New Preview at Gamespot

[LDiCesare]

The stacked units seems to be worth little. How will the ai pick units? If it doesn't pick them right, then you'll revert to moving them by hand. I'd like to know what extra units do: IF I move 20 units against 1 unit, and my 3rd unit finally kills the opponent, what do the 17 other units do? Are they stuck or not?

As for wonders, Galciv has the feature where losing a wonder to someone else loses it all. I much prefer it to Civ or CtP's handling of wonders. If you have to think more before building a wonder, I think it's a good thing, but let boost wonder production (either caravan-civ2-like or through leaders a la civ3 - sigh - I liked caravans).
Incremental rush-buying in civ2 was clearly an oten-used exploit and I don't think too many people complained as it disappeared.

Now this

You can still spread your influence over a broad area, but not have as many cities, necessarily.

is confusing. Is he meaning you need less cities to spread yourself out and grab territory if you decide to pump them up or what? He's still saying you can spread over a broad area, but it is the spreading, not how it's done, that is the problem.

In Civ IV, rather than having to have all the prerequisites to research something, you just have to have one of the prerequisites.

This can certainly make for interesting options and mods.

[Impaler[WrG]]

This is ware my Idea of Making all wonders buildible by All Civs just like thouse "Small" wonders. The First person to Build it gets the Full effect of the Wonder and every Subsiquint builder gets a watered down bonus. On the plus side the cost goes down for the subsequent builders.

Now combine that with a rule that each Civ can only have 1 City building a wonder at a time and things will be perfect.

[Donegeal]

Perhaps ICS will be curtailed by health. There might be some factor in a cities health that includes proximity to other cities. The closer the cities, the lower the health/production/commerce/food (For those that don't know, corruption was replaced by city health.).

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]
This is ware my Idea of Making all wonders buildible by All Civs just like thouse "Small" wonders. The First person to Build it gets the Full effect of the Wonder and every Subsiquint builder gets a watered down bonus. On the plus side the cost goes down for the subsequent builders.

I've liked that idea since the first time I heard it, though to add a little to what you said: To get the smaller bonus of a wonder you need to have finished at least 50% of the wonder, that way people don't just switch to the wonder in the last minute to gain the bonus

[LDiCesare]

Perhaps ICS will be curtailed by health.

That's unlikely since it's said that bigger cities will have a health hit.

[Donegeal]

Yes, I know that they said that. But that does not mean that proximity to other cities is not another factor. Think about it. If cities were built one on top of another (ala ICS) where would they be getting rid of their waste? put a bunch of cities next to one another and you have a waste/health problem.

[Sabre2th]

People seem to be ignoring the increased maintenance costs as an ICS limiter. It's entirely possible that the cost will be so huge as to completely shut down scientific research, which would leave an ICSer open to more advanced attackers.

The only way to combat that would be larger, more powerful cities. It would force you to build your cities up before you could afford to expand

(All of this assumes the cost is prohibitive, of course)

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Sabre2th
People seem to be ignoring the increased maintenance costs as an ICS limiter. It's entirely possible that the cost will be so huge as to completely shut down scientific research, which would leave an ICSer open to more advanced attackers.

The only way to combat that would be larger, more powerful cities. It would force you to build your cities up before you could afford to expand

Anyone here struck with the elements in civ4 that have a decidely CTP feel to them...

This is similar to the city caps in CTP - exceed the cap and ALL your cities suffer, as opposed to the corruption model in civ3 which penalized cities based on empire size to a small degree but more heavily, based on location to a palace (which ends up not really limiting ICS all that much).

Exceeding the cap in CTP does limit ICS - not perfectly - but it is a step in the right direction. CTP's problem was that the AI was weak in expansion (but we in the modding community have fixed this to a great degree - especially in AOM)

For instance, in the earliest government types in CTP, you could not simply spam the map with cities because you would run into massive happiness problems, which caused an endless round of rioting in most of your cities. You had to move to a more advanced government type to be able to get the ability to have more cities. This could be handled in the same way in civ4 with a civics slider setting that could add more cities based on tech.

The end result was that you have to choose what approach you take to getting new cities when you had the new cap in hand - - either build new ones (which might not be worthwhile because of the time required to build them up to size) or conquer them.

This requires some forethought. You may need to build a new city to get a particular good and have it work against your cap. But that's the breaks...


PLEASE NOTE_REVISED 07/21/05 =============
Using 20 cities as the base setting for an optimal empire size in the Ancient age...(Optimal is the total production/commerce/food/science of your best 20 cities with no losses - if you exceed that number of cities, you lose total production/commerce/food/science that will bring you back to your 20-city totals)

A slider adjustment could also be established so that you can choose a more bureacratic control-type setting as part of your civics - allowing you more cities (let's set this at 25), but reducing the overall production/commerce/science of your empire. This would simulate a government system that requires a lot of workers to maintain your empire, but do not really add anything beneficial to the empire (sounds familiar???)

Simply choosing the bureaucratic setting would also impose the following penalty too. Using my example above, it could drop your optimal empire size number from 20 to 15. If you have only 20 cities while in this bureaucratic setting, you will lose 25% of your total production/commerce/food/science.

The benefit is if you choose that setting and you want to have a larger empire, you can control more cities (25) and your optimal number will gradually rise back up to 20 over a period of time.

There is also a break point though - if you keep exceeding the new size (25) even more, your civ would drop back down to an optimal setting of 19...18..17 cities. Thus if you decide to go too large, you will become increasing inefficient.

Bottom line - You may have a 30-city empire, but it operates worse than an efficient 20-city empire.
===================================

You would then focus on improving the cities you have, to boost your production/gold/commerce/food strength which would be a good thing. The base is weighted against the number of cities you own instead of total population.

Rampant ICS is limited because you would end up crippling yourself if you do it heavily. You do have some wriggle room though with the sliders.

I think that the combo of what civ3 did with ICS, with settler cost as 2 workers and the high maintenance cost for large empires could just about limit and destroy ICS.

And religion appears to be similar, but greatly expanded from CTP...

[Sabre2th]

Originally posted by hexagonian
...

Exactly my thinking. I think the combination of the new maintenance costs and the carryover from Civ3 could go a long way toward limiting ICS.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
The stacked units seems to be worth little. How will the ai pick units? If it doesn't pick them right, then you'll revert to moving them by hand.

Attackers in civ3 games usually picks his strongest attackers - and by default, the defender puts up the strongest defender. It usually does not make sense to put up a weaker attacker against the strongest defender, because most likely the attacker would lose and give the defender more HPs. So this does not seem to be a problem

Originally posted by LDiCesare
I'd like to know what extra units do: IF I move 20 units against 1 unit, and my 3rd unit finally kills the opponent, what do the 17 other units do? Are they stuck or not?

In the field, you know what you are against (at least in civ3 you can see exactly what occupies a tile by clicking on it to get the report), so sending in units en masse would be an efficient means to fight a battle.

See twenty units on a tile - send twenty units in with a push of a button instead of the endless click-n-drag dance

I'd use this feature all the time...

In a city situation, there probably be some guesswork involved, but what I'd like to see is a combat bonus given to a player who sends forces en masse. The tradeoff - either get a combat bonus and lose movement or possibly take more losses with a true single-unit vs single-unit format but retain movement for units because you are holding them back.

Might be too late for that feature though.

[LDiCesare]

Attackers in civ3 games usually picks his strongest attackers - and by default, the defender puts up the strongest defender. It usually does not make sense to put up a weaker attacker against the strongest defender, because most likely the attacker would lose and give the defender more HPs. So this does not seem to be a problem

Yes but hitpoints are gone as there are promotions instead and this wasn't relevant against elite units. Also I suppose promotions will occur in the middle of the turn when you are attacked too, but to what extent will that change the odds of the fight, and how many can you have for a single unit?
If I attack with 4 units of strengths 3,3,3,6 versus one with strength 7, I may want to soften it with one (or 2) 3-strength units before finishing with the 6-strength unit. Particularly if the opponent is an elite unit which can't increase in power.

I also think the feature is good because, most of the time, it'll probably automate what I'd do by hand, but I too would like a more CtP-like combat system where the stack acts as a whole and gives bonuses because you sent everything at the opponent.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Actually, DiCesare, HP's are still in the game-they are just handled differently. First up, the number of men in a unit 'sort of' represents the number of HP that unit has-from 1 (conscript) up to 5 (Elite). Secondly, though, each man has a certain number of points of damage that it can take before it dies (up to 20 per man-or 100 in total-if my calculations are correct). This, combined with the variable damage-based on strength-that units do when they hit, will probably make older units obsolete in combat very quickly, forcing player and AI alike to upgrade constantly and putting paid to the 'spearman vs tank' phenomenon once and for all.

As for ICS, it is probably one of those things which any fanatical player can exploit-no matter what game designers do. City maintainance, the ability to extend culture via cash investment, the greater importance of city specialisation and Great People, the variety of terrain improvements, and the new health system will all tie in together to make ICS far less of a successful strategy for achieving final victory.
Actually I find it ironic that you feel this way about ICS in Civ4, Yin, because over in Civfanatics, MeteorPunch sounds scared that these new rules will make the game feel 'less epic', and thus prevent players from building masses of cities !

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[LDiCesare]

I didn't get that there were both promotions and increase in the number of men (hp). It doesn't change the fact that in some cases you may want to override the default order and micromanage combat because this is not truly stacked combat.
As for damage dealt depending on power, that was already the case in civ2 (firepower), except here they put attack, defense and firepower in a single figure. We might mod Civ2 and check how the civ4 combat model works .

[Addled Platypus]

ahhh... a yin26 free thread


the biggest adjustment for me will be no more shields !

never played Civ, did it start there ?

it has been in all the others.

Modder's are you listening?

[joncnunn]

I would imagine that you can still switch from one wonder to another wonder in that case. (Assuming there is one left you can build.) At if the one you switch to costs the same as the one you were originally trying to build, you would be a huge favorite to complete the new choice.

Originally posted by binTravkin
Anyways, I'll lose something and that's no good.
Imagine you've poured everything you have just to get that very important Great Library project (and you're playing MP and all the others are at least as strong as you) which will give you each tech any 2 others own and now in the very last turn someone still finishes it before you.

That's it.
Game over.

You've lost too much time going for it and the cash refund is not gonna be generous enough.
In MP games such crass loss of resources will most likely result in a defeat or serious weakening.
You will have to think hard before starting any project.


Anyways - I liked the trailer featuring George W. and Sid M.