Civ 4 is being released tomorrow

Grandmaster Jogurt · Post by **Grandmaster Jogurt** » 2005-11-03 01:29am

Stark wrote:Ugh. Why is so much of this game so uninspired? There's STILL no food-movement between cities (each city has to support their entire population: dumbest shit ever, even in 200BC)...
[snip]

That's something I've wanted ever since Civ II's primitive version of it. Would it be possible to mod that into the game?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-11-03 01:38am

I don't know: it's easy to mod game entities like maps and civs, but I'm not sure how much flexibility in the actual engine or game elements you get.

What makes it ridiculous is that MoM and MoO2 had this feature. A *decade* ago. The C4 diplo system is also 90s vintage - although admittedly, most new games ALL have shit diplo systems (like that Galactic Civilisation game).

Captain tycho · Post by **Captain tycho** » 2005-11-03 01:54am

In reply to Stark, the CivIV SDK will be released in early 2006, giving modders access to the barebones game mechanics, etc. Hopefully the food movement can be added in at that level.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-11-03 08:59am

Captain tycho wrote:In reply to Stark, the CivIV SDK will be released in early 2006, giving modders access to the barebones game mechanics, etc. Hopefully the food movement can be added in at that level.

Large portions of the game are written in Python (including the UI, though not the graphics behind it, IIRC) so this may well end up being one of the most moddable games ever

You know someone's going to put Civ2's combat engine back and some of the goodies from it like food-sharing.

Captain tycho · Post by **Captain tycho** » 2005-11-03 08:35pm

phongn wrote:
Captain tycho wrote:In reply to Stark, the CivIV SDK will be released in early 2006, giving modders access to the barebones game mechanics, etc. Hopefully the food movement can be added in at that level.
Large portions of the game are written in Python (including the UI, though not the graphics behind it, IIRC) so this may well end up being one of the most moddable games ever

You know someone's going to put Civ2's combat engine back and some of the goodies from it like food-sharing.

I really like this new combat engine, though. VAST improvement over the earlier Civ games.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2005-11-03 08:52pm

I'm getting the hang of it, it's pretty nice, the combat system. Though, I do sorta miss being able to bombard enemy units...

Enigma · Post by **Enigma** » 2005-11-03 09:30pm

I've installed the game. Played it for about ten minutes then went back to Sid Meier's Pirates. It certainly is different than CivIII. I can't find the option to rush production like the previous Civs. Can one rush production or has it been taken away?

Captain tycho · Post by **Captain tycho** » 2005-11-03 09:48pm

Me and Bunny are in a game right now, just started...waiting to see how it turns out.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2005-11-03 10:12pm

Enigma wrote:I've installed the game. Played it for about ten minutes then went back to Sid Meier's Pirates. It certainly is different than CivIII. I can't find the option to rush production like the previous Civs. Can one rush production or has it been taken away?

See quick game

Grandmaster Jogurt · Post by **Grandmaster Jogurt** » 2005-11-03 11:51pm

Enigma wrote:I've installed the game. Played it for about ten minutes then went back to Sid Meier's Pirates. It certainly is different than CivIII. I can't find the option to rush production like the previous Civs. Can one rush production or has it been taken away?

You need either the slavery or universal suffrage civic to rush production.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2005-11-04 12:03am

For some reason I thought you were talking about the rush option that speeds up the game. Opps, lol.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-11-04 12:04am

Which makes slavery pretty much useless: who wants to sacrifice 2+ population just to speed something?

And I HATE the combat 'system'. Just like every other Civ system, it's obvious who's going to win, and things like forests are more important than guns. If your warriors kill two spearmen, the last spearman will kill all three warriors. The combat ratio is almost exactly what's going to happen. Even worse, entrenchment allows ridiculous results like 'archers kill 2/3 marines' and whatnot. Why is Civ combat ALWAYS frustrating, inflexible and biased?

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2005-11-04 12:36am

Stark wrote:And I HATE the combat 'system'. Just like every other Civ system, it's obvious who's going to win, and things like forests are more important than guns. If your warriors kill two spearmen, the last spearman will kill all three warriors. The combat ratio is almost exactly what's going to happen. Even worse, entrenchment allows ridiculous results like 'archers kill 2/3 marines' and whatnot. Why is Civ combat ALWAYS frustrating, inflexible and biased?

Because it's a system that works relatively well, and has for over a decade? *shrug*
Why don't you mod the system to your liking? Just add some extra zeros, that should work.

Enigma · Post by **Enigma** » 2005-11-04 12:40am

InnocentBystander wrote:For some reason I thought you were talking about the rush option that speeds up the game. Opps, lol.

That is what I meant. Previous Civs allow you to rush the production so it'll be ready for the next turn, but I can't find it here.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2005-11-04 12:57am

Then see above, it's a civic bonus. Slavery (Labor Civic) let's you do forced labor and universal sufferage(Government) lets you spend gold on it. So if you grab the prymids, you can get sufferage right away. Of course, I myself sorta perfer Police State

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-11-04 01:56am

Thanks to this move, money is almost totally worthless until mid-game.

Thunderfire · Post by **Thunderfire** » 2005-11-04 03:38am

Stark wrote:Thanks to this move, money is almost totally worthless until mid-game.

You'll need money for a high research/culture rate and ofcourse for
trading.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-11-04 07:31am

Okay Now I have Civ IV on DVD, only played 3minutes.

Installed and started without any problem, so I am happy.

Enigma · Post by **Enigma** » 2005-11-04 07:48am

InnocentBystander wrote:Then see above, it's a civic bonus. Slavery (Labor Civic) let's you do forced labor and universal sufferage(Government) lets you spend gold on it. So if you grab the prymids, you can get sufferage right away. Of course, I myself sorta perfer Police State

Damn. That means I have to work for it.

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2005-11-04 10:43am

What a steaming pile of fucking shite.

I am a massive civ fan. I preordered this games ages ago. It was delayed by one week. My copy arrives this morning - great I thought. Not so - the bug fiddled piece of shit doesn't even load up, and on the TWO occasions where it has loaded [by random it seems] it won't let me start a game - it just hangs and crashes.

A patch better sort this out, because I refuse to spend yet more money upgrading to play a game.

P4 2.53
512MB Ram
GeForce 4 64MB
XP SP2

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2005-11-04 11:24am

...and now the game completely refuses to load at all. Can't even get to the main menu no matter how many times I restart the pc.

Why me?!

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2005-11-04 11:46am

Ali check out the Civ IV forums either Apolyton or Civ Fanatics. They have a list of fixes for the more common loading issues right now and there's a patch promised fairly soon coming up from Firaxis. Other than that I'm sorry dude. I know if I had similar issues I'd be really pissed too.

xammer99 · Post by **xammer99** » 2005-11-04 02:51pm

Stravo wrote:Ali check out the Civ IV forums either Apolyton or Civ Fanatics. They have a list of fixes for the more common loading issues right now and there's a patch promised fairly soon coming up from Firaxis. Other than that I'm sorry dude. I know if I had similar issues I'd be really pissed too.

Question along similiar lines. Has anyone noticed a pretty bad memory leak? Cause it starts off runnin beautifully, but after a few hours is just runnin like a damn dog. Eventually it'll start crashing and BSDing on me too.

I've looked at the firaxis support site and didn't see anything close to what I had (though that was yesterday and i'll try again in a sec). But anyone got any ideas for how to fix that degrading performance problem?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-11-04 06:15pm

I think it's just the game being inefficient: savegames can quadruple in size over the course of the game, and as the game fills up with entities it becomes much, much slower. Call me nuts, but a pretty C++ front end on a python/XML backend should run fine on 3200/2Gb/6600. Not that I'm criticising the sacred cow or anything.

Robin · Post by **Robin** » 2005-11-04 07:52pm

I found that the slow down seemed far more prominent when I'd been speaking to other Civs, so it may be something to do with the leader head animations (therefore, the wonder videos might also cause this problem, on my computer they stutter like mad although the bik files play fine outside of the game), however if I exit to windows and reload the game it'll run just fine again.

On a related note, turning down the graphics to medium improves the framerate alot, very noticable when scrolling around the map, especially when zoomed out a fair way in the later stages of the game.

ALI_G wrote:...and now the game completely refuses to load at all. Can't even get to the main menu no matter how many times I restart the pc.

My little brother couldn't get his to run at first, in the end he said he used a program called safe disk 4 hider, with that running the game ran fine. Seems like another case of the copy protection system buggering up the game.

Specs

AMD Athlon XP 2400+
2 GB ram
GeForce 6800
XP SP2