInfo.xml in that directory, and it contains lots of settings for each difficulty level.

(edit) Okay, I’ve looked over the file and if I’m reading it correctly, “the level where the AI doesn’t cheat” is one where the AI does very much cheat. Here are the AI adjustments I’ve discerned for Noble:

[ul]
[li]Bonus vs barbarian and animal attacks increased by 30% each
[/li][li]Unit supply cost reduced by 65% (!)
[/li][li]Unit upgrade cost reduced by 70% (!)
[/li][li]“Inflation” (empire size penalty?) reduced by 20%
[/li][li]War weariness reduced by 30%
[/li][/ul]

There’s a UnitCostPercent setting of 50 and an AIUnitCostPercent setting of 100 but I think that’s 100% of 50%, i.e. cost relative to human players; I can’t imagine the AI paying twice as much to build a unit.

There are also two setting that seem to imply a negative initial diplomatic attitude and an increased likelihood to never trade technologies, but I don’t know if that’s only vs human player or also vs other AI players.

Anyway, I think I’m seeing now why every AI empire manages to sprawl all over the world with a dozen units in each city, all the while keeping a technology lead…

Jaguars don’t require any special metal whatsoever. That’s their primary advantage over Swordsmen (who they replace). For my money, losing 1 combat strength in exchange for not needing iron isn’t worth it – and the special bonus in jungle combat hardly makes up the difference. The only way Jaguars are a big advantage is if you have incredibly poor luck, and have no access to copper, iron or horses. Even then, you have to hope your opponents don’t have access to any of those things either, or they’ll build better units than your Jaguars anyway.

There really is no setting where the AI both plays it’s best in a strategic sense, but is the same playing field as the human. It looks like every difficultly level was tweaked individually. The computer is a lot more aggressive on higher levels, even without setting ‘Aggressive AI’. I’m not one to talk though, I haven’t managed to beat prince without gimping the AI in some way (turn off tech trading or spaceship victory). I could do it on Terra, I think, exploiting foreknowledge of the new world, but I wanted to do it straight up.

You can outsprawl, outproduce, and outtech the computer on Noble though – lots of players do it.

Even though it’s old now, Sulla’s Civ 4 walkthrough really helped me understand a lot of the underlying game mechanics. http://civ4info.com/Sullla/civ4intro.html

‘Walkthrough’ makes it sound pretty basic, but it explains quite a few things you couldn’t have found in the manual.

My experience with Monarch has been a pretty passive AI as well, but that might be because of my strategy revolving around no religion at higher levels.

Chris Woods

No, I think “inflation” refers to the increasing cost of maintaining your empire (any size) over time. Look at your financial breakdown, especially in later years, and you’ll see a certain amount of coin dedicated to paying “inflation.” The number goes up as game time increases. It’s just a basic drag on your economic development.

I’m surprised at all those AI bonuses. I really thought that Noble represented the “even playing field” where it was just your smarts vs. the programmer’s ability to code AI. Interesting.

^^^
Aye me as well. I suppose without those bonuses a noob like me would be able to steam roll the AI on Noble but the wording of Noble makes you believe the AI isn’t getting any bonuses.

I don’t believe we ever said that (tho I could be mistaken) although Noble is probably the “most balanced” level. We aren’t trying to pass the Turing Test with the AI - we found that not having a monolithic approach to bonuses simply makes the game more fun. For example, the AI never gets production bonuses for wonders, even on Deity; giving the AI bonuses for wonders effectively takes them off the table at higher levels. On the other hand, AIs always have to build more units than the human (or, rather, the AI could never, ever leave empty cities as humans sometimes do), so we are more generous with bonuses involving unit support costs and upgrading.

Well it is implied in the tooltip of the prince level description “this is the first level where you are handicapped vs the AI” .
So it makes sense to think that the AI has no extra boni compared to the player on noble.

a-ha! Whenever someone brings this up, I always go back and check the Noble description, but I guess I didn’t notice the Prince one. Sorry about that…

no problem semicolon right bracket.

Since this seems to be the Civ 4 questions thread, here is mine:

Does anyone know how the worker autoimprovement AI determines what´s best for the city? I really hate to do all the stuff manually, but the worker AI seems to be pretty bad when it comes to more modern improvements.

The most obvious example would probably be that the workers love building farms even though they could build far more productive watermills. In one game I hadn´t even researched biology, but the AI wanted to build 1 food farms even though it could have built 1 food(state property) ,2 hammers, 2 commerce watermills.

I don’t think the workers consider civics at all. This probably makes sense, although it would be nice if you could guide their automation a bit more in general. Do they take into account the citizen automation settings like ‘maximize production’, ‘maximize science’, and whatnot? That would be useful.

What I’d really like is a ‘leave forests around this city’ button next to the automation preferences for each city. I know you can turn forest chopping off globally, but it’s a decision I make on a city-by-city basis.

I’ve been pretty impressed with how general purpose the AI is. I’ve tried some wacky mods that add some wacky features, and the AI does use many of the custom special abilities and units at the right times. Pretty cool.

Is there a way to show the ‘fat cross’ for cities on the main map? I’d really like it that was shown rendered on the main screen when a settler was selected so you could more easily minimize overlap.

Has anyone been able to find a patrol button or key combo? I think it would make navies a helluva lot more useful if I could set them to patrol up and down wherever I like. Didn’t CivIII have the ability to set units on patrol?

I’m having a moral dilemma.

Is it wrong to build up a nuclear stockpile for the ultimate backstab against someone who has been your friend for an entire game but is now winning the space race?

Oh, another thing. Score-wise, is a win by Nuclear Holocaust worse than a second-place if I play nice?

Second place is the first loser. If those people didn’t want to be consumed by nuclear fire, they shouldn’t have crossed you.

Just be aware that at that stage of the game, you’re going to have to follow up on your nuclear devastation. At that stage of the game the AI is going to have shelters up at a minimum (if not SDI) and you won’t be able to nuke their main cities effectively. You CAN probably use a first strike to carve a path to their interior and use your military to seize and raze their capitol, but it’s not going to be a one-turn thing, so if you’re going to do this you should probably do it around the 2000-2005 period to give yourself some time if the offensive stalls.

Also your enemy will probably have one or more defensive pacts, so hope you’re ready for some football!

(BTW I usually play with space race off, simply because if you don’t it’s always either AI Wins Space Race, You Win Space Race, or You Play Whack-A-Mole Against AI Space Races)

I have a question about powering factories. You can use coal, hydro, or nukes in terms of what you can build.

  1. If you use coal and then later build a hydro does the coal plant go out of use? Meaning that you no longer get the -2 health penalty.

  2. If you build a nuke plant (with the risk of a nasty meltdown) do you get more power than with a hydro? If not, why build the nuke plant? It costs more and you have to have uranium. From what I can tell you can build the hydro plant anywhere–not necessarily near water.

In terms of gameplay it might have been better to force you to be near water to use hydro. So in some cases you would be forced to either use dirty coal, or potentially messy nukes. I’ve never built a nuke plant so I’ve never had fallout.

In fact, I’ve played around five or six full games and nukes have never been used. Generally the victories have been by time or by space. I almost had a domination but I just needed a bit more territory before time ran out. I can’t seem to get a diplomatic victory since the other Civs vote against me even if I’ve been nice to them.

The earth map that starts at 1000AD is a lot of fun. What was weird was that there were two Civs that I guess were like Barbarians. You had no diplomatic relations and they didn’t show up on the roster. The Vikings were such a Civ which I could understand but also the Byzantines. I wouldn’t think of the Byzantines as Barbarians. 12 other Civs were put all around the world where you would expect them. It even starts you out just at around the time of the first crusades. Saladin is the most powerful Civ and a French and English army are in the area working on Jerusalem.

I’d like to see more scenario games like that. What would be nice is Diplomacy style map set up for the early 1900s. Then there would need to be a mod to have two turns per year although I guess this isn’t crucial.

The new patch has worked well and I’ve only got one hard crash. Seems like if you don’t play for too long in one stretch the performance holds up well on my more than four year old rig. I wouldn’t mind seeing another patch though…8-)

I was able to launch a ten-nuke stockpile before my opponent put up the SDI. Only two of his cities had shelters and lucky for me they were relatively unimportant. His capital and three largest cities won’t be producing or researching much of anything which is good because he has a major tech lead on me, about 5-6 techs or so which puts his military almost a generation ahead of mine.

So far I’m feeling good though. It’s 1936, I’m playing the Germans, and I just nuked the hell out of the Americans. Nothing can stand between me an world domination now.

Warmongering isn’t so easy as it was in Civ 3, but reading the CivFanatics forum plenty of people seem to be winning by conquest or domination, but I’m pretty sure it was made harder because of complaints by the ‘peaceful buider’ types that Civ 3 favoured the warmonger too much. Personally I never managed a culture win in Civ 3, but I’m turning into a culture vulture in Civ 4; with the right leader (Cathy or Liz) and a reasonable start, I find it doable up to Prince level so far. I don’t turn off the space race because it’s really the only way the AI knows how to win.