Civ 4 - Fall from Heaven 2 (version .41N) and more - Updated 6/3/2010

[MrHat]

Is my game bugged? As far as I can tell, for Domination Victory I just need 30% world population and 62% land ownership.

I have 87% world population, and like 64% land ownership, but it doesn't give me the win :(

Maybe?  I'd wait a bit and grow my culture a bit.  Generally for me it takes 64% land to trigger.

My game is def. bugged.  Made all other civs capitulate or eliminated them (one of them still shows up on the leaders list but has no units and no cities).  Still no victory.  I want my Win points. :(

[lac]

Hey look at that, first time I'm getting somewhere at monarch.
Then this guy shows up. Any advice on dealing with these oversized critters?

[veredus]

Fireballs and a leveled up hero.

[lac]

It turns out he wasn't much of a problem after all because he seemed happy with one conquered city so I had ample time to ship an army back to the mainland and kill him. I tried to capture him but apparently he doesn't count as a beast.

Could anybody explain how to combat inflation? I conquered my continent but I'm afraid that in doing so I've over-extended my empire. More than 50% of my expenses is categorised as inflation and I'm going bankrupt because of it.

[Merusk]

Winter and Summer Palace improvements.  They work just like the regular palace for corruption control, but I think they have a smaller radius.  If you built them too early, you're screwed and will have to rely on just your courthouses.

As for those named ape/ lion/ whatever beasties I'm pretty sure they're still animals but you just can't capture them.

[lac]

Yeah, focussing on money making buildings and courthouses/palaces balanced my finances out after a while. It still crippled me for 50 turns or so.
I think I need to raze cities more. 25 cities of which 10 were new put me down hard in this game.

[Cadaverine]

Probably a dumb question, but what does it mean when units have 2 numbers under their strength?  For example, my archer units had 4/5.  I looked in the manual, and searched around CivFanatics, but couldn't find an answer.

[Kail]

Probably a dumb question, but what does it mean when units have 2 numbers under their strength?  For example, my archer units had 4/5.  I looked in the manual, and searched around CivFanatics, but couldn't find an answer.

I could be wrong (haven't seen it comfirmed, this is just my impression) but I think it's offensive/defensive strength.  For example, your Archers essentially act as if they have strength 4 if they're attacking something else and strength 5 if something else attacks them.

[Typhon]

it's offensive/defensive strength.  For example, your Archers essentially act as if they have strength 4 if they're attacking something else and strength 5 if something else attacks them.

This is correct.

[Sky]

Not in the manual because it's a mechanic from vanilla civ, the player is assumed to know vanilla civ when reading the manual.

[Paelos]

Vanilla civ scrapped offense/defense to the best of my recollection. I know it was a mechanic in 3, but it wasn't in release of 4.

[Lum]

Yeah it was added back into 4 by FfH and many other mods, because defensive-focused units are kind of important!

[Sky]

Yeah, forgot about that. I also forget that I had completely stopped playing Civ4 when Ched turned us on to FFH2. Even at that early stage of development it was so superior to Civ4.

That's my main trepidation about Civ5, I really didn't like Civ4 at all until Kael 'fixed' it.

[Paelos]

Original Civ 4 just had nothing to make it stand out. All the civilizations were interchangable to the point of bland. All religions were meaningless beyond just having one. All the buildings were the same for every culture. They essentially tried to create a game about world domination under the rules of political correctness and wound up with something bland and repetetive.

My guess is that if they listened to their fans at all, or noted what was good / bad about their approach, they will have civilations with much more diversity and flavor. I want playing as the Russians to feel significantly different than playing as the Mayans. Also, have the balls to make religions actually mean something. The Total War games managed to do it without pissing people off, so sack up.

[Sky]

I don't hold much hope for that. My biggest hope for Civ5 is that Kael changes his mind and makes FFH3 for it :)

[Paelos]

Well they are adding hexes, so my guess is that aren't trying to dumb the game down further. I think they learned the lesson that going for homogonization and simplicity wasn't doing them any favors.

[Ingmar]

I think they're just cutting religion entirely for Civ 5?

[Paelos]

I think they're just cutting religion entirely for Civ 5?

Sort of. They are in favor of a deeper social policies system. However, I think they have religious options within the system. How deep that goes, nobody knows.

[Lum]

Well they are adding hexes, so my guess is that aren't trying to dumb the game down further.

From everything I have seen, your guess is wrong.

[Paelos]

Well they are adding hexes, so my guess is that aren't trying to dumb the game down further.

From everything I have seen, your guess is wrong.

Call it more of a wishful dream, then. The more I read into it, the more I get the feeling that I'm wrong as well. This quote was from one preview:

The first suspicions of a market-driven compromise are usually generated by the dreaded "A" word, accessibility. While it's true that some game systems, like religion and espionage, have been removed ... accessibility just means the developers want to make it easier to understand and manipulate the complexity within the game. Most of these are merely matters of convenience rather than cutting back.

So in the same statement you tell me that religion and espionage got cut, but most changes are about convenience and not cutting? 

[Sky]

Because there aren't many people buying Civ? 

I wish they'd stick to the fork: a console-based 'accessible' version (ported to the pc for 'new' audiences) and a traditional pc version that gets more complex each iteration, rather than the reverse.

[Paelos]

There are plenty of neckbeardy war games out there so they don't need to take it too far. However, it seems like they have all these great ideas for new features, but they never flesh them out completely. The modders seem to have no problem taking that leap, however.

[Lum]

My take *cough* is that Firaxis is going for adding a lot more CivRev to Civ 5 - elimination of stacking, elimination of religions, elimination of espionage, and from screenshots, it looks ilke using CivRev's model of autobuilding roads.

I strongly suspect I will continue playing (heavily modded) Civ 4 when Civ 5 comes out and that they're OK with that - Civ 4 is for the hard core and Civ 5 is for the 'casuals'. And CivRev is for... uh... consoles!

[Sky]

I'm definitely not neckbeardy or hardcore, ffs.

[Tebonas]

The more I read about Civ5, the more underwhelmed I become. Kael really beat them up and took their lunch money, now they hide from complex games in the shallow end of the strategy game pool.

[Sky]

I strongly suspect I will continue playing (heavily modded) Civ 4 when Civ 5 comes out and that they're OK with that

Thinking about this, I really have to disagree. You think they're ok with abandoning their prior playerbase? I know you're rolling in Lumbux and will but Civ 5 anyway, but for the poor huddled masses, I'm leaning towards this being the first Civ I don't buy on release (ok, Civ 1 I didn't get at release, but I did play the DOS version first!). Dumbing the game down is just shitting on almost two decades of loyal fans, Civ 4 was enough of a slap in the face with a limp vanilla something or other, the first lame expansion and then finally BtS made it somewhat decent, if not flavorful at all.

Right now it's looking like waiting until Lum or Ched find the new mod hotness a year or two after it's released.

[Paelos]

To me it always comes down to, "What are they adding?"

The answer so far seems to be hexes. That's all I can really make heads or tails of when I look at the corporate speak. That ain't enough for $50, sorry.

[Sky]

To me it always comes down to, "What are they adding?"

I guess my current pessimistic view is "What are they taking away?"

[Rendakor]

Honestly I'm excited about the lack of unit stacking. Making war was always very frustrating because both sides needed to field tons and tons of units. Now, each individual unit will mean more because you will be able to field fewer overall units.

It's a shame they didn't man up and just flesh out each available religion to be distinct; instead, they're pussing out and just scrapping them. Losing espionage sucks too. Hexes, meh, I don't really care one way or another.

[Sky]

Sucked back into FFH2 for another game. Since I've been doing Hemispheres lately, I decided to change back to my old Islands setup with a twist. My traditional setup is Islands, archipelago, lots of tiny islands and one large per civ. This time I went for more small islands and more large islands than civs, to provide a couple battlegounds to fight over that weren't a home territory, naval supply chains, etc.

Though I then got Elohim and with my jamming research I was rushing magery which of course gives you the Nexus. I'm contemplating removing the Nexus and Obsidian Gates from the game, they're just too unbalancing. Not quite "I win", but Lanun should be dominating this particular layout. Of course, once I actually clash with them it could get interesting because they are in a position of power in any situation where I don't have a beachhead and establishing beach-heads on the far side of the globe (where Lanun is) will eventually play some havoc with the economy...

Does anyone else name their units? I don't name them all, but most of my more adventurous stock units I like to name. I feel it adds a lot when it's the Flying Dutchman rather than a generic Privateer that's sailing the seven (or twenty) seas.

[Tebonas]

I started naming my units a few months ago. It started out as a boon for a winning a totally hopeless fight or surviving a gruesome siege. Plus all the units in my aventuring party (the entourage of my exploring heroes). Those are individual names. Then I started naming arcane units according to their position (defensive buffers vs Combat Spellslingers). Still flavoured to the particular civs. Amurite Witchdoctors would be quite out of place. Those are job titles and sound accordingly boring.

[WayAbvPar]

I wasn't even aware that was an option. That would make it a hell of a lot easier to track everything in late game. I have been using the BAT mod in BTS civ the past week; it numbers each unit as it is built, so at least you can tell which ones have been around a long time. Crossbow 1 was a beast in my last game 

[Sky]

Now you can name him Frank.

[Sky]

For some reason I was just in the mood to start a Hippus game. I think my slightly turtley Elohim game spurred the want of a mass of horsemen sweeping across the plain.

Started a Big and Small map, snaky continents with lots of interspersed islands. Rushed Animal Husbandry while my scouts went looking for some horses (well, revealing map at this point). Netted THREE settlers from natives! Aaannd, no horses except for one past a choke point. And I mean none other, I had a few turns where I was just pumping out scouts because rushing AH and then horse techs doesn't give much to build, seven civ's worth of snaky continents and not another damn horse.

So I decided to get radical and restart the game (I always make a save on turn 1 - Hippus Start). And move my entire civ over to where those horses were. AND I got the three settlers from natives again, along with a worker and some cash to pay everyone until I could build my capital on turn 15 or so. Popped my three cities across the bottleneck, containing Malakim as the only civ behind me, and first on the list for the hordes to roll over.

Also decided on a new strategy for the bulk of the horse, giving them the withdrawal bonus, since it was already pretty high and I can pump a bunch out to overwhelm. I really wish I had a couple priest units to take care of the damaged units, but I'm hoping for a numbers victory, since I'm still light on building options (rushing horse archer) but have a pretty decent (new) starting position.

[Tebonas]

Its been a while since I played the Hippus last, but don't they get Horses from their Palace?