What's in Civ4. Just the facts, ma'am! (2nd edition)

[Locutus]

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[Locutus]

See opening post.

[Locutus]

See opening post.

[Locutus]

See opening post.

[Locutus]

See opening post.

[Locutus]

Major update posted based on the interview with Barry Caudill:

- Barry Caudill is senior producer
- Resources that are being "worked" is also animated. "In addition, unit movement and combat will be much more interesting and exciting than ever before."
- Many aspects previously hidden in menus and screens will be visible on the main map
- A lot of tool tips and pop-ups will help the player run the game, only 'power users' will need to leave the main map and use menus and screens to manage their empire.
- There will be 18 new civs, not 19 (I guess one got cut?) and new ones include Incas and Mali.
- In Civilization 3, you were always guaranteed a minimum level of cultural expansion when you planted a new city. That is not the case in Civilization 4. You will have to develop your culture or risk being enveloped by a larger neighbor. This leads to the interesting possibility of creating a Luxembourg or Switzerland completely engulfed by another Civ's borders. We also tweaked Civilization 3's luxury slider and turned it into a culture slider. Raising the culture level makes people happier and helps produce more culture for your entire Civ.
- In Civilization 4, the AI will have to respect your borders or declare war but you will be able to negotiate Open Borders to allow travel.
- The [resource] system has been greatly expanded with the addition of many more resources, all of which are tradable. Some of the new resources, like marble, help to increase wonder production, some are food resources (these help with the overall health of your cities), and some, such as iron or copper, allow you to build certain types of units.
- We also changed the way bombardment units work in the game so they are now like a hybrid of previous games.
- Civics: For example, you may have a Theocratic Police State that also has Universal Suffrage or you may have a Pacifist Slave State with Hereditary Rule. The Civics are divided into five major areas - Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, and Religion - and each of those has 5 possible choices depending on what you have researched. In addition, AI leaders will have certain favorite Civics and they may ask you to either switch to theirs or stop using the one that offends them.
- The city that founds a religion becomes a holy city and you can build missionaries for the purpose of spreading religion to other cities faster.
- There are no epidemics in Civ4 (as there were in C3C, I think?)
- During early prototyping, it was determined that more is not always better. In order to streamline the process as much as possible and to highlight the new promotion system, we decided to actually reduce the number of units some. Still, there are some units that haven't been part of previous versions like Grenadiers and Horse Archers and War Elephants that are not specific to only one Civ.
- Some of the promotions include: jungle or forest bonuses, city defense, city raider, flanking, or just simple power bonuses.
- In Civilization 4, you get automatic trade routes after you establish a trade agreement with a particular leader. Also, rivers work like roads so two cities on the same river are connected even if no roads have been built.
- We will not be including any espionage options that are terrorism related. You will, however, create spy units and move them around as you did in previous versions of Civilization.
- In diplomacy, you will be able to broker peace between two warring Civs or ask a Civ to go to war with another even if you are not currently at war with that Civ.
- New victory type: Alliance victory, in which you can share the win with a partner.
- Voice artists will be hired for various parts of the game
- "we'll have over 45 spectacular movies in the game." -- so probably not 90, as that German magazine claimed
- "we have been playing MP games for a year and a half already."
- MP: Players will be able to compete in traditional turn-based or simultaneous move games either on a network or via the Internet. We will be using Gamespy for Internet matchmaking. Other options include Hot Seat, Play by Email, and a persistent turn server we call Pitboss.
- "Coop will work in a similar fashion to what you would expect from an RTS like Age of Kings or Warcraft 3. Players on the same team will share line of site, the benefits of wonders, research (they can even research the same thing to try to get it faster), unit trading, and share territory. All of these additions deliver a plethora of new strategic and tactical options to the players." NOTE: so that means the explanation we got earlier that co-op mode means several players can control the same Civ is probably NOT true.
- Civilization 4 will be the most moddable version of Civilization ever. Players can edit basic stats and attributes in XML files. On a higher level, much of the game will be exposed to Python so modders will be able to edit events and have more control over how the game works. On an even higher level, we are planning to provide an AI SDK to allow experienced programmers to dig very deep into customization.
- Internally, we have 38 on the team working directly on various aspects but we also have some work contracted out and several interns coming on board for the summer. We started working on the game about 2 years ago and expect to have it in stores for the holidays.
- From a design standpoint, all major systems are in and Soren Johnson (our lead designer/programmer) is spending the majority of his time working on the AI. We have a lot that's looking great already but we still have some art and programming to go before we will be ready for full test this summer.

[Nikolai]

Great work you're doing, Locutus. Keep it up.

BTW, when can we await more info from E3?

[lockstep]

According to Barry Caudill, the French are also in. So there are 16 confirmed civilizations at the moment.

[Modo44]

And since when are the Inca a new civ?

[Locutus]

Originally posted by lockstep
According to Barry Caudill, the French are also in. So there are 16 confirmed civilizations at the moment.

Thanks for the heads-up. Added.

[Myrddin]

Great work and the game sounds good, except the marketing aimed at RTS players

How soon will we get the Apolyton mod?

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Myrddin
How soon will we get the Apolyton mod?

I guess it depends on if the modability is as they have stated it. Tweking every aspect of a game takes time, and if you can mod every aspect that's a long time for makeing a tweaked mod. On the other hand you can really tweak it. I'd really like to know more about moding. That interview raised more questions than answers regarding moding at least.

[Spiffor]

Great job Locutus

Edit: BTW, maybe the update tags aren't useful anymore? With the E3 info, it's like a whole new document, that everybody should read, whether they last accessed the thread yesterday or 6 months ago

[Locutus]

Yes, after E3 (which is still only in its first day now) I will completely rewrite the document. I considered doing it before E3 but then I'll probably have to do it again afterwards.

[Peter Triggs]

Originally posted by Gramphos
I'd really like to know more about moding. That interview raised more questions than answers regarding moding at least.

Me, too. These vague comments that keep coming out about an AI Software Development Kit are very intriguing. I wish they'd say more.