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Locutus
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ACS CTP1/2 Manager & Civ4 Co-Manager
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Hengelo, The Netherlands
Nov 1999
time: 06:21
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Major update posted based on the interview with Barry Caudill:
- Barry Caudill is senior producer
- Resources that are being "worked" is also animated. "In addition, unit movement and combat will be much more interesting and exciting than ever before."
- Many aspects previously hidden in menus and screens will be visible on the main map
- A lot of tool tips and pop-ups will help the player run the game, only 'power users' will need to leave the main map and use menus and screens to manage their empire.
- There will be 18 new civs, not 19 (I guess one got cut?) and new ones include Incas and Mali.
- In Civilization 3, you were always guaranteed a minimum level of cultural expansion when you planted a new city. That is not the case in Civilization 4. You will have to develop your culture or risk being enveloped by a larger neighbor. This leads to the interesting possibility of creating a Luxembourg or Switzerland completely engulfed by another Civ's borders. We also tweaked Civilization 3's luxury slider and turned it into a culture slider. Raising the culture level makes people happier and helps produce more culture for your entire Civ.
- In Civilization 4, the AI will have to respect your borders or declare war but you will be able to negotiate Open Borders to allow travel.
- The [resource] system has been greatly expanded with the addition of many more resources, all of which are tradable. Some of the new resources, like marble, help to increase wonder production, some are food resources (these help with the overall health of your cities), and some, such as iron or copper, allow you to build certain types of units.
- We also changed the way bombardment units work in the game so they are now like a hybrid of previous games.
- Civics: For example, you may have a Theocratic Police State that also has Universal Suffrage or you may have a Pacifist Slave State with Hereditary Rule. The Civics are divided into five major areas - Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, and Religion - and each of those has 5 possible choices depending on what you have researched. In addition, AI leaders will have certain favorite Civics and they may ask you to either switch to theirs or stop using the one that offends them.
- The city that founds a religion becomes a holy city and you can build missionaries for the purpose of spreading religion to other cities faster.
- There are no epidemics in Civ4 (as there were in C3C, I think?)
- During early prototyping, it was determined that more is not always better. In order to streamline the process as much as possible and to highlight the new promotion system, we decided to actually reduce the number of units some. Still, there are some units that haven't been part of previous versions like Grenadiers and Horse Archers and War Elephants that are not specific to only one Civ.
- Some of the promotions include: jungle or forest bonuses, city defense, city raider, flanking, or just simple power bonuses.
- In Civilization 4, you get automatic trade routes after you establish a trade agreement with a particular leader. Also, rivers work like roads so two cities on the same river are connected even if no roads have been built.
- We will not be including any espionage options that are terrorism related. You will, however, create spy units and move them around as you did in previous versions of Civilization.
- In diplomacy, you will be able to broker peace between two warring Civs or ask a Civ to go to war with another even if you are not currently at war with that Civ.
- New victory type: Alliance victory, in which you can share the win with a partner.
- Voice artists will be hired for various parts of the game
- "we'll have over 45 spectacular movies in the game." -- so probably not 90, as that German magazine claimed
- "we have been playing MP games for a year and a half already."
- MP: Players will be able to compete in traditional turn-based or simultaneous move games either on a network or via the Internet. We will be using Gamespy for Internet matchmaking. Other options include Hot Seat, Play by Email, and a persistent turn server we call Pitboss.
- "Coop will work in a similar fashion to what you would expect from an RTS like Age of Kings or Warcraft 3. Players on the same team will share line of site, the benefits of wonders, research (they can even research the same thing to try to get it faster), unit trading, and share territory. All of these additions deliver a plethora of new strategic and tactical options to the players." NOTE: so that means the explanation we got earlier that co-op mode means several players can control the same Civ is probably NOT true.
- Civilization 4 will be the most moddable version of Civilization ever. Players can edit basic stats and attributes in XML files. On a higher level, much of the game will be exposed to Python so modders will be able to edit events and have more control over how the game works. On an even higher level, we are planning to provide an AI SDK to allow experienced programmers to dig very deep into customization.
- Internally, we have 38 on the team working directly on various aspects but we also have some work contracted out and several interns coming on board for the summer. We started working on the game about 2 years ago and expect to have it in stores for the holidays.
- From a design standpoint, all major systems are in and Soren Johnson (our lead designer/programmer) is spending the majority of his time working on the AI. We have a lot that's looking great already but we still have some art and programming to go before we will be ready for full test this summer.
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lockstep
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Vienna, Austria
Aug 2001
time: 06:21
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According to Barry Caudill, the French are also in. So there are 16 confirmed civilizations at the moment.
Last edited by lockstep on 18-05-2005 at 00:01
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Peter Triggs
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Gone Fishin, Canada
Jan 2000
time: 05:21
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quote:
Originally posted by Gramphos
I'd really like to know more about moding. That interview raised more questions than answers regarding moding at least. |
Me, too. These vague comments that keep coming out about an AI Software Development Kit are very intriguing. I wish they'd say more.
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vovan
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Woah, crazy. Good stuff, Locutus, and man, I'm getting excited about this already. 
EDIT: In the screenshots section, you mention the Pyramid image... I think it may be from a wonder-movie for the pyramids wonder?
EDIT2: I also only sort of glanced through this thread, so I may have missed something, but I was wondering... On this here screenie:
http://media.pc.ign.com/media/620/6...mg_2785570.html
Consider Madrid. Has there been any indication as to what those things above the city name mean? One can make some guesses as to +25%, as that appears in many places, but what about the icons to the left of that? The little buddha with a star maybe means it's a holy city, but the two orbs with stars elude me.
Last edited by vovan on 18-05-2005 at 05:34
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Locutus
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ACS CTP1/2 Manager & Civ4 Co-Manager
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Hengelo, The Netherlands
Nov 1999
time: 06:21
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quote:
Originally posted by vovan
Consider Madrid. Has there been any indication as to what those things above the city name mean? One can make some guesses as to +25%, as that appears in many places, but what about the icons to the left of that? The little buddha with a star maybe means it's a holy city, but the two orbs with stars elude me. |
The +25% is probably indeed a defense bonus, that's how I explained it in the opening posts. I forgot to mention the religion symbols, but that is indeed what they are, this was established months ago. Buddha = Buddhism, blue thingie = Hinduism, David star = presumably Judaism (you may have to enlarge the image to recognize the David star, but that's definitely what it is). What the stars are we can only speculate about, but it would indeed be very logical for them to represent a holy city.
I'll add this missing info to the opening posts.
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17-05-2005 23:23
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