Apolyton Civ4 PREVIEW (By Solver) - Part 1 online

[MarkG]

yes through culture. in the late game you should have some high culture cities anyway....

[ml_4da3]

The anti-ICS stuff sounds good. As I have understood it, the strategy and ones skill in Civ IV will not depend as heavily as before on how well one is to pump settlers and cities, but how well one are able to balance on the point of optimum expansion, right?

Expand to little and your empire will be small and insignificant, expand to fast and your empire will be of low quality, and in the long run become small and insignificant. Correct? The key to success will lie in continously finding the optimum rate of city building / conquer.

All of this sounds verry good and *realistic*. But it would NOT be good if it is impossible to expand ones empire forever. It should be possible to afford having cities all over the map - if you can get there the right way...

Solver: Will it be possible to have a strategy to conqueror the world and coming out of it as a winner, given sufficient time? Or does the new anti-ICS rules create a point/moment where no expansion is ever beneficial again?

[Dale]

I still want someone to mod in TRUE stacked combat, not this pseudo-stacked 1-on-1 combat.

Dale

[Solver]

Uhh.... that's a lot of stuff . Let me try to answer some.

Additionally with air combat, do some ground and air come with an automatic bonus to air-defense, or is that only possible via promotions (or very specific unit-types)?

Air combat is more balanced now. There are some ground units with inherent ability to defend vs. air units - they have a chance to intercept those. Defensive air units can do the same, of course - overall, this is pretty fair, although I haven't experienced enough air combat to say for sure.

You mention that early ICS tactics are very difficult because of those maintenance costs. Is there a time when you do get established that your empire can handle the costs, and then pursue an ICS-type strategy as a builder?

You can later handle the maintenance of course - after all, the point is to grow a strong economy, isn't it? However, by that time, the continents will be settled, and you won't have much room to expand to. Depending on the map, though, in the Renaissance, a whole new race can start to colonize new continents if such exist, post-Galleons,

What is the time in turns for a small city to create a settler? Does it take longer than in a normal civ3 game?
How fast does a normal city grow?

It takes longer than in Civ3. Plus, your city not growing while the Settler is being built influences that more. Your first settler will almost certainly take a two-digit amount of turns to be built.

Great People-aside from producing Golden ages (which become successively harder to achieve each time), it sounds like Great People can often achieve in 1-turn what it might take 10-15 turns (at least) to achieve normally. Yet, unless I am mistaken, building settlers actually reduces the chance of that city generating a new Great Person. So, once again, any benefits gained from producing hundreds of little cities actually comes at an ever increasing cost-in potential great people-at a time when you need them most!!

That is very good analysis. Cities with more population are far better GP producers. If you stall your pop growth by having many size 2-3 cities, you're not going to be getting any significant GPs - and their impact is indeed significant.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Dale
I still want someone to mod in TRUE stacked combat, not this pseudo-stacked 1-on-1 combat.

Dale

What would be the benefit of that? Let's analyze.

In CTP style stacked combat, there is a row of melee units, absorbing damage, one or more rows of ranged units, who deal damage and a number of flanging units, who add damage. If the first row dies, ranged or even flanging units step in until one side runs out of units, or hits the break button. All this runs driven by a script, or is even hardcoded, the player has no choice, which unit type should attack next (they all attack sort of the same time).

In Civ4 as it looks now, best strategy will be moving small stacks of mixed arms, containing defenders against foot units, defenders against mounted units, bombardement units, foot attackers and fastmovers for the occasional excursion. This is nearly the same as CTP style stacks, just that they don't act as one unit; although I am sure this time stacked movement is implemented from the get go. But other than in CTP games you have the full control over what unit should attack next, how many bombardement is needed and you can retreat with your remainders anytime if you see, that you're losing. The only thing what would be yet more CTP-like would be a script for auto-attacking of a stack. I don't doubt that it can be implemented, given that the modability will be not worse than in CTP. However I doubt, that this would be a good idea and that many people would adopt this mod, because all it would do is to add automatism to a matter nearly all players enjoy to micromanage.

[Nikolai]

Very good preview Solver! And many thanks to you and Markos for answering most of our questions, it's deeply appriciated!

[Atahualpa]

Well stacked combat has some advantages. E.g. you attack with the first unit, you lose and the defender gets promoted (in civ3 he even regained a health). Now the next unit has it even harder, even though normally you'd be fighting the unit at the same time. Ofc this could easily be countered if the defender gets to choose the promotion only after the unit survived the turn and effective only during the next turn.

But as you said, I think the desire for stacked combat in civ4 will not arise that much. At least contrary to Civ3 where we see mostly two kinds of units, one that maximizes attack and another one that maximizes defense in Civ4 we will see much more diverse and small stacks.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
Well stacked combat has some advantages. E.g. you attack with the first unit, you lose and the defender gets promoted (in civ3 he even regained a health). Now the next unit has it even harder, even though normally you'd be fighting the unit at the same time. Ofc this could easily be countered if the defender gets to choose the promotion only after the unit survived the turn and effective only during the next turn.

I suspect this to be the case, as it is the only way that system would work in games such like PBEM. In Civ3 there was no need for this, the promotion line was straight conscript -> regular -> veteran -> elite, but in Civ4 with its multiple upgrade features a choice has to be made.

[Maniac]

Is it possible to mod that distance from the capital affects city maintenance, but # of cities doesn't? I find a # of city limitator an unrealistic and crude hammer method to make large cities more attractive. Great People seem a much better and fun way to achieve this effect IMHO.

[Atahualpa]

I think you're right and this also kills the annoying battles where you needed to kill exceptionally strong defenders who got even better during the battle and in the end the defender got stronger than before.

Another annoying thing about combat was that units regained their health way too fast. The system is imbalanced such that reducing hitpoints never achieved anything and if you had run all your attackers against a city reducing every defender to one shield you have effectively achieved nothing as next turn they are back to whooping full health.
I think this would need to be modded that units in cities that have been under attack during the turn will not auto-regain health. This also makes artillery bombardement more effective, because you can supress the city with it. And another thing it would change is that hiding behind the city walls will not keep you safe in the long run and you've got to send reinforcements to make a sally. Effectively this would model some kind of besieging.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Its funny, but the only bad thing I have heard in this entire 'preview thread' is probably the thing most easy to alter. Namely I think that razing cities should carry a fairly heavy diplomatic penalty, though not as much as nuking. However, the degree of it should depend on various factors-primarily whose cities they were. A civ-or its allies-whose cities you regularly raze should definitely take a fairly long time to forgive you for it, wheras someone who is that civ's enemy will probably tend to say 'meh!', though they may still look 'askance' at you. Even your allies should be moderately put-off by such behaviour.
Would that be fairly easy to mod in Solver, MarkG?

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[MarkG]

i think it could be done with some python....

[Dale]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph


What would be the benefit of that? Let's analyze.

In CTP style stacked combat,........

Please note that I did NOT say CTP stacked combat. I said TRUE stacked combat.

Even CTP stacked combat was, as you say, scripted to an extent. But I think I've worked out a much better way, that's fairer for all concerned, while not having that "roll of the dice" (to borrow someone's quote I once heard) element.

Dale

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
In CTP style stacked combat, there is a row of melee units, absorbing damage, one or more rows of ranged units, who deal damage and a number of flanging units, who add damage. If the first row dies, ranged or even flanging units step in until one side runs out of units, or hits the break button. All this runs driven by a script, or is even hardcoded, the player has no choice, which unit type should attack next (they all attack sort of the same time). ...But other than in CTP games you have the full control over what unit should attack next, how many bombardement is needed and you can retreat with your remainders anytime if you see, that you're losing.

The choice lay in the overall composition of your stack and CTP2 did have the retreat option (which IMO, was flawed...) because the AI did not use it. But it did allow the player a measure of control too - if he wanted to use it. Bombardment in CTP could happen from a seconday stack before the main stack attacks, also allowing a measure of control to the player.

The strongest feature of stacked combat, imo, was the risk of losing everything in one shot. And I actually liked the aspect once you committed to battle. It made battles more of a make-or-break situation. Historically, ancient warfare had more of this type of element. Once you committed to battle, you were either screwed, or you won. It makes for great gameplay...and to use a chess analogy, you cannot lose part of a piece when things go bad - you lose the whole piece.

Not that I have a problem with the civ4 system (I'm optimistic about the mechanics), though I'm reserving judgement until I get the game. My problems with single unit vs single unit was more along the lines of the tedium factor, when the best strat was sticking everything into a single stack of doom and then sending 50 or more of the same exact type of unit into battle one at a time - again and again and again...

If the preferred strat is to create a series of smaller specialized stacks, it would be a huge step up from civ3. If military creation is harder in that there ends up being less total units on the map, then single unit combat becomes more bearable. If there is a effective grouping feature for unit movement, it gets even more bearable.

[sophist]

Originally posted by Verenti
Waaaait. So the more cities you have, the more money you lose. So if you build a big empire, your military options are Limited because of Maintaince costs? And by that I mean, you can go on a conquering spree because you've expanded large peacefully... Okaaay.

I'd slightly rephrase it to "the more money you spend." Whether it's a loss or a gain depends on other things. You could go on a conquering spree and then get rid of the cities you capture, either by giving them away or destroying them. Or you could make money through extortion and pillaging.

Originally posted by hexagonian

Hence my use of the term similar... Similar in that the end result is the same for both setups in CTP and civ4. The larger you get, the greater the potential strain you can have in your empire, if your cities are not set up to handle it.

Bottom line: The end result of civ4 looks to be more like the end result of the CTP system than the civ3 system.

Wow, all that bolding sure helped turn a bad point into a good one. You know what would make it super awesome? ALL CAPS. Yeah baby.

The end result is not the exactly same. The end result in the average case may be the same, but the mechanism matters, and that doesn't mean that it's the same in the general case. Hard caps differ because you're always conscious of their presence. Hard caps differ because they are inflexible and are thus must be tuned for the common case. If you play substantially differently from what the designers intended, you're going to have problems. A dynamic limiting factor suffers from none of those problems.

Originally posted by tuckson

OK, sounds good. The only drawback then seems to me that, especially in the later era's you create empty area's which will attract settlers like bees to a honeypot. Is there a way to secure those areas you've conquered but razed?

I think that's a lot less likely. Just adding more cities onto an empire won't necessarily be profitable; in fact, it could be the opposite. So opponents (be they AI or real) would be less likely to grab territory like that. Furthermore, building settlers is harder and more expensive, so any such rush would be slowed. Finally, because mindlessly building cities could be expensive, it might not be such a bad thing if your opponents rushed to fill in newly cleared space, as those cites could end up being net losses for them, or at least, not the most profitable use of their resources. If there came a time that those cities started being net gains, you could always try to take them away.

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
Namely I think that razing cities should carry a fairly heavy diplomatic penalty, though not as much as nuking.

Don't forget that it would only apply to an AI. If you think razing cities freely is too beneficial, then your deterrent should be something that applies to MP games as well. I think many people will play a lot more MP than they think because of the flexibility Firaxis has incorporated into the setup.