Fluffball's Civ 4 thread

[haphazard1]

Sounds intreresting. I would recommend keeping the save file, just for curiosity's sake. You can look at the world builder after you have finished (whatever result that ends up being) and learn what happened.

High difficulty level raging barbs can wipe out AI civs, particularly on maps that favor lots of area for them to spawn. Highlands can spawn tons of barbs, as well as things like rain forest or the larger great plains maps. I once played a huge rain forest map at emperor with raging barbs, and half the AIs were killed off by barbs. I eventually discovered their ruins once I finally got strong enough to expand despite the waves of incoming barb units.

[Fluffball]

I did wind up playing the game, mostly just out of builder-pleasure. I could have won conquest in the BCs because only 1 (!!!!!!) opponent survived the barb onslaught. I'm REALLY phoning it in and basically just hitting next turn because I want to see the full developed glory of some of the cities I have and for no other reason.

Obviously HC built literally every single wonder in the game after I gave him that early game head start by being literally the only entity in a field of 18 of whatever that was able to put up some early research. As it is I'm a few points away from domination after semi-consciously culture-shielding Toku from dozens of stacks of dozens of enemy barbs.

This is my first serious ("") attempt at deity, and I won't be playing it again. My allies basically sucked horribly, but the SHEER AMOUNT OF CRAP they built was staggering. I mean between the two of them they have literally like 200 cities. It's obnoxious. Their power graphs are dozens of times higher than mine, and yet I'm still providing a third of our research. Also to put this in perspective, Toku, the lone surviving AI enemy, has like 20 cities, is using axes and crossbows, and is on power parity with me who is using infantry. His forward plant I saw pop up before I shielded him with culture had like 30 axes in it.


Also another commentary, I doubt Sullla is still reading this after I disagreed with him on marathon speed (hey T-Hawk backed up my point!), but there are a LOOOT of ways to speed up end-game conflict you're not using. If you don't care, then go full bore and group the entire stack and hold down alt; it will give you the best attack odds every time without you having to manually check it (deselect siege, as the AI will use sacrifice cats for you.) And that can be used in combination with checking the odds and then finding and promoting the applicable units. The fact that you individually sleep like 20 units slows things down massively, just alt click and sleep them all. Who cares. That's another thing marathon gets you really good at, caring about the important stuff and not caring if my 180th cav is going to get better odds than my 290th, I'll let the computer just tell me.

[haphazard1]

I disagree about stack attacks. I tend to be more like Sullla, and control my various units individually while thinking about match ups and such. It is similar to handling individual workers and improving tiles for cities rather than automating my workers; for me, those kinds of actions are Civ. It is a core part of the game and I enjoy it.

It is a good thing that the automation options are there for those who want them, but each player enjoys Civ in their own particular way. Moving tons of units in late game can get tedious sometimes, but mostly that just means I need to finish conquering everyone.

[Charriu]

Good example is Sullla's defense in his Elizabeth game. I doubt that the automation could have handled this.

[Fluffball]

I think you guys are thinking of something else. The feature I'm taking about is to select a stack and hold down alt to see the odds. You can do that individually like sullla does, and select several units to tests their odds, however it's WAY quicker to use the stack and alt to see which unit has the best odds. You can still manually order the unit to attack if you wish, but using this feature assures you instantly see the best odds on the first try. Obviously you may want to change that using promotions, but I don't see any reason not to have immediate access to information rather than manually finding the information. Particularly in large scale wars, it will literally save you hours.

Knowing shortcuts like this makes the game far less tedious, which was kinda the theme of the way stream... tedium.

[haphazard1]

Was thinking of something different. Hmmm, I was not aware of the feature you are describing; will have to check for it. Thanks to Realms Beyond, I am still learning new things about games I have played for years.

[Charriu]

Same here. Thanks

[T-hawk]

Highest odds for the first attack isn't always the best way to go. Maybe your top attacker has a Shock promotion and the top defender isn't melee but the second one will be, such that you have another attacker almost as good against the top defender and the Shock guy could be much better against the second defender. You might chase 80%-then-60% when a more favorable sequence of 75%-then-75% could be available by paying more attention to the details of what matchups will happen down the line.

[Fluffball]

Highest odds for the first attack isn't always the best way to go.  Maybe your top attacker has a Shock promotion and the top defender isn't melee but the second one will be, such that you have another attacker almost as good against the top defender and the Shock guy could be much better against the second defender.  You might chase 80%-then-60% when a more favorable sequence of 75%-then-75% could be available by paying more attention to the details of what matchups will happen down the line.

Yup that's just true, but when you have a stack of 80 cavs' it's often the best option to get through a 30 minutes combat in like 20 seconds. If you have an insanely mixed group of attacked and defenders you may want to slow it down, but for 80 cavs, you're going to want at least SOME computer help.

[Hollybombay]

playing a turn based game that you can save and return to, most players i think would rather have overall better odds, than to save ten seconds.