[C4:AC][Support] Impressions on CIV4?

[Illuminatus]

C4:AC is out (in NA).

Team members and other SMACers who have CIV4, what are your thoughts so far? Did you notice anything useful about game mechanics for now? Please report your impressions and findings here.

[Chaos Theory]

Though I've only played one game so far, I was somewhat impressed, and generally happy I bought the game. Some of the changes from previous Civ games are welcome, though the sometimes-vaunted change in combat from separate attack and defense values to one combat value isn't very impressive.

The drone control model is much more forgiving than before, and the addition of unhealthiness is a nice check on growth. Unfortunately, when bases are placed such that their radii overlap, tiles are assigned to one city or the other by the game, rather than allowing the player to assign such tiles himself. Bases are also restricted to at most 1 per 9 tiles (3 tile minimum distance), which is frustrating at borders, at least on smallish maps.

There are lots and lots of resources, but you only need a few. The rest are just awards for expanding and claiming territory. The AI diplomacy mood explanations are a welcome improvement, and are even something we could reasonably carry over into a SMAC clone, for debugging purposes if nothing else.

The Civlopedia seems poorly organized, though I can find my way through it when I need to. Golden ages are nice, though perhaps not worth the price in great people, given their short durations. Great people are useful, but I settled most of mine.

I'm favorably impressed by the Civics system. Closed borders make sense and are good. Religion is an interesting element of the game. It seems like spying and probing is only a very small element of the game. I find terrain improvement effects sometimes difficult to predict - irrigation sometimes yields 1 nutrient, and sometimes 2, even on seemingly identical tiles at the same time. Planes are handled better than before. Combat experience influences the game a little, but in my meager experience, could have been left out with little effect.

[Lord Nword]

I haven't bought the game yet... And I'm worried about when I do since my system is the minimum specs... Not to mention the great number of problems with ATI video cards, of which I use one. It's tempting to illegally d/l cIV in order to check whether it will work. I know I'd definitely buy it if it does work.

Just my thoughts at the moment.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Lord Nword
I haven't bought the game yet... And I'm worried about when I do since my system is the minimum specs...

My system is a 1.3GHz GeForce 5.2 system, everything else above average spec. I played the tutorial fine np. I started my first game on a large map, and the game crashed immediately. I backed down to a standard map and medium graphics and everything ran fine for about 2 hours, and then I got a black screen crash. When I tried to reboot my computer I then got a blue screen of death as follows:

***Stop:0x0000007B(0x8187C030, 0xC0000032, 0x00000000, 0x00000000) INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

Took me about 3 hours to figure out how to get past this blue screen of death and get my system up and running again (and I'm no moron when it comes to this sort of thing....). I'm assuming its directly related to my system's being barely above the minimum requirements for the game. FYI.

D

[binTravkin]

Sounds like the typical Win RAM overload problem..

[GeoModder]

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
Unfortunately, when bases are placed such that their radii overlap, tiles are assigned to one city or the other by the game, rather than allowing the player to assign such tiles himself. Bases are also restricted to at most 1 per 9 tiles (3 tile minimum distance), which is frustrating at borders, at least on smallish maps.

I can assign specific tiles to overlapping radii by two ro three times clicking on the shared tiles. I think it's a sort of "warning" system that the oneclick assigning doesn't work. You can tell on the shade of that specific tile in the cityscreen.

Do you mean 2 tiles inbetween cities, or 3 tiles? Cause I've seen a pretty decent amount of 2 tiles inter-city spacing in a more dense populated continent...


I think my biggest quirk is that when it's told that a certain wonder is expired, that it is not marked in the city screen. Hard to see what city to continue developping for encouraging the birth of certain Great Persons.
And as CT already said: difficult to predict what the outcome of terraforming is, especially later ingame when certain technologies adds on the tile output.

Slow game for me of course in the last 100-150 turns, being below graphic minimum specs, even with the setttings set on 'low'.

I like it how the food resources determine how healthy (read: big) your cities can be. In my game I got currently 5 food resources which raise healthiness, it encourages trading alot or gives a nice boost to your diplomatic standings if you share your surplus with another civ.


Didn't had any CTD or BSOD sofar, which is a bit surprising seeing that people with better systems have them.

[Mellian]

Instead of creating a new thread, I may as well post my impressions so far from my exploration in the XML (I spent more time in the xml and modifying than actually playing the game ). Here is a list of stuff and thoughts that could be usefuluseful for converting Civ4 to SMAC:

Leaders


I was pretty impressed by being able to chosing leaders for a civilization...well the ones with more than one leaders anyway...and then have the option creating new ones, and make them available for multiple civs to chose. In some ways, may not be useful for SMAC, but leaves the option of creating other potential leaders for each faction.

Heck, if we like, we could make event triggers depending on certaint situation to have coup d'etats and a new leader takes over, or for the factions using the Democracy civic will have a new leader elected every certaint amount of turns base on the kind of people in the faction, "religions", diplomatic situation, and so on, from a pool of created leaders. It would represent the chaoticness of democracy, and how such a faction can suddenly change every so often.

Also, the extra leaders could be available for when there is civil wars, if we do code that option in or implement such a mod created by some non-civ4:SMAC person.

The stats and other things for each leader is pretty extensive, so we can really provide character for each of the faction leaders, on top of the overall faction characteristics. We could create a leader base on each of the main ideologies in smac. The traits is also useful to determine the differences between the leaders and their effects on the faction.

As for the leaderheads, the 3d animated versions of SMAC leaders shouldn't be that important nor focus on to much, unless some of the 3d graphic folks feel like doing so anyway. Static leader pics work just as well, and lot more simple and easier to implement.


Civs

There is not much in the xml to define the character of a faction, but easilly allow which facilities and units they can build, what their special units are, what starting units, buildings and techs they get, what their starting civics are, what leaders they have and so on.


Religions

This seem pretty pointless for SMAC, but can be useful like turning it into Ideologies, which is a big part of SMAC, at least story and diplomatic wise. Each faction would start out as the founder of their core Ideology, and then it will spread which may influence "culture" conversions of other bases, or certaint situations of a base and the faction's civics may make it more vulnerable to have certaint ideologies from spread into their bases. Anyway, something we should explore.


Units

Haven't fully explored the unit xmls yet, but from what I have seen, units are seperated by classes and types...chassis and unit classes... So i don't think I need to say how useful that is for unit creations during the game.


Promotions

I was about to write spiel on this, but realized that I need to put more thought in to it first, so a long with others things, will post about it later one.

-mellian

[Addled Platypus]

what it comes down to for me

the whole right click menu in smac...still awesome

the mouse over in Civ4 awesome

[Soren Johnson]

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
Though I've only played one game so far, I was somewhat impressed, and generally happy I bought the game. Some of the changes from previous Civ games are welcome, though the sometimes-vaunted change in combat from separate attack and defense values to one combat value isn't very impressive.

The drone control model is much more forgiving than before, and the addition of unhealthiness is a nice check on growth. Unfortunately, when bases are placed such that their radii overlap, tiles are assigned to one city or the other by the game, rather than allowing the player to assign such tiles himself. Bases are also restricted to at most 1 per 9 tiles (3 tile minimum distance), which is frustrating at borders, at least on smallish maps.

There are lots and lots of resources, but you only need a few. The rest are just awards for expanding and claiming territory. The AI diplomacy mood explanations are a welcome improvement, and are even something we could reasonably carry over into a SMAC clone, for debugging purposes if nothing else.

The Civlopedia seems poorly organized, though I can find my way through it when I need to. Golden ages are nice, though perhaps not worth the price in great people, given their short durations. Great people are useful, but I settled most of mine.

I'm favorably impressed by the Civics system. Closed borders make sense and are good. Religion is an interesting element of the game. It seems like spying and probing is only a very small element of the game. I find terrain improvement effects sometimes difficult to predict - irrigation sometimes yields 1 nutrient, and sometimes 2, even on seemingly identical tiles at the same time. Planes are handled better than before. Combat experience influences the game a little, but in my meager experience, could have been left out with little effect.

you can switch tiles between cities by clicking on the tile in the city screen of the city you want to work it. This also allows you to use the governors but at a high-level determine which tiles should "belong" to which city (which wasn't possible in previous games).

[Senethro]

Thanks for looking in on us Soren, are there any other interface tricks that would be useful to know? I found that one on my own simply by furiously clicking on what displeased me. The interface is one of the most improved things about Civ4. I was using it not just easily, but instinctively.

For everyone, heres a good thread on Civfanatics hidden away amongst the spam. Someones been cracking the city maintenance numbers.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=138473

As for the game itself, I'm having trouble not taking Industrious or Philosophical civs. Pair that trait with Spiritual or Financial (and maybe Creative. Oh, and the Mali[Spi/Fin] aren't half bad either.) and you have most of the Top Tiers that will see most use in multiplay.

Expansionist and Organised seem to be the weakest traits, at least at Noble difficulty. My success has been very limited/inconsistent on higher difficulties and mostly derives from Wonder/Great Person abuse.


Edit: I forgot to say my biggest beefs with the game, that navies are once again near useless, its hard to project military power over long distances, and mid-late game techs go too fast compared to production/growth.