Who'd be keen to have an ongoing Craccum forum game of Civ 4? (once those who want to get the game of course). I can get 2-3 outsiders to join us, so that's a few people already. We'd play for a few hours every night from 9ish to 12ish (for any who are on 56k and don't want to tie up their phone, such as myself right now :(, long story).

The nice thing is, the game handles people not being there/dropping very well, so if one or two people can't make it one night (too many people and we'll skip that night instead) the AI can handle them for a while and they can take over later. If someone gets disconnected while the game is in progress, either the AI can run it while they rejoin, or we can just wait for them (the game gives you a few options in this case).

Oh yeah, and if you have an ATI video card and you find that the game is crashing, I may be able to help you, I just recently fixed this problem, and it seems a lot of other people (though still a minority) have had the same problem.

After exams are finished, count me in.

That sounds awesome, im getting my new computer tomorrow. Ill talk to you this afternoon Oob

I'm up, although I'll probably be working nights lots and have yet to get myself a copy of Civ 4.

If anyone here besides me has the game already and some time on their hands, we should have a test run tonight just to work out any technical issues in advance.

I think in a month or two there'll be a 'persistant turn based multiplayer' option, which is tricky to explain, but will be the best option if/when we can use it, as we won't all have to play at the same time for it to work.

BTW, I'll probably only be able to get one outsider, the other two I was thinking of will still have their exams (they're in ~6th form).

*coughs* :ph43r:

Are you volunteering?

I've got it as well, but I dunno if I can be fucked playing a whole game at the moment.

I just want someone to test out multiplayer with (not have a game, just start a game and have a few turns to see how things go) at this point, then we'll have a full game when everyone's finished with exams and has had time to acquire the game.

When we do have a real game, we'll probably do a smaller map so that it runs well and doesn't take too long to finish. If that's successful we can have a larger game.

Also, we'll have to decide on the options for our game at some point, so we'll do a vote. See the post below this one (in a few minutes).

!!!LONG BORING POST AHEAD!!!

Ok vote for which options you want, don't bother voting for those options you don't care either way about. I haven't included every option, as some are no brainers (we don't want the 'always peace' option for instance) or unimportant. I'll give my choice and reasoning below each one.

Teams or free-for-all. This isn't an option in the game menu, but it's something we should decide beforehand. I was thinking we should split everyone into two or three teams, because if we play free-for-all people will form alliances anyway, so if we arrange it beforehand we can ensure that those teams will at least be fair.

If we have an odd amount of people then we could have an AI player make up the numbers, or someone could be on their own (in which case we would ban tech trading to make it fair on them).

Map type. I'm not sure what all of these mean, but if I know or have a good idea I say what that is below:

* Archipelago (like islands but larger)
* Balanced (decent mix of continents and islands I think)
* Continents (a few continents)
* Great plains (like the great plains in the US, kind of like Pangaea)
* Highlands
* Hub
* Ice age (lots of ice in the north and south, so you'll have to stick near the equator)
* Inland sea (one large continent with a huge sea in the middle)
* Islands (lots of tiny islands)
* Lakes (lots of lakes)
* Maze
* Mirror (uhh... a symmetrical map?)
* Oasis
* Pangaea (one huge continent)
* Ring
* Team battleground
* Terra (similar to earth, where everyone starts on one continent and there's a 'new world' you can get to by ship)
* Tilted axis
* Wheel

I choose archipelago, so that it will give noobs a chance as they'll be protected by the sea for a while. Archipelago gives you more land per island than 'islands'... I think.

Size, from smallest to largest: duel, tiny, small, standard, large, huge.

I choose small if we have 5 or less people, standard if more. Large and huge will bog the game down too much, even my (fairly good) computer finds it slow, I'm playing a large pangaea map atm.

Climate: temperate, tropical, arid, rocky, cold

I choose temperate (the default option).

Sealevel: low, medium, high. The higher this is, the more land you get.

I choose medium (the default option).

Era: ancient, classical, medieval, renaissance, industrial, modern future. I think this decides how much tech you get at the start.

I choose ancient (default), so that new people won't be swamped with options from the beginning, plus it makes it more fair on people who chooce races that have an ancient unit as their unique unit (such as Mali or Aztecs).

Speed: Epic, Normal, Quick. This governs how long it takes to build and research things.

I choose quick, so that the game won't take too long, and it gives us a good chance to get to modern tech if we start in the ancient era.

Options:

* No city razing, means you don't have the option of destroying a city when you capture it. I choose no, the default ('no no city razing', ie. you can raze cities) because I have a specific evil plot in mind that involves burning down cities :oob:

* No city flipping from culture. This means you can't take over cities by 'culture flipping' them, which is when you have a city with such high culture that its borders envelop another city and it eventually turns over to you. I choose no (ie. yes you can flip) because it's really a part of the game. It's not a big deal anyway, I've never lost a city to culture flipping in Civ 4, and have only flipped a few from the AI.

* City flipping after conquest. If this is off, it means a city can't flip back to its original owner after enough time when conquered. I choose yes (they can flip). I've never had this happen to me in single player anyway, so it's not a big problem if you play properly.

Hint: the first thing you should build in an occupied city is a theatre to get the culture back up, as when you take over a city it loses all its culture and culture producing buildings like in Civ 3.

* No barbarians. I choose yes, because if someone gets fucked by barbarians early on it could really unbalance the game.

* Aggressive AI (AI players are more aggressive). I choose no (the default), the other humans should be aggressive enough :).

* No technology trading. I choose no (ie. you can trade tech), or else one person will get ahead and pwn everyone.

Victory types (choose all the options you like):

* Time: whoever has the most points at 2050 AD (I think) wins.
* Conquest: last man standing
* Domination: first person to get 75% of the land area and 75% of the world population wins. Like conquest but you don't have to pick off every last crappy little city.
* Cultural: first person to get 3 (or 4?) cities of 50,000 culture wins.
* Space Race: first person to build a space ship wins.
* Diplomatic: useless in multiplayer, no one's going to vote for someone to win :P.

I choose conquest and domination, because peace sucks.

Turn timer (how much time you have per turn, from most time to least): snail, slow, medium, fast, blazing.

I choose slow, if you want a twitchy game then Civ isn't for you. It should be enough time so you don't feel rushed while at the same time keeping things at a reasonable pace.

Number of AI players. I choose none, playing against humans is kind of the point of multiplayer.

Difficulty (from easiest to hardest): Settler, Chieftan, Warlord, Noble (middle/average), Prince, Monarch, Emperor, Immortal, Deity.

I choose Noble, as I've heard that lower difficulties mean you can get a free settler from finding a 'goody hut', if someone did this early enough it would completely unbalance the game. The difficulty won't matter much anyway if we have no AI players (although it does affect a few other things), and Noble is still fairly easy.

I don't have much time as me and the gf are pushing for 60 on wow, but if you just want to test it out i'm sure i can find some time. However my versions not legit so I dunno if I can do it over the net. Might just be lan games for me.

Whose your favourite civ? So far i'm enjoying the romans as I can generally take over a neighbouring civ early on with praetorians. I'm also finding quite a difference if i micro manage as much as possible.

JPAR, are you running it off a CD image on your computer, or was it downloaded as a pre-installed game beforehand? Mine is using a CD image, and I think it would be fine for this.

But yeah, time is a real problem for me, as I work late nights relatively frequently.

You and your girlfriend play WoW together? That's rather impressive :P

The game doesn't have a CD key, so it doesn't matter that it's not legit. I may organise a LAN game of it after xmas, but atm we're planning an internet game. I won't really be pushing for this to happen until the patch is released, which should be soon, it was actually released about a day ago but they quickly pulled it when some bug was discovered.

Depends on the map for me. If it's archipelago (or any map where you would expect to have a lot of coastal cities) I use Qin Shi Huang/China for the financial ability (which is great when you have a lot of sea squares), otherwise I use Gandhi/Indians. Both of them have pretty good unique units, though ideally I would have Praetorians as my UU.

Ok, ive really got to try and put more time into learning how to play this damned game, the tutorial was utter crap

Yeah it's a pity there's no pdf manual for it. I could send you a manual for Civ 3, but there would be a lot of differences. Again, feel free to send any questions my way, perhaps with screenshots.

I'm playing off an image, sounds good.

Do you know how to make much money in the game? I can beat the computer, but i'll be damned if I can get much coin other than by taking cities. I know coastal cities are great for it, i build them up, but i've heard you can make like 40g a turn with science on 90% and i'm not sure how.

I played a character to 60 (max level) by myself, she played a char to 40 on that account also. Then she moved in and my friend stopped playing so I got his account and we both made new characters. The games gotten kinda boring, but playing together sitting next to each other the whole way is pretty fun. However it's rather sad when you get into yelling fights over the game, and it does happen.

Here are the ways I can think of right now:

* Create a specialist commerce city. Pick a city that generates the most money, even when the science rate is high (in the late game you should be running at approximately 90% science 10% tax), this would probably be a holy city of one or more religions. Put all your money generating buildings there, particularly Wall Street, emphasise commerce in the squares around it (cottages and such), and use merchant specialists.
* Build money generating buildings (markets, grocers, banks, etc)
* Build cottages. Once these becomes towns (which takes quite a while), they'll be generating a crapload of gold. In many cases you may find other improvements are preferable though, such as farms. Bear in mind they need to be worked (used) in order to improve (cottage --> hamlet --> village --> town).
* Pick a leader with the financial and/or organised ability. Washington is the only leader with both.
* Found a religion (or several) and spread it. Build that religions special building (with a great prophet) and the Spiral Miranet (if you can beat the other civs to it), both of which will give you +1 gold for every city with that religion.
* Don't have too many military units, as you may be paying a lot of support (the finance screen will tell you if this is the case).
* Pick appropriate civics. For instance, Pacifism will cost you a shitload if you have a large military.
* If you have too many cities, you will be paying a lot for maintenance, this depends on your civics I think. Quality over quantity. If you really do like having a lot of cities, pick a leader with the organised ability, which will alleviate the problem to some extent (although the common opinion on forums I have read is that financial is better for money than organised). Consider razing crappy cities when you capture them, rather than keeping them... I hardly ever do this, but I have a few times when a city I capture really sucks or overlaps a lot with other cities.
* Build courthouses in cities with high maintenance (I generally build them if the maintenance is 6 or more).
* If any other civs have a lot of money lying around, sell technology to them. Make sure that if you sell a tech to one civ, try to sell it to all the other civs before your client gets the chance. Obviously avoid selling techs which could cause you problems if an enemy gets them, such as gunpowder... attacking cities defended by musketmen can get sticky.
* Some techs give a free 'great merchant' to the first to discover them, which can make you a decent pile of cash.
* There are many ways in the game to stack positive effects together, and not just for money. The aforementioned commerce city is one example, but there are many, such as the financial ability (+1 gold for squares which produce at least 2 gold) + cottages (which generate 2 gold when they become hamlets), or the specialist military city: Heroic Epic (double production for military units for that city) + West Point (+4 experience for units built from that city).

What difficulty are you playing on now? I'm still on noble but am having a good game and think I will win reasonably. We need to organise a time to test out multiplayer sometime.

I haven't been playing it lately, but I've beaten it a few times on Prince. I started a game on Monarch but couldn't be bothered finishing it... I had a very bad start and shouldn't have played that one at all. With a good start I'd probably win on that difficulty, though it would be close.

The American revolution scenario is quite easy, I played as the yanks and amassed a huge army by cutting down forests for the free hammers (hammers = production units). They should change that scenario so that you don't get free hammers from deforestation, it's pretty lame and makes it a cakewalk.

For a fun game, crank up the difficulty and have a 'city states' game with 18 civs, tiny pangaea map. Most civs will only have one city to begin with, a few will have two. Such conditions would really amplify the strength of your Praetorians, if you can get some iron.

I've tested multiplayer with a friend of mine, we only had a few turns but it seemed to work very well.

:blink:

So are the people who said they were interested in this still interested? I have a few more outsiders now.

im still up for it

If you are keen, remember to get the patch (see the other Civ 4 thread).

yeah ive got the patch already

Ok given the amount of people we could have (up to four outsiders, plus myself, plus anyone on this forum who is interested), it's looking like it would be best to have the game as a LAN rather than over the net, as the latter would be a pain to organise with this many people. So for those here that are interested, tell me what days you would be available for the period 26th of December- 6th of January. Unfortunately (for this LAN at least), both christmas and new years eve fall on the weekend, and assuming no one wants to be at a LAN on either of those days, the LAN will be on weekdays, so some people may have to miss out, but as long as most people can make it then we'll be sweet. Besides, it's not the kind of game where you need heaps of people, in fact the performance will probably be better with less people as it means we can have a smaller map.

The LAN will be a two, possibly three day affair, as those of you who have been to LANs before know that the hassle of getting all your shit there means that it really has to be at least two days to be worthwhile. My parents won't be here so we'll have full use of the house, which probably means we'll have some sort of console on the upstairs TV, as there'll be breaks from the game and periods where we're waiting for people to arrive on any given day, also I have a foosball table for such times. You may be expected to chip in a few bucks for any game/console/controller rental costs, depending on what we get, as well as your share of any pizza.

There will be a non-Civ LAN as well which I'm planning for the 6th-8th of January (starting someone in the evening of the friday, going on till sunday afternoon), I'll post a thread for this in the Nothing Forum sometime in the next few days, which I'll link to on this forum when it's made.

I'll make a more formal version of this annoucement once the date is settled.

Man, I wonder how many LANs I've had at my house by now. It's gotta be more than ten.

I'd be up for a LAN on the 7th and more importantly the 8th of January, as long as I have that day off work. AOE 1, Counterstrike, Doom 1 (you can basically just download it off the net in 5 minutes on 56k) and Battlefield Vietnam/1942 are my calls.

Ban World Of Warcraft from it, that's my only rule for lans at my place.

For the non-Civ LAN, the games will be (in order of likelihood, from most likely to least):
* Warcraft 3 (a 'hero only' map/mod, not a regular map, so you may like it even if you normally don't like Warcraft 3. In fact it's probably the only game we all like, even the hardcore FPS people).
* Dawn of War Winter Assault
* UT2004 and/or some mod of it
* Quake (Quake I that is) deathmatch
* Star Wars: Jedi Academy (capture the flag and/or deathmatch)
* Star Wars: Battlefront (not to be confused with the RTS 'Battlegrounds')
* Battlefield 1942 (capture the flag rather than conquest)
* Alien VS Predator 2

Those are the standard games at least, which have the big advantage of already being set up on the computers of all the regulars, plus we know them. As for the games you mentioned (other than those already listed), Doom 1 is possible, AOE is highly unlikely, and Counterstrike is FORBIDDEN AND WILL NEVER BE PLAYED AT ONE OF MY LANS.

We will of course take your requests into account, but convenience and familiarity means that the games from previous LANs will be most favoured. Hell, if we had my way we'd play Halflife Team Fortress for too fucking long.

What the fuck, that's seriously softcocked about Counterstrike. I'd love to play TFC on LAN if we actually had others playing it, that game kicks serious arse.

Warcraft is the Ghey.

Doom 1 is frankly hilarious and the shit that happens in it is just so funny (like when you walk through shonkily-coded walls in-game).

Quake One and UT? Now you're talking!

Try the map we play (which is more like a mod) before you dis our warcraft game, I normally wouldn't like warcraft either.

We may be able to get a game of TFC cranking, it's happened before. Depends who comes I guess.

I want to try Pariah multiplayer :P

I've got that, so it's an option.

A shit option. That game is serious pooh.

So I've heard.

I cant make any of those dates. I work 6 day weeks

Then you miss out, unless you can request time off for it (Alex does this).

Nah id rather not miss out on the money, whats wrong with having an internet game?

Yeah I guess we can do both. However, for an internet game, I think we'll just go with myself, Alex, and anyone from the forum who wants in (just Steveo and Hauser I think). I could rummage up more people but it's probably easier just to have the four of us, since you have to be able to get everyone into the game at the same time.

Hauser: status report. Do you have the game and the patch?

Also, what times/days would be good for you guys to play on the net? I'm still on a fucking modem at the moment (will hopefully have this sorted before christmas), so I'm thinking anytime after 9.30pm.

I have the game, not the patch, I'll endeavour to get it soon, but I'm pretty buggered for the next week or so, so we'll have to wait a little while. I should be able to play anytime after 9.30 too normally.

This thread lives!

Three things:

1) Here (less than 10 KB) is a handy file for getting rid of the intro movies, instructions are inside, but it basically entails replacing the intro movie files with duds. This will be handy for any multiplayer game we might have, see below.

2) The game is currently up to version 1.52, you can get the patch here (about 47 megs). I haven't tried the link myself, so just google the file name if the link sucks.

3) I talked a while back about how I was waiting for a certain kind of multiplayer option to become available... the beta version of this was recently released. The way it works is someone acts as server (I can do this, although if any of you already have a server going that would be better) and every x amount of hours (we can set what x is, probably 24 is a good number) the game running on the server takes a turn, so everyone takes a turn within that period. Here's an example which might make it more clear

a) I set up the server at midnight to take a turn every 24 hours
b) The game runs and a turn passes every 24 hours. Everyone logs in and takes a turn once a day, and over time the game gets completed.

Normally this would mean the game would take a very long time to finish, but one feature is that if everyone is in the game at the same time then the game runs like a normal net game, instead of having to wait 24 hours between turns. So for this I would suggest that we set a certain time each day (say, after 8pm in case we have people on modems with one phone line) where players get on the server if they have time. This will be particularly good in the early game where the turns are quite quick, so I hope to start the game before the semester begins. We'll have simultaneous turns on, so you won't have to wait for each person to finish their turn before you can have yours (although when you finish your turn you'll have to wait for everyone who takes longer than you, we can discuss turn timer options to stop people from taking fucking ages).

People have different schedules, social commitments, and so on, but I would expect that now and again we would by happy coincidence end up with everyone on the server at the same time, particularly during uni holidays and such. The best way would be for us all to contact each other on MSN around 8 oclock to see if everyones available for this (and of course any of us busy with other things need not bother, the others will take their absense as a no).

If someone doesn't take their turn in the alotted time, I think the game just presses 'end turn' for you, although it may possibly get the AI to take that turn instead (not sure, we'd have to see about that). So if you do expect you're going to miss a turn now and then, you'd probably want to make sure to queue up several buildings/orders for your cities/units, so that something gets done... the game supports this kind of thing pretty well. If you're going away for an extended period (say, overseas holiday) we'll see what we can do about having the AI take over for you for a while... or permanently if you decide to quit the game entirely. The whole point of the system is flexibility, and both the game itself as well as this multiplayer system are designed to be flexible.

I'm going to be testing this with a friend of mine at some point over the next few days, and while I'm doing that I'd like to see which of you are interested in this. Hopefully by now we've all had a chance to learn the game (perhaps with the help of the manual I posted earlier in GTFO) and since the game is now up to v1.52 I expect any serious bugs have been fixed. We would of course play on a reasonably small map so the game runs well and doesn't take ages to finish.

Sorry for the really long post.

Ok we've tested it over the net and it works. You may have to forward some ports though (if you're on ADSL), but we'll see if it works without doing that. I'll test it out with everyone who's keen individually, reply here or send me a PM if you want to give it a try and we'll arrange a time (or just message me on MSN: the_oob :at: hotmail.com).

Looking at you JPAR, Hauser, and Steveo, you guys still interested? I think there were one or two others here as well, plus I can get 2-3 people from outside the forum.