Hello smithy, I have some good and bad news for you.
smithy wrote:
I've not bought Civ4 yet, but I will be soon. Being a big Civ3 fan, what I'd like to see fixed is:
(all of these points are related to the single player game)
1. If you have a small war with a country in (say) the year 3600BC, quite often they hate you for the remaining 6000 years of the game! A lot of the time I find that all nations hate me for no reason. If a nation is "gratious" towards me, it's not unusual for them to declare war with no provocation. (when I say "me", I assume it's nothing personal). Anyway, I'd like to see the enemy civs attitudes be a bit more realistic.
in Civ4 you can see what attitude modifier applies to each Civilization in the diplomacy screen. So you know why they hate you. I have not played the game long enough yet to see if war declaration modifier stays until the end of the game. I usually don't wage war to anybody anyway (not worth the hassle most of the time)
Some things I've learned from Civ3 and the modifiers I see at Civ4, they usually hate you because ;
1 - borders are intersecting (cultural influence overlap)
2 - You have some resource-tech they're looking for
3 - You have a close ranking and they see competition
4 - They're in a no win situation (this is usually when a gratious country declares war)
5 - Because everybody hates you (this does happen, and you can also use it for your cause) when somebody declares war at you, try to get some ppl on your side as quick as you can. or everybody will start declaring war at you.
2. The worker units on "autopilot" are rubbish! All they do is build roads and mines, tearing up my carefully irrigated land that allows my cities to grow in size. Putting them on manual gets very tedious and repetitive.
Arrgh ... unfortunately workers are still quite dumb. They cut forests, destroy farms, and do anything possible to damage your setup.
by the way, forests are actually useful to keep in civ4. They provide 0.4 points cleanness to the city, and they can be upgraded with the lumberjack improvement for more production (like mines for hills)
3. The Civ AI's war tactics are really stupid too, especially in overseas wars. Imagine you want to re-create the D-day landings and start to occupy an entire enemy continent. I would send over dozens of battleships, 100 tanks and a huge amount of planes for cover (a lot of hardware). However, the computer's attempt at a D-day landing will usually be 8 units maximum. No match for a continent full of enemy ground units.
depending on the difficulty level, actually I have encountered some good planned invasions in civ3. But sometimes the computer makes suicide attacks, if it can't find anything to do more useful (in a no win situation).
4. Why can't I build a city in the mountains?
Mountains are impassable in civ4. let alone building cities. and no bonuses, no production. Also glaciers. Maybe they become passable with some late technology.
By the way, before you buy it, maybe it's better to check if it will run on your setup. I read that many people have had problems running the game. For me it runs perfectly on my p4 2.4 with ati 9000 128mb. Little bit slow sometimes.
