[an error occurred while processing this directive] Preview: Day Five


A battle with more modern units(from one side at least)

Battle view when you attack from the sea. What is missing? My ship... ;)

Now I have some excuse for war....

Threats work some other times...

The Unit Manager screen also provides advice on where you need more units. On the bottom left my favorite choice for the radar map: no geographical or other info and just the borders

Bye bye Germans
Day 5. Spent most of my time playing instead of keeping notes :)

Map/Scenario Editing
Ralf asked about creating maps and scenarios. I've tried the editor a bit today. Cut/copy/paste works nicely. The major difference is that maps and scenarios are distinct. Maps are saved in and loaded from another folder. Also, when you save a scenario, you also set the scenario folder and the scenario name. All the appropriate files are created under /scenarios(where the official scenarios are as well). This means that the scenario you just saved is ready to be tested right away(in ctp1 you had to find the file, create the folders and the text files, move the file, etc etc)

Why He Hates You
I just noticed this today, you can see it in one of the screens I posted yesterday. The Intelligence Screen shows you a short analysis of the current feelings of the AI towards you. Stuff like that they are ungry cause you're tresspassing, or that they loved the last reception your diplomat held, etc etc. Very helpfull

Mayors Do Tiles
I took my mind of the bad experiences from civ2 and smac and enabled the Mayors on my cities today. They seem "trustworthy", although I'm sure some perfectionists wont be satisfied... I was impressed to find out that they also take care of the tile improvements in their city. Here's what the manual says about them

For those who do not wish to micromanage every city, especially when you have large numbers of cities in your empire, mayors offer welcome support. You can appoint a mayor in any city you choose. When you activate a mayor, it will automatically manage the fundamental aspects of your city for you. Your mayor will also construct basic tile improvements like roads, farms, mines, and fishing nets.

You can have your mayor focus on production, growth, offense, defense, science, gold, wonders, or happiness. When you give this order, your mayor will do whatever it can to maximize the city's output in that area. The mayor will not, however, throw caution to the wind and send your city into a tailspin of rioting and starvation. Based on the priority you choose, your mayor will add units, improvements, or wonders to the city’s queue. Your mayor may also choose to adjust the allocation of specialists within your city to fulfill your orders (see Specialists, on page 34).

You can still place tile improvements and adjust specialists while your mayor is active, but the mayor may reverse any changes you make. You can also continue to modify the build queue while your mayor is active. Mayors will only add items to a city’s queue and will not modify the order of items within the queue.

Control Panel Totally Gone
After enabling the mayors, the only thing I currently need the control panel for is checking the health of a unit which is on the same tile with other units. Although this can also be done with the Army Manager. Bottom line, I have the control panel most of the time hidden...

Threats Work!
Up until recently in my game I was just one of the 4-5 best civs, so nobody listened to my requests or even threats, especially since my units tend to ignore what a border line is :) Lately though, I've conquered too smaller civs, which does tell something I guess. As you can see from the screenshot, a threat to declare war worked towars the pirating Indians...

Advices In Unit Manager
One of the tabs on the Unit Manager(see screenshot) shows you a list of all the units and armies(groups), statistics for the different unit types and the support settings. But the most cool thing is that it gives you advice on where more units are needed

Flanking Units
This is not something I found in the game but something worth quoting from the interview of Dave White on IGN:

In normal combat the unit line up to each and attack the unit directly in front of them. If one army outnumbers the other then the extra units have to wait for an opening before they can join the battle. This ends up increasing the losses a strong army could suffer even when fighting a much smaller army. Flanking units have the ability to attack opponents next to them as well as those right in front of them. Once a Flanking unit, such as a Knight, has dispatched the enemy in front of him he can continue to attack the next enemy over allowing multiple Flanking units to gang up on individual enemies. We also made the Defensive units a bit different. Defensive units can survive battle a lot longer but can't necessarily deliver much in the way of damage. This makes them ideal to combine with Ranged units. The Defensive units can take the brunt of the attack allowing the Ranged units to rain death on the enemy. Without the Ranged support, Defensive units will eventually be overrun as their ability to inflict damage might not be that good


Comment this page

Return to (P)Reviews Index

[an error occurred while processing this directive]