Celebrations, Gov't Types

[Lawnmower Man]

I just started playing CTP a few days ago, and I have yet to figure out how to trigger celebrations. I know in Civ I & II, you just had to have more happy people than content people and stuff, but I don't understand how to get celebrations in CTP.

Also, I would like to know what the Military rating is for government types. What does it mean when a gov't has a "Bad" or "Good" rating? I Notice that the Senate doesn't step in and force peace treaties (or at least it hasn't happened to me yet, and I've provoked plenty of wars). Does it have to do with Martial Law and stuff?

Also, I built The Agency, which says gives you a spy capability at every city, but I still don't see hidden units that spies should be able to see. I think I'm ahead technologically (there is one country on the south side of the map that I haven't officially contacted), so I don't think The Agency has been obsoleted yet. At least, I don't recall any messages telling me it had been.

Other than those issues, I have to say that CTP is even better than Civ II. It took all the things that were good about Civ II and fixed all the things that were frustrating and tedious about it. After I'm played out (or the price comes down to dirt cheap), I guess I'll have to check out CTP II.

Finally, how are Civ and CTP related? I know Sid left to do AC and other things, but did the rest of the original Civ team creat CTP, or is it a totally independent venture? Reading the manual, I got the impression that CTP is some kind of sequel to Civ, but I couldn't tell for sure. Any comments would be appreciated.

[Gregurabi]

A city will celebrate when you have happiness 85 (10 above normal) in that city. The effect of celebration, however, might not be the same as you're used to: on Chieftain level celebration causes population growth (1 new citizen per turn), but above the Chieftain level celebration does nothing at all except annoy you with message icons.

(Note on happiness: in case you hadn't discovered it yet, the single number on the main screen is your average happiness for all the cities in your civilization. To get the individual city happiness, the easiest way is to press F1 and use the sortable listing.)

The "Good" and "Bad" (etc.) ratings for the governments are just a rough guide; in some cases, it's not even accurate. If you're serious about knowing the effects of the different governments, you'll have to read the text files that come with the game that define the governments' characteristics. (E.g., each government has recommended workday/wage/ration settings, and multipliers for production/gold/science, and martial law details, and the maximum number of cities before unhappiness, and so on.)

There's no Senate to prevent you from going to war. Kill all you want.

The Agency wonder doesn't give you spy information on enemy cities; instead, it gives you protection equivalent to having a Spy unit fortified in your own cities, in case anyone tries to spy on you.

CTP is not a product of Sid Meier or Firaxis (Sid's new company). It's done by Activision, with a completely different team of designers/programmers. They negotiated for the rights to use the name "Civilization" in the game's title, but that's the only thing that it actually borrows from the Sid Meier games (other than the basic concept).

[Cannes]

One piece of advise, Lawnmover man. Download the patch, hack, pack and med mod 4 and install them in that order. It makes the game even better! Actually it makes all the differense. The AI still won't be a challenge, but the building of an empire is cool in itself. There are some additional tweakings that need to be done with the med mod though. If you play on huge maps you will need to increase the max number of cities for some of the futuristic governments. Another thing is that Wes made mills and arqueducts available in space and sea cities in his mod, where they don't belong in my opinion. These things are easy to change in the governments and improve text files in the scenario/med pack 4/default/gamedata directory.

[Cannes]

My latest game (which I'm still playing) is deity level. I'm just about to finish it off by destroying the last of the opposition with a huge army in the year 2264. consisting of fusion tanks (hovertanks in med mod), war walkers, swarm supported by plasma destroyers, stealth bombers and space fighters. In the beginning I went to explore my entire continent as fast as possible getting all the huts. It is very important to expand ferosciously in the early game or else you will fall behind quickly (especially on emperor and deity). That way I got a few extra cities that help the initial expansion. I was on the same continent as the Canadians and the Australians. It wasn't hard to keep peace on the continent, but the Australians were proving much too effecient in building wonders and took some of the key ones from me. So I erradicated both them and the canadians in the renaissance(sp?) and early modern age.
I didn't really explore more than that I got a steady supply of updated maps of the world from the mexicans. Whom I decided to erradicate next because they were starting to compete with me to the good wonders. From then on I have been in constant war sweeping over the land trampling all resistance. This is the main weakness of the game. The AI is unable to muster any real resistance.
Another problem with Ctp out of the box is that as soon as the initial expansion is over you suddenly find yourself in the genetic age wondering what happened in the last 2000 years?! Wes' med mod helps this in a BIG way. I would advitice you once again to install it. With the mod it is actually possible and necessary to build renaissance and early mordern units and wage war with them before they are made completely obsolete by war walkers and fusion tanks. Wes has made tons more units and advances and expanded to timeline to match it. It is simply great! I can't stop advitising it. Before I played Ctp I was like you, wanting to play the game out of the box, but I've found that with Ctp it is (sadly) necessary to install mods to crutch the shortcommings of the game.

[Lawnmower Man]

Greg: The documentation says that a city will grow twice as fast under celebration. I assume this means that the food stored or the food gathered is multiplied by two, but I never checked to see if this was the case. Also, it seems that a lot of my cities start out with happiness 74, and I have to build an improvement just to get them to 75. What's up with that? I mean, if, in my city happiness box, the net happiness is 0, the city happiness will be 74, under a Prince. Maybe this only happens when the city gets fairly big.

I guess I misunderstood The Agency. I thought it would also give you visibility of foreign spies. That is, I thought it would allow me to spot a spy lurking next to one of my cities, the way an actual spy would. That way, I wouldn't have to keep spies handy to eradicate foreign spies.

Thanks for the info on CTP's history. They obviously borrowed a lot of concepts from Sid, but they added a lot of new ones too. It's much better than Alpha Centauri (which turned out to be something of a disappointment).

Cannes: Call me a purist, but the only patches I like to apply are upgrades that fix bugs or change rules for better balancing. I might try some of the other mods someday, but I think I'll play out the game as is for now. I haven't even finished one yet (but I'm kicking butt on Prince level, and I could easily build the Alien stuff).

General Question:

Do you guys tend to focus on expansion to cover as much of the map as possible, or do you expand until you meet some resistance, and then develop your civ? I tend to expand a lot early on, until I hit borders and coastlines, and then I spend a lot of time building improvements. I end up with half as many cities as the AI, or less; but I out-research, out-gold, and out-produce them with 9 or 10 totally buff cities. I stay neck-n-neck with one or two top civs, and then at some point, I just skyrocket past them, and I don't know what the cause is. It seems like they get themselves involved in wars, and that hinders research, but I can't really tell.

Also, it seems like space is pretty boring. You have to build terrain improvements just to gather anything, but I have to admit that being able to go halfway across the map in one turn and drop right next to someone is pretty cool. I also like bombing the heck out of people with Stealth Bombers and taking a city with a single War Walker.

Also, why would anyone research Alien Archaeology? It doesn't give you any benefits, but it takes away all y our wonders. I guess if you were behind, you'd do it to spite whoever built the wonders that it obsoletes, but if you're ahead, it just seems silly.

[Emperor10]

Everyone is correct. Most definitely Med Mod 4.12 improves the game considerably. New units, goods, wonders, improved AI, governments, and balanced issues solved. If you haven't got it yet, its well worth the effort to give it a try.