"For sale: French rifle. Never fired, dropped once." -or- "Isabella is kind of a ho"

[control_group]

Hokay, so:
I have begun playing Civ 4. I've completed one game, am dominating a continent on Terra circa AD 1300 in another, and have taken a stab at multiplayer. It should not surprise anyone, then, that I am about to ramble on about Civ 4 for a bit. After all, I'm always thrilled to natter on about subjects of interest to no one but me.
The

Comments

[abmann]

Civics have/had great potential. In Alpha Centauri, they were incredibly useful and had a dramatic effect on the game. They had so much impact that, if yuo had the right spread, you could win with a few civilizations in significantly fewer turns thath the game would otherwise allow. I think that Civ 4 made them less amazing and more a decent nudge in what ever area they affect

[abmann]

That wasn't supposed to be a response to _sterno_...

[control_group]

That could be part of the problem; I never played SMAC.

I'm calling them a net plus for the moment, but provisionally. We'll see how they work out.

But some of them just seem a bit crap. Slavery, for example. I can think of very few situations where swapping population for production might be a good idea.

Unfortunately, one of those situations doomed my burgeoning (two city, gaem-leading) French Empire yesterday: a sudden influx of seven barbarian axemen, when all I'd had to face previously was, at most, two barbarian warriors. On Epic, there was no chance for me to pump out enough units to save me once they all showed up pretty much simultaneously.

(Yes, this is my own fault for procrastinating military buildup until I finished the Pyramids)

[abmann]

Slavery is fun only when other civs use it and you switch to emancipation. Then foreign affairs get all jumbly and silly because they hate you.

This is the problem I've had with the French. I ALWAYS forget to beef up city security until a city gets sacked. I'm currently trying to take back two cities that the French took too easily since all they had for defense were warriors from the beginning of the game. This is especially vexing because the computer always magically has 5-9 units defending a city the second they step into it. I'm unsure how this happens but I've never been able to do it as damn quickly as the AI.

I have seen zero barbarian activity since crossing into C.E. This is likely due to the fact that ever livable square has been take by one of the six civs in the game.

[control_group]

Word On The Street (by which I mean, an interview with Sid Meier) has it that the AI, in this iteration, pretty much doesn't cheat. And, having yesterday had the opportunity to take over an AI civ mid-game, I can confirm this (at least, on the Noble difficulty setting). When I took over Isabella (once the French got trounced), she had two archers in every one of five cities. HOWEVER: she did not have a single granary, she only had two workers, she had one city working on the Parthenon and one on barracks, the other three were working on archers.

The AI does it by prioritizing militarization quite highly.

[control_group]

I was, in fact, talking about that (I didn't attribute because I didn't feel like digging up the link, and I knew I should dig up the link if I was going to attribute), though I apparently misremember the interview.

Part of my belief, though, is based on the ability to take over AI players in multiplayer games if your Civ goes in the toilet. It seems to me that, if the computer out-and-out cheats at higher difficulty settings, any multiplayer game with AI civs would be highly susceptible to cheating.

Of course, you can turn off taking over AI, but still.

[control_group]

The biggest holdup to building the Ottomans, really, would be creating the art. As far as their performance, I'm pretty sure that's not even Python, that's all XML. You don't have to know jack in order to "reverse engineer" XML, really. But it's just not as much without the art.

As for the Wonders, I've got a similar problem with granaries. Building the Pyramids was always priority #1, so I never built granaries unless someone beat me to the Pyramids. Now I have to consciously remember to put them in. Ditto the Oracle and temples.