No Money

[Virtual Alex]

So in Civ 4 units just have 2 values, a total combat value and movement? Or are you saying movement isn't a combat value?

[Virtual Alex]

The problem with making cheap upgrades, even though realistically it seems easy: just give the warrior and axe and bam, is the human players ability to plan ahead.

Here is how all of my civ3 games start. I mass warriors, I don't build a single spearman. I just make 30 worriors and horde money. Then as soon as I get iron working and road to an iron I upgrade them all to swordsman and attack my clossest victim. For how fast an attack like that comes, I can easily wipe out an entire civ with just that stack of 20 swordsman. Realistically speaking, you wouldn't KNOW what iron is, and that soon enough you will get it. So cheap upgrading essentially breaks the game. As I feel it does in Civ three. At least the warrior (1/1/1) to swordsman (3/2/1) does. If I had to start making my swordsman after I got iron the hard way, it would take me 30+ turns to make an army big enough to do some damage, and by that time the AI would have a defens other than 2 spearman per town. It's probably just an issue of balance.

[rah]

Hmm, the AI usually seems to have enough money to upgrade everyone to riflemen.

[Nikolai]

As soon as my cottages has become towns and I have got some money making buildings and such, I tend to have lots of money floating around.

[Prussia]

I guess if you play Marathon mode, upgrading is alot easier.

But if your cities aren' t big enough, they can't make use of the cottages anyways...

[Nikolai]

My cities always grow big. I don't tend to specialize either, too much fuzz and the AI does it for me anyways it seems, so I have most of my citizens working the area around the city.

[Nikolai]

ANd btw, I don't play on marathon mostly. I found out I sucked more with the slower speeds than on normal(never tried the fastest though).

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Originally posted by Prussia
I guess if you play Marathon mode, upgrading is alot easier.

But if your cities aren' t big enough, they can't make use of the cottages anyways...

I'm in the midst of my first Marathon game and I had hardly any cash until the riflemen/cavalry stage.

As soon as my income goes up, I turn my science rate up. I don't see my income increasing any faster (relative to game speed) in Marathon, as opposed to Normal speed.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Virtual Alex
So in Civ 4 units just have 2 values, a total combat value and movement? Or are you saying movement isn't a combat value?

One combat value and one movement value.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by rah
Hmm, the AI usually seems to have enough money to upgrade everyone to riflemen.

Because they cheat and have infinite funds to upgrade

Seriously, though, them computer players get massive discounts to upgrade cost at higher levels.

[rjwoer]

And that smells like stinky cheese.

A good reason to balance the upgrade costs.

[Rancidlunchmeat]

Originally posted by Prussia


I guess this works, but I don't have enough people working the land for all of those cottages to do much.

Maybe that's the best place for us to start. What size cities are you managing to build during the time you aren't over-expanding but are also cash poor?

What are your citizens working intead of working cottages?

What were the first items that you built? Did you build units such as settlers or workers early on that stunted your city growth which prevents you from having the population required to work the cottages?

Yes, it's fine that they are expensive, but just unproportionally so. It would be reasonable to have to pay 1000 gold to upgrade, lets say, a spearman to a tank, but it's unreasonable to upgrade a warrior to a spearman for 200 gold, when that's your entire bank!

I think the point is that you aren't supposed to be upgrading the early units, especially not warriors.

If you're spending what very little money you have early on (and how did you even get that money? Through goodie huts probably, not a function of your economy), to upgrade Warriors to Spearmen, you're definately going to get shafted during the next two quick expansion phases when your economy still isn't producing enough commerce to fund your research and you now lack the treasury to 'deficit' spend because you used it on upgrading a Warrior to a Spearman.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by rjwoer
And that smells like stinky cheese.

A good reason to balance the upgrade costs.

If you want it balanced, just play on noble.

[rjwoer]

since we're talking about upgrading units, am I the only one who badly misses the Civ III ability to go into your military advisor page and upgrade units from there--without having to search each city, click on the individual units, and upgrade that way?

When I have the money for the expensive upgrades in Civ IV, I have to waste gobs of time going from city to city and unit to unit!

[Ming]

As much as I hated Civ III... that was a great feature.

However, thanks to the new promotion system, I rarely upgrade all my units of one class. I just upgrade the good units.