First Impressions (screenshots, etc.)

[yin26]

Originally posted by Chronus9

Yin - is your avatar a picture of you eating a cardboard box? Why are you in a bunny suit? (Halloween?)

LOL. Well, it's carrot flavor cardboard, of course!

[yin26]

Some ICS feedback so far:

Your gold runs paper thin in the early game, and 42 gold from a goody hut suddenly makes you dance around the living room. Thus, as Solver's review pointed out, even a city maintenance of 1 or 2 gold begins to have significant meaning. I was fortunate enough to setup a silver mine and built roads to it, etc., which has helped.

So, as of now, still early game, I have 4 cities. The 4th city put my gold in a -1 per turn, and I left it that way for a long while (again, the goody huts were key). But as I plan now for the 5th and possibly 6th city, I have had to sacrifice 10% research to stay in the positive. This means, in effect, that I will be running negative again at a -10% research penalty against the AI.

Of course, I am on Noble setting, which means the AI has no bonuses. So in that sense, the situation about sort of means I would be upping my difficulty (for the early game at least). In other words, this is fun again!

Finally, the biggest piece of this puzzle will be how well the AI pushes its tech and gold advantage. But with defense given a boost this time around, and with at least one warrior and one archer in each city already (usually with lots of promotions from killing attacking barbarians), it would take the AI some concerted work against me to put the hurt on. For the moment, then, I'm turtling in order to pump out the maximum number of cities I can possibly sustain in hopes of having a strong mid to late game.

[aspvv]

Originally posted by Lou Wigman
This flies in the face of the "real world" where war has generally meant a boost for scientific and technological advancement.

I do not think this statement is accurate. In the real world the real war does not provide a boost to anything, if anything it slows things down because the resources have to be allocated to war efforts. WWI and WWII are good examples.
The only way it might appear that the war boost advancement is because there is greater emphasis on war related technologies and greater budget for them. That is consistent with the game, when the war is expected one tends to concentrate on military technologies.
The only way a war contributes to tech advancement in real world is as opportunity to test all of the military technologies already in place and weed out the bad ones.

[Tventano]

After the tutorial I started a "noble" standard continents map (all default). Now after 5 hours playing, I killed the japanese and it is 1260 AD. Btw tehy just build a settler during the war, really smart of them
The music is great. But it will take some time before I know all the tricks with the keyboard and how I want all the UI settings.
Strategy for improvements and buildings is still lacking for me. Why combined arms are useful I now experienced, but still do not know how to see quickly what attacker would be the most successful. When I have three stacks next to a city I want to capture the city with the less possible losses. This is quite complicated because you have to recognize all icons.

So the game is really addictive, but it will take some time before I can play at a decent level. Probably cannot finish this evening, thus wil continue tomorrow.

[CarnalCanaan]

Originally posted by aspvv


I do not think this statement is accurate. In the real world the real war does not provide a boost to anything, if anything it slows things down because the resources have to be allocated to war efforts. WWI and WWII are good examples.

I'd agree with this. Prolonged war can cause a society to rearrange its priorities, making war seem like a boost. Although WWII gave us jet propulsion and nuclear power, it also held the civil rights movement back and may have postponed environmentalism.

[Sirian]

No word from Yin in the last few hours. Was he busy with family and other normal activity? Bored with Civ4 already and on to something else? Or was he so consumed with One More Turn that he's still playing right now and too preoccupied to post an update?

- Sirian

[alva]

He has very silent hasn't he.

That's either very good news or very,very bad...

[DramaticActorVoiceOver]
Next week on Poly!!!

Will Yin bite back at Sid and once and for kil the evil foe??
Will he instead start biting in the dreaded box of doom??

Be sure to turn in!!!
[/]

[yin26]

Well, here's a look at what has already been reported about the stability of relationships. I'm at 1320 A.D.:

[yin26]

And here is my city status so far:



You'll see that the 5th and 6th cities were only just added and that my treasury is currently -1 / turn. This will be fixed soon via a Great Person adding gold, but there is this delicate balance against expansion too fast.

[yin26]

And this just popped up :

[yin26]

Interesting note on what happens as you conquer (and hold) enemy cities. After taking this city (which, by the way, was a rather dull cakewalk), my treasury took a hit:



As you can see here, city maintenance is now at 12 a turn. I have already started building improvements to lessen this cost, but you can see that the designers are pushing hard to limit how fast you can hold a growing number of cities:

[yin26]

By the way, so as not to make this look too bleak, you can set a city to create wealth. For example, by doing this with my largest city (Beijing), my treasury jumps to +7 / turn (I also just got another Great Person, who added +3 before that).

So there is a tradeoff here as Beijing now cannot produce anything else.

[yin26]

Here is the wealth standing:



I should say that almost 4 hours in to the game, the AI has posed absolutely NO THREAT to me. Just to liven things up, I took that city above, and the AI asked for peace a few turns later. Needless to say this worries me a bit on the Noble level, and I know you can customize the game for aggressive AI. Anyway, I won't say more on this until I see how the game unfolds.

[yin26]

To give a sense of how quickly things can shift in the game, after a few wonders, Great Persons, and other improvements, my treasury is back up to +8 / turn WITHOUT putting Beijing on wealth-making. To this extent, Civ 4 is doing something I had hoped it would: Making a kind of mini-game of running your own empire apart from whatever the AI is doing. This aspect seems promising.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

I should say that almost 4 hours in to the game, the AI has posed absolutely NO THREAT to me. Just to liven things up, I took that city above, and the AI asked for peace a few turns later. Needless to say this worries me a bit on the Noble level

I have to say, Yin, that it has me mildly concerned too. In fact, it is probably the ONLY piece of info I have heard since the games release that has me a little nervous. Though I am not normally a warmonger, I do like some of the AI civs to be more of a genuine threat to me at various points in the game (though the Barbs are sounding VERY nasty indeed). I wonder if this is just a one-off experience? Perhaps other people could let us know if they have experienced 'tough as nails' AI opponents who REALLY put them through their paces?

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.