Civ IV 'on the floor' game speed shifter

[Lancer]

I'd like to go from epic to marathon after the slow initial play of a game. Which got me thinking, why can't the game speed shift around at will, during play? Boring time? Speed it up. Interesting time? Stretch it out...

Discuss.

[Lancer]

What's the problem with this concept?

[Ari]

One problem may be how you're defining boring. If it's tied to a specific era, it might be easier to simply mod the techs of that era to be cheaper. If a certain era is more interesting, you could make the techs more expensive, to prolong the era.

Also, I'm pretty sure game speed affects costs, as well as certain other things that might not be directly related to time. Altering speed in the middle of a game might play havok with all of the balancing that went in to adjusting all of that stuff, not mention seriously mess with someone in the process of building a wonder.

[Targonis]

Re: Civ IV 'on the floor' game speed shifter

Originally posted by Lancer
I'd like to go from epic to marathon after the slow initial play of a game. Which got me thinking, why can't the game speed shift around at will, during play? Boring time? Speed it up. Interesting time? Stretch it out...

Discuss.

The problem with changing speeds during gameplay in part is due to strategy changes that are needed for each speed, plus each city in the game would need to have the production shifted to deal with the change. If something needs 700 production units under Epic, and you have 400 units of production complete, how will this shift when you change game speeds?

The game has other parameters that are adjusted as a part of the game speed as well, so making sure that all of these get addressed would take a bit of effort.

All of this would have to be checked for each city in the world, adjusted, and then you hope that nothing went wrong.

So, it's really NOT good to be able to change game speed, simply because there is too much that can go wrong.

[TriMiro]

I agree with Targonis. Variable speed would require another level of balancing. At the end, I am not sure how many people would play the game at variable speed, I for one play only on standard.

[wodan11]

Oh, I don't know. It probably wouldn't be THAT hard. You can already edit the game speeds, even create your own if you like. You can edit the # of turns in each epoch, for example. Thus, the game is already designed to vary all of the multitude of impacted things, based on this one single variable.

All that would be needed is to program in the ability to change it from inside the game.

Wodan

[Targonis]

Originally posted by wodan11
Oh, I don't know. It probably wouldn't be THAT hard. You can already edit the game speeds, even create your own if you like. You can edit the # of turns in each epoch, for example. Thus, the game is already designed to vary all of the multitude of impacted things, based on this one single variable.

All that would be needed is to program in the ability to change it from inside the game.

Wodan

The problem isn't in adjusting the number of turns the game lasts, but all the other things that get adjusted based on the game speed selected. If you can go from quick to slow game speeds, you can also go from slow game speeds to fast. Trying to tune that sort of thing is not trivial.

Others have mentioned that depending on world size and such, going to marathon game speed makes things more difficult for example. Now, try doing adjustments to make things work and see how that goes.

You could always just jump to the era you want to play as a way to avoid the time periods you don't enjoy as well...

[snoopy369]

You might be able to do this in the python console in-game, actually, maybe someone more familiar with python (Locutus, Solver, etc.) can say for sure. The python console can be brought up in-game (tilde, if you have the chipotle code set in your ini) and then you can use it to set various things.

[Lancer]

If you have 400 production towards a 1000 completion, that could be reduced to 40% and the totals recalculated. In fact, everything could be reduced to percentages? Hmm

Maybe it would be prohibitively difficult to do...I don't know.

[Unimatrix11]

As an easy solution for the meantime: Use advanced start...