Smirr posted:

Awesome, thanks! Gonna give it a spin now.

Smirr posted:

I played for 50 turns without running into any issues. However, and I realize that this isn't really your problem alone, the modpack isn't compatible with the enhanced user interface mod (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=512263) anymore whereas it was before. Here's the problem: the city screen is completely borked. In particular, you can't exit it or do anything in it. This is what it looks like:



Just to reiterate, with your modpack alone everything is fine.

Washout posted:

What are the best mods for making managing happiness a bit less onerous? The best thing I've read about it so far is that happiness seems like 70% of the game, you pretty much have to spend the most time and effort of your civ managing happiness and worrying about what religion or culture you are taking is almost totally dependant on which one will give you the most happiness to the exclusion of everything else.

So are there any mods that just tweak this a little bit? I don't want some kind of infinite happiness mod. I just don't want happiness to be the dominant reason for nearly every decision I make in my empire, including feeling like I'm being limited to choosing civs that give easy to use happiness buildings like egypt.

I realise that I could be going for a tall empire instead of a wide one and it would be a bit easier, but I'd still be primarily concerned with making sure I built every single happiness building possible in every city, it just seems too dominant of a requirement regardless of empire type.

Washout posted:

I realise that I could be going for a tall empire instead of a wide one and it would be a bit easier, but I'd still be primarily concerned with making sure I built every single happiness building possible in every city, it just seems too dominant of a requirement regardless of empire type.

The White Dragon posted:

The thing to remember is that if you're doing well (a reasonable number of cities with high population for the era), you're pretty much guaranteed to have happiness problems up until the Renaissance Era--you can trade luxury resources, but there's a hard happiness cap and unless you purposefully throttle your growth, your pop is gonna catch up to you FAST.

Your two best tools for combating unhappiness come in the Renaissance Era in the form of the Forbidden Palace, and in Ideologies since they fight it on a percentage level rather than giving you a lump sum of . Unhappiness in your empire is simply a fact of life for a while. The challenge is keeping it manageable until you can more or less eliminate it entirely--if it's the micromanagement aspect that you dislike, however, then I can relate, brother.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

It's been ages since I played CIV, but yeah, as I recall barbarian units just pop into existence ex nihilo. Barbarian cities will only show up if a spot of the map gets left unexplored for a significant length of time.

For combat, basically you make a Stack of Doom, and you try to put enough collateral damage (mostly siege units) into it that your enemy's units will all be fighting at minimal health (which depends on the unit doing the damage; catapults can't hurt units as much as artillery can). Throw your siege against their stack until it can't do any more damage, then throw your units against their weakened units and hope they run out before you do.

Your city population cap will largely be dictated by available food -- each pop unit takes 2 food to keep alive and the city will starve if food gets lost. On the other hand, you only need population to work tiles, so a small city with good tiles can still be worthwhile. Your science city/cities should have tons of food available so they can work as many villages as possible. Ditto your Great Person farm, which needs to support a lot of specialists.

Early game, you can go for an axeman rush. I think that something like 6-10 axemen is generally considered enough to beat down an early-game AI capital through brute force, and the capital's worth more than most wonders in terms of long-term value to your civilization.

Pvt.Scott posted:

The barbarians are angry. I spawned alone on the corner of some continent and they're keeping me penned in. I'm in the medieval era and I haven't found another civ, though I've been scouting far and wide. They're starting to roll in with spears and axes and poo poo.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Mm, you're expected to expand much more aggressively in Civ4 than in Civ5, because there's no cap on how many cities you can have. In turn that means building more units to protect your civilians. It's possible that you're alone on your continent (and thus a lack of expansion on your part leaves the barbarians way too much room to spawn in); in any event, not having found another civ yet sucks because you've had to hard-research every single tech instead of trading for them.

What difficulty are you on? And you didn't turn on Raging Barbarians, did you?

Washout posted:

What are the best mods for making managing happiness a bit less onerous? The best thing I've read about it so far is that happiness seems like 70% of the game, you pretty much have to spend the most time and effort of your civ managing happiness and worrying about what religion or culture you are taking is almost totally dependant on which one will give you the most happiness to the exclusion of everything else.

So are there any mods that just tweak this a little bit? I don't want some kind of infinite happiness mod. I just don't want happiness to be the dominant reason for nearly every decision I make in my empire, including feeling like I'm being limited to choosing civs that give easy to use happiness buildings like egypt.

I realise that I could be going for a tall empire instead of a wide one and it would be a bit easier, but I'd still be primarily concerned with making sure I built every single happiness building possible in every city, it just seems too dominant of a requirement regardless of empire type.

The White Dragon posted:

The thing to remember is that if you're doing well (a reasonable number of cities with high population for the era), you're pretty much guaranteed to have happiness problems up until the Renaissance Era--you can trade luxury resources, but there's a hard happiness cap and unless you purposefully throttle your growth, your pop is gonna catch up to you FAST.

Your two best tools for combating unhappiness come in the Renaissance Era in the form of the Forbidden Palace, and in Ideologies since they fight it on a percentage level rather than giving you a lump sum of . Unhappiness in your empire is simply a fact of life for a while. The challenge is keeping it manageable until you can more or less eliminate it entirely--if it's the micromanagement aspect that you dislike, however, then I can relate, brother.

Arnold of Soissons posted:

I've been playing Civ4 recently, too. Doomstacks or no, the systems are so much deeper and more fun to play with than 5.

Trade routes are just an automatic thing, right?

Arnold of Soissons posted:

I've been playing Civ4 recently, too. Doomstacks or no, the systems are so much deeper and more fun to play with than 5.

quote:

Trade routes are just an automatic thing, right?

Torrannor posted:

Yes, provided you have a connection (ocean/roads).

LogisticEarth posted:

and the tech tree make stupid stuff happen like having Lancers floating around while you have B-17's bombing enemy cities.

LogisticEarth posted:

Absolutely. The primary problem with Civ 4 was the Doomstack issue, which all previous civs had also had. I think a better solution was a stacking limit rather than a one-per-tile system. I'm not a huge fan of Civ 5's combat. It makes combined arms really clunky, and the tech tree make stupid stuff happen like having Lancers floating around while you have B-17's bombing enemy cities.

The tech tree, unchangeable social policies, and inherent biases against wide empires make Civ 5 a much more static game, where for 3 out of 4 victory types, the optimal solution is to just sit on your 4 cities and churn away the turns, occasionally fiddling with city states for bonus resources or World Congress votes.

KKKlean Energy posted:

That's part of the charm of Civ though. The alt-history silliness.

(not that I don't agree with everything else you said; I do)

LogisticEarth posted:

Absolutely. The primary problem with Civ 4 was the Doomstack issue, which all previous civs had also had. I think a better solution was a stacking limit rather than a one-per-tile system. I'm not a huge fan of Civ 5's combat. It makes combined arms really clunky, and the tech tree make stupid stuff happen like having Lancers floating around while you have B-17's bombing enemy cities.

Arnold of Soissons posted:

Was it 3 where you could group a handful of individual units into an single more powerful group? I remember it clearly and I was very surprised that it didn't come back in 5, especially with the real estate premium of one unit per hex

Arnold of Soissons posted:

Was it 3 where you could group a handful of individual units into an single more powerful group? I remember it clearly and I was very surprised that it didn't come back in 5, especially with the real estate premium of one unit per hex

e: I think it required a Great General but either way

Gort posted:

You could do it in Civilisation: Revolutions without a great general. The result was just that the 3-unit army became the standard unit and the lone unit was a temporary thing at the start of the game that got replaced quickly.

LogisticEarth posted:

^^^^ Civ 3 got a bad rap because it changed a LOT from Civ 2, and sort of has a bunch of proto-features that were generally better fleshed out in Civ 4. I'm kinda hoping that Civ 6, if it's ever made, will have a similar relationship to 5. In general Civ 4 is an all around replacement for 3, with the exception of two things. 1.) Resource colonies were a neat idea, and 2.) The leaders changing their outfits based on their era was great, and really should have been a feature in all subsequent iterations of the series.

Irony Be My Shield posted:

I'm not sure if I really like the idea of a "limited" doomstack, it sounds like it would be just like Civ 5 only you have to spend more time assembling each unit.

Gort posted:

I always thought the best way to do combat would be to combine the Civ 4 system and the Civ 5 system:

1. Have no limit to the number of units that can occupy a tile
2. When a tile is attacked, the best defender defends it, but the damage that unit suffers is taken by ALL units on the tile

For example, a spearman and an archer are sharing a tile. They get attacked by a horseman, so the spearman defends. He takes 25 damage from the horseman, and does 30 damage back to it. The archer he is sharing the tile with also takes 25 damage.

Result - no more issues with pathfinding during peacetime, and during wartime you have an incentive to spread your army out as much as possible, but if you must attack on a narrow front you can do it, but it leaves your armies vulnerable to a potentially deadly counterattack.

Arnold of Soissons posted:

When you compare Age of Wonders 3 or Endless Legend to Civ V I think it's clear very quickly that more-than-one per hex just makes more sense.

Gabriel Pope posted:

This is pretty much how the first few games worked, except combat was to the death. A lucky spearman could take out 100 tanks at once.

Tomn posted:

Is Age of Wonders 3 necessarily the best example to use here? Strategically it allows limited stacking, but in actual combat it's one unit per tile.

I don't have Endless Legend, incidentally, but I seem to recall reading that their combat also goes into a 1upt system as well. It sounds like both games are primarily an argument for adding a new tactical layer than anything about stacks vs 1upt.

Tomn posted:

Is Age of Wonders 3 necessarily the best example to use here? Strategically it allows limited stacking, but in actual combat it's one unit per tile.

I don't have Endless Legend, incidentally, but I seem to recall reading that their combat also goes into a 1upt system as well. It sounds like both games are primarily an argument for adding a new tactical layer than anything about stacks vs 1upt.

Pvt.Scott posted:

Historically accurate. Katana can cut through tanks, so if the spear was made from Hanzo steel it should work.

LogisticEarth posted: