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First of all, I'd like to announce that I bought a new PC box just to play this game so my pre-release copy really cost me about $600. Don't worry, it'll be worth every penny in the end.
So, after staying up until 2am playing last night without touching the manual I actually read it over lunch and since I took notes, I'm sharing them so others can play more and read less. Of course everyone reads the entire manual cover-to-cover eventually (along with the use agreements, right?), but this might help point out some key things that were new to me.
Here goes:
Experience Points for units:
2xps give a unit a promotion, then 5 more to get each subsequent promotion.
Units get twice the XPs when attacking than when defending.
XPs are rewarded based on relative unit strengths (i.e., more XPs for beating strong unit)
Can earn up to 5 xps via animals, up to 10 via barbarians.
Barracks give units made in that city +2 xps
Vassalage civic gives units made in each city +2 xps.
Theocracy state religion gives units made in city with that state religion +2 xps
Corruption:
National Property civic eliminates the distance corruption penalty.
Courthouses reduce corruption in a city.
Views:
Great person’s point bar lower left of city view.
Click on city name, not the city itself, to get a summary view of the city screen.
Unhappy vs. Unhealthy
Unhealthy cities consume more food.
Unhappy citizens refuse to work.
Each has icons.
Right of the city food bar is the health display. Cities gain health points from forests, fresh water, etc. Important: When the number of unhealthy faces exceed number of health points, the unhealthy citizens consume extra food and the city eventually won’t grow.
A similar display is there for happiness. Important: When the number of unhappy faces exceed number of happy faces, the unhappy citizens consume their food but don’t do any work.
Misc:
WLT*D = No maintenance costs: Size>7, no angry, no food loss to unhealthy are all prereqs.
Assign specialists to generate Great People. Artist, Engineer, Merchant, Priest, Scientist.
Need appropriate building in place to assign specialist (e.g., temple for priest).
Building Items:
When construction orders are changed, the city will automatically try to build the previous item once the new item is finished. You can clear the queue.
Important: When building workers/settlers, all extra food is consumed. The city will not grow! Building an early settler or worker has a new large drawback.
Borders:
Can’t cross a boundary without declaring war, or establishing open border access.
Animals never cross cultural borders except to attack just across the border, so they can often be ignored. Barbarians will cross cultural borders.
Improvements (except roads/rail) can only be made inside your borders.
Research:
You can change your research target without immediately losing the progress, but the progress will revert back towards zero over time.
If your treasury is low and you are in deficit spending, the game will automatically decrease your research rate. The game will never automatically increase your research rate.
Like Civ3, commerce generated by your cities is the key to research. Libraries, Monasteries (lesser extent than libraries), Specialists, and Civics can increase research rate, but commerce is key.
Tile Improvements:
Farms (Agriculture) must be built next to water. Farms increase food and give access to rice, wheat, corn. You need civil service to chain farms with irrigation.
Pastures (Animal Husbandry) are needed to access horse, cow, pig and sheep resources.
Camps (Hunting) are needed to access deer, fur, ivory resources.
Plantations (Calendar) are needed to access bananas, dyes, incense, silk, spices, and sugar resources.
Quarries (Masonry) are needed to access stone and marble resources. Important: stone and marble can halve building times for some early wonders. Copper, Aluminum, and Iron also halve certain build times.
Wineries (Meditation) are needed to access wine resources.
Work Boats are needed to access water resources. They are destroyed when they build the improvement to access the resource. Work boats can also move on ocean squares within your borders.
Cottages improve commerce and grow when the tiles are worked by a citizen of the city. The more they grow, the more commerce they bring in. Did I mention that commerce is the key to research?
The blue circles that appear when you are moving workers are the computer’s suggestions. Important: Note that the blue circles may suggest a farm to replace a growing cottage, so be careful. Cottages and Farms will over-build each other! A flashing blue worker icon is a strong suggestion from the computer.
Trading Routes:
Important: Sailing allows a trade network to be established along the coast, so you can get around land-blocking civs to their neighbors.
Resources within a city are available to that city without any roads. Roads between cities are needed to create a trade network to link resources to other cities.
Religion:
Two early religions:
Meditation – Buddhism
Polytheism – Hinduism
Others:
Christianity – Theology
Confucianism – Code of Laws
Hinduism – Polytheism
Islam – Divine Right
Judaism – Monotheism
Taoism - Philosophy
Founding a religion gives you ability to make a shrine. Important: You can see what’s going on in all enemy cities that use the religion(s) that you found.
Organized Religion Civic allows build of missionaries in all cities. Else you need to build a monastery to build a missionary. Missionaries can’t cross without open borders. Missionaries have a percentage of success of converting a city, the chances are greater for your own cities. Each religion present decreases the changes for conversion success. The missionary is NOT used up by this attempt.
Civics:
Five separate categories: Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, Religion.
Lots of mix and match options with different upkeep costs/benefits for each one. Important: you can check the impact of a Civics change on the Civics screen BEFORE you make the change, including # turns of anarchy, which is key as there is a delay in making any other changes once you’ve made one change.
Some early civics:
Hereditary Rule: +1 happy per garrisoned unit
Vassalage: +2 xp for new units, less unit support costs.
Slavery: allows pop-rushing
Organized Religion: allows missionaries without monasteries. Under Organized Religion, cities with your state religion build buildings 25% faster (not just religious buildings).
Great People:
First Great Person costs 100 points, then +100 for each subsequent one.
First civ to get Music gets a free Great Artist.
Parthenon increases great people production in all cities!
Important: Designating specialists will add great people points to a city. Citizens don’t add anything.
Can sac two great people for first golden age, then +1 for each subsequent golden age.
Diplomacy:
Don’t forget to declare war through diplomacy. Not sure if a border crossing is considered a rep hit.
Alphabet needed to trade technology.
Permanent Alliances are new, and truly forever.
Trade:
Very Important: Trade routes are back! They are also managed automatically. Trade routes equal additional commerce, which is the key to research.
Foreign trade routes are more valuable than domestic routes. Open borders are important to getting trade routes that are most profitable. At game start, each city can only have one trade route. The number of trade routes can be increased through technologies, certain civics, buildings, and wonders.
Terrain:
Hills are –1 to food. So are Jungles.
Units:
Scouts can’t cross borders either, don’t bother trying.
Caravels can cross borders.
Catapults can “bombard” a city, or “barrage” (i.e., attack) a regular unit.
Leader Traits:
Very Important: Different civ Leaders give different effects, including faster builds for buildings or wonders, free promotions, increased health, cultural increases, faster great people birth rates, etc. See p159 in the pre-order manual for the list. Wow!
Maintenance:
Very Important: Per Soren: Maintenance is a flat cost per city that increases with empire size. Build too fast and your core cities won’t cover the maintenance costs of your outer cities.
Most Important: Read Soren’s afterwords starting on page 175 of the pre-order manual to gain some better insight into their plan for Civ4. That might be more useful than the rest of the manual (e.g., the game design is intended to push players towards city specialization).
Questions:
Does anything get destroyed when a city is captured?
Can work boats move in coastal squares outside your borders, or only inside the borders?
Does a border crossing war declaration hurt your rep more than using the diplomacy screen?
Can you sneak attack anymore?
Happy Civing!
So, after staying up until 2am playing last night without touching the manual I actually read it over lunch and since I took notes, I'm sharing them so others can play more and read less. Of course everyone reads the entire manual cover-to-cover eventually (along with the use agreements, right?), but this might help point out some key things that were new to me.
Here goes:
Experience Points for units:
2xps give a unit a promotion, then 5 more to get each subsequent promotion.
Units get twice the XPs when attacking than when defending.
XPs are rewarded based on relative unit strengths (i.e., more XPs for beating strong unit)
Can earn up to 5 xps via animals, up to 10 via barbarians.
Barracks give units made in that city +2 xps
Vassalage civic gives units made in each city +2 xps.
Theocracy state religion gives units made in city with that state religion +2 xps
Corruption:
National Property civic eliminates the distance corruption penalty.
Courthouses reduce corruption in a city.
Views:
Great person’s point bar lower left of city view.
Click on city name, not the city itself, to get a summary view of the city screen.
Unhappy vs. Unhealthy
Unhealthy cities consume more food.
Unhappy citizens refuse to work.
Each has icons.
Right of the city food bar is the health display. Cities gain health points from forests, fresh water, etc. Important: When the number of unhealthy faces exceed number of health points, the unhealthy citizens consume extra food and the city eventually won’t grow.
A similar display is there for happiness. Important: When the number of unhappy faces exceed number of happy faces, the unhappy citizens consume their food but don’t do any work.
Misc:
WLT*D = No maintenance costs: Size>7, no angry, no food loss to unhealthy are all prereqs.
Assign specialists to generate Great People. Artist, Engineer, Merchant, Priest, Scientist.
Need appropriate building in place to assign specialist (e.g., temple for priest).
Building Items:
When construction orders are changed, the city will automatically try to build the previous item once the new item is finished. You can clear the queue.
Important: When building workers/settlers, all extra food is consumed. The city will not grow! Building an early settler or worker has a new large drawback.
Borders:
Can’t cross a boundary without declaring war, or establishing open border access.
Animals never cross cultural borders except to attack just across the border, so they can often be ignored. Barbarians will cross cultural borders.
Improvements (except roads/rail) can only be made inside your borders.
Research:
You can change your research target without immediately losing the progress, but the progress will revert back towards zero over time.
If your treasury is low and you are in deficit spending, the game will automatically decrease your research rate. The game will never automatically increase your research rate.
Like Civ3, commerce generated by your cities is the key to research. Libraries, Monasteries (lesser extent than libraries), Specialists, and Civics can increase research rate, but commerce is key.
Tile Improvements:
Farms (Agriculture) must be built next to water. Farms increase food and give access to rice, wheat, corn. You need civil service to chain farms with irrigation.
Pastures (Animal Husbandry) are needed to access horse, cow, pig and sheep resources.
Camps (Hunting) are needed to access deer, fur, ivory resources.
Plantations (Calendar) are needed to access bananas, dyes, incense, silk, spices, and sugar resources.
Quarries (Masonry) are needed to access stone and marble resources. Important: stone and marble can halve building times for some early wonders. Copper, Aluminum, and Iron also halve certain build times.
Wineries (Meditation) are needed to access wine resources.
Work Boats are needed to access water resources. They are destroyed when they build the improvement to access the resource. Work boats can also move on ocean squares within your borders.
Cottages improve commerce and grow when the tiles are worked by a citizen of the city. The more they grow, the more commerce they bring in. Did I mention that commerce is the key to research?
The blue circles that appear when you are moving workers are the computer’s suggestions. Important: Note that the blue circles may suggest a farm to replace a growing cottage, so be careful. Cottages and Farms will over-build each other! A flashing blue worker icon is a strong suggestion from the computer.
Trading Routes:
Important: Sailing allows a trade network to be established along the coast, so you can get around land-blocking civs to their neighbors.
Resources within a city are available to that city without any roads. Roads between cities are needed to create a trade network to link resources to other cities.
Religion:
Two early religions:
Meditation – Buddhism
Polytheism – Hinduism
Others:
Christianity – Theology
Confucianism – Code of Laws
Hinduism – Polytheism
Islam – Divine Right
Judaism – Monotheism
Taoism - Philosophy
Founding a religion gives you ability to make a shrine. Important: You can see what’s going on in all enemy cities that use the religion(s) that you found.
Organized Religion Civic allows build of missionaries in all cities. Else you need to build a monastery to build a missionary. Missionaries can’t cross without open borders. Missionaries have a percentage of success of converting a city, the chances are greater for your own cities. Each religion present decreases the changes for conversion success. The missionary is NOT used up by this attempt.
Civics:
Five separate categories: Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, Religion.
Lots of mix and match options with different upkeep costs/benefits for each one. Important: you can check the impact of a Civics change on the Civics screen BEFORE you make the change, including # turns of anarchy, which is key as there is a delay in making any other changes once you’ve made one change.
Some early civics:
Hereditary Rule: +1 happy per garrisoned unit
Vassalage: +2 xp for new units, less unit support costs.
Slavery: allows pop-rushing
Organized Religion: allows missionaries without monasteries. Under Organized Religion, cities with your state religion build buildings 25% faster (not just religious buildings).
Great People:
First Great Person costs 100 points, then +100 for each subsequent one.
First civ to get Music gets a free Great Artist.
Parthenon increases great people production in all cities!
Important: Designating specialists will add great people points to a city. Citizens don’t add anything.
Can sac two great people for first golden age, then +1 for each subsequent golden age.
Diplomacy:
Don’t forget to declare war through diplomacy. Not sure if a border crossing is considered a rep hit.
Alphabet needed to trade technology.
Permanent Alliances are new, and truly forever.
Trade:
Very Important: Trade routes are back! They are also managed automatically. Trade routes equal additional commerce, which is the key to research.
Foreign trade routes are more valuable than domestic routes. Open borders are important to getting trade routes that are most profitable. At game start, each city can only have one trade route. The number of trade routes can be increased through technologies, certain civics, buildings, and wonders.
Terrain:
Hills are –1 to food. So are Jungles.
Units:
Scouts can’t cross borders either, don’t bother trying.
Caravels can cross borders.
Catapults can “bombard” a city, or “barrage” (i.e., attack) a regular unit.
Leader Traits:
Very Important: Different civ Leaders give different effects, including faster builds for buildings or wonders, free promotions, increased health, cultural increases, faster great people birth rates, etc. See p159 in the pre-order manual for the list. Wow!
Maintenance:
Very Important: Per Soren: Maintenance is a flat cost per city that increases with empire size. Build too fast and your core cities won’t cover the maintenance costs of your outer cities.
Most Important: Read Soren’s afterwords starting on page 175 of the pre-order manual to gain some better insight into their plan for Civ4. That might be more useful than the rest of the manual (e.g., the game design is intended to push players towards city specialization).
Questions:
Does anything get destroyed when a city is captured?
Can work boats move in coastal squares outside your borders, or only inside the borders?
Does a border crossing war declaration hurt your rep more than using the diplomacy screen?
Can you sneak attack anymore?
Happy Civing!
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