Sulla Civ4 Walkthrough

Civ4 Walthrough 1 Page 1 of 8
Created by Sulla (http://www.guybailey.com/sulla) Packaged and hosted by RuggeR29 (http://www.civfour.com)
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part One
With no further ado, let's get started with the Walkthrough! I start by loading up Civ4 and
picking "Single Player" from the main menu. There are other options for Multiplayer, the Hall of
Fame, the Civilopedia, and so on, but for right now we're only interested in trying out a Single
Player game. The Single Player menu has 4 options: Play Now, Load Game, Custom Game,
and Play A Scenario. They should all be pretty self-explanatory; Play Now is a fast way to start
a new game, while Custom Game allows you to pick some more options. To give you a better
idea of what you can choose for a game, I go into the Custom Game menu. That screen looks
like this:
The top of the screen allows you to set the civs; naturally I can pick my civ and who I'm playing
file://C:\sullla\civ4_walk_1.html 11/2/2005
against, as well as which difficulty level I want to play on (there are now 9 difficulty levels,
ranging from "Settler" up to the traditional "Deity"). You can also set teams by assigning two
civs to have the same number; yes, you can play a team game with the AI if you want to even
in Single-Player. Or set all the AIs to the same team and play against them all as a real
challenge.
The bottom left corner is where all the map settings are stored. There are six sizes for each
map (ranging from Duel to Huge), four different climates, and three different sea levels. You
can also choose to start in any era you like (from Ancient up to Future) and set any of the three
game speeds. As for how many map types there are, well - Civ3 shipped with three of them:
Archipelago, Continents, and Pangaea. Civ4 is shipping with TWENTY ONE map scripts!
That's the full list of maps; note that these are not pre-drawn maps but scripts that create a
new map for each game within certain parameters. Some of them are clearly for Single-Player
(SP) and others for Multi-Player (MP), but all of them CAN be played in either setting. And for
those people who were whining about the maps being smaller in Civ4: try running a Huge
Terra map. The thing is gigantic; it's significantly larger than a Civ3 Huge map. Don't think we
weren't paying attention to you.
Obviously victory types are in the bottom right corner. The box in the center has so many
options though that I need to post another picture to show the full thing:
All of these are options that can be set before starting a game of Civ4. They can be set for
both SP and MP, by the way, though a MP game of Always Peace isn't the most exciting thing
in the world! In addition to typical stuff like barb options (watch out for those raging barbs!
seriously, I'm not kidding), you can also pick some of the most popular Civ3 variants right from
the menu. Yes, One City Challenge and Always War are now options built right into the game
itself. Hopefully this will allow a number of people who never thought of experimenting with
some of these variants to try interesting and fun approaches to the game. Also, note how
moving the mouse over any of these options displays more information about it (I'm mousing
over the One City Challenge here, of course).
After messing around with the settings a bit, I pick Saladin as my leader (there's a reason for
this, which I'll get to in a bit) and keep everything else on the defaults. Going to be playing on
Noble, since it's the "even" setting where the AI gets no advantages or disadvantages. Once
everything is set properly, I click the launch button and get started! Here's what the starting
position I drew looked like:
Note that I've shrunk these pictures down a lot to reduce the bandwith usage on this site... A
lot of people are going to be reading this, so bear with me on the need to keep the pictures
fairly small. Anyway, let me try to explain the main game screen a bit before I start doing
anything. At the top right are all my advisor buttons, which are also accessible using the
function keys (F1-F9). We'll look at them in more detail later. At the bottom of the screen is a
picture of the unit (a warrior in this case), the commands that I can issue in the middle, and the
minimap and some other command buttons in the bottom right. The score is also displayed in
the corner at all times (although you can turn it off if desired). As far as looking at the starting
position, I seem to have drawn a resource poor starting location here. (Resources are much
more important in Civ4 than in Civ3, as you'll see.) There's stone in range but nothing else.
Let's move the warrior and see if I can spot anything else in the fog.
Aha! We have horses present. That makes this a much more viable start, to be sure. (The tile
yields - that is, the food/shields/commerce on the map - appear automatically when a settler is
selected. And that blue circle is where the game suggests that I settle.) Since I don't want to
settle one tile off the coast (this is an even bigger no-no in Civ4 than in Civ3), I move the settler
one tile southeast onto the coast and end my turn. That reveals a cow resource right next to
where I moved! Our situation is looking up. The last thing I do on this first turn is to turn on
the tile grid, since I've fallen into the habit of using it. That can be done with the hotkey Ctrl-T
or by pressing the button I arrowed in the picture below.
In 3950BC, I can start out the history of my civ by founding Mecca:
Founding a city has now opened up research (note the tech icons at the top of the screen).
Before dealing with that though, let's peek inside Mecca and decide what to build first.
So much for this game being dumbed down, right? I won't go into detail on what everything
does here just yet; for now, I tell Mecca to start working on a warrior. Since warriors cost 15
shields and Mecca is producing 2 shields/turn, it will take 8 turns. There's basically nothing
else that I can do on the city screen at this point, so I leave it and go back out to the main
game screen.
The next thing to do is to pick which technology to research. Looking at the choices above, I
can research (in order from left to right), Meditation, Polytheism, Fishing, Agriculture, Hunting,
Mining, and Masonry. All of these techs unlock important things, but I want to try and get a
religion here first, so I pick Polytheism as my first research choice. If I can be the first one to
research this technology, I will found Hinduism in Mecca (which would be very good). 11 turns,
so let's cross our fingers and hope for the best. The warrior moves out to go exploring, and
with nothing else to do I end my turn.
Well, that takes us through the first two turns of the game. Go on to the next page to see what
happens next.
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part One
The next couple turns move by quickly. I spy a goody hut in 3920BC and head towards it. Pop
the hut in 3840BC and get experience from it:
Well, well, well... there's something you couldn't get out of a hut in Civ3! The hut grants my
warrior 5 experience (XP), which is enough to pick two promotions. In Civ4, your units can pick
a promotion at 2XP, 5XP, 10XP, 17XP, and so on, though getting more than 20XP with a
single unit is extremely rare. Different units get access to different promotions, and certain
promotions are prerequisites for other promotions; for example, you can't take City Raider II
until you have City Raider I. Here are the three choices I get with my warrior with his new
experience:
file://C:\sullla\civ4_walk_1a.html 11/2/2005
Oh yeah, units glow when they have access to a promotion, I should mention that. I can
choose from Combat I (+10% overall strength), Woodsman I (+20% defense in forest/jungle),
and City Raider I (+20% City Attack). City Raider probably wouldn't be a good choice here,
since I don't plan to attack any cities with this unit. And while the Combat I line of promotions is
never a bad option, I'll get more benefit by taking Woodsman I and then going on to take
Woodsman II, which will grant my warrior 2 movement in forest and jungle tiles. Basically, the
warrior can move twice each turn instead of once so long as he's moving through forest, which
is exactly what I want in a scouting unit. I go ahead and do that, and then move my newly
promoted warrior twice. Promotions are fun!
There he goes! I marked out the path in red, and also note the little promotion icons next to the
unit's picture. That helps you keep track of which unit has which promotions; you can also
mouse over the unit to get this information. My Woodsman II warrior spends the next couple of
turns zipping around the map, sticking to the forests to keep moving along at a good speed.
Mecca's borders expand from the palace's culture in 3760BC, revealing another horses and an
ivory resource just out of the city's radius. Ack! Well, have to put another city to the east to
grab them... On the next turn, my scouting warrior finds the Egyptians to the north!
Hatshepsut is Cautious towards me, not surprising given that we've got no pluses or minuses
from diplomacy as yet. Notice that there's only two diplomatic options at the moment: declare
war or maintain peace. That's it! You have to research certain techs to be able to trade techs
or trade gold with other civs. No one's going to be running 0% research out of the gate in this
game! Since I can't do anything else, I pick the peace option and send my warrior on his
way. Also keep in mind that I can't enter Hatshepsut's territory to scout it out without declaring
war, so I skirt her borders for now. Borders mean a lot more in this game than they did in Civ3.
In 3640BC, Mecca completes its warrior and I get another pop-up message: someone has
already founded the religion of Buddhism!
Probably a good thing I didn't try to go after that religion then, heh. The tech for Buddhism
(Meditation) is cheaper than the one that enables Hinduism (Polytheism), but if you miss
Hinduism you have a decent chance to get Judaism by researching the tech Monotheism.
Buddhism is more of a cheap, one-shot deal. I went with the safer bet here, and hopefully it will
pan out. We'll find out in 3 more turns. Incidentally, the fact that most Spiritual civs (like my
own Arabs) start with the tech Mysticism allows them to begin researching a religion right out
of the gate. That's almost as big of an advantage as the lack of anarchy that Spiritual civs
enjoy. If you want an early religion - take a Spiritual civ. As to what the Philosophical trait does
(my other trait as Saladin)... we'll get into that a bit later. For now, I fortify the new warrior in
Mecca and start putting some shields into a barracks.
Meanwhile, my scouting warrior has found another goody hut in the east. This one gives me a
map (eh, not so great) but it does reveal that I should push north and east with my scout.
Looks like I have a bottleneck of land to the south; I'm fairly close to the southern tundra. I'll
have to push north therefore to grab the land in that direction before Hatshepsut takes it.
There's also room for a dynamite city to the east, one with fish/clams/wheat all present. I have
plans for that down the road...
The next turn my warrior finds a lion out there in the wilderness. Yikes!
I zoomed way in to take that shot, partly to show that you CAN do that in Civ4, also partly to
show better what the lions look like. Despite what some proponents of doom posted on the
public forums, these barb animals are not the end of the world. They can eat unguarded
units (settlers and workers) if you send them out in the fog, but combat units will rarely be
taken out. I move my warrior northwest then northeast, daring the lion to take him on. Hey, he'll
be defending in forest (+50% defense) and since he's Woodsman II, he'll get another +50%
bonus on top of that. I am not afraid.
Between turns the lion attacks, and uh, wow, he did some damage.
My warrior has been cut to half strength (1.0 out of 2). This was an extraordinarily bad roll of
the dice for me; usually the warrior unit would be undamaged or have little more than a
scratch. I'm going to have to stop and heal him now to make sure he doesn't get killed. See the
little medical icon? That tells the unit to "wait until healed"; it will take 5 turns to heal
completely, hmmpf. Units heal faster in your own borders than neutral territory, and even
slower in foreign territory. Nothing to do but wait it out here for now though.
On the plus side, I was the first to discover Polytheism and thus found Hinduism in Mecca.
After getting the religious video (neat!), I then get a popup asking me whether I would like to
convert to Hinduism. Since there's no reason not to do so - as a Spiritual civ, I don't even have
to go through a turn of anarchy! - I go ahead and do so. Now the big question on everyone's
mind has got to be, what does religion actually do in Civ4? Well, it does a couple of important
things:
1) Any city with your state religion in it produces 1 culture per turn. The holy city of your state
religion also produces an impressive 5 culture/turn. Spreading your religion around is thus a
good way to expand borders early on in the game.
2) Cities with your state religion in them get +1 happy face, which allows them to grow one size
larger (more on this later).
3) Cities with religion in them can build religion-specific buildings like temples and cathedrals.
No religion, and you can't build a temple!
4) Similarly, since a temple is a prerequisite for priest specialists, you can't create priest
specialists without a religion either (more on city specialists later).
5) If you control the Holy City for a religion and get a Great Prophet, you can have him create
the Shrine for that religion. The Shrine is a wonder that produces 1 gold/turn, every turn, for
every city in the world that has that religion. If you've spread your religion around a lot, this can
be a LOT of money!
6) Finally, religion has a huge amount of influence on diplomacy. Civs that share the same
religion will tend to be friends; those with different religions will have real trouble getting along.
In this game, I'll be trying my best to spread Hinduism around and reap some major shrine
income down the road.
Now that I've discovered my first tech, what to pursue next? Let's look at the tech tree itself.
(F6 is the hotkey, and there is also a button on the top-right of the main screen that leads to
the same place.)
This will of course look very confusing for anyone seeing it at first, but with time it becomes
easy to navigate, trust me. I started out with Mysticism and The Wheel because I was Arabia,
and you can see that I've already researched and completed Polytheism. Now there are plenty
of different options to pick here, but the most important thing for me to research at the moment
is some worker techs so that I can hook up my nearby resources. Yes, you have to
RESEARCH things like mining and farming in this game, your workers don't start with those
abilities! It's possible to produce a worker early on in the game and literally have nothing for
him to do since you haven't researched any of the worker techs yet! Since we want to hook
up the cows and horses near Mecca, the tech we want is Animal Husbandry. The fastest way
to get there is to research Hunting, then go from there to Animal Husbandry (we could also
start with Agriculture and then go on to Animal Husbandry, but I don't need Agricultre right
away and it's a slightly more expensive tech). So Hunting it is, 5 turns of research at the
moment.
Mecca has also hit size 2 this turn, and now that it's grown a size, I'm going to change its
production. It currently has 7 shields invested into a barracks; those shields will be saved and
stored for when I go back to the barracks later (this is of course different than how production
worked in all previous Civilization games). I change production to a worker, which will take 12
turns to finish. Take a look:
Workers and settlers are produced a little bit differently in Civ4. In past Civ games, they cost a
certain amount of shields and dropped the population of the city upon completion. In Civ4, they
don't drop the population of cities, but workers and settlers count both food AND shields
towards their production. In other words, cities building either workers or settlers do not grow,
since their excess food goes towards producing the units. Mecca here is adding its 2 excess
food to help produce the worker. Since workers and settlers are a lot more expensive in Civ4
(60 shields and 100 shields, respectively) they are also both more valuable than they were in
previous games too. Woe be it to someone who loses their first worker to a barb unit. So it will
take us 12 turns to produce a worker, but that's actually pretty standard for this part of the
game. Mecca's growth will take off once I get that worker out and build a pasture on the cows
and horses. Also note that I arrowed the Hindu icon in Mecca; the little gold star indicates that
it's the Hindu holy city.
Next: more exploration and early expansion of Arabia.
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Two
The following turns are somewhat uneventful. Mecca is building a worker, which will take a
while, and my exploring warrior is healing after the mauling he took from that lion. Let me take
this opportunity therefore to show you what the land around my capital looks like, and also to
demonstrate the extremely useful resource pointer:
You can see Mecca in the bottom left, along with my healing warrior in the top right. Egypt is
just north of my scouting warrior. I've arrowed the button that turns on the resource display (the
hotkey is Ctrl-R). As you can see, it's extremely useful at pointing out where the resources are
located on the map. I have cows and horses in Mecca's range, and a nice little cluster of
resources to my east as well. That's where my first couple settlers will be heading, to make
sure that I get those resources and not Hatshepsut. I've marked out a tentative location for my
first settler with a red dot (the infamous dot maps of Succession Game fame, which some will
recognize). That would claim wheat, fish, and clams - all health resources that add lots of food
to the city site. Again, I have plans for that site down the road...
On the next turn, an English scout wanders by and I am put into contact with Victoria:
Victoria is one of the two English leaders in this game, with Elizabeth being the other one.
There's not much I can do at the moment diplomatically other than agree to peace, so I do that
and send Vicky away. One odd thing to mention though - the English warrior came up and met
me from the south, not the north. Ack! Is there a civ down there? I'll have to build another scout
at some point and go find out what's down there. I was assuming that the land down there
would go uncontested and be mine, hmmm...
By the way, the icons at the top of the diplomatic screen (I circled one in yellow) tell you what
civics the AI civs are running. This early in the game, we're all using the default starting ones,
so nothing of interest to report there.
Next turn (3360BC), my warrior is healed to full and starts moving again. I could of course
have kept him moving while he was hurt, but I didn't want to risk it. The Hunting research
comes due the following turn, and since I skipped the tech screen for the first tech (there was a
lot going on when I discovered Polytheism), let me show you what it looks like for Hunting:
This screen nicely lets me know exactly what the tech does and what other techs it leads to. A
camp is a worker action that hooks up certain resources (elephants provide ivory, beavers
provide furs, and deer provide game). I don't have any in my immediate territory, but there are
some elephants nearby that I'll grab soon. This tech also lets me build scouts and spearmen
(although I need either copper or iron to build the spears). I would normally be prompted to
pick another tech to research, but I already queued up Animal Husbandry earlier. I should also
mention that all of the little tech quotes are read by Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame.
A half-dozen turns pass where I'm just exploring more of the terrain with my warrior. Hatty is
surrounded by jungle; looks like she's near the equator up there. It will be interesting to see
how well the AI handles that start. As my warrior wanders further north through the jungle, he
kills another lion and then contacts one of Gandhi's units:
The diplo options are the same as with the other leaders, but now look at the religious icon in
the top right corner. Gandhi is the one who founded Buddhism! And it's already having a
negative effect on our relationship; we have a -2 penalty due to religious differences. As a
result, I actually have the worst relations with ultrapacifist Gandhi, heh. Heathen dog! (By
the way - it's very ironic that "Buddhist" Gandhi hates me for my Hindu religion!) I can probably
improve those relations later on with trade, but if things go sour, there's always the chance to
open up some religious whoopass on G-man.
Religion adds a whole new layer of strategy to Civ4. It's great fun.
Shockingly, my warrior has again taken a lot of damage from the lions he ran into and is again
at 1.0/2 strength. Geeze, I do have Woodsman II here, right? Getting some very unlikely
results... I move him onto a jungle hill tile and set him to heal again. The next turn (3040BC),
my worker finishes in Mecca and I set the city back onto a scout to go see what's located down
in the south. I want to get Mecca to a larger size before it starts building settlers, and I don't
have the techs to start building some real military units yet. Now take a look at what my worker
can do:
What I want to do is build a pasture on the horses; this will add 2 shields and 1 commerce to
the tile and also hook up horses so that Mecca can build horse units. But I can't do it yet
because I don't have the tech; Animal Husbandry won't be due for 4 more turns! Therefore, the
only thing I can do at the moment is have my worker build a road on the tile, and if I didn't have
The Wheel, I couldn't even do that! I can't build mines or farms yet either, hehe, although I
don't need them immediately. So my worker builds a road first on the horses, then moves over
and builds one on the cows as well. It's all he can do at the moment!
Also notice that the borders of Mecca have expanded again; this is due to the fact that it's the
Hindu holy city, and that's producing 5 culture per turn. Higher levels of culture grants a
defensive bonus in Civ4 as well, so that's what the +40% means next to the city's name.
Animal Husbandry comes due in 2880BC, and now I have the choice of what tech to go after
next. Since I'm unsure at the moment, let me show you the popup help that appears when you
move over the list of techs:
As you can see, it gives a pretty good indication of what each tech does. After thinking for a
minute or two, I decide to grab Mining next - not because I need to build any mines
immediately, but because I want to go for Bronze Working, and Mining is the pre-requisite for
that. Now that I have Animal Husbandry, I can also set my worker to build a pasture, so I do
that.
I finish the scout the next turn and have Mecca go back to putting some shields into a barracks
(I don't intend to finish the barracks now, but I have nothing better to build and want Mecca to
be size 3 before it starts producing settlers). Scouts have 2 movement but are only strength 1,
so they are quite weak. They do get a +100% bonus against animals though, so they stand a
good chance of winning any battles against those lions. I send him south to try and find where
Vicky is located.
My warrior in the north has managed to find Gandhi's start; he's a good distance to the north
on the other side of the jungle. Looks like we won't have too much contact early on. My worker
completes the pasture on the cows in 2760BC, and wow look at what that has done to the yield
of the cow tile:
The cow tile is now producing 3 food and 3 shields. Wow! That's certainly a big improvement
over the 2 food/1 shield it was getting before. I arrowed the tile in red to show the change.
Hooking up the resources you have outside your cities is thus a huge impetus to growth in the
early game. I'll see a similar benefit from building a pasture on those horses. I also circled the
culture of Mecca in red (bottom left corner) to show that it's pumping a robust 7 culture/turn
here in the early game, thanks to 2 culture from the palace and 5 from being the Hindu holy
city. It's already hit the 100 culture border expansion and is well on its way to the 500 culture
level.
On the right side of the city screen, note that there's now a cow icon in the top corner (I have a
yellow arrow pointing to it). This shows that the cows are now connected to Mecca, and they
are providing one extra health point to the city. I circled that in yellow; whereas before the city
had 7 health points, now it has 8. That means that the city can grow another size before it
becomes unhealthy and starts requiring extra food; I'll talk more about health and happiness
later on when they become an issue (I'm not even close to the limits at the moment, as you
can see). With the cows hooked up, my worker skedaddles over to the horses and starts
building a pasture there as well.
In 2600BC, Mecca hits size 3 and my worker finishes the pasture on the horses (I can now
build chariots, yay!) I swap Mecca over to building a settler, which will take 10 turns currently.
That seems like forever in Civ3 terms, but it's pretty standard for Civ4. Research comes in on
Mining and I head after Agriculture next; going to need some more food for the capital than I
initially planned (yes, I did change my mind about heading for Bronze Working).
Meanwhile, my scout has found Vitoria's start position. Wow, did she ever get shafted by the
map generator or what?!
That's some rough land down there, a lot of tundra and ice. Not much food. Also note that
Vicky is entirely blocked in by my borders; if I don't sign Open Borders with her, she CANNOT
get past my civ and expand further to the north. How convenient for me. It will be interesting
to see how well she manages down there; Vicky does have Marble which will help her build
some wonders, so we'll see how she does. She's welcome to have pretty much all of the land
down there.
My worker goes to mine the hills tile near Mecca; he actually can't mine the tiles with trees on
them, since I don't have Bronze Working yet and that's need to cut down forests! Other units
continue exploring... Then I run into Mansa Musa in the north.
Must be quite a crowded continent here; this is not a pangaea map, and yet 5 civs are all on
the same landmass. Not too much I can do with Mansa Musa other than say "hi" and go on
about my business. And as if that wasn't enough, I run into Caesar on the following turn!
That's six out of seven civs on the Continents map starting on the same landmass, hmm...
Now I really like Civ4, but whoever wrote that line of dialog should be beaten with some kind of
blunt instrument. Seriously now... You can also see the Roman scout that met my warrior in
the picture above. That lets me demonstrate something else new in Civ4, the ability for units of
different civs to share the same tile without fighting. Take a look:
I go to move onto the same tile and am prompted as to whether or not I want to declare war. I
pick "no" and voila! My warrior and Caesar's scout share the same tile without killing each
other. After playing Civ4, you start to wonder "hey, why wasn't it always like this?" One of the
nice effects of this is that you can defend your teammates' cities in MP games along with their
own units. Anyway, continuing on with the walkthrough...
Completing the mine on a hill near Mecca allows me to swap to that tile and shave another
turn off my settler build (the time dropped from 5 turns to 4). Now my worker is going to road
that tile and start building roads towards the location where the second city will be founded.
Only one problem: I currently don't have a defender for that second city, and I'd really rather
not leave it completely unguarded for barbs to ransack or for the AI to walk into and capture.
Therefore, I'm going to use my SCOUT as a defender temporarily until Mecca can build a
chariot and provide some real defense.
Don't ever try this in a MP game, unless you're REAL sure that you're not going to be attacked.
Medina is founded in 2200BC. This is what my little civ looks like now that it's expanded to two
cities:
The cities have three tiles of overlap, which I would have preferred not to have, but I wanted to
make use of the horses and ivory (elephants) that Mecca just missed out on. Medina is
building a barracks but only until I finish researching Fishing; then I will have it switch to a
Work Boat, the most basic naval unit that hooks up water-based resources (more on this in a
little bit). Now one other thing I'd like to point out: see the little hut-things circled in red? Those
are indicators of what tiles are being worked by cities; Mecca is using the grassland forest and
Medina is using the horses tile. For tiles that workers have already built improvements on, the
presence of smoke coming out of the little pasture chimneys tells you which tiles are being
used; I have yellow arrows pointing to them. You can thus see what tiles a city is using right
from the main game screen, although it's not the easiest thing in the world to spot. But you can
always zoom in real close when in doubt too.
Continued on the next page...
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Two
Mecca soon finishes its chariot, allowing the scout in Medina to head out exploring again. I
now have an actual defender in my second city. Mecca goes back to work on another worker;
I'd like to have one for both cities. The first worker took 12 turns, but now thanks to the tiles I've
improved, this second one will only take 5 turns. Nice! (The decision of when to build your first
worker is a very strategic one in Civ4, since you don't start with one. A great addition to the
game that adds a lot of depth.)
The tech Fishing comes in and I go back to work on Bronze Working. You don't lose the
research you have accumulated by switching to another tech in Civ4, which is a welcome
change from previous Civ games. Medina starts work on a Work Boat for its Fish resource. In
1960BC, the historian Bede ranks the most Cultured civs in the world and has me #2! No
surprise that Gandhi and I are tops in the ranking, seeing as how we're the two civs that have
founded religions so far. Someone will probably be getting to Judaism soon though.
Well, speak of the devil...
Seriously, I typed that one turn before the announcement came. I think I know this game too
well... The other thing I wanted to point out is that Hinduism has spread on its own to Medina.
Great! Religion will spread on its own at times; initially it will only spread to close locations, like
this, but eventually you can get the religion spreading on its own to places far and wide. You
can also control the spread of religion with missionaries, and that is the more common way for
it to spread, but I thought I should point out that it can spread on its own too.
As for the blue circles on the ground, that's where the game is suggesting my worker go next.
For once I actually agree with it, and send the newly produced worker to the grassland tile in
the south to build a farm there. Mecca needs more food more than anything else right now. As
far as who founded the religion, the fact that I get a popup stating "Gandhi adopted Organized
Religion!" tells me that he was the one to get Judaism. (Organized Religion is one of the civics
options; I'll get to them later.) Wow, BudJewism in India. That's pretty rare; much more
common to see HinJewism due to the way the tech tree shakes out. No big deal at this point
though.
Whoops, my scout ends his turn next to a barb warrior in 1840BC. He's dead if the barb
chooses to attack him (scouts get a bonus against animals, but not against barbs). Sure
enough, he gets smacked down and killed. Nuts.
Discover Bronze Working, which now allows me to cut down forests and see the copper
resource. There is a copper close to me (yay!) but it's controlled by a city Victoria just founded
(no!) No other copper within a thousand miles. I'll have to hope I have iron, or else I'll be all but
forced to attack Vicky. At least I have horses! Now since Bronze Working also enables the
Slavery civic, let's take a look at the Civics Screen (F3 hotkey):
The Civics system is basically your government in Civ4. You pick from different choices in
each of the 5 categories, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. Since this is still
the very beginning of the game, I'm running the defaults in every category. The only choice I
can pick is between Tribalism and Slavery; they both have the same Upkeep cost (Low), but
Slavery gives me the added bonus of being able to whip my cities to produce things faster at
the cost of sacrificing some population. As a Spiritual civ, I can swap civics without going
through a turn of anarchy, so I go ahead and do so even though I don't plan on using the whip
at all. You never know what it might come in handy... I'll return to this screen again as I
discover later, more powerful civics.
A couple turns later, Medina finishes its Work Boat. Let's take a look at what these things do:
Work Boats hook up sea resources in the same way that workers hook up land resources.
There's one big difference though: instead of building tile improvements, Work Boats are
consumed (destroyed) in the process of building fishing nets on a resource. Here, I choose the
option to build some fishing nets on the fish resource, then stand back and watch the food
output skyrocket on that tile:
That fish tile is now producing 5 food! That's a lot! (The bread loaf = 5 food). Now the city is
growing like a weed, and it can make use of the shields from that ivory tile as soon as it grows
to size 3. Things are looking good here in Medina. Also notice the trade routes section on the
left side of the city screen. What does this mean? Well, Civ4 generates trade routes
automatically when cities are connected to one another. Since Mecca and Medina are
connected, they have a trade route with one another. Now it's a very small trade route, since
we're early in the game, but with time it may be able to develop into a very lucrative one. You
can also get foreign trade routes by signing Open Borders agreements with other civs,
something that I'll demonstrate later on; foreign trade routes are almost always worth more
money than domestic ones. At first each city can only have one trade route, but certain
technologies and civics open up additional ones later on. Trade routes can bring in tons of
commerce in the late game, so it's important to be aware of the fact that they're there.
Also notice that more resources are starting to appear in my cities as the workers hook them
up; horses in the strategic resources column, cows and fish adding health, ivory adding
happiness.
With the Work Boat finished, I set Mecca to building a settler (it's now at size 4 and can build
one in just 8 turns) and Medina to building a chariot escort for that settler. Usually you would
want to have archers serve as defenders (they are the best early-game defensive unit), but
since I have horses I'm skipping Archery for now and using chariots. They are 4 strength and
make pretty good defenders early on too, at least against barbs. (Barbs can capture cities in
this game - beware!) Several turns pass by uneventfully, as I finish researching Pottery
(granaries and cottages! yay) and Masonry (city walls and some other good stuff).
Hinduism spreads on its own to the English city of York in 1520BC. This is great news, as the
city will be more likely to flip to me (it's under a lot of cultural pressure, and cities with your
state religion in them are much more likely to flip). Secondly, it means that Vicky will convert to
Hinduism herself and thus I'll reap increased diplomatic benefits with her. Mecca finishes its
settler and - now that my workers have just built a Quarry and hooked up the Stone resouce to
my north - starts work on Stonehenge, my first wonder:
Mecca is producing 11 shields/turn, as you can see by counting them. But since I have stone
connected, I get double production towards Stonehenge, and since the wonder is cheap (only
120 shields), that means I can built it in just 5 turns! Stone and marble are thus very strong
strategic resources; they don't allow you to build any extra units, but boy can they ever help
you get wonders. As for what Stonehenge does, it will put a free obelisk in every city on the
map, thus providing free culture until it obsoletes with the discovery of the tech Calendar.
That's quite good, but I'm actually more interested in Stonehenge for its free Great Person
points, which I'll get to in a few minutes.
Damascus is founded two turns later on the "red dot" site I marked out ages ago, and hey -
what's this?
All of a sudden, my gold has gone negative. What happened? Well, in Civ4 adding more cities
costs you money in maintenance costs to support them. Spamming a ton of cities everywhere
without any thought behind them is a sure way to go bankrupt. There are many ways to control
the costs, like building courthouses and using certain civics, but for now it's just important to
remember that cities cost maintenance in Civ4. Buildings do NOT cost maintenance though. In
past Civ games, buildings cost money and cities were free, so it was a good strategy to spam
lots of little cities with few buildings in them all over the map. Not so in Civ4, as it's the other
way around. That will take some time for people to get used to, I'm sure. I reduce the
science rate to 90% (first time I've touched it at all), and am now running in the black again.
Not surprisingly, Mecca completes Stonehenge first in 1160BC and I am treated to a little
wonder video (neat!). Now that I have a wonder, let me stop and explain how this whole Great
Person system works.
Now the Great Person bar at the bottom right of the screen has become active; by mousing
over it, I get the information you see displayed in this picture. Basically, there are two ways to
generate Great Person points (hereafter, GPP): through using specialists (which we aren't
doing yet) and through building wonders, which automatically generate GPPs each turn.
Stonehenge naturally produces 2 GPPs each turn; since Saladin is a Philosophical civ, this is
increased by +100% for a total of 4 GPPs. When that bar fills up all the way, the city will
produce a Great Person; right now, it will take 25 turns if I don't do anything else.
How does the game determine what type of Great Person is produced? Well, usually it's
determined by the specialists that the city is running; for example, if you're using Scientist
specialists, the city will be accumulating Great Scientist GPPs. In the case of wonders, each
wonder produces GPPs associated with a certain type of Great Person. In the case of
Stonehenge, the GPP produced are Great Prophet points. So unless I run a specialist here or
build another wonder, Mecca has a 100% chance to produce a Great Prophet. I'll talk more
about Great People as I go along and as I get more of them. Safe to say, Stonehenge all but
guarantees an early Great Prophet (which will prove quite useful).
Shortly after building Stonehenge, I discover Monotheism (NOT founding Judaism, since it was
taken by Gandhi a long time ago) and change over to the Organized Religion civic that it opens
up. This civic is expensive (High upkeep!) but it allows you to build Missionaries without a
monastery improvement in a city, and also boosts production by +25% when constructing
buildings in cities that have your state religion present. It's quite powerful, although on higher
difficulties the cost is so expensive that I'm less likely to use it. Here on Noble, it's quite
manageable. And no anarchy again for changing civics - Spiritual is a fun civ trait.
After finishing its granary, Mecca starts work on another useful early wonder, the Oracle, which
grants the discoverer a free tech of their choice (yes, one of the most useless wonders in Civ3
now is very strong indeed). The Oracle would be half cost if I had marble, but unfortunately I
don't. Medina built a Work Boat for Damascus and now starts on another worker, since I only
have 2 for 3 cities. Here's how things stand at 1000BC:
Note that even though I think I've played this thing pretty well so far, I'm still not in first place in
score; Gandhi and his double-religion culture-monster civ is leading in score. Well, I'll shortly
blow past these AIs and leave them in the dust, but Soren's AI really does know what it's
doing. Anyone who tries to jump into Emperor right away will be in for some surprises. Things
are looking good at this point.
Next time: settling more cities, building more wonders, and customizing a city to spam Great
People as fast as possible.
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Three
Several more uneventful building turns follow. My cities are locked on infrastructure at the
moment, although when they finish I'm going to start building up my military a bit... especially
do something about that warrior guarding my capital! As soon as I discover Writing, Gandhi
comes calling and asks to establish Open Borders:
Open Borders will allow our units to enter each other's territory and allow trade routes to
extend between my civ and Gandhi's. Now we can't have any trading routes at the moment
because our civs aren't connected, but they will be eventually. Since there's really nothing to
gain by refusing, I go ahead and agree to Gandhi's offer. It won't really have that much of an
effect at this point. On the other hand, I go ahead and sign Vicky and Hatty to Open Borders
agreements in a real attempt to cultivate relations with them. I can already trade with Vicky,
and I want to send my Hindu missionaries into Egypt soon to convert her to the true faith;
Medina is already at work on a Hindu missionary as I speak.
Argh, bad news strikes in 825BC as someone else completes the Oracle just 2 turns before I
do!
Not a total disaster, but the Oracle would have helped out a lot. A whole lot. Tons of Great
Person points that Mecca would have gotten for free there. Ah well, not the end of the world.
Mecca swaps to an Archer for defense, then will go back onto settler building. Fortunately, the
following turn the shields I had put into the Oracle get converted into 134 gold. A decent
consolation prize, although I would have rather had the wonder...
Now that I've built my first one, time to say a word about cottages:
Cottages are tile improvements that add commerce to a tile. Roads do NOT add commerce
anymore, they only increase movement of units. Initially, cottages only add one commerce to a
tile; in order to become more valuable, a city must "work" the tile with the cottage by selecting
it on the city screen. After 10 turns of being selected, a cottage turns into a hamlet (which adds
2 commerce to the tile), then eventually it can grow to a village and then a town. Towns add 4
commerce to a tile, and can get some extra effects from certain civics, so they are quite
powerful - but they take a long time to develop. I won't be building any cottages at Mecca
because it's a food-poor city and I'm gearing it towards production. Medina and Damascus
have enough food to support several cottages and become commerce powerhouses. You'll
see with time.
On the next turn, I produce a Hindu missionary and start moving him towards Egypt's borders,
temporarily leaving Damascus unguarded to ensure he gets there safely (again, don't try this in
MP kids!) While he's moving in that direction, a barb warrior wanders into my territory. This will
give me a good chance to show the combat odds that you can display in Civ4:
You can see these odds by holding down the right mouse button and moving onto an enemy
unit, or by using Alt plus the left mouse button (I think). Basically, this shows the combat
strength of both units. My chariot has a strength of 4, the barb warrior has a strength of 1.8 (he
loses a little strength because my units get a boost when fighting barbs on Noble). This does
NOT mean that the odds of me winning are 4 divided by 5.8 - what it means is that my unit is
strength 4 and the enemy unit is strength 1.8. My chariot has more than 2:1 odds to win each
round of combat, and the chariot will do more than twice as much damage when it hits
compared to when the warrior hits. The odds of me winning are more like 98% than 68%; if
you're behind by more than 2:1 in the combat odds, there's virtually no chance to win. As for
what actually takes place, my chariot is reduced to 1.9 strength, but not surprisingly wins the
battle.
On the same turn, my Hindu missionary has made his way to Thebes and gets ready to
convert it:
Success! Now there is another convert brought into the Hindu fold. With luck, Hatty will
spread the religion around herself and thus get me even more converts. Judging by her city on
the map, I can also see that she has the palace and a barracks in Thebes and nothing else.
What you see is what you get, in terms of the map.
Several turns go by without anything too important happening. Medina produced another
settler and sends him north to go grab the gold resource in that region. Mecca starts work on
the Pyramids, which I will have a very strong chance to get due to possessing stone (double
production speed again).
Things start happening again in 525BC when I discover Alphabet after a long research time.
This is the tech that enables tech trading (it also caused me to enter the Classical era), so let's
see what deals are possible. This will be a good chance to check out the Foreign Advisor
screen (F4 hotkey).
There are actually several different tabs on the Foreign Advisor screen, one showing the
relations matrix (which can hold as many as 17 civs), another for resources, and one for
current deals as well. But the one that I've found to be most useful is the Technology screen. It
shows very clearly what techs you possess, what techs the AI civs have, and whether they
would be willing to trade their techs or not (yes, there are some techs that they will simply
refuse to trade no matter what - like if they're building a wonder they won't trade you the tech
for it). You can click on each leader to see what the situation is vis-a-vis each one. Here,
Victoria has Meditation and Sailing that I lack, both of which she would be willing to trade,
while I am up Polytheism, Alphabet, and Animal Husbandry on her. The tech I'm most
interested in getting is Monarchy from Mansa Musa, so let's dial him up and see if a deal is
possible.
I work him up to this deal, which he accepts. Notice that by mousing over the techs you can
see exactly how expensive they are (as I'm doing with Monarchy) and thus avoid getting ripped
off by the AI. I still had to pay him more than he gave me, but it was a good trade for both of
us. Monarchy and Alphabet are about the same cost in beakers. Now I can hook up my wines
next to Medina! (Monarchy enables wineries.) Also note that it's possible to get the AIs to
declare war on other AIs without going to war yourself, although expect to pay an arm and a
leg to get them to do that. And because Mansa Musa has good relations with Gandhi, he
simply won't fight India no matter what I say. That's why that option is redded out.
Because Vicky is backwards technologically, I cut her a deal to pick up Sailing and Meditation.
That also improves her relations with me. So while tech trading is still possible in Civ4, the
focus is much more on self-research and exchanging techs - rather than running 0% science
the whole game and buying everything from the AI. Those days are long gone. You can still
pay money for techs, but it's a lot more expensive to buy techs than research them. A lot more.
Not to mention you can't even pay for things using gold in diplomacy until researching
Currency, while is 1/3 of the way through the tech tree!
On the following turn I get my first Great Person, a Great Prophet in Mecca:
It should be no mystery where this guy came from, as Stonehenge got me the Great Person
points to produce him (as I explained earlier). Now the question is, what do I use him for? I
have several different options; I can use him to discover a tech (Theology in this case), I can
save him for a golden age (I would need another non-Prophet Great Person for that though), or
I can merge him into a city as a "super-specialist", which is often a good option too. However,
in this case I'm going to use my Great Prophet to create the Hindu shrine in Mecca. This will
grant me 1 gold/turn for every city in the world with Hinduism in it. If I play my cards right, it will
let me run 100% science for basically the whole game! Let's take a look at what happens.
As of now, I'm only getting 5 gold/turn from the shrine, so the effects are not too dramatic. It
was enough to bump me up from 90% science back to 100% though. Also note that Mecca is
now getting 6 Great Person points each turn instead of 4; it's getting 2 from Stonehenge and 1
from the Hindu shrine, then +100% because Saladin is Philosophical. I'll have to come back to
this city again later after Hinduism has spread a bit further to show what a big difference shrine
income can make.
Things are looking good as of 500BC. Continued on the next page...
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Three
Between turns, Gandhi comes calling and "demands" Monarchy.
Demands in Civ4 work basically the same way that they did in previous Civ games, except that
occasionally your allies will come asking for help, and you'll irritate them if you don't help them
out. Gandhi in this case is definitely NOT a friend of mine (see the relations on the left side)
and so I tell him where he can shove off. He grumbles a bit but does nothing. Our relations will
drop a little bit further, so we may have to fight the Indians a little bit later on.
Meanwhile, I moved the chariot in Damascus out of the city to attack a barb unit and now the
city has gone into unhappiness! Let me show you what that looks like and what it means:
What's going on here? Look at the happiness level that I have circled at the top of the city
screen. In all previous city shots, the number of happy people (on the left) has been higher
than the number of unhappy people (on the right). Whenever that's the case, or when the two
numbers are equal, nothing happens. But when you have an excess of unhappy faces (as is
the case here), the excess unhappy people become angry citizens. You can see I have one of
them here. These angry citizens eat food but contribute nothing to the city; they're basically
useless mouths. In order to put that angry person to work, I need to get some additional
happiness for Damascus. Thus, there is a limit to how far you can grow your cities before
unhappiness kicks in. For this particular situation, I can simply move my chariot back into the
city and that will remove some of the unhappiness (you can see what the reasons for
unhappiness are too). -2 happiness from lacking a military unit in the city and -6 simply from
population (because the city is size 6). Since this city has so much food - more than it can
support with happiness - I'll be creating some specialists here soon to use the excess
population. You'll see in a little bit.
Also note that I circled the maintenance cost of this city in yellow. Remember how I said that
cities cost maintenance? There's the evidence right there. Damascus costs 2 gold each turn.
That's why I was losing money before; I'm still losing money, but countering it partly with my
Hindu shrine income.
Continuing on, Confucianism is founded in a distant land in 475BC. We were only 9 turns away
from getting it ourselves, despite not prioritizing Code of Laws much at all. Just who founded
the religion is a mystery for now... perhaps the last civ that's on another island somewhere (?)
The next turn, Gandhi proposes trading Mathematics for Monarchy. The two techs are about
equal in value, so I go ahead and do so. That may even cancel out the negative from refusing
his demand earlier. Meanwhile, I'm moving another Hindu missionary north to try and convert
Mansa Musa, although he has a long way to go to get there.
After a couple of quiet turns, Hatty comes asking for help:
So this is basically the same deal as Gandhi, Hatshepsut wants me to give her the tech
Monarchy for free. However, since my relations are good with Hatty (look at the +3 modifiers)
and I want to cultivate her as an ally, I decide to agree to the demand and give her the tech.
Now in past Civ games this would have been meaningless, since the AI civs never really
remembered who their friends were, but not so in Civ4. Hatty goes from Cautious to Pleased,
and now let's take a look at our new relations modifiers:
You can see that I gained +2 points with Hatty for helping her out, going to a total of +5. We
are now Pleased and it looks like I have a solid friend to count on in case trouble brews down
the road (the AIs will remember you if you help them out - and also if you don't!). Now this
being Noble, I could roll over everyone without too much trouble, but I'm demonstrating how
the system works and how diplomacy shakes out, which can be applied on all difficulty levels.
Also note that this is how the relations matrix looks. It can accomodate as many as 17 civs, so
don't think that it's limited to just a couple as Civ3 was.
In 325BC, thanks to some help from a forest chop (cutting forests adds shields, just like in
Civ3), Mecca completes the Pyramids:
I watch the wonder movie (glad these are back for Civ4) and get the screen you see above.
The Pyramids open up all of the Government civics (those are the ones in the first column) for
use, even ones that haven't been discovered yet. It's the Civ1 Pyramids, in other words. This
wonder also provides 2 Great Engineer points each turn, which is a pretty nice benefit in and of
itself (Great Engineers can rush wonders... yeah, so they're good to have). I'm going to hold off
on changing civics until I finish research on Code of Laws (2 turns) because there's another
civic there that I want to swap to. For now though... let's take a look at Mecca. I mean REALLY
take a look at the city up close.
There's Mecca seen from a closer angle. Everything that I've built in it gets represented right
on the main game map. I identified them all for easy reference. This is still pretty early in the
game, so I'll have to do this again a bit later to show you what some of the late game cities
with tons of stuff in them can look like. Oh - and you can zoom in even further if desired, and
rotate the camera to any angle. Just thought I should point that out.
Lots of stuff happening in 275BC. First of all, Victoria calls me up and cancels our Open
Borders deal. Why is she doing this? Aha, Victoria was the one to found Confucianism. As
soon as she switched to the religion, our relations dropped considerably. Now look at the
Foreign relations screen:
Our relations have dropped precipitously, and now Vicky is annoyed with me! Well, fortunately
for me she is the weakest civ on the planet. If relations don't improve, I'll just have to eliminate
her, sooner rather than later. Wouldn't even be that hard to do...
On the other hand, my missionary in the north brings another convert into the Hindu fold by
visiting Mansa Musa.
Our relations will go up further as time passes and Hinduism spreads through the Malinese
civilization. It never hurts to have another friend! Now, since I've managed to build the
Pyramids and also have just finished researching Code of Laws, time to take another look at
the Civics screen:
I'm swapping to Representation and Caste System, both of which are two of my favorite civics.
Representation is a Government civic usually only available much later in the game, which
grants +3 happy faces in your largest cities (which is good in and of itself), but more
importantly adds 3 research beakers to the output of specialists. Caste System allows you to
run unlimited scientist, merchant, and artist specialists in your cities provided you have the
food to do so. Therefore, the obvious question is, who are these specialists? What in the world
do they do? That's what I'm getting to now.
Specialists have always been around in the Civ games. They were the
entertainers/taxmen/scientists in the previous games; here in Civ4, there are 5 types of
specialists, plus the always-available Citizen specialist. In order to create a specialist, you pull
one of the tiles being worked by a city off the land. Let me demonstrate using the city of
Damascus as an example, since this city is going to use a lot of specialists:
This is Damascus functioning normally. Notice that it's size 8, so the city is working 8 tiles on
the city screen. It's also running a gigantic food surplus (+7 food/turn!) so the city will soon
grow itself into unhappiness and produce useless unhappy citizens. We don't want that.
Instead, what I want to do is turn some of the population of the city into specialists using the
buttons on the right side of the screen. I've been ignoring this so far, but now it's time to
explain them. From top to bottom, the little faces stand for Engineer specialist, Merchant,
Scientist, Artist, Priest, and Citizen specialist. Ordinarily, you need to build certain city
improvements to add specialists to a city. For example, you can't run a Priest specialist unless
you have a temple built in the city (makes sense, right?) Damascus can't use any Priest
specialists because it doesn't have a temple, as you can see. There are also limits on how
many specialists can be created; you need a temple for every Priest specialist you want to
create, to stick with the same example. (Citizen specialists are a bit different; you can always
create them, but they provide no Great Person points and only 1 shield, so it's rarely
worthwhile to make them.) The Caste System civic, however, allows for UNLIMITED
Merchants, Scientists, and Artists. That's why those three buttons are lit up here. The only
limitation is how much food you have. And Damascus has a lot of it.
Now watch how I customize the city:
Big difference! Now, at the cost of stripping Damascus of most of its production and food, I've
got a Great Person-generating factory! Each Artist specialist is generating 4 beakers, 4 culture,
and 3 Great Person points; ordinarily, Artists produce only 1 beaker, but remember I'm using
the Representation civic as well which adds +3 beakers to all specialists. One effect of this is
that Damascus' research output has skyrocketed up to 28 beakers/turn; it is now producing
more research than any other city in my civ! More importantly though, remember that each
Artist produces 3 Great Person points each turn. With 4 Artists, that means 12 points each turn
- BUT Saladin is a Philosophical civ, so that gets increased by +100% to 24 points/turn. Now
perhaps you can start to see some of the advantages of being Philosophical. As a result, in
just 8 turns I'll generate a Great Artist here in Damascus (remember, the Great Person type is
determined by the kind of specialist you run), and then we'll have some Culture Bomb fun. Just
you wait and see.
This is why I love the Caste System civic. It allows for an enormous amount of flexibility, and it
combines wonderfully with certain other civics (like Representation, and also Mercantilism) and
certain civ traits (especially Philosophical). No other civic gives you greater customization
potential. (And lest you think that Spiritual/Philosophical is the best trait combo, you should see
me play a game with a Financial civ where I go the cottage-spam route. Or take an Industrious
civ for a spin and go nuts on wonders. Or take a Creative civ and dominate someone culturally.
All of these leader traits can be played to an advantage - I'm just making the best use of what I
have here with Saladin.)
Next time: detonating a culture bomb and fighting the first war!
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Four
I spent the next couple turns building some archers for defense and prepping the location of
my culture bomb city. Researching Construction, which will open up two military units
(elephants and catapults), both of which I plan to use. While I'm waiting, one of my scouting
units comes across a barb city in the west. Take a look:
Yep, barbs can found cities in this game, and capture them too. No one has been able to
capture Zapotec yet, and with only one chariot here I won't be able to get it either. I'll keep my
chariot in there area though, in case I can swoop in and get it on a failed attempt from Gandhi.
The barb units that the city will produce can probably also promote my unit too.
Najran gets founded in 75BC as my culture bomb city. I have it start on walls, because I expect
it to be the target of English aggression, sooner rather than later. It's a total junk city, nothing
but ice and tundra... but with luck, it will let me flip some English cities. But before I can do
anything else there, Mansa Musa comes proposing a deal:
This is a very fair deal; both techs cost about the same amount, and ordinarily I would accept
it. However, Calendar is the tech that obsoletes Stonehenge, and since I have no resouces
that are connected by Calendar (silks, spices, etc.) there's no reason to accept it. I decline.
Just wanted to demonstrate again that the Civ4 AIs will come proposing trades, and they are
not the idiotic ones that we're used to from prior Civ games (most of the time, that is).
25BC: Discover Construction, most of my cities swap to building either elephants or catapults.
The only reason I can build elephants is because I have ivory - that was fortunate. Homer, a
Great Artist, is born in Damascus, and I start moving him towards Najran. Damascus is
reconfigured to produce a Great Merchant next (that will help keep me in the black and also so
I can show you what that particular Great Person does). Homer is in position in 25AD, and it's
time to demonstrate the infamous culture bomb.
Before:
After:
Boom.
Hastings is toast. It will flip to me in a matter of turns, probably less than 10. York is in deep
trouble too; I don't know if it will be able to hold out. Getting that city would be key, because
there's a source of copper there and I don't have any myself. I don't plan to leave anything to
chance though, because I'm building up an army of elephants + cats to go and destroy
England in the near future. The Great Artist has simply given me control of the battlefield.
Now, lest you say "OMG, this is so overpowered, how can this be in the game!" let me
reassure you that we spent an ENORMOUS amount of time testing the culture bomb and
making sure that it was in balance. The Great Work is useful for flipping new, culture-poor
cities like Hastings. You may also be able to flip weak cities like York which have little culture
built up. The culture bomb does NOT flip long-established, core cities. If you use it on a mature
border, it's unlikely to move much at all. So before anyone goes crying wolf about a broken
feature, try playing with it some and see for yourself. It IS very useful for flipping weak junk
cities though, as I'm doing here.
Sure enough, I get my first revolt in Hastings in 150AD. Now a revolt does not equal a flip; that
means that the city shuts down for a few turns due to rioting, and serves a warning that the city
may flip soon. A city can never flip on the first revolt, but has a good chance on the second
revolt, and I believe is guaranteed to flip on the third revolt. Since Hastings will never be able
to accumulate any culture, it's doomed and will flip shortly. Meanwhile, on the same turn, my
workers finish a road that connects me to Egypt, so time to see what we can trade:
Resource trades are usually done on a one-to-one basis in Civ4, although the AI is much less
willing to trade you strategic resources than health or happiness ones. Ordinarily, I would swap
my fishes for Egypt's corn, to both of our benefits. However, since I just stole a corn away from
England and am hooking it up at the moment, I don't need her corn and so I don't make a deal.
I'll have to come back to Hatty later when she hooks up her dyes. Also note how good our
relations are: up to +8, and still climbing. I have one strong friend!
On the next turn I discover Theology and found Christianity.
I really wasn't even trying to get this religion, as I was aiming for the Theocracy civic that
accompanies Theology, but this will give me a chance to demonstrate the role of a minority
religion. If I get another Great Prophet, I can spread Christianity around as well and make
money off of it. The fact that Damascus is the Christian Holy City (one of your cities gets
picked at random) only makes things that much better - that's the city I would have picked if I
had a choice! I send the free Christian missionary (the later religions come with 1 free
missionary, to help them get started) to Mecca and add Christianity to that city as well.
Now, let's look at another civic swap to Theocracy:
Theocracy is a civic that grants units built in cities with your state religion 2XP. Since barracks
grant your units 4XP (that's what they do), a unit built in a city with barracks plus Theocracy will
start with 6XP - enough for 2 promotions, since the first two promotions come at 2XP and 5XP.
Those 2XP are thus quite valuable, as it gets your units an extra promotion! As I'm preparing
to fight now, I'm going to make use of the extra promotion. Now of course it does also have a
drawback - no spreading of non-state religion allowed. (I waited a turn to swap civics so my
free Christian missionary could convert Mecca first.) That could also be viewed as a plus if you
don't want an AI religion spreading into your territory, but it's usually a negative. And I also lost
the benefits of running Organized Religion, so my cities no longer get the building boost and
they'll need Monasteries to build missionaries. But as far as a wartime civic goes, Theocracy is
a pretty good deal.
For example, look at one of the elephants I've just produced using the new civic:
Elephants look pretty good in 3D, don't they? The unit starts with 6XP just as I said, and so
I'll get to pick 2 promotions. I generally like going with Combat I and Combat II with the
elephants, although it's good to mix in some other promotions too, like Shock (+25% against
Melee units) and Medic I (+10% healing for all units on same tile). My cats are generally going
with Bombard (increased collateral damage) and Accuracy (reduce city defenses faster)
promotions.
Between turns, Mansa Musa comes up with a nice resource deal that I accept:
Fishes for spices, a good deal for both of us. It will also boost relations further; my fellow Hindu
buddy to the north looks like another long-term ally.
No surprise, a couple turns later Hastings flips to me:
It was wholly surrounded by my culture, so no surprise there. By the way, unlike in Civ3, units
are not destroyed in a culture flip... the English units in Hastings were teleported back to their
own borders. No more random disappearing of gigantic armies. Culture flips are also much
less random; anyone could see the Hastings flip coming a mile away, for example. Now that
the eastern part of my southern border has been secured, I can get this war started shortly.
Just need a couple more elephants...
On the following turn, I get a Great Engineer in Mecca!
Ha, got him due to having built the Pyramids. The odds of getting a Great Engineer in Mecca
were about 30%, with about 70% chance for a Great Prophet (I was going to get SOME kind of
Great Person, but most of my Great Person points had been Prophet ones). Now I can show
you what the main function of a Great Engineer is: they can finish the production of almost
anything in one turn (some late-game expensive wonders won't be completed fully, but a Great
Engineer will add a significant amount of shields). And in this situation, what I want to do is
rush a wonder!
The Parthenon will only further my Great Person addiction, as it increases Great Person points
by 50% in all cities. That means I now get +150% total, after factoring in the Philosophical
bonus. Uh oh. Also, as soon as I get those War Elephants done in Mecca and Medina, I'm
going to war with Victoria. Time to remove the Confucian scum from the face of the map!
One last little story to report before going to war: I got a free Great Artist for being the first to
discover the tech Music (as with the tech "Philosophy" in the Conquests version of Civ3,
discovering certain techs first confers certain rewards). I'm going to use him in Baghdad to
show the effects of using a culture bomb on a more mature border, and also hopefully to steal
iron from the Egyptians.
I marked the tiles gained from the culture bomb with a red dot. Notice that although I certainly
grabbed an extra line of tiles (and especially the iron!), Elephantine is not in any danger of
flipping. This is the more common result of using a Great Work; it's actually pretty tough to flip
cities in Civ4. Don't think that the culture bomb is completely out of balance, because we
worked pretty hard to make sure that it wasn't.
Continued on the next page...
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Four
Victoria has bothered us enough. I dial her up and tell her that we're tired of sharing the same
corner of the world. War is declared! Let's look at the battlefield:
I've got a nice little stack of elephants/cats in place, and Vicky has a mixture of spears, axes,
and archers on defense. The only dangerous unit there is the spear, since it gets +100%
against mounted units (like my elephants). Before I do any attacking of the city though, let's
swing the odds in my favor by bombarding the city with my cats to knock out that defensive
bonus:
I smack the city with my first cat to drop its defenses a bit, as shown above. Then, I send in my
next cat in on a suicide attack to do some collateral damage. Hopefully he'll live, but if he dies
that's OK too - just so long as he does some collateral damage to all the units. Watch:
Ooh, got lucky there and had my cat withdraw from combat (basically, he retreated before he
would have died). In addition to being able to bomb city defenses, cats and other Siege units in
Civ4 cause collateral damage - that is, damage to other units on the same tile as the one
you're attacking. They are the anti-"Stack of Doom" weapons, designed to prevent you from
grouping all of your units on the same tile. All my units are on the same tile here, true, so I'm
violating my own rule - but Vicky hasn't discovered Construction and doesn't have cats yet.
Look at the damage done here to the other units aside from the archer. Not too devastating,
but suicide 5 cats, and you can shred a stack to pieces. I send the other cat in for suicide
damage, and he does get killed, but now the defenders in York have been badly injured:
Now my elephants can clean up the defenders easily. As long as I keep building cats to
replace the ones that die, I should be able to tear through England easily (especially once I
control that copper and they can't build those nasty spears anymore!) My elephants have no
problems killing those weakened units, and York falls to me:
You get money from city captures in Civ4, which is a nice boost. I choose to keep York, and
move the units that still have movement left into the city to defend. Notice that the city is in
revolt for the next 3 turns; this basically means that I can't do anything with it whatsoever until
it comes out of revolt. This is more or less the way a typical capture of a city goes in Civ4.
Move up your units, bombard the city defenses, possibly send in collateral damage units, then
attack with the main force. Capturing cities is much harder in this game than in Civ3, but each
city is much more valuable too. Vicky only has 2 more cities, so I'll move on them once I heal
up and should be able to eliminate her fairly quickly.
By the way... lest you think cats are the uber unit in Civ4, keep in mind that horse units like
knights can shred them with ease. There's a counter for every unit in Civ4, so no more building
a gigantic stack of the best unit in each age (immortals/knights/cavs/etc.) and simply marching
them from city to city. You have to use a little more thought in this game.
In the middle of the war, Damascus generates a Great Merchant. Now his special ability is to
move to a foreign city and conduct a trade mission for a ton of gold, so I'll move him out to do
that and show you a picture when he gets there. Back on the war front, after resting for a few
turns, my units move out and target Vicky's southern city in the ice, a total piece of junk if I've
ever seen one:
That's the Confucian Holy City? (The little gold star on the religious icon means it's the holy
city.) It looks like it should be the capital of the penguin religion. I was going to raze it, but
now I'm not so sure I should do it. Ah well, might as well do it and make Confucianism a dead
religion. It will be interesting to see what negatives I get in terms of relations from razing a holy
city. I don't think I've ever done that before - but never have I seen such a poor holy city either.
Let's experiment, shall we?
Bah, it was a worthless icebound city. I don't care how holy it was! (Ooh, got a worker too -
nice!) Hmm, doesn't seem to be a huge penalty attached to razing a holy city; probably since
nobody has any Confucian cities except for Vicky (I'm sure that if Egypt were Confucian, Hatty
would be furious with me now). Victoria, of course, isn't exactly happy with me:
-12 relations, not bad. I've actually seen worse before, been at lower than -20 with
Montezuma in one game, but this is still a pretty fierce level of hate. Too bad Vicky won't be
around for more than a couple more turns...
London is quite well defended:
The only dangerous unit there though is the one spear. All of the others will fall quite easily to
my elephants and cats. I also turned on the resource pointer here to show you that London has
one resource I want: Marble. That will help construct some more wonders down the road, no
doubt about it. After a couple turns of bombardment to reduce the defenses, the city should fall
without too many problems. My cats do their job as usual, with three of them dying but
devastating the defenders in turn:
After that mauling, it's just mop-up work for my elephants.
Now if the English had researched longbows and were defending with them... well, it would
have been a lot more difficult, let me tell you. Keep in mind this is only Noble, roughly
equivalent to Regent in Civ3, so I'm easily cruising through this thing. The AI is no slouch on
the higher difficulties! Vicky had some truly terrible land too, so it was almost a mercy killing to
remove her.
Next time: post-war reconstruction of my economy, and the overseas age of exploration.
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Five
I won the short victorious war over the English quite easily, but the Civilization games are more
than just war simulations, so now I had the job of building up my economy and incorporating
the conquered territories into my Arabian Empire. Since most of the land I conquered was
made up of useless junk cities, this could prove to be a bit of a challenge.
First of all, while I've got plenty of money in the bank (over 500 gold now as a result of
conquering those cities), I'm now losing it hand over fist at 100% science. Where's it all going?
I open up the Financial Advisor screen (F2) for the first time to take a look at what's happening
with my money:
The Financial Advisor screen is extremely useful for explaining why it is that you're losing
money. Here, we can see that most of my costs are due to civic upkeep and city maintenance.
Also notice that you can get mouse-over help for each and every one of these numbers for
more info (as I've demonstrated with the maintenance costs in the picture). Now there's not all
that much I can do about my civic costs, other than swapping to some cheaper civics (here's
where being Organized makes a big difference!) but what I CAN do is to cut back on my city
maintenance costs by building some courthouses across Arabia. Once I get 6 courthouses
built, I'll be able to build a Forbidden Palace and cut maintenance costs that much more.
Courthouses are dialed up in many cities across my territory. I'll also be getting access to
markets/grocers/banks soon too, and those will increase the wealth coming in from my Hindu
shrine in Mecca.
While we're on the subject of wealth, my Great Merchant has made his way to Timbuktu and is
ready to conduct a Trade Mission there:
As the description says, the amount of money is determined by the size of the city and the
distance from your own palace. Conducting a Trade Mission here will grant me 1300 gold,
which is pretty good! I've seen even higher amounts on larger maps; on a Large map game on
Epic speed, I was able to get over 4000g once from a trade mission (the gold amount scales
by game speed too). Still, this is quite a nice boost and will let me run 100% research for ages
and ages, even if I don't do anything to fix my finances. I take the gold boost. Now if I can just
get a Scientist, I'll have managed to show you what every Great Person does in Civ4!
Several turns of inactivity follow, the only important items being the completion of a couple
wonders by the AI civs (they're no slackers even here on Noble!) At least two wonders were
rushed by the AI using Great Engineers; yes, they do know how to use the Great People and
will make use of them. No Civ3 Conquests broken armies here. 780AD sees the completion of
research on Civil Service, a critical tech that opens up several important things. First of all, it
allows for the construction of Macemen (if you also have the tech Machinery and either copper
or iron). Since I'm not intending to fight at the moment, that's not all that important. It also
allows workers to build farms NOT immediately next to fresh water though, and that's going to
be a big help for a lot of the cities in my relatively dry start here. Workers begin spreading
irrigation immediately.
Finally, it also opens up the Bureaucracy civic, one of my favorites. Since it's time for another
civic swap, let's look at the Civics screen again:
Bureaucracy increases the shield and commerce output of the capital city, which will be a big
help as I now launch back into wonder-building mode at Mecca. Also note that I'm swapping to
Pacifism in the religious column; this civic will increase my generation of great people by
ANOTHER 100%, for a total of +250% overall in cities with my state religion. These powers
come with a cost though, as Pacifism also causes you to pay extra money for all military units
(makes sense). But I can probably afford to run a small military for a while here, and I'm about
to set up a monster city for Great Person production at London shortly (you've got to see this).
Short term, I'll be paying more money, but in the long term I should come out ahead.
A couple turns later, Caesar presents me with a demand:
I can go two ways with this. I can aid him and try to cultivate Caesar as another ally, or I can
reject the demand and keep him from getting Music at the cost of potentially isolating the
Romans. Since Rome is a weak nation and far away from me, I choose to reject the demand.
Caesar is already mad at me, you can see, because I have been trading with Mansa Musa (his
enemy). Just remember this for the future if I get into a war with Rome - I had the chance to
get him on my side, BUT that would have necessitating irritating Mansa Musa. You can't be
friends with everyone in Civ4, but the friends you DO make will generally stick with you. The
system's not perfect, but it's a lot better than the previous Civ games.
And sure enough, just a few turns later, here comes the proof of our lowered relations: Caesar
cancels Open Borders with me.
No surprise there, it's a direct result of failing to help him. Don't let it be said that your decisions
have no effect on diplomacy!
While there's nothing much going on, let me show you what happens to cities when they
become unhealthy. I already pointed out the effects of unhappiness earlier, so here's the
unhealthy equivalent:
Basically, for every extra point of unhealthiness that exceeds health, the city requires an extra
point of food to support each turn. Since I have two more points of unheathiness than health
here, Medina requires two extra points of food each turn. (In this situation, it should have a +5
food/turn surplus, and instead only has a 3 food/turn surplus.) While it's almost never a good
idea to add extra population that exceeds the happiness limit, it's not a big deal to have
unhealthy cities - as long as you have enough food, that is. I routinely have many cities that go
into unhealthiness. You can also get mouseover help explaining where the unhealthiness
comes from (entirely from population here).
Oh, and since I've discovered the tech Currency, my cities now have two trade routes instead
of one. Medina is getting 8 commerce/turn from them, so it's already pretty significant. I can
increase that even more by building a harbor (increases income from trade routes), which I
intend to do soon.
I get another Great Merchant in Damascus a couple turns later; let me show you another
function of Great People, their ability to discover technologies:
All Great People can be used to discover technologies (or, for the late-game technologies,
knock out a lot of the beakers towards discovery). The technology discovered will be one that
relates in some way to the type of the Great Person; for example, Great Prophets will discover
religious techs while Great Scientists will discover ones related to technology. Here, my Great
Merchant has the option to get me Paper, which I take. This technology opens up Map
Trading, so I do a bit of that and get an updated view of the world.
With the discovery of Optics a few turns later, I can build caravels to go out and explore the
world's oceans:
Caravels are the first ships that can travel onto ocean tiles (galleys can't do it at all, unless they
are in your cultural borders. No more suicide galleys, which you have to admit were a pretty
gamey and unrealistic concept.) The Age of Sail is underway! Hopefully I'll find something
interesting before long; don't forget there's still one more civ out there in the fog to be found!
Also note that Caesar has swapped his state religion to Islam, which Hatty founded. Relations
have definitely cooled with the Romans.
I get another Great Person in Mecca (no surprise, with all the wonders in that city), and the
type? Another Great Merchant! Well, let me show you ANOTHER way you can use Great
People, by merging them into cities as "Super Specialists":
Selecting this option will merge the Great Person into the city, permanently providing a boost
on each turn of the game. What you get is a little different for each Great Person; the Great
Merchant adds 1 food and 6 gold, as you can see (the 3 beakers again comes from the
Representation civic that I'm running). Since Great Merchants actually add FOOD as super
specialists, they are one of the most useful ones to do this with. And that gold boost is
multiplicative with markets and banks too. So not a bad option here at all to create the super
specialist. (As for the wonder, Angkor Wat will make my Priest specialists more powerful by
adding an additional shield to their output; usually, Priest specialists provide 1 shield and 1
commerce, while after building this wonder they produce 2 shields and 1 commerce, making
them better than Engineer specialists!)
As the turns fly by without anything too crazy happening, the one significant thing is that
Mansa Musa has swapped to Buddhism. That's not what I want, so I start flooding him with
missionaries (takes a long while for them to get up there). Once I convert all his cities, he
should swap back again. And to be honest, I need the money from shrine income as well; I've
been losing money at 100% research for a long time now. I discover Education and enter the
Renaissance era without issue (cities looking cooler with the era change though).
With lots of turns going by in a hurry, let me show you how things stand in 1100AD:
Mostly building, not too much going on. These be quiet years in Arabia.
Continued on next page...
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Five
After many years of lonely searching, my caravels find something in the fog:
Looks like an unoccupied island; the only settlement I've seen is a barb one. I hope to be able
to build some colonies here a little bit down the road. With a Forbidden Palace, the mainteance
costs wouldn't even be that bad...
More exploration, as I find America on the next turn, just a little bit to my west.
FDR is the leader of the Americans. Their island is quite large, but naturally they're quite
backwards in technology. I trade for the world map, and see that FDR has no religion?! Time to
run some Hindu missionaries over there ASAP! America could become quite the
powerhouse down the road, once they get in contact with the rest of the world and begin
trading for some resources. I want to make sure that they're on the good guy team as proper
Hindu devotees.
Sure enough as I predicted a couple of turns ago, my efforts to convert Mansa Musa back to
Hinduism have proved successful. He's reached an almost sycophantic level of friendship with
me now:
All the way up to +15 with Mansa Musa, wow! I'm only at +8 with Hatty. This is about as
high a level as I've ever reached with an AI civ. There's no way Mansa Musa will EVER
declare war on me right now, not unless something happens to worsen our relations. Since
we're the two strongest civs on the planet, things are looking pretty good for us right now.
As for what I circled in the picture, the symbol circled in red indicated that I have Open Borders
with that civ. I have Open Borders with everyone except Caesar at the moment, who refuses to
trade with me due to religious differences. The yellow circle is around the symbol indicating
that trade is possible with this civ; I can trade with everyone except FDR, since I'm separated
from him by ocean tiles. Once I discover Astronomy, I'll be able to trade with him too. The other
symbols on the score display indicate - as you've probably figured out by now - what state
religion each civ is running.
My missionaries continue to pursue my goal of spreading Hinduism far and wide; one of them
has traveled all the way to America and converts Washington:
I get a Great Merchant for being the first civ to discover Economics, but while I'm moving him
across the continent to Timbuktu for another trade mission, I'll have to drop my science to 90%
temporarily. Once I get some banks up, I'll be in better financial shape (I'm really not in any
trouble at all, but was hoping I could keep running at 100% research). Discovering that tech
has also opened up a new civic, Free Market, which adds an extra trade route to each city. I
revolt to that, so let me show you what Mecca now looks like:
Our primitive city from the early game has grown into quite a metropolis now! As far as
identifying things go, take a look at the trade routes first of all. I now have three of them,
contributing a sizable 15 commerce each turn. I can get one more trade route, for four total,
when I discover the Corporation tech, which I'll do pretty soon. Trade routes = money and
research, so they are quite important. In the column below that, look at my shrine income. Up
to 19 gold every turn now, and still climbing! I should be able to get over 30 gold once I finish
converting all the American cities (though that will take a while).
As far as Great People go, I'm clearly about to generate one soon. But just what type that will
be is anyone's guess. This is the one result of building a lot of wonders in one city: there's no
guarantee what kind of Great Person you'll get. Still, usually better to do this and get more
Great People than worry overmuch about the type. Oh - and there's the Great Merchant I
merged into the city earlier. You can see what he's contributing to Mecca each turn too.
Since Timbuktu is a larger size now than before, I get more money from this trade mission.
With the additional 1700g, it's now easy to run 100% science again. On a side note, I've
certainly gotten a lot of Great Merchants this game... that's really quite unusual. I'm going to try
and generate a Great Scientist next, because I could use an Academy in Mecca.
By 1330AD, with the completion of a Bank and Grocer in Mecca, I'm back to making money at
100% science. My Hindu shrine is paying for the entire costs of my civ, all by itself!
It's all about the shrine income, baby! Also note that I've finally gotten around to founding
another coastal city to make use of some tiles that were otherwise going to waste (I should
have founded Kufa much earlier, but wasn't really thinking about it). The next goal will be to get
some colonies overseas on those islands I've discovered; with such a huge treasury and still
running in the black, I can clearly afford it, and if I can get a Forbidden Palace over there, I
wouldn't even have to pay that much in maintenance. That's the plan, anyway...
Meanwhile, my long development of the city of London has come to fruition. It's now designed
as my super Great Person city. Take a look:
Thanks to the ridiculous accumulation of seafood resources outside London (3 fish, 3 crabs), I
can run this city as a Great Person factory. Using Caste System, I'm now supporting eight
scientists! I could get that to 11 if I wanted to, but I want to preserve some production in the
city by having it work the mined hills tile and marble quarry. (My personal record for number of
specialists sustainable in one city was 15 merchants during a testing game.) Since the city also
gets +250% to Great Person points (Philosophical civ + Pacifism civic + Parthenon wonder),
I'm up to a crazy 84 GPPs each turn. That will get me some Great Scientists for some
Academies awful soon! Always fun to specialize cities like this; see what the land can do for
you and use it to your advantage.
Now that I have a fair amount of the globe scouted out, let's look at the globe view. The button
for it is in the bottom right corner of the main screen (it looks like a globe, shouldn't be too hard
to find). This is what it looks like:
Yep, so it's an actual globe that you can look at and view. Now of course this is just a graphical
effect (the maps are really still square and not spherical), but it does look pretty cool. You can
also look at a couple of different filters on the globe; I'm using the cultural one now, and you
can also view the globe by religion, look at resources, military units, etc. A fun piece of eye
candy.
A couple turns later, I finally generate my first Great Scientist:
The special ability of the Great Scientist is to create an Academy, a building that increases
science by 50% in the target city. It's very useful to put in your top science city, or even cities if
you get a number of Great Scientists. They are also quite useful to use for discovering techs
late in the game (or adding a lot of beakers towards techs). Mecca's research went up by
about 40 beakers from this Academy, and that benefit will continue to add more beakers over
time.
Shortly after getting that first Great Scientist, I pop another one as a result of running all those
scientists in London. Let me show you what I mean by having a Great Person knock out most
of the beakers towards a tech without discovering it entirely:
In this case, the Scientist only knocked two turns off of my research, so the effect was not that
dramatic. However, the later you get in the game, the less the long-term benfit of things like
merging a Great Person into a city or building an Academy matters, and the more useful the
immediate rewards of discovering a tech become. A long-term effect does no good when the
game is about to end! You can also save Great People to trigger a golden age, which is what
I'll try to do next with my Great People.
With the discovery of Scientific Method, I enter the Industrial Age and all my cities change their
look again. Also my workers now have the modern graphic to represent them (they look like
little factory workers now). I'm actually beginning to get close to the end of the game here, it's
about 2/3 of the way done! I'm still actually missing Gunpowder however, so I make a short pit
stop to pick that up. And yes, you can skip techs like this and be in the Industrial era without
Gunpowder.
Things have been too quiet lately. Now I don't particularly want to fight a war myself now... But
why don't I get the AIs to fight each other and mess themselves up? Let's see what it would
take to get Mansa Musa, who's pratically worshipping me, to fight with Gandhi:
It costs me an arm and a leg, but I'm way up in tech by now and can afford to give these techs
to Mansa Musa. I don't know exactly what will happen next, but fireworks of some kind are
bound to break out. I better start upgrading my defenses just in case some fighting breaks out
with Gandhi!
In fact, no sooner does one turn pass before Mansa Musa comes asking for my help in the war
against Gandhi:
Uh-oh! That's not exactly what I had in mind when I paid him to attack India! But if I refuse to
help out, my relations with Mansa Musa will drop precipitously. What to do, what to do...
Choices like this are what make Civ4 a fun game to play. Ultimately I decide we need to help
out our friends. Gandhi has never really been my ally, while Mansa Musa has reached a
ridiculously high level of relationship points with me. Let's join our Hindu allies and punish the
Buddhist heathens! I accept Mansa Musa's offer to declare war.
Things just got a lot more interesting!
Next time: War! The Hindu team versus the religious unbelievers.
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Six
So I find myself in a war that was I wasn't quite expecting, due to the fact that I feel compelled
to help out my allies. Well... going to have to play defensively, at least initially. First order of
business is to upgrade my sorry defenses and get some modern units in place. I'd also better
start researching towards even better military units. Rifling ordered up as the next tech; that
will give me a huge advantage over Gandhi's longbows. Going to be training a fair number of
units, so I swap civics back to Theocracy for the experience boost. Time to hunker down until I
get my hands on rifles.
No attacks come forth from Gandhi on the first few turns of the war; he must not have had any
offensive units himself to throw at me. (He would in fact send some units at me later,
fortunately after I had more than archers in my cities!) Once I discover Rifling, I begin
upgrading some of my old troops into rifles so that they can be useful again. Even the warrior
unit that I started the game with can now become useful again!
Remember this dude from way back at the beginning of the game? I used him as a scout for
ages then brought him back home for safekeeping. You don't just disband a Woodsman II unit
when you might be able to get good use out of it later! Now I can turn this warrior into a
Rifleman (at a pricey cost, ouch!) but it's a good use of that treasury that I've built up as a
result of all those Great Merchants. Archers across Arabia get outfitted with rifles and become
suddenly potent defenders.
Wow, talk about things heating up... Caesar up and declares war too!
I'm not exactly afraid of Caesar, the weakest civ on the map, but the jerk sucker-punched me
by attacking through Egyptian territory and stole one of my workers! Well, there will be
payback for this, if not immediately than someday. I'm going to be preoccupied with Gandhi,
but let's see what I can arrange with my allies:
Mansa Musa refuses to declare war on Caesar, but Hatty readily agrees to do so. Even better,
I don't even have to pay anything - I just ask her to do so as a friend, and she does! (Can
you imagine a Civ3 AI doing that? I swear, the diplomatic system in this game has been
improved soooo much.) Your friends really take care of you in this game, so long as you take
care of them too.
As for the unit that treacherously attacked my worker...
Brave guy, no doubt, but that was a suicide mission all the way. He didn't even scratch my
rifleman, heh (I had about 3:1 odds to win every round of combat, and my rifle would do three
times as much damage when he hit). I whack another Roman axe in my territory (also on a
one-way mission), and any threat from Rome has been removed. Not likely too much else will
get through Egypt to reach me...
On the Indian front, I've got a little stack bombarding Bombay, the closest city to my territory:
Bombay's defended pretty well, but my cats are bringing down the defenses nicely. Caesar
moved out his units on the following turn, making it easier to clean them up. (That was a pretty
weedy decision.) But Gandhi pulled a nice move and used his cat to do some collateral
damage to my stack!
Now unfortunately for Gandhi I have a Medic II elephant in place for just such an eventuality.
But as you can see, the AI is pretty good at playing by the same rules as the player - it will
even use cats for suicide damage! Now of course it's not as good as a human at fighting, and it
never will be, but the AI has made some serious strides from Civ3. Don't think that you can run
around with impunity using Conquests armies anymore.
After I manage to bombard the defenses of Bombay down to 0 and get a half dozen rifles
outside the city, it falls easily:
No losses, just took some time and planning. (Bombay is especially useful to have, since the
Versailles world wonder is in there. Versailles acts as another Forbidden Palace in reducing
maintenance costs, except that only one civ in the world can built it - or capture it, in this case.)
Of course - it was rifles against longbows too. As soon as I finish that research on Assembly
Line, I'll be able to upgrade those rifles to infantry and kick even more Indian behind. Nice.
Of course, the one problem is that Bombay's borders reset to zero, so that India's culture still
controls most of the battlefield. This is one reason why conquest tends to be difficult in Civ4,
the persistence of old borders when you capture/raze cities. What I can do, however, is to
move in a Great Artist that I've had sitting around and use him in Bombay to instantly end the
resistance and push out the cultural borders. The effect is not dramatic initially, since even the
culture bomb is not enough to displace the old, built-up Indian borders from Gandhi's
remaining cities. But as I capture more cities, the borders in Bombay will spread out and give
me control of the battlefield. I'll show you what I mean in a picture a little bit later.
Meanwhile, a fierce struggle has been raging around the Egyptian city of Heliopolis:
The Romans have been bombarding down the city defense with their cats (yes, the AI is smart
enough to do that too), and they may soon launch the general attack. I hope that Hatty will be
able to hold on to the city! Not too much I can do about it at the moment, of course.
Madras falls in 1580, and I decide to keep it since it's size 10 even though the location leaves
a lot to be desired (one thing the AI doesn't consider when founding cities is to put them on the
coast - you'll see a ton of AI cities foolishly placed one tile off the sea, like here). I upgrade my
rifles to infantry and begin driving for Delhi. Once I get Steel, I can also upgrade my cats to
cannon, and do even more damage when bombarding cities. Also notice that Bombay's
borders stretch far out to the south (from the culture bomb), but they do NOT make inroads
into the established Indian borders to the north. You can't just pop a Great Artist in a captured
city and expect to move an old border back a long way. The only place you can really get the
borders to move a lot is with new, culturally weak cities - like I did against England earlier.
Oh no, Hatty has lost a city! When I get a chance, I'll have to send some forces over and
help her. The one weakness of the Civ4 AI when it comes to war is capturing cities (it's the one
thing that they have a lot of trouble doing), but Soren made gigantic strides in improving that
part of the code over the last couple months. Here's an example of an AI civ doing a good job
and actually taking a city, which was a rarity for most of our testing. This was an eye opener for
me when I saw it, I was not expecting Caesar to get an Egyptian city! (Heliopolis is the Islamic
holy city, and Islam is Caesar's state religion right now. I wonder if that's why he went after that
city?! Probably just a coincidence though.)
On the following turn Hatty makes peace with Caesar. It looks like he'll be keeping Heliopolis,
at least for the short term... I'll see if I can capture the city and gift it back to Hatty at some
point. India is occupying the full attention of my civ at the moment, however... Gandhi comes
asking for peace, which I reject. What he doesn't realize is that this is a war to the end.
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Six
Delhi is placed under siege for several turns, using cats to blast its defenses down to zero
while my infantry gather outside it. In 1610AD, the city falls to my combined arms force:
Ha, took the Indian capital! Note that my old elephants are still being put to good use! That
Medic II elephant is greatly speeding up the rate at which my units heal, even if he doesn't do
much fighting himself. Never get rid of highly promoted units, since they retain their promotions
after being upgraded. That goes especially for Medic promotions; units with them can retain
their usefulness for ages. Also, this illustrates why it's always good to have at least one Medic
unit with any stack. The faster your units heal, the faster they get back into the field again.
I have more units outside Lahore but no cats/cannon at hand to bring down its defenses. What
to do? Well, I can use my frigates that I built to guard my coasts to bomb the city and bring its
defenses down from the sea!
Now as you can see, naval ships don't reduce the city defenses nearly as much as siege units
like cats and cannon do (each shot was only taking away 4%!) However, ships are much more
mobile than siege units, so using naval task forces to reduce the defenses of coastal cities is a
very strong strategy late in the game. I'm only up to Frigates at the moment; if I could get some
battleships and carriers, you'd see some real damage. Maybe in the future...
Although the effect was relatively minor, my frigates did reduce the defenses of Lahore from
40% to 20% over the course of 3 turns. With several infantry in range, time to send in the
troops.
Uh, whoops. Well, that will happen sometimes, otherwise the combat wouldn't be random. Now
before you say, OMG how can a longbow kill an infantry, consider that the longbow was
getting +20% from city defense, +25% from his natural city defense bonus, +25% for the city
being located on a hill, and +45% from being promoted to City Garrison II. The actual combat
odds were 24 for me versus 15 for Gandhi, so this wasn't outside the range of possibility (less
than 2:1 odds). Unusual, to be sure, but not impossible. That's why attacks are not won on
pieces of paper. I call off the attack for a turn and marshall some more forces outside Lahore.
MUCH better.
Now returning to a subject I mentioned earlier, one of the most useful things that Great Artists
can do is to expand the borders of cities captured during war. I had London (my Great Person
factory, remember) start working on a Great Artist for me shortly after the war began, and now
that I've captured Delhi I'm prepared to use him to expand my borders in the captured Indian
territory. Take a look at what this guy can do:
So ironically, the Great Artist - the peaceful cultural specialist - is remarkable useful for wartime
operations! (By the way, there is a "delay" of several turns before borders will expand fully,
which is why there is some open cultural space between Delhi and Gao. This was done to
prevent some abuses in MP.) Once again, the Great Artist has not made inroads into Indian
territory, but what it has done is to give me control over all the space I've already captured
(along with the earlier culture bomb in Bombay). Another thing that Great Artists do is to
instantly end resistance in a city in which they are used; thus, Delhi has already stopped
resisting and is ready to start rebuilding (I'm having it work on a granary). And all that culture
grants you a defensive bonus as well in the city. Yes, don't forget about Great Artists when it
comes to warfare!
Meanwhile, I'm starting to feel the effects of war weariness in my cities, so all the more reason
to get this war over with soon:
War weariness works basically the same way in Civ4 that it did in Civ3; it gradually builds up
as a result of fighting and losing units. There are certain buildings (jails) and civics (Police
State) that you can use to fight it, or you can use the luxury slider (which is also the culture
slider) to increase happiness levels. I should be good for now, but if the war goes on too much
longer I'll be in trouble.
The small town of Karachi falls in 1635AD. More importantly, the second Indian capital and
only remaining large city of Calcutta comes under attack at the same time. A couple turns later,
I take the city!
Ooh, lots of spoils of war there. Multiple workers (Gandhi must have fled to the west with his
workers, and now I'm starting to grab them in his last cities). My armed forces move rapidly on
to Kolhapur (whose defenses have been bombarded down to zero by my frigates) and I
capture the last Indian city on the western part of the continent:
Even more workers to grab there! Now Gandhi is down to a single city left - which Mansa Musa
is about to capture next turn. I helped him out by bombing down the city defenses, and taking
out the top defender. Take a look:
And that's it! Gandhi is gone for good. I sign peace with Caesar as well, and now the planet
has returned to peace. Minus one of its members, of course. One final look at the Foreign
Relations screen:
Getting a little bit emptier on that screen! Caesar is the only member of the non-Hindu block to
survive, mostly because he's been too far away for me to reach him. Everyone else is
incredibly happy with me, at Friendly relations (the highest you can get). Mansa Musa is at an
unbelievable +26 with me (!!!) which is by far the highest I've gotten with any AI civ, ever.
Things are looking good for the Hindu team.
Next time: pushing for victory. The conclusion of the Walkthrough!
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Seven
The great war with India was now over, and peace had returned to Arabia. With the game
beginning to approach its conclusion, it's about time for me to start thinking about victory
conditions and how I want to go about winning this game. Before getting to that point, however,
let me first show you a shot of the captured Indian empire:
Calcutta and Kolhapur are still in resistance, but the rest of the cities have come out of it and
are doing nicely. All those captured Indian workers are doing their best to fix up these new
cities the way that I want them (the automated AI workers are decent, but they have a
tendency to build too many cottages and not mine/farm enough. This makes the AI a good
competitor in terms of technology, but leaves them at a production disadvantage.) I also have
railroads to build all across Arabia, so there's plenty for my workers to do (too much, actually; I
need to pop out a couple more real quick).
The war weariness is gone, but now there's something new making my cities unhappy. What's
this?
I'm getting Emancipation unhappiness in my cities. This comes from other civs switching to the
Emancipation civic, which has the effect of making the people of any civ that is NOT running
Emancipation unhappy. It's an interesting little twist that is designed to mimic the fact that
nobody actually runs Slavery or Serfdom in the modern world. Or, if you choose to run those
civics, your people will be real unhappy. Since I'm out of warfare now, it's time for another civic
swap. Let's look at the civics screen one more time:
Here are the new civics that I'm running. The two that I changed were from Theocracy back to
Pacifism (because I'm no longer at war), and from Caste System to Emancipation. Now this
change does mean I have to give up the Caste System civic, which I've gotten so much use
out of, but Emancipation is drastically cheaper and it will get me out from under the
unhappiness penalty. As far as the cost issue, by going from two "Medium" upkeep civics to
two "None" ones, I've slashed my costs in half! That will help me research even faster, possibly
at 100% again (I'm at 90% right now). This civic move is one that makes my civ stronger.
Now, I've had an extra Great Prophet sitting around for a while now, so I move him into Delhi
and prepare to use him for something neat. In capturing Delhi from Gandhi, naturally the
Buddhist shrine was destroyed, but with my Great Prophet I can REBUILD the shrine and start
taking advantage of the shrine income from Gandhi having spread Buddhism around earlier in
the game!
This is one of my favorite things to do in Civ4, it's like STEALING someone else's religion!
My income jumps up drastically from building the Buddhist shrine too, up almost 20 gold per
turn. That's a lot! Gandhi did his job well earlier in the game, there are 14 Buddhist cities in the
world. And now I get to profit from it, hehe. To the victors go the spoils.
I discover Radio on the following turn and enter the Modern era. All my cities now have little
car sounds when I zoom in and look at them. Since I have a Great Scientist and a Great
Prophet sitting around, let me use them for a golden age and show you the final usage of
Great People:
It takes two Great People of different types for the first golden age (as stated in the picture),
then three for the second, then four, etc. But you can theoretically have an unlimited number of
golden ages, although it would take a heck of a lot of Great People after a while. The golden
age works basically the same way in Civ4 as it did in Civ3, the boosting production and
commerce of all tiles. I'm going to use my golden age here to help my cities build factories and
power plants, and grab some wonders in the cities that already have both. A good use for a
golden age. Also, note that golden ages only last 8 turns in this game (more turns on Epic,
fewer turns on Quick game speeds). Oh, and Medina looks awesome in the above picture.
Those Modern Age cities are something to see.
For those afraid that maintenance costs would rule out large empires, note that I have a very
sizable amount of territory and can still run 90% science at a profit, and 100% science at a
manageable deficit. Of course that's mostly because I've really worked hard to build up my
shrine income, but with good management you can easily run large empires in Civ4. It just
takes more thought and planning to do it.
Now that I'm getting closer to the end of the tech tree, it's time to think about victory conditions
and which one I want to pursue. Let's look at the Victory Conditions screen (F8), which shows
my progress towards each of the different goals:
Fortunately, I'm leading in the pursuit of every victory condition. My score is way ahead of
Mansa Musa, but I don't plan on waiting until 2050AD to win a time victory. Conquest would
involve killing everyone, including my allies, and I don't plan to do that. Ditto for Domination;
I've got the most population and territory, but I don't want to have to kill my friends in order to
get enough territory to go over the domination limit. As far as the peaceful conditions go, I'm
not really in good shape for the Cultural victory either (I don't think I'm going to get 3 cities over
50,000 culture).
That leaves the Spaceship and Diplomatic victories. Now the Spaceship victory is a little
different in Civ4 than in previous games (you have to build some more parts, and having the
right resources doubles the production speed of certain parts) but it's basically the same deal
as in Civ3. Since the Diplo victory has been completely reworked, however, and since my
relations with my buddies are SO good, I'm going to pursue that victory condition. Mecca will
start on the United Nations in a few turns, and can even use golden age production to build it.
Here's a late game view of Mecca, so you can see what a fully built up city can look like:
Mecca's getting over 120 shields/turn, pumping out 419 beakers every turn, and getting an
amazing 92 gold at 0% science! Granted, this is in a golden age, but still - it's all about the
shrine income! 36 cities have Hinduism in them. That's really, really high. I worked hard to
spread my religion in this game, and the rewards really paid off. Conquering a sizable part of
the continent has also left me with a ridiculous treasure trove of resources; I'm actually only
missing 2 happiness resources and 1 health resource. Aside from those, I have them all! You
can also see the list of wonders I built, and the huge trade route income pouring in from all
over the world. Don't forget to sign those Open Borders agreements with other civs for trade
route income!
And a zoomed-in shot of Mecca as it appears on the world map. You can actually see every
building and wonder that I built here if you look closely, although they are jumbled a bit
together. I'm impressed that Civ4 manages to display everything that you build on the main
map, although individual opinions as to how good this looks will of course vary. For my money,
it's a lot better than Civ3.
I build the United Nations in 1735AD. In Civ3, the diplomatic victory was a good idea, but it
was very poorly implemented. Every civ got one vote regardless of size or power; it would be
as if in the real world China received the same voting power as the Federated States of
Micronesia. You could also simply gift the AI civs a bunch of stuff on the last turn right before
the vote, get them to Gracious, and have them vote for you. Not a great system.
Voting in Civ4's UN is done by population, so the more people each civ has, the more votes
they get. (It's the same system as used in the Galactic Senate from Master of Orion, which
some readers may have played.) The first vote in the UN simply determines who gets to be the
Secretary General - that is, who gets to pick which diplomatic resolutions get put to a vote.
That's the first voting decision that I get to make in 1735AD:
Up against Roosevelt, I see. I'm a candidate because I built the UN (if you build the wonder,
you will always be a candidate for Secretary-General). FDR is the other candidate because
(aside from me), he has the highest population. Of course, since I've got by far the most
people in the world, I can actually vote myself Secretary-General regardless of what anyone
else does. I wonder who will win the election?
As expected, I win the election when the results come in on the next turn. Note that this does
NOT mean the game is over. All it means is that I get to pick which resolutions we all vote for
in the United Nations. One of those resolutions is the Diplomatic Victory vote, which I plan to
pursue, but please note that the civ that becomes the Secretary General does not
automatically win the game. You only need 40% of the vote to become Secretary General, but
you need 60% of the vote to win a Diplomatic victory - much harder to do!.
Most troubling from that result is that Hatty voted for FDR and not me. WTF?! Here I've
been showering her with gifts for ages, and she votes for him over me? I must say I don't
understand that. Something strange going on there. I'm at +14 with Hatty, so I don't know what
more she wants from me. With her vote, I'm a sure bet to win the Diplo Victory vote. Without
Hatty? Going to be tight, real tight. I need more population in the former Indian lands so I can
pull more votes! With the next election coming in 4 more turns, I will do everything in my power
to increase my population.
While I'm waiting, I do get one last Great Engineer, which I use to rush Rock N Roll in Mecca:
Rock N Roll, Broadway, and Hollywood are late-game wonders that provide the civ that builds
them with special new happiness resources: Hit Singles, Hit Musicals, and Hit Movies,
respectively. These resources can then be traded to other civs like any others, or held onto if
desired. Since some of the more "barbaric" happiness resources become obsolete in the late
game (whales, ivory, and furs all become obsolete when discovering certain techs), you'll often
need these modern happiness resources to replace them. It's an interesting game dynamic;
not everyone will agree with these modern wonders, but at least it's something a little different.
In 1755, I get the choice of what to vote on in the next UN elections:
You can see that there's a number of choices here to pick from. I'm going to go straight for the
victory and see if I can get it; there's a good chance that I'll fall a little short, but at least I'll
know how close I am. Some of the other options here are quite interesting too, like adding
additional trade routes and forcing civs to adopt certain civics. There will be other chances to
explore those, but for now let's see if I can win a diplomatic victory.
As expected, I come up a little bit short:
Hatty has decided to be a jerk and continue to vote for FDR over me. Well it's obvious what
must be done here. I just have to build some tanks, take on that "rogue nation" of the Romans,
and - by taking away some of the Roman population - gain enough votes to declare myself the
UN victor! Yes, uh, very peaceful indeed. And if I can get Egypt on my side versus Caesar,
she'll probably vote for me. Yes indeed, that sounds like a plan - if a fiendishly devious one.
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Seven
Since I don't have enough votes to win a UN victory, I pick the Single Currency resolution the
next time around to increase the number of trade routes in all cities. I figure this will benefit me
more than the AI civs, or at least make no difference. It passes overwhelmingly, of course:
Everyone seemed to like that one...
One thing Caesar's NOT going to like is my declaration of war against him, coming on the
following turn. The tanks roll out and Heliopolis falls easily:
Tanks start out naturally with the Blitz promotion, allowing them to attack multiple times on the
same turn. Against anything weaker than rifles, tanks simply mow the competition down
without breaking a sweat. Load them up with some City Raider promotions and go kick some
butt. I gave the city back to Hatty and enlisted her in the war against Caesar. We'll see if that's
enough to get her to vote for me; if not then I'll have to conquer all of Rome, which would
undoubtedly get me enough population for a diplo win. Hatty better vote for me next time, I've
been very good to her!
Antium is defended, um, err, wow...
It's medieval junk, but I wouldn't have moved my tank there if I knew Caesar had that much of
it! Between turns, my tank kills off over half a dozen medieval units before finally succumbing
to a Roman knight. Glorious struggle there, I lost my unit but he took out half the Roman
military. Meanwhile, Hatty...
We've got a problem here. This system is just not working the way it's supposed to. I've given
Hatty everything she's asked for throughout the game, we're sharing a religion and have done
so for millennia, we're fighting a mutual military struggle, I gifted her back one of her own cities,
and she's STILL voting for FDR, who has literally done JACK for her throughout the game?!
Something ain't right here. I'll have to point Soren in the direction of this issue so he can take a
look at it, and hopefully it will get cleared up eventually. For now,
Hatty's intrasigence means that Caesar will have to go through more suffering, as I capture his
people to gain more population for voting:
At least Hatty is willing to help me in the fight against Rome. Go figure, she's willing to hurl her
military at Caesar along with me, but not willing to vote for me in the UN, which would end the
need for military conflict in the first place! Heh, this almost mimics the chaos of the real-life
United Nations. I'm rolling around with Modern Armor, now that I've discovered Composites, so
any chance Caesar might have had is long since gone. (I've also built a gigantic rail network
inside Mali and Egypt in order to move my troops through their territories!)
In 1820 I get re-elected as Secretary General of the UN (after every 3 votes, a new election for
a Secretary General is held). That means that the next Victory election can be held in 1840, by
which time I should have plenty of votes from taking Roman cities to push me over the top.
Neapolis falls in 1830, Cumae and Ravenna in 1835. The Roman civilization is in tatters:
By the way, that's my City Raider III Modern Armor there; his combat strength would be 70
when attacking cities at full strength. Nothing short of Mechanized Infantry is going to stand up
to that, and Caesar - well, Caesar had longbows. Payback for sniping my worker earlier has
been achieved.
One last look at my Religious Advisor right before the game ends. You can open this up at any
point in time with F7; I just never did up to this point because I didn't need to change religions.
It's also helpful for showing you exactly what the effects of religion are in each of your cities.
Notice that Hinduism is the religion of almost half the world's population. That's extremely
unusual; it's very rare to have more than 30% following any one religion - after all, there are
seven of them! I really spready the religion around and made it the paramount one on the
planet. Buddhism has also done fairly well, thanks to the efforts of Gandhi. And look at what
Caesar did with Islam - it's solidly religion #3 in the world. That's extraordinarily rare; Islam is
founded so late that it plays virtually no role in almost every game. (It wasn't founded until
almost 1000AD in this game.) To be as high as 13% is not something you'll see very often.
And this was also a game where we had BudJewism (instead of the much more common
HinJewism), and the Confucian holy city be destroyed. What an odd game as far as how the
religions played out!
The vote comes in on the next turn, and as expected I am the winner!
I was within 40 votes of being able to vote myself the UN victory, heh. Still faster than
Domination though, and I wasn't quite to the Space condition either (though I did have a
couple parts finished on the ship). This wouldn't have dragged out so long if it hadn't been for
Hatty! At least Mansa Musa remained my buddy throughout the game. Oh, I also find it
hilarious seeing Caesar abstain with his 5 votes. Like that made a big difference!
I watch the replay, which has of course made it back for Civ4:
The replay keeps track of how many sessions you played, which will probably make the
admins for the Game of the Month happy. Apparently I played through 16 sessions on this one,
many of which were due to the fact that I was typing non-stop as I played this game. Time was
26 hours, 45 minutes. You can play much faster than that, but I tend to take my time and
manage things very closely. It's possible to play this game without too much
micromanagement, or a lot of it if that's what you like. I'm sure you can guess where I tend to
fall on that spectrum...
After the replay, I get a shot of the Demographics screen. You can actually access this at any
point in time while playing by hitting F9, I never bothered to take a picture and include it until
now (sorry!) Very useful in MP to see how you're doing compared to the other playes. (You can
pull down those tabs on the left and get a graph in several different categories, against all civs
or just one player.) Naturally I killed the AI in every major category, especially production and
GNP (commerce). Only thing I had a bad rank in was happiness, because of all the war
weariness from fighting Rome! Well, Caesar would have been eliminated in 3 or 4 more turns
anyway...
And on the "Dan Quayle" screen, I earned the rank of Augustus Caesar, not too bad. There
are better ranks, of course, but this one's pretty good. This is another feature that longtime
fans of the Civilization series will probably be glad to see return.
Finally, the game gets entered into the Hall of Fame. You can sort the scores by lots of
different categories, like leaders, difficulties, etc. By clicking on the button I have arrowed, you
can also watch a replay of the game, which is a very nice feature to have. Makes it a lot easier
than having to keep a savegame and then reload it just to watch the replay! First game I
actually have in the Hall of Fame (it was added relatively late in the testing process).
You can then get the option to quit to the desktop of keep playing. I'm done with this game, so
I exit Civ4 and finish up for the day. Go on to the next page for the conclusion of the
Walkthrough.
Civ4 Walthrough Conclusion Page 1 of 2
Civilization IV Walkthrough: Conclusion
Well, there you have it. I've gone through an entire game of Civ4 here for you, and if you've
read through all seven parts, you should have a pretty good idea of what a typical game will
look like. Of course, there's plenty to explore that I havent't covered here; many different
leaders to try, map types to explore, different game speeds, victory types - it's a big game! Not
to mention that Multi-Player is a whole other world unto itself, with plenty more to offer.
I've enjoyed the time I've already had working on Civilization IV immensely. While you'd think
that the game would be getting stale and boring by now, that's actually not true. I can't wait to
see how things are going to play out now that the community is starting to get its hands on the
game! I anticipate a great deal of good times ahead, as we continue to explore this game. I'm
no kind of impartial observer - far from it - but in my experience thus far, Civ4 is by far the best
game in the Civilization series. If you liked what you saw here, perhaps you'll pick up a copy
and join in the fun.
I also want to thank the members of the Civ community who stepped in and offered their help
with the Walkthrough. Within hours after my original site on Sirp's webhost crashed due to
excess bandwidth usage, I already had multiple offers of new web hosting to move the
Walkthrough to. Special thanks to corwin90 (Guy Bailey) who gave me permission to move my
website over to his hosting. You guys in the Civ community are the best.
One last thing to mention: if you are interested in getting a copy of Civ4, take a look at the
Official Strategy Guide as well. I know, I know - those things are usually worthless pieces of
garbage. But one of the Civ4 testers that I have a great deal of respect for co-authored that
guide, and packed it with all kinds of useful information. If you see it on the shelf, pick it up and
flip through it a bit. I promise it's worth at least a look.
Thanks for reading! Good luck and happy civving.
- Sullla
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This PDF of Sulla's Walkthrough can be found on RuggeR29's website:
http://www.civfour.com
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file://C:\sullla\civ4_walk_conc.html 11/2/2005

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Sulla Civ4 Walkthrough

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Civ4 Walthrough 1 Page 1 of 8

Created by Sulla (http://www.guybailey.com/sulla) Packaged and hosted by RuggeR29 (http://www.civfour.com)

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part One

In 3950BC, I can start out the history of my civ by founding Mecca:

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part One

Next: more exploration and early expansion of Arabia.

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Two

Continued on the next page...

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Two

Well, speak of the devil...

guarantees an early Great Prophet (which will prove quite useful).

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Three

Things are looking good as of 500BC. Continued on the next page...

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Three

Between turns, Gandhi comes calling and "demands" Monarchy.

population. You'll see in a little bit.

After a couple of quiet turns, Hatty comes asking for help:

and now let's take a look at our new relations modifiers:

Now watch how I customize the city:

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Four

On the next turn I discover Theology and found Christianity.

Now, let's look at another civic swap to Theocracy:

No surprise, a couple turns later Hastings flips to me:

On the following turn, I get a Great Engineer in Mecca!

Continued on the next page...

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Four

London is quite well defended:

After that mauling, it's just mop-up work for my elephants.

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Five

A couple turns later, Caesar presents me with a demand:

Continued on next page...

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Five

A couple turns later, I finally generate my first Great Scientist:

Things just got a lot more interesting!

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Six

As for the unit that treacherously attacked my worker...

Continued on next page...

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Six

Next time: pushing for victory. The conclusion of the Walkthrough!

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Seven

In 1755, I get the choice of what to vote on in the next UN elections:

As expected, I come up a little bit short:

Continued on next page...

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Seven

Everyone seemed to like that one...

Antium is defended, um, err, wow...

Civilization IV Walkthrough: Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Good luck and happy civving.

This PDF of Sulla's Walkthrough can be found on RuggeR29's website:

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