Improvements of Civ IV over Civ III

[MasterDave]

I like civ 4's diplomacy in general, including its trading system. By SMAC sequel, I am in fact talking about Alien Crossfire.

[VonSharma]

I really don't like the graphics in civ4. The terrain maps really do nothing for me. I really would practically get aroused with the maps of Europe in conquests or just in a regular game. I really enjoyed just looking at and admiring my nation and its borders in civ3 but in 4, it just looks like whatever.

Diplomacy and the constraints on expansion are infinitely times better in Civ4. Religion is cash money too.

But for all the corruption, pollution and other annoyances, I really, really loved the scenarios in Conquests. Rise of Rome, Feudal Japan, Napoleonic Europe were simply amazing, and I will always love Civ3 for that =)

(Oh and I actually agree with an earlier comment, I like the modern music in Civ3 better... especially the music they added with the Pacific Theatre scenario.... classical is good, but I need a change of pace after a while, maybe some Joe Satriani would be cash money).

[Virtual Alex]

I am a forgottom mac user still sitting here waiting for Civ4 to come out for me. But this thread was fun to read. I have been trying to get my hands on a PDF manuel of Civ4 so I can start learning about the differences. Just curious about some differences here:

How does the new pollution work if it's not the wack a mole? is it just a global warming thing?

Without gold per turn... Whats trading like now? Just lump sum for product? Can you still buy lux and res? Do you still need iron and stuff?

Have they done anything to handicapped old units vs modern units?

What do some/all of the new improvements do? I heard cottages, windmills, watermills, what do they do?

As for differences, I am not sure how I feel about Hammers... I have played with "shields" since Civ1, though civ3, and CTP and it's always shields. But I guess hammers make a heck of alot more sense.

[Chronus9]

People still listen to civ music?!?!

I actually have four songs from Civ 2 on my iPod.

[Virtual Alex]

I am an avid collecter of video games music, I too have all of the Civ2 Music on my itunes

[MasterDave]

Originally posted by Virtual Alex
I am a forgottom mac user still sitting here waiting for Civ4 to come out for me. But this thread was fun to read. I have been trying to get my hands on a PDF manuel of Civ4 so I can start learning about the differences. Just curious about some differences here:

How does the new pollution work if it's not the wack a mole? is it just a global warming thing?

Without gold per turn... Whats trading like now? Just lump sum for product? Can you still buy lux and res? Do you still need iron and stuff?

Have they done anything to handicapped old units vs modern units?

What do some/all of the new improvements do? I heard cottages, windmills, watermills, what do they do?

As for differences, I am not sure how I feel about Hammers... I have played with "shields" since Civ1, though civ3, and CTP and it's always shields. But I guess hammers make a heck of alot more sense.

To answer your specific questions: Pollution (along with the city population limits in Civ 3) has been replaced by the concept of city "health". Each population in a city generates one unhealthy face. Certain buildings also generate unhealthiness such as forges, factories, drydocks, airports, and laboratories. Some buildings produce two unhealthy faces such as coal plants and the iron works. Certain terrain near cities can cause unhealthiness too such as jungles and flood plains.

To combat unhealthiness you get little red cross health symbols in each city. If you have more unhealthy faces than health crosses, then a green cloud forms about your city, and your food surplus is reduced by one for each excess unhealthy face.

Each difficulty level you get a certain number of "free" red crosses (for example I think you get five free health bonuses in each city on noble level). Also forests in the fat cross of a city each produce half a health bonus (hence all the debates here about chopping). Being next to a lake or river adds two health. Certain buildings add health too, based on other conditions (e.g. granaries add one health for each rice, corn, or wheat resource you own, up to three max). Aqueducts and hospitals also add health crosses, instead of allowing you to grow your cities past size 6 and 12 in civ 3 (there are no city size linits in Civ 4). Lastly, each different kind of food resource your empire owns gives you one healthy cross. Therefore, if your empire owns or trades for lots of different kinds of foodstuffs, your people are healthier and your cities can grow larger.

If you have a city that produces a huge ampunt of unhealthiness, it is possible to get global warming in one of its tiles, turning that tile into a useless desert. This is a fairly rare event and has happened to me less than a half dozen times. The only time you get pollution on a map tile is if somebody uses a nuke (the pollution is called fallout), and it can be cleaned up by workers.

Trading is a bit more restrictive than before. You can trade a static amount of gold for techs, world maps, religious conversions, asking the AI to go to peace or war, or asking them to stop trading with someone. You CANNOT trade a static amount of gold for resources (no more getting 800 gold for iron from an AI then canceling the deal next turn ). You can ONLY trade gold per turn or resources for other resources. You cannot trade resources for techs or anything else besides other resources or gold per turn. The ONLY time that you can offer another player both a pile of gold and gold per turn is when negotiating a peace treaty, which is automatically enforced for 10 turns. The gold per turn is only paid for those 10 turns.

In the last patch they changed the formula used for combat calcuation to favor more modern units with higher initial strength values. It used to be that a fight was strength vs. strength, so a wounded helicopter (24 str at full hp) that was down to 6 str could be killed by a full strength pikeman (6 str) half the time. Now, after the latest patch, the attacking strength of a unit is the average of their initial strength and their current strength. Therefore, the wounded helicopter would be (24+6) / 2 or have a 15 attack strength, and the pikeman would have a harder time defeating it.

I could write about improvements all afternoon, but in a nutshell they add either commerce, hammers (production), or food to a tile, much like in Civ3. Cottages add commerce to a tile, and when they are worked, they grow over time into hamlets, villages, and eventually towns. Cottages add one commerce, hamlets two, villages three, and towns four. These numbers are also modified by civics and techs that add commerce and other bonuses to villages and towns. Windmills add one commerce and one food to a tile, although this also improves with techs. Watermills add one production (improves with techs). Mines and lumbermills add one production (plus one with a railroad) also, there is a very small chance of discovering a metal or gem resource in a mined hill each turn. Farms add one food to a tile, plus one more when you learn biology. Workshops add one production and take away one food, improving with tech and civics.
In addition to these improvements, you can also build specific tile improvements on hexes with special resources. For example, you can build pastures on tiles with cows, pigs, horses, or sheep, special farms on food resources, special mines on metal and gem resources, wineries on grapes, and plantations on luxury resources and certain other food resources such as bananas. Resources that are not worked add small bonuses to a tile (such as one extra food, production, or commerce), but they add much larger bonuses when worked (for example a gold mine produces 5 gold per turn!!). You can also use workboats to build fisheries on fish, clams, whales, or crabs. Resources need to be connected to your road network in order to be "owned" by your empire. Many resources when "owned" add one health or one happy face or let you build certain units.



All improvements can be pillaged by units, and cottages/towns can be pillaged once for each level of improvement for huge amounts of money. I have pillaged towns from the AI that were worth around 25-30 gold for each of four pillages! Boats can pillage fisheries.

[Virtual Alex]

Wow amazingly informative. Thanks alot!

Sounds like cottages are the nuts.

[sparkyal]

There are quite a few good things about CIV IV over III. Many have been named, but for the sake of repitition:

- Unit promostion are great
- Corruption has been replaced, the corruption eventually stopped me from playing CIV III
- strategy, in CIV IV you can't just mass armies and go for it (well you can, but it's harder)
- combat is way6 better in CIV IV, IMO I always thought CIV III took a step backward in this regard (many tanks were killed by spearmen)
- the air force is finally worth the trouble
- no more loss of sheilds/hammers for building units in a city!
- religion adds a great element to the game.
- civ chioces instead of goverment allows for much more creativity
- i think the leader traits are a lot better balanced
- the AI doesn't need to cheat to win. In CIV III the AI had to cheat it's head off to keep up. The AI in IV is much better
- diplomacy is way better (although I too miss the quotes from CIV II!!!!)
- polution, gone, YEAH!!!!!!
That's a pretty good list I think....

sparky

[proviisori]

I would like to see more interesting wonder movies and the return of the high council from Civ2.

And also the partisans... they were good addition and added realism to warfare.

[Dis]

Originally posted by sparkyal
There are quite a few good things about CIV IV over III. Many have been named, but for the sake of repitition:

- Unit promostion are great
- Corruption has been replaced, the corruption eventually stopped me from playing CIV III
- strategy, in CIV IV you can't just mass armies and go for it (well you can, but it's harder)
- combat is way6 better in CIV IV, IMO I always thought CIV III took a step backward in this regard (many tanks were killed by spearmen)
- the air force is finally worth the trouble
- no more loss of sheilds/hammers for building units in a city!
- religion adds a great element to the game.
- civ chioces instead of goverment allows for much more creativity
- i think the leader traits are a lot better balanced
- the AI doesn't need to cheat to win. In CIV III the AI had to cheat it's head off to keep up. The AI in IV is much better
- diplomacy is way better (although I too miss the quotes from CIV II!!!!)
- polution, gone, YEAH!!!!!!
That's a pretty good list I think....

sparky

you did not lose shields for building units in a city in civ3. Only in smac and civ2.

and I disagree about the air force. The modern age goes so fast, if you don't immediately start building spaceship parts, you will lose. I never have time to even research flight, let alone build them. Or the AI will beat me to the spaceship.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Dis
...
and I disagree about the air force. The modern age goes so fast, if you don't immediately start building spaceship parts, you will lose. I never have time to even research flight, let alone build them. Or the AI will beat me to the spaceship.

You are not speaking of huge marathon games.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Dis
and I disagree about the air force. The modern age goes so fast, if you don't immediately start building spaceship parts, you will lose. I never have time to even research flight, let alone build them. Or the AI will beat me to the spaceship.

That's because you're playing with space race enabled, which is no fun at all.

Space race is for hippies

[DrSpike]

I played Civ3 a lot, and enjoyed it. However, Civ4 is the game Civ3 should have been. There is more need to react to the game and leverage your advantages, be they terrain or your civ traits, with usually more than one sensible way to leverage to attain a given goal. It's Civ4 not Civ3 that is the spiritual successor to Civ2 - arguably it's a better SP experience than Civ2 due to the game being more tailored to the AI, but without losing too much depth.

In Civ3 the AI was made competitive, but at the expense of many restrictions on the player. Corruption forced you down the same expansion path each time, there was only one government (+ one sometimes for war), and fighting was about stack size not quality of units or strategy. Artillery was too powerful as well. Caps on research speed were just lame. The most interesting strategic element was the palace bump, which had to be well orchestrated. This involved disbanding your main city after producing the Forbidden Palace to reduce corruption in your main core, and thus getting a 'free' palace somewhere in your second core. This is obviously artificial, and another side effect of the poor corruption model.

As a kicker they screwed up even the poor implementation of corruption they decided on (they only realised this when the playerbase figured it out) and then broke even more things when fixing this in C3C. The things they broke were never fixed, which was unforgiveable in my view.

Thus if you want to play Civ3 today you have to choose between PTW final patch which is about using exploits to overcome the straitjacket corruption places on you or play C3C which was never finished.

Personally, despite the fact I played it a lot, I have no clue why anyone would play Civ3 now.

[gunkulator]

Originally posted by Jaybe

EXPLOIT!!
I am much happier with Civ4's way of doing it.

Maybe I'm missing something but how is trading immediate for per turn exploitive? If you broke a deal even once in Civ3, that was it. You'd never be able to trade per turn items ever again.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by gunkulator
Maybe I'm missing something but how is trading immediate for per turn exploitive? If you broke a deal even once in Civ3, that was it. You'd never be able to trade per turn items ever again.

Some people supposedly arranged it so the payoff was big enough that they didn't care about future resource/gpt trades. They were probably going into conquer/domination mode then, anyway.

Since I never would stoop to such 'trickery', I call it an exploit (it's all subjective, you know).