So the play over and over again till wee hours of the morning because Tokugawa just won’t die?
Troy
I have no idea if this is the real Civ IV thread, but it’s a 12 year necro.
I’ve played 4 games of Civ IV for the first time in ages and it’s completely kicked my butt on Prince difficulty. I keep getting boxed in, so I start falling behind because I can’t settle enough cities. If you start falling behind on science it can get tough quickly.
It’s kind of a nice feeling having trouble succeeding in a Civ game without cranking up the difficulty. With all the trouble I’m having it’s like I never put 2000+ hours into Civ IV when it came out! I used to beat Prince regularly.
I never really liked the espionage, as it can get frustrating seeing your cities get poisoned and you don’t know who it is - which I guess is the point.
Yep, every Civ IV game I played in recent times included disabling Espionage from the start.
Prince difficulty in Civ IV I seem to remember as being a big step up. Noble difficulty was meant to be the default, and Prince is when it is important to start being efficient. By that, I mean unburdening yourself from building everything and anything in every city. Generally speaking:
- Specialise your cities and you’ll have a better shot.
- Don’t be afraid to chop forests early on in the game to push out a settler.
- Slavery isn’t all that bad really.
All features I miss in Civ V and VI…
The trouble with disabling espionage, iirc, is that it changes all those espionage-producing buildings to make something else instead. Culture, maybe? A bit skewing. They could definitely have done a much better job with that system. Perhaps playing vanilla is the way to go, though there are balance issues there, and the AI is weaker.
I believe Noble is where the AI is playing at roughly the same difficulty as you. By which I mean that compared to the player they have some advantages at things the AI is bad at, and some disadvantages elsewhere to compensate. I’m still hugely impressed they were able to achieve an AI that could beat an average player without having to rely on huge bonuses. I guess that’s the advantage of building the game so that an AI can play it rather than building a game then trying to write an AI for it.
It’s a staggeringly well named thread by Tom back in 2006 for resurrection in 2018.
I had my best game so far, but still not good. Playing continents, Prince, Large - everything else at standard. I’m tempted to slow down the speed to marathon (or epic). Whatever is one step slower.
I got off to a good start. I got a bit more aggressive off the start and took several cities from my only neighbor on the continent. I also started with some decent resources / terrain for a change. I got my science machine running and after finding the rest of the civs I was around 4th out of 9. But, I was researching techs quickly. My plan was to pump out some advanced units and take over my 2 easy closest rivals.
I was about ready to attack when Spain and a vassal attacked me. My navy was crap so they controlled the seas but I repelled their invasions pretty easily. I made some ships and got control of the shore on that side. I made 2 transports to start my attack on my neighbor.
Then 5 of the remaining 7 civs all attacked me. I had been on good terms with many of them. I then noticed that they all were a different religion then me. Ooops. I didn’t see that happen. Again, their navies were much larger and they landed units but I killed them. Slowly I built up more ships and was able to kill their ships but they kept coming. Sometimes I would need to wait and build up more ships before I could attack again, so they were able to blockade some of my cities.\
Without my trading partners and with the blockades my population dropped. I struggled to keep my cities. Eventually a could smaller ones fell. China launched a spaceship and I hoped I could hold on until they won. I was able to made peace with 2 of the civs, but another one declared war. I lost another city and finally China’s spaceship landed. So I lost, but I was happy to have survived.
So, I think my main mistakes were:
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Waiting to long to attack another civ to grab their land. I fell into the trap of, “if I just wait a couple more turns I could use this unit”. Because I didn’t continue to expand I didn’t have enough cities to keep up. In Civ IV you really need to keep getting cities.
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Didn’t maintain a big enough navy. It’s hard to get a foothold once their ships come pouring in.
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Didn’t pay enough attention to diplomacy and religion. I should have tried harder to get to free religion, or switched to their for the time being.
Yeah, epic speed I found best. I did solely play marathon once, but truth is, I no longer have the time for a 20hr management game. With epic, I found that I had a decent middle ages/early gunpowder era. Also, it meant that I wasn’t needing to upgrade units as often, so if conflict did break out, I could end the war with maybe one tech higher tier units than what I started with in order to scrape out an advantage.
And i just rejoined the forum to respond to what i thought (at first glance) was Tom’s honest attempt to get back into Civ IV now!
Hey Tom you should never stop playing Civ IV. Like the ‘good’ Star Trek and ‘good’ Star Wars, Civ will never be better than IV, they just have lost the ability to make ‘better’.
Well boo to me, and hi to everyone else. And yes i still play CivIV over all other versions; currently ‘A New Dawn’ mod version with a few tweaks from myself.
I also agree ‘Epic’ speed seems the best fit for most default and modded games.
Oh, believe me, I haven’t! I’ve just taken occasional hiatuses.
Hmm, I’m not familiar with A New Dawn. I’m guessing it’s some sort of post-apocalypse total conversion? Let’s see. Oh. Seems I’m way off base.
That doesn’t tell me much other than “we just remade everything because we could”. Can you tell me a bit about why you like it, Zak?
-Tom
The last couple games I played with permanent alliances on. It’s kinda nice when you’ve spent the effort to befriend another civ that you can make it permanent.
We just fell short of getting a space victory. The Romans were out ahead, but with our alliance we gained ground through research. We just fell several pieces short though. In cases like that, I’m always torn about whether to continue to go for the peaceful victory or attack who is in the lead.
The problem with the large world is that it can be a royal pain to get troops over to where the other civ is. I should have sent some spies over earlier to try and disrupt their spaceship construction.
I only had one city on the coast so I couldn’t build up a big navy.
As an aside: Ok. Well one reason I had to stop posting here was the switch to Discourse (which I explained at the time). Anyway it is not clear how to directly quote a post that I can see, ‘reply’ directly to a post does not give the body of the text for me. There is probably an easy reason why, but it is especially the forum software that makes it hard to stick around. Sorry Wumpus (although I know he has now gone).
That out of the way I will try to make a decent attempt at replying given the options I seem to have.
We all know and love Fall From Heaven 2 (1 was nice also, like a good pilot ‘episode’); just a beautiful zany (sadly unfinished) conversion of the excellent Civ IV system.
I’m also partial to one of the Dune Wars mods for it’s particular flavour.
Those two have been my favourite mods for CivIV for a good long while, so I started looking around for some new stuff over the years, to keep that CivIV wagon trucking (as it simply deserves it imho).
Another mod, Caveman2Cosmos, is like the ‘kitchen-sink’ of mods. I LOVE that about it to be honest, it’s a beast of a mess of crazy oddball everything, from it’s Cleeve (was that his name?) like attitude to alpha-male Neanderthals (very early game) to having a space stage (like in those Call To Power games). It is the most ridiculous of Civ mods ever, with some great idea’s and aspects, but also some serious flaws. It’s huge and unwieldy, but certainly worth a try by any CivIV gamer that has not looked at it, and here is the link for it:
Anyway back to CivIV and a little history before I go into A New Dawn.
In the period between Civ II and Civ III I became an avid player and fan of the Call To Power games. I know they kind of split the ‘Civ’ community (for many number of reasons), but I really appreciated some of the things they evolved in the civ theme overall.
Stacked combat AND having a proper army size with it’s own little engine (for front, ranged and flanking units) is still just genius compared to how Civ does it (still).
A great graphics engine (for the time) and brilliant polish in many parts of it’s design and production. I certainly never felt the need to get into Civ III because of the CTP games (1+2). CTP2 especially (after patching) was a fascinating civ game to me, so I ended up helping (in a small way) with modding it and getting the source code released much later on.
So in CTP2 they had some basic concepts of religious units, these acted like the ‘spy’ units in Civ; one-shot use units to do certain actions. There were also (iirc) some buildings that served in a religious capacity for the city (and civ) they were built in. It was a pretty basic set of functions, and as a student of religion and history got me thinking.
So I started a thread on Apolyton (where all the modding for CTP2 took place) about religion in CTP2, what we might do with it and how to improve it to become a more near-world experience in the game. That thread got lost during some Apolyton upheaval but it ended up being part of most of the excellent mods that came later for CTP2 (like the Apolyton Pack etc), and with people like Wouter Snijders and Dale Kent all that eventually ended up in the BTS expansion pack.
One thing I really like in A New Dawn is the religious representation (apart from Judaism being too early vs others (like Hinduism), so I mod that aspect a little in my game) and it has this great ‘pre-religious’ part where in a town you can start with things like ‘Myth of the Hero’ or ‘Myth of the Sea’ etc and these relate to either town locations or stuff that has happened.
Want to play fully as an ancient Egyptian? well pick the correct leader and learn ‘Mythology’ to discover ‘Kemetism’ and be able to build the Pyramids wonder. Most of the religious (and cultural) aspects work in a really well thought out way like this, as good as in any ‘civ’ game,
So that is one of the aspects of A New Dawn I really like. Now we are finally talking about A New Dawn, another reason I might like it as much as I do is that is one of the newest mods for Civ IV, and as such has borrowed things or incorporated smaller mods (like BUG etc) from the very best of Civ IV modding history. There is nothing out of place here for a pure Civ game, it all fits perfectly into the setting we all know and love.
There have also been AI improvements, but that is often really hard to judge as to how well they ‘play’. The best I can say on that is I have not seen anything so unusual in AI behaviour it stands out to the point of distraction.
However I’m pretty certain stacks of doom still are a thing, that was the one big Achilles-heel Civ IV suffered from.
However all the other aspects of depth that came with the BTS expansion for Civ IV are fully part of, and expanded/improved upon that I can tell. This is a FULL game experience of Civ, unlike with the later Civ games that stripped Civ IV down, then later sold the bits back to you in ungainly, awkwardly strapped on mechanics.
So for now (going on the last year I’ve been playing it) A New Dawn is my go-to version of Civ IV. FFH2 and Dune Wars are obviously still a big part of CivIV fun, but A New Dawn does the ‘best yet’ version of a default human history game of Civ. Worth a look by all Civ fans imho. Oh, a lot of it is pretty modular also, so in the game launcher you can turn various aspects on/off and then you have all the usual Civ IV game set up options to look at and try out. It is just a very thorough and detailed game of Civ IV.
I would still like more stuff to do in the early stages, and when you look at ‘crazy’ Caveman2Cosmos, you can see you can do a lot here, but overall for most people it will do enough with the classic civ theme to be satisfying.
I never tried the permanent alliance choice. That does remain one of the frustrating things about Civ IV (and I suspect the later versions?) in how a perfectly good relationship, one you invest in, can often simply go south with very little warning. Your option here could be a solution to that, but I’m not sure how my ‘realism’ antenna would deal with it?
Maybe if it worked in a way that just ensured peace for a good number of turns (say 50-100) but then would revert back to the normal previous pre-permanent alliance state, forcing you to pay the cost for a new one from time to time, or not as you choose. I love the flux of a good game of civ.
Zak, thanks so much for the thorough reply! That sounds great, and I’m especially glad to hear that it builds on other mods like BUG. I don’t know that I can go back to Civ IV without BUG and BAT functionality!
I’ll also be curious to see what it does with religion. I really enjoy seeing designers struggle with how to model religion, and Civ IV is one of my favorite approaches. Now I want to check out how New Dawn has built on that.
As for Discourse, just highlight the text in someone’s post and a little “Quote” tag pops up. Press it and it will copy in a quote wherever you’ve got your cursor! Easy as could be! Alternatively, the quote button at the top left of the reply window will quote the entire post.
-Tom
So I’d been thinking of getting Civ 4 reinstalled and this thread pushed me to do it. I installed Warlords expansion because I remember that the Beyond the sword one has just odd things added that mess up the flow, but I could be wrong about which expansion is wonky or if either of them is. Still, I dinked around for a couple of hours and it’s just such a zen feeling of the right amount of decisions, feedback, and tension.
So I have it in Steam, are there problems with adding mods to a steam version? Is it worth it to track down a non-steam version to do the mods?
I just reinstalled Steam version and only one minor blip with the New Dawn mod mentioned above (really good first impression, BTW. I’d describe it as Civ4 with a lot more detail) which they explained in the launcher. Basically, Firaxis released a patch to switch from GameSpy to Steamworks but broke one UI element they use. In Steam, you can roll it back to the patch before that or just deal with one missing religion-related UI component. Very minor stuff.
It looks like there is a UI bug in the game set up (with the mod). I can only see epic or slower for game speed, and I don’t see a way to scroll down to the quicker speeds though it looks like they are in the list.
Did you change the resolution or do you have DPI scaling set in Windows?
I see it at 1080p, 1440p, and 4k, with restarting the game after changing the resolution. dpi scaling looks like it is set to 100% and hasn’t been touched.
I believe custom game has the game speeds in a dropdown. So if that’s still available it might get you around the problem.
(thanks for the quote tip)
It’s pretty decent (with a couple of odd choices like the aforementioned Hinduism/Judaism miss hit, also ‘vikings’ get to follow ‘Asatru’ with the invention of the ‘rudder’). But we have:
Kemetism, Hinduism, Naghualism, Zoroastrianism, Hellenism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Shinto and Asatru.
Which is a pretty decent spread. You also have a ‘pre-religious’ period where you have a few local choices (stuff you can do in each city, rather than a civ-wide choice as in the main religions above.
For these proto-religions you first need ‘storytelling’ then you can have:
Myth of the Sea (with Fishing)
Myth of the Sky (with Stargazing)
Myth of the Hero (with Storytelling AND having a level 3 Unit)
Myth of the Beast (with Storytelling AND having a captured beast)
It’s a nice quick simple system that works well for the very early game.
As for people on Steam, i have no tips to making CivIV+mods work well, I use GOG so have no Steam-specific issues with getting mods working, though pretty much all the decent mods (and the ones i mention) do require BTS plus the latest patched version of CivIV to run. If you don’t like BTS, you will miss out on most of the mods that add interesting things to CivIV (like FFH2!!!).
Now excuse me while i build up my Apiary installations to boost food production (you grow slow in the early game!).
Probably more importantly i need to manage my southern border region as i have four barbarian stacks spread over the south east and south west flanks. They seem to operate in two main armies (lead by an Elephant rider!) with higher level units than i have (not found any metals so far), with a smaller ‘support’ army each. Hmmm so maybe the AI is a little better?
Also beware of the ‘balanced’ resource choice, it can make it pretty hard (but fun).
Ohh, you’re on a different screen than I was so I misunderstood the issue you were having. As @rho21 says, use Custom Game and you can select it there.