At first I thought Civ on a console was a wanton atrocity and a sign of the apocalypse. I still believe that. And no amount of good reviews will ever change that. Because when it comes down to it, its still nothing more than an oversimplified, dumbed down version of Civ 4 which I already fucking have and I've been spending the last few years playing, trying to make it MORE (not less) complex with mods.

No matter how you slice it, no matter how much worth they put into the transition, no matter how smoothly it translates to the console...its still a lesser game than the one I've already got on my shelf, the one that's been sitting there for a couple years now.

Otherwise I've convinced myself to be ok with the game's very existence so long as it NEVER detracts from or in any way influences the future PC versions.

QUOTE (Mackaxx @ Sep 3 2008, 18.46)

Thats right EHK. Also we should all only play MS flight simulator when we want to play games involving flying planes. Furthermore we should only play the 'serious' race car simulations and never dare to enjoy anything that is geared more towards fun. In terms of strategy games anything not involving spreadsheets is for pussys.

To do anything else should make your face burn with shame. Defend that underpopulated niche!

Eh, not saying you can't make dumbed down games for the twitchy, ADD addled, goldfish attention span, button mashing console gamers, but perhaps pick a different property? Civ 4 is already simple enough for anyone whose ever played a Civ game before (there are a few of us in that niche), I couldn't imagine stripping it down any further. And the last thing I want is for Sid to get it in his head that Civ 5 needs to be even more simplistic for the kiddy crowd that gets fidgety if they go more than 30 seconds without beating a hooker or blowing someone's head off. Yes I'm trying to evoke Yahtzee. No I'm not terribly successful. Sue me.

Seriously though, Civ 4 already got rid of most of the irritating micromanagement of previous civ games, most of the illogical penalties, fixed worker automation, simplified the combat structure, has the easiest and most intuitive menu interfaces in the game. Its already a smoother and more user friendly gameplay experience than any previous Civ by far. Why exactly did it need to change?

Personally I think Civ 4 is the best of them. Ditched alot of the inexplicable concepts (far away cities taking 2,000 years to build a barracks due to Uber-corruption), fixed the chronic city spamming/expand early and often strategy that was damned near a requirement on Civ 3, improved and eliminated much of the micro-management, the most intuitive and user-friendly menu's the game has seen, revamped/simplified/and improved the combat system, enough additions and subtractions to warrant a new game and refined just about everything from the previous entries. I still play it years later. (though mainly with mods these days)

I love the game. YMMV.

QUOTE (diabloblanco18 @ Sep 14 2008, 23.49)

Up until just recently, I was playing with the Fall From Heaven mod, which is amazing. Well, amazing once you get over the fact that it's still very much in development. Even so, I think it kept me occupied and having fun for as long as vanilla Civ4 did. The pronounced differences among the various factions are, IMO, its biggest strength. You can find it here http://kael.civfanatics.net.

Played Fall from Heaven a bit, but I'm a staunch Total Realism loyalist. Awesome improvements to the combat systems with military doctrines and new promotions. Love the more extensive, more powerful and better balanced civics. The immense variety of nation-specific units are interesting, the national units are awesome, differences in religions, buildings, everything.

Only problem is they still don't have a Beyond the Sword version yet. Which is why I keep the Warlords disc in the CD dish instead of BtS. I'll switch when they switch.

QUOTE (Lord of Oop North @ Sep 15 2008, 10.21)

Total Realism was an awesome mod for Civ 3. With Civ 4 doing a lot of the things that the Civ 3 TR mod was attempting to do, I can only imagine how awesome this newer version has become.

Heh, I enjoyed playing it alot on Civ 3 as well. That full earth map of theirs for Civ 3 was fucking nuts. (anywhere from 5 to 30 foods from a given fish square if I remember correctly. Get cities of size 60+)

Actually that was one of my bigger disappointments with Beyond the Sword. Most of what they added Total Realism had either already done or worked on extensively. TR had just about every new unit and building that was added to BtS. Worked hard to improve the spy system, which BtS totally revamped, but I found myself longing for the TR version. The buildings using resources (so that only a certain number of said buildings can be built, according to your resources) was already done in TR, not the same thing as the corporations, but using similar initial concepts.

Those mods will spoil ya. That said though, BtS actually deserved to be called an expansion. It added not only new shit, but entire new game concepts that really add a couple more dimensions to your strategy. Warlords was kind of a disappointment in that regard. However owning Warlords is 100% worthwhile if only to play the TR mod. Can't wait til they put out a BtS version.

QUOTE (Iskaral Pust @ Sep 15 2008, 12.34)

Throw me a freakin' bone. Does less micro management at least speed up the game play?

You know as well as I do that a good game of Civ can see the sun coming up before you blink even with micro-management gone.

Micromanagement improvement:

Its easier to manage all the cities in the empire from a single menu if you want to go that route. Especially helpful in the late game eras when you're friggen huge. You can set endless building queue's for the cities you'd rather not bother with. You can set continent or worldwide rally points. Or you can select any number of cities you want and set rally points for units produced from those cities and another rally point for others.

That irritating late game pollution of Civ 3 is gone. Pollution is worked into the city itself with each 'unhealthy' point taking away a single food from the city, essentially stunting growth. (until you build the proper buildings to overcome it)

Worker automation actually works. The best its ever been. Early game its still not the best idea, but late game when you say...need to turn your entire empire over to railroads, you can't beat it. Just automate those fuckers and let them move.

You can tell the city governors what to focus on, whether it be commerce/food/production and that influences which squares they place the population on. Cities have the usual Civ squares plus specialists who provide various culture/tech/commerce/production (but never food) bonuses that you can use the population on. You don't have to manage this. And its really not necessary to do so until you get to the much higher difficulty games. But it can add ALOT of micromanagement if you choose to mess with it. But its really kind of optional. And more important early game than late, and the computer tends to make smart enough choices for it not to matter early game.

But dude...this is Civ. There's no such thing as a short game. (although BtS does have a playable quick game option that I hear works really well, but I've never tried it.)

QUOTE (Jacen @ Sep 15 2008, 17.09)

Civ 4 was great while it lasted. I liked almost everything they added, though the religion aspect was kinda of half-baked. The Leonard Nimoy voiceovers were a great little touch. However, after awhile the game got boring. Then I started using cheats (don't do it!). You start small and just help your treasury out a bit, next thing you know you're putting wine, wheat, steel, gold, diamonds, oil and bonus reasources around each of your cities. At that point the game is ruined and it's hard to play it again after that.

The other thing I kinda am tired of the Civ games when it comes to military matters. The 4th game made some nice additions in this regard with various combat bonuses, but overwhile it still seems so basic and mundane, I hate that. I want to pull of some grand strategy maneuvers and feel like an actual General, when in the game the combat is basically a total grind with very little thinking involved. Simply send non-stop tanks at the enemy stack until they fold etc.

Heh, I have the same damned problem. That's why I turn off the cheat option before I start a new game. Helps me resist my less savory impulses.

Yeah the computer isn't exactly a strategic genius, really need other human players for those Hannibal over the Alps moments. But some of the mods tweak the combat system enough to make it interesting. And just plain ole BtS has enough unit pro and con bonuses to largely require that you practice some combined arms strategies unless you're way more advanced.

QUOTE (tzanth @ Feb 23 2009, 22.24)

Random side question: How many people refer to their rival civs by their leaders names? I never do; for me its always "the english" rather than Elizabeth or Victoria.

Depends on the Civ really. For the Civs that are essentially personified by a single great leader, one who may even overshadow the Civ in history, I usually refer to them by the leader. Shaka, Genghis, Hannibal. But for the ones where the Civ is more prominent than any individual leader, I refer to them as the Civ. Than there's Gandhi because its always amusing when Mr Pacifist opens a can of whoopass on someone.

My Civ 4 addiction is on vacation at the moment, replaced by a run at EU3.

QUOTE (Papirolle @ Feb 25 2009, 02.31)

Don't forget, your second or third city should be a military production city. Build it somewhere where it's going to have a high production, build Granary, Baracks and start pumping out military units. This city should basically never stop producing units. Only build buildings and wonders that will help with this.

But if you keep producing soldiers you're gonna go over your manpower limit and run into severe maintenance penalties that will force you to mint and ratchet up your inflation while you fall behind in tech. Before you know it your Men at Arms will be getting their asses kicked by line infantry. Not good.

Yeah the military strategy of the AI is one of the few major failings of he game. It doesn't get creative, doesn't maximize its potential (which always annoys me about the higher difficulty levels. The computer doesn't play better, it just cheats more), and doesn't know how to best use the military assets it has. Its predictable, redundant, and really easy to exploit sometimes. Of course this isn't a criticism limited to Civ4 as poor AI is pretty much endemic of nearly every video game ever made. I've got to play a human opponent sometime.

QUOTE (Security Squish @ Feb 25 2009, 23.06)

I'm guessing that you are talking about EU3, not Civ4. Very true by the way.

Yep. Just got EU3 Complete (had the original but now I've got the expansions too) for $10 and loading up the Magna Mundi mod. My Civ4 addiction is on hold for the moment.

QUOTE (Triskele @ Mar 14 2009, 19.21)

I usually just tell them to work on improvements or to improve the nearest city. Is there anything wrong with this strategy?

Generally yes, at least for the early to mid game. Automated workers are not optimated workers. They will not always pick the best improvements. (computer seems incredibly farm happy at times) they will not always improve the essential resources first. (need horses quick to build those chariots? He's off building a shack for a pig) When you get a bigger empire and TONS of workers, yeah it makes sense to automate to cut down on the micromanagement. But early in the game when you have fewer cities, it doesn't take too much effort to direct them yourself and most players probably should.

QUOTE (Triskele @ Mar 14 2009, 19.21)

Also, do they get to a point where there are no longer improvements and they just sit in a city occupying resources? I get the sense that is so but I'm not positive. If so, should I disband them at that point or try and move them to other cities?

Civ 4 changed that aspect from previous civ games. Units no longer suck up city resources of any sort. (except that your city won't grow while building a settler or worker) They simply cost money in maintenance. How much depends on the number of units, whether they're in your cultural territory or not, what difficulty level you're playing, etc. The full cost of all your units is shown on one of the menu screens. Workers do contribute to this total, but not a huge amount. And they're generally worth keeping around cause you're always gonna conquer new territory, learn techs that open up new improvements, and of course have a boatload of improving to do once you learn railroad.

Another tip for Civ 4 is to not expand too quickly too early. In past civ games the further a city was from the capital, the more corruption it would have. Corruption would take a share (a larger share the further from the capitol you got) of your production/revenue/tech in that particular city and eliminate it. The effect was that far flung cities on distant continents would essentially contribute nothing and be incapable of producing crap. But the best strategy was still to expand as much as you could as often as you could, a strategy the computer often took to heart with far flung cities dotting barren deserts and arctic tundras. You lost nothing by having them, so why not?

Civ 4 eliminated this. (and thank fucking god) Instead of corruption, cities now cost a certain maintenance per turn, determined by the number of cities and their distance from the capitol. The effect being, if you do expand alot early, you're cities aren't generating alot of revenue yet, and the cost of maintaining those cities forces you to lower your tech research significantly, which may lag you behind the other civs.

As another poster guessed/observed, the higher you go up in difficulty, the more micromanagement, strategy, and specialization is gonna be required of you to remain competitive. Over at civfanatics they have comprehensive discussions over the merits of Specialist economies vs. cottage economies. (SE/CE) You'll hear talks of military production cities, wonder production cities, etc. Building only the essentials than pumping out axmen like so many zerglings. I don't play that in depth myself, but the skies the limit if you want to really get into the game.

QUOTE (Jacen @ May 18 2009, 11.58)

Question: I'd like to buy the "Beyond the Sword" expansion. I know there was another expansion pack released before itcallled Warlords. I'm not really interested in the scenarios, I mostly want the core game elements that were upgraded and tweaked etc. If I just buy Beyond the Sword, will I get all the improvements and new stuff added to the game from "Warlords" ?

The scenarios aren't that special and you get all the gameplay mechanics from Beyond the Sword, so you're better off skipping Warlords. My favorite player-made Mod happens to be available only for Warlords at the moment however, which is about the only real reason to get it. Presumably they'll get their long overdue BTS version up and running eventually, but who knows.

Pretty steady at Monarch myself. Perfect balance of challenge and playability. Any higher and you really have micromanage everything to keep up with the rabidly cheating AI.

Bah...why do I reload this game everytime a thread pops up?

Monarch difficulty.
Total Realism Mod.
Japanese (I like their national unit)
Real world map. (custom for the mod, HUGE)
French starting spot. (I hate playing on islands.)

Lets go.

QUOTE (Triskele @ May 23 2009, 20.11)

Yeah, it's hard to tell sometimes where exactly a given game is going.

Can someone explain the mod that EHK mentions above for me? I haven't played this game nearly as much as many of y'all and I've never actually installed a mod on a game before.

All sorts of player made mods can be found at Civfanatics. Some mods are massive, some minor. Some add tweaks, some overhaul the entire game, and some just give you a kitchen sinks worth of extra buildings/units/etc. My personal favorite, the one I play 10 times more than vanilla (I barely play vanilla anymore), is Total Realism.

Its about as full of an overhaul as you'll get from most of these mods. Adjusted all the civics, enhanced the power of most of them, and made even the earlier ones worthwhile. Creative and badass national units/buildings. Extensive expansion of units/buildings, but not to the point where it just feels like they're throwing shit out there just to throw it. Most everything fits and makes sense. Significant and extensive unit bonuses and liabilities that vary from offense to defense, city attack or defense, attack or defense against different types of units, with minor (and sometimes major) variations for each individual civ. Introduced military doctrines which can be gained through great generals that give any unit built of a certain type an array of new promotion options. (Probably one of my favorite additions. A good substitute for the boring 'Give +2 EXP to units built here' bonus most great generals are used for)

Expands the religions to include Zoroastrianism and a few others. Gives religions and temples realistic bonuses and penalties. (Cows give Hindu's a happy face/Islam gets an unhappy face from wine, that sort of thing). Specialty units available for each religion. Some spread quicker than others. (later the religion, usually the quicker the spread) And even some decent incentives for sticking it out pagan for a while.

It has a massive real earth map with your civ of choice starting in historic locations. Expect to spend far longer in all periods of history, so you get to use many units that might get skipped over as you tech-up in the regular game. Every few civ has its own graphics for most of its units. Barbarians are an actual menace rather than a minor nuisance. And about a thousand other things that I could list, but I'll spare you.

Its pretty much my favorite mod and I love playing it. There's a thread on it in Civfanatics as well as a forum devoted to it if you have any other questions. You can download it there. Some of the bigger mods can get a tad buggy, especially if you don't have much RAM or if you're using XP, but there are ways around that. This mod only works with Warlords. They've been promising a BTS upgrade for months but it doesn't seem forthcoming anytime soon.

The mod I play greatly increases the amount of culture necessary for that sort of victory. Even so, the resources are so abundant in certain areas that a number of cities can build pretty much everything with a rather high population, which with the right civics, wonders, and the already expanded building database, makes for a pretty easy cultural victory about halfway through the modern age if that's what you were going for. Myself, I think that makes for a damned boring victory.

However another boring victory is conquest. Especially on the huge maps where at some point you no longer have any desire to build rail lines or improve cities, you just want to raze shit and move on or not move on at all. Further, noone wants to spend the last dozens of rounds scouring the landscape for tiny hold out cities in the middle of nowhere. I usually keep space race around for a 'when I get really friggin bored' option. More often though, I play til exhausted, call it quits, and sometime later start a new game.

One MAJOR problem with my favorite mod is that the AI just isn't challenging late game. They debilitate themselves with mountains of obsolete units and tend to fall behind techwise. Gets boring.

QUOTE (Jacen @ May 29 2009, 15.02)

Again I'm realizing, I'm a total newb compared to you guys. I guess your "build only what you need strategy" is one the computer is using? I hate that shit. You conquer a huge city and they have jack shit in there for buildings. I don't know how they make any money. It sounds like Pap and McBig, you two must play very aggressively, going at war all the time? I kinda prefer the building/making money aspect of it all.

Confession:

The game I was playing last night..... I caved in. France was rushing me with 5 stacks of doom outta nowhere...and I gave in, I did it, I opened the godamn world builder and all the sudden they were getting pwned by modern armor in 1400 ad. It was glorious...but I feel soiled now.

damn it.

As Squire said, the computer cheats. The higher the difficulty, the more it cheats. Toss it on emperor for a bit and you can see the computer pumping out warriors in the second or third turn of the game when it takes your starter city 6-9 turns to build one. Also, I'm pretty sure a freshly conquered city has some destroyed buildings that must be rebuilt (if you want), so that may account for the limited number of buildings as well. Raping and pillaging takes its toll and all.

I get impatient with all the workers and/or time necessary to improve cities, so I'd be setting railroads in 3800 BC half the time. I turn off the world builder option when I play or else I'd load it up every time.

I can and do play the maximizing game. (cottage economy/production cities/build only what's needed/etc) But I too prefer a slow paced, build the empire, establish grand multi-purpose cities game as well, and play that way more often. I like wars with limited troops and a decisive tech advantage. A bit harder to do with BTS, the AI is much better in that one. AI really has the combined arms stack attack thing down in that one.

Just finished one of those leisurely paced games. Total Realism, real world map. Had Europe, Mideast, most of West Asia and India. Just discovered tanks, promoted 30 of my cavalry to tanks and decided to clean out Africa. A distant second place was China. Well, pretty much the moment my troops made it to Africa, China invaded. Now even with my crack tank troops, China outnumbered me at least 10 to 1 in total units. They were fielding riflemen, Cuirassiers, and Pistolers mostly. I took my remaining troops in Asia and placed them on hills between mountain passes, playing a delaying action with various choke points. Built forts on the hills and hoped I could hold out a few turns til the cavalry arrived.

Thankfully my much larger, less defended, and more exposed north-western asian front was not attacked in force. Most of China's army was massed around Indo-China, set to flood into India. The computer being the computer, they decided to attack my troops rather than skipping them and heading towards the city. This bought me the time to get my stronger forces in position. A few turns later I had them there and it was time to go on the offensive. China didn't attack in northwest Asia because they had few troops there. So I sent a sizable force to that position and started conquering and razing cities left and right.

My most promoted, crack/elite troops surged through the central-left Chinese desert (just north of Tibet), direct route to the capital. Better defended, but not too heavily. Huge attack power, movement bonuses, can use enemy roads promotion, and heal while moving...this crack force me short work of everything in its way. I took most of my greener forced, placed them in defensive stacks between my main cities in India and the bulk fo the Chinese army in Indo-China and played a holding action. I figured my hill placed stacks with forts on them, full of tanks and Mechanized infantry could hold off any attack the chinese made. Once my Elite forces finished the off the heart-capital, they'd swing around and assault the main Chinese army from the other side.

Brilliant strategy (although its all premised on the computer being predictably stupid. But exploiting the AI's known tendencies is part of the game as well) And it worked for a while. Swept through the lightly defended northern cities like hellfire. Pure blitzkrieg, Manifest destiny style. Destroying everything from my border to the pacific coast. My defensive green troops in the south held off what was thrown at them with minimal damage. (forts help) And my elites were slowly but surely taking out the heart of the Chinese empire.

But I got greedy. The northern Blitzkrieg was pushed too far, too fast and before you knew it I didn't have a single unit with more than half its life. They weren't grouped either, as half the northern cities had 1 or 2 troops in it, so I only sent one or two troops to take that city. Apparently the Chinese had a fair share of horse troops up there, the whole area was roaded, and they started picking off my more advanced, but isolated troops and I began sustaining heavy losses. I was forced to group the remaining troops together, place them on some highly defensible ground, and wait the 5-8 turns for them to heal.

My green defensive troops in the south were doing so well defended, I figured they could take out the gargantuan Chinese stack on their own. So I moved them up and started attacking. They killed everything in sight. But remember, this Chinese army outnumbered me by 10 to 1 or more. And while defending from hill forts didn't do much damage to these guys, attacking did. Next turn the Chinese throw everything at these green troops. The chinese attacked endlessly. After a while I got sick of watching it. Went and made some coffee, came back 10 minutes later, and the chinese were still attacking. By this time they'd wiped out an entire stack of green troops and were going after the next. And the next one. Before you knew it I had one stack left and that was getting battered.

At that point I said screw the primary Chinese cities, I'd destroyed enough of them, and moved all my crack troops down to the main Chinese Army to create a second front. One benefit of the chinese attack was that half their previous forces were dead and those that weren't were at a fraction of their strength. So my elites just pounded and pounded them. (each one with about 4 movement points, blitz promotion, and a bunch of other shit, so 4 attacks per turn/20ish units, so we're talking 80 dead chinese units a turn or more) 2-3 turns later, the Chinese army was destroyed. I methodically wiped out the rest of the core chinese cities. Moved my healthy units up to Siberia and started wasting the rest.

A close call, but tech & promotions proved decisive. After the chinese dropped, there wasn't really a viable competitor left in the game. So I mopped up the rest and called it a day. Good game. The chinese suck.

QUOTE (Papirolle @ Jun 1 2009, 07.12)

Since I often crash my economy in the early game I often go with Specialist Economy for teching and later switch to Cottage Economy during the middle ages.
I also love having a powerhouse capital with lots of settled Great People. Settle all Great Prophets in the capital and later Great Scientists. Bee-lining for Literature and building the Great Library is an excellent strategy for this (it gives two free Scientists).

I'll do things a little differently. I'll have a tech city, a money city, and a wonders building city. Sometimes they're all the same city, but not usually. And one of them, usually the one with the greatest potential for population (preferably the wonders city) will be the main great person farm. The capitals are often well placed for alot of things and that often ends up being the wonder city/GP city. I might find a better location later in the game, but for the early game with the early wonders, Parthenon/National Epic in particular, its often your best early bet. If that city also has alot of tech potential, it'll double as that as well.

But the money city will always be where the first religion pops up. Build the shrine there and it dwarfs everything in income. Build Wall Street and all the other revenue doubling wonders there as well. I also drop the great prophets and merchants there too. The mod I play doesn't allow you to monopolize the religions, you can only keep the founding city as the founding city (otherwise it drifts to another city of the same religion) and get the long term benefits of the great shrine if you make that the state religion. You also can only build temples of your state religion in a city. I actually prefer this, levels the playing field a bit and halts my initial impulse to make a mad early grab for all the religions and to build every damned temples/monastery in sight for half my cities. (Super happiness and culturally overwhelming)

As for the tech city, if its not my capital/wonder city, it'll be someplace with alot of plantationable resources, (or gold/gems), or alot of potential for cottages. Maybe something coastal if I'm a financial Civ and can build the Colossus. (4 revenue per sea square ain't bad and saves time vs. slowly growing cottages) Anyway, I'll build the Great Library there along with any other wonder that grants a scientific bonus or free scientists. I'll place my academy there and than every subsequent Great Scientist will be settled there.

I don't like overexpanding early and a Cottage economy makes for less micromanagement, so I generally go that route. I like maxing the size of my cities and using all the squares that make sense to use before I start turning people into priests/scientists/etc