GENERAL: Cafe "Tamerlin" II

[HuangShang]

i'll be here as long as there r others, but i dont mod

[Ekmek]

viewing civfanatics and apolyton, o far (first few days I know) it looks like the moddability of Civ4 may take awhile until the crack the code on some of the topics. A bit disappointing, but on the other hand I'm glad I decided to wait until christmas.

However, I know Dale, locutus and Solver appear to be Beta testers but I've seen Martin G and a few others seemed to got Civ4, hopefully they are willing to post a CtP2ers view of civ4.

[Protra3211]

Hi E how is the new resource code coming along in the new playtest?
I can see what you mean E there are some problems with Civ4 as even with a new computor ( mine is 3 months old) a ugrade of video card is a must.
But im happy with playing CtP2 updates and (just finished up a Medmod2 game) and enjoying the mods.
Ages of Man might be something for those who are waiting to upgrade their computors. Between ram and video card you could spend over 200 dollars along with 50 dollars for Civ4. But after that you should be able to play most new games.
Im waiting it out for now.

[Ekmek]

Protra,

Resources has gone well. ctp2 now has it where you can build things if a city only has a good, or either good, or if any one city has a good.

this weekend i've also added the ability to assign a good to a building or tile improvement.

The intent there is to add more unique resources, like creating horse pastures for raising cavalry units (once you get a tech to breed them)

or we can make tobacco and cotton crops that you have to plant before you can trade them

or with nuclear weapons you can make it so that the player has to build a tile imp nuke research facility to build nukes. and a nice touch is that the tile imp can be pillaged so you can remove the nuke facilities and eliminate enemy nukes.

the building good can allow for computer factories to see electronics. or armament factories to sell weapons to less developed countries and give them the weapons. this would be d one by creating a gunpowder unit that is available before gunpowder but needs the good armaments. but you can only have the building that makes the good "armaments" once someone has developed gunpowder.

there are a few more things I'd like to do but hopefully I can finish adding this to the text files for the Apolyton Edition release.

[child of Thor]

sounds very good E over the years we've had great discussions on how to make goods more strategic in CTP2, cant wait to try out the stuff when the Apolyton Edition+ gets finished.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by E
However, I know Dale, locutus and Solver appear to be Beta testers but I've seen Martin G and a few others seemed to got Civ4, hopefully they are willing to post a CtP2ers view of civ4.

I'm waiting too...I do know that Solver, Locutus and Dale are really positive about civ4.

That says a lot to me.

[rsewar2]

Originally posted by E
The intent there is to add more unique resources, like creating horse pastures for raising cavalry units (once you get a tech to breed them)

or we can make tobacco and cotton crops that you have to plant before you can trade them

or with nuclear weapons you can make it so that the player has to build a tile imp nuke research facility to build nukes. and a nice touch is that the tile imp can be pillaged so you can remove the nuke facilities and eliminate enemy nukes.

the building good can allow for computer factories to see electronics. or armament factories to sell weapons to less developed countries and give them the weapons. this would be d one by creating a gunpowder unit that is available before gunpowder but needs the good armaments. but you can only have the building that makes the good "armaments" once someone has developed gunpowder.

This sounds fantastic! my only concern is: will the ai be able to handle all this for themselves?

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by E
viewing civfanatics and apolyton, o far (first few days I know) it looks like the moddability of Civ4 may take awhile until the crack the code on some of the topics. A bit disappointing, but on the other hand I'm glad I decided to wait until christmas.

Yes I agree that you have to learn to mod Civ4 in the first place. And of course to learn to mod Civ4, you have to play it, to know what to mod.

Originally posted by E
However, I know Dale, locutus and Solver appear to be Beta testers but I've seen Martin G and a few others seemed to got Civ4, hopefully they are willing to post a CtP2ers view of civ4.

Yes indeed I bought the game for 35¤. That's indded a good price espeacilly if you consider, that the game should cost 45¤. Well against that price is nothing to say (except you find it cheaper ), because that's the normal price for a new game in the first week, and not 50¤ as it was the case of Civ3. But I doubt that I will find it for less than 35¤ before Chrismas, therefore I bought it, so that I can make my computer fit. The only two things that don't fit to the mininum requirements are the 32MB RAM of my graphic card (it has T&L, I know this from Settler5) and Windows 98. However both things are not a problem, so I can conclude that the game is indeed runnable. Of course without getting an OS that requires some activiation crap. Probably I would get the professional version and as far as I know it comes without that crap.

Unfortunately this game is now a little bit slow (what should I expect), therefore I decided to get some more RAM, since I can only put on my motherboard old SDRAM PC133 it shouldn't be so expensive, the only problem is to get some. By the way this is also a good idea if I want to run the debug version of CTP2.

Well so far I cannot do a full review of the game. And I doubt I should play the game so intensively. I should rather do other things. But of course I am still here.

As said I don't have a huge overview, and the game is slow so that I can browse Apolyton while I am playing, the game has already a "Just one more turn addiction" but it is weak, probably it is slow. I tried to fix the options menue, for me a lot of options where missing on these tabs therefore I decided to mess around with the python file that controlls the screen. And at least I found the problem, a function that returned something invalid caused the screen options to disappear. However while I was fixing I got this one more turn feeling and played on.

One thing to notice is that python is reloaded automaticly, I think it isn't a good idea that there is no option to allow me whether this is done automaticly or manually.

A new interesting concept is that your units can share tiles with units of other civs. That is of course a plus for the AI. However here is the downside of the UI, in order to execute a speacial order for instance converting some pops of another city you have to move your cleric (priest or whatever this unit is called) into the target city. You cannot give a pathed move order in combination with a special order. For instance if I want to move my worker to quare X in order to build there a farm for instance I have to give this move order and once he is there I can can give the build farm order.

So far I used the worker automation, as I didn't understand the system quite well at that point. And of course as this point and click way of doing it is very laborious. At least they could allow me to place these construction yards independently so that the worker auto stuff can do the rest.

Then the Caravel bothered me, in order to not bother my computer to much with heavy load and of course for an easy start to learn the game I decided to start on an archipelago world. Unfortunately I couldn't leave my island with a Galley, because it can't move on deep ocean tiles. But the Caravel cannot transport land units except of non combat and non settler units. So I still sit there and I couldn't find the units on the poster.

One thing that is nice if your build queue is empty you get a pop up message that asks you what to build next, unfortunately it doesn't allow you to fill your build. I thing this dialog should be extended to a full fledged build manager with the capacity of handling multible cities, as we have it in CTP2. With insert add and remove buttons. Of course something like that should have the mini build queue in the city view as well, it is a problem if there are no buttons and you don't have any lue how to use this build queue effectively. And the city view needs an exit button, because you have to read this blinking text first in order to know how to exit this screen.

However so far a build queue wasn't necessary since I had only space for three cities on my little island. A cool thing is that you can have two or more holy cities. I discovered the Hindu tech at first and the Christ tech at first, that's really cool. Religion is cool in Civ4, as long as you can exploit that to your own advantage, e.g. two religious buildings that increase happiness.

A nice thing is that if your active unit isn't on screen you can click on a tiny unit symbol on the edge of your screen, that has an arrow on it and that brings you to your active unit.

The text file equivalent seems easy to be moddable. Nice is that you have in string files all the strings of the different languages together. So no missing files if you do a mod, and a mod is available in all languages. The localizability was one thing I was worring about, but in fact the game asked me on installation in which language I would like to play the game, and I can change it after installation from the options menue and no restart is necessary to continue the game in English.

And I think here comes another problem, noone thought it would be necessary to playtest the game in other languages than English. There are typos and problems related to the Umlauts. On the one hand they simply forgot to localize some of the UI elements. Poping up something like Buildings even if it should be Gebäude in a German version is unprofessional. And worst thing is what they did with my name, of course I had to call my leaer after myself: Martin Gühmann, when I was saving the game they replaced the ü by something else. OK I fixed that manually but then the game didn't find the file even if it was in the folder there, but if I replace the ü by ue then it works, even if it should work with the umlaut in the first place.

Well that review is rather limited and I rather saw what does not work as it should be, from a gamers point of view in general and from CTP2er point of view in particular. I would say that my point of view is rather bias of course. But that would be the case as well after playtesting this game for half a year as well.

But however the game is stable on my computer no problems with the graphics, even if reduced them to a minimum for performance. No crashes, except the one I got when the game wanted to play wonder video, I should have restarted my computer after the installation, so my fault. Well some interface malfunctions the options screen, but I doubt that is Win98 as I found someone else on CivFanatics with problems related to that screen and he has WinXP Chinese edition. So the problems are limited.

-Martin

[Ekmek]

wow thanks martin. i've seen you maq, epw, and i think protra got civ4. it might be nice to see a thread of a ctp2ers view of civ4 when you feel up to it.

did i miss something but did they switch the dipomacy screen to have the ai on the left and the player on the right? it was the other way before...

how is the worker usage. i was thinking maybe we should mod an early worker in ctp2. basically there only function would be to reduce PW cost of improvements if they are on the cell being built. it gives the player something to do in the beginning but I would make the worker obsolete with industrialization and maybe an event that would remove worker units from the map once industrialization was discovered. just a thouht i threw around.

do you think religion is something to add? I think it could be like government and it would be relativel easy to implement religion only units and buildings by following the govt model. but i think its best value is the diplomacy. I already looked at the holycity stuff by comparining it to IsCapitol code and probably have a wonder with a flag to designate holy cities like the place designates a capitol. it looks somewhat easy on a first glance (although i'm sure it would take me awhile)

[Maquiladora]

Originally posted by hexagonian

I'm waiting too...I do know that Solver, Locutus and Dale are really positive about civ4.

That says a lot to me.

Well we do know Dale isnt so positive about one thing by his signature:

Civ4 Modding plans:
- True stacked combat (not 1-on-1 faked stacked combat) & Field bombard artillery

Which i agree with as i said on AoM forum. The rest of the game is pretty good though, speaking as someone whos completed one and a half games of course. I still dont like workers either but its not so bad as it seems you dont generally end up with as many cities as in civ3.

I dont really have that "one more turn" feeling with any civ games anymore, but im certainly enjoying modding so far.

Ive used the map generator a couple of times, which is pretty powerful (you can place goods, cities anything) and easy to use, and getting used to the file locations and structure. Also made a few new civ flags which is easy once you get the right tools to save and edit dds format.

Dont yet know how hard creating totally new units will be, but reskinning the models is easy.

[Protra3211]

Thank you Martin for the review. Im waiting to pick up Civ 4 because more information is needed to guide me on upgrades that will give me the best results.
My computor is only 3 months old P4 512ram 128MB video. From what im reading the bottom line is a 256MB video card nvida and at least a Gig of ram would be right . Have a bonus coming in Dec. and will upgrade.

On the bright side I did order Ages of Man and should have in my hands by the weekend.
Again AOM is perfect for any Civer and will more than make up for not being able to play Civ4 as AOM is deep and complex and should give that one more turn feeling!

[Maquiladora]

I have a 128mb Nvidia (geforce fx 5200) and it works fine, probably borderline but smooth enough on small maps.

CPU (for turns) then graphics card (for navigating the map/menus) is probably the priority. 512mb memory seems to be enough, i rarely go in the swap file on small-medium maps.

[Martin Gühmann]

Once again a new edition Apolytoners' Hall of Fame: December 2005. Vote now!

Yeah and another poll is out there. Vote for the one and only ultimate civilisation fansite Apolyton at Voodo Extreme.

-Martin

[hexagonian]

The current patch appears to help civ4 in the performance area. The patched game does run quicker than it did 'out of the box' on my system, at least.

[Peter Triggs]

So, who's got Civ4?

Of those who have it, what kind of problems (if any) have you had?

edit: I guess that sounds a bit blunt and programatic. I don't mean to be rude; it's just that it would be interesting (possibly mutually beneficial) to have this kind of information.