Episode: 4230
Title: HPR4230: Playing Civilization IV, Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4230/hpr4230.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:45:45

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This is Hacker Public Radio, episode 4,230, for Friday the 18th of October 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Civilization 4 Part 2.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Ahu Kha, and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we continue our look at the mechanics of this game.
Hello, this is Ahu Kha, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series on computer strategy games.
We are going to continue with our look at Civilization 4.
What I want to do first is to talk about built cues, because the interface for the build
system in Civ 4 is a little different.
When your city has finished building something, it could be units, buildings, wonders or whatever,
and there is nothing being worked on.
A pop-up screen will give you a chance to select the next build item.
Now that's handy, but what it won't do is let you set up a build cue to construct several
things in order.
To do this, you need to select Examine City at the top of this pop-up window, which opens
the city screen.
You can also open this at any time by double clicking the banner with the city name.
Even here, what you will see is small icons representing the things you can build.
And by clicking on these icons, you can set up a cue, which you can see on the bottom
left of the screen.
If you simply click an icon, it becomes the current build item at the top of the cue.
But if you shift click, you add items to the cue consecutively.
For example, I might want to set up a new city for which I need a settler.
But I want to have a military unit along to protect the settler.
So I could first click on, for example, a warrior, and then shift click on a settler.
And for good measure, shift click again for a worker that I can use to build a road to
the new city, and which will then develop the tiles.
Now another nice trick is to alt click on a unit.
That will tell a city to just keep producing that unit over and over until you stop it
by going into the city screen and replace it with something else.
This is a big time saver if you are embarking on a war and just want to keep the units coming.
And if you already have a cue in place and need to add something at the top, control
click will insert that at the top of the cue.
Now in the early game, it's fine to just select the next item from the pop-up window.
But as you get more cities and things get busier, it really becomes more efficient to use
the examined city option and populate your cue.
But then there are times you need to make a quick change, such as if another player declares
war on you and you need to switch to producing military units.
In that case, opening your domestic advisor screen using the icon that looks like a house
on the upper right will show each of your cities and what they are currently producing.
In addition, you can see how much production capability each city has, seen as the number
of hammers, so that you can go to the most productive cities and have them crank out the
emergency units.
Now the next topic we want to look at here is research and technology and how you advance
through the technology tree.
That's the other choice you're going to be faced with right away.
When you set up your first city, two things you got to decide what will the city produce
and what will you start researching.
And then it just continues through the game.
You can only research one technology at a time, so you know, decisions have to be taken.
You start by looking at your land.
If you see animals like sheep, pigs, or cows, animal husbandry is the tech that will
allow you to build pastures so you can exploit the resource and help your city grow.
Also animal husbandry is required to reveal horses on the map and you will want to build
a pasture for your horse resources so that you can build chariots and mounted military
units.
And speaking of military and early tech, most experienced players will get as soon as
they can is archery, which gives you a military advantage over any player that doesn't have it
yet.
Or if another player has it, you'll want to get it to preserve the balance of power.
Another important early tech is mining.
Many of the players start with a knowledge of mining, but if not, you'll have to research
it yourself.
And if you have bananas, dyes, incense, silk, spices, or sugar, you need to research the
calendar in order to build plantations to exploit the resource.
Why the calendar, you know, they needed to tie it to something, I guess.
It doesn't make a great deal of sense, but that's the way it is.
So in other words, you want to survey the area to decide what it is that you're going
to be most useful researching.
Then you need to consider your neighbors.
If they are nearby, there will be fighting, and you need to be prepared.
Horses for chariots and mounted units, of course, but to get swordsman, the first really
serious military unit, you have to research iron working.
Now in Civ4, you generally won't be attacked too early, but you do need to build up your
strength because weakness invites attacks.
And if you can only research one thing at a time, you can see how you'll be torn between
the choices.
But that's the whole point of the game is to force you to make choices and find a path
through all of this stuff.
Now research is the main way you get technologies in advance to the trade, but there is another
way, and that is to trade with other players.
The ability to trade technology advances is unlocked when you discover alphabet, which
is a fairly early tech, so you can get there pretty quickly.
And you should trade as often as you can to build your list of available technologies.
Yes, trading techs means the other guy is also building his list of techs, but the way
you look at it is if you don't trade for his tech, he'll just use it to trade with other
players and you'll be the one that gets left behind.
The best thing if you can pull it off is to obtain a tech either through researcher by
trade and immediately try to trade it to every other player for techs they have.
Now I would argue that even if your tech is more valuable, trading it still makes sense
for two reasons.
First if your valuable tech is trading multiple times, you are in essence trading it for three
to four other techs, even if they're not as valuable individually, collectively it's
a bargain for you.
Secondly, the way the tech tree works, a lesser tech you may have bypassed will probably
be a required prerequisite for some other tech you will soon want.
And getting it through trade saves you from having to invest your science resources to
research it yourself and waste those turns.
A good demonstration of why this works is that the programmers of the game program the
AI players to trade like crazy with each other.
And so should you.
Now, sometimes you know you want to get to a tech that is further up the tree and it
will have prerequisites.
You can go to your science advisor, now that is the icon of a beaker in the upper right.
Or if you have just finished a tech and need to choose, you can also select show me the
big picture either way you will have the tech tree laid out for your inspection.
Find the tech you are desiring, click on it, and the game will automatically research all
of the technologies needed for the one you want creating in essence a research queue.
Also, when on this screen you can mouse over the text and see what they open up for you.
Generally, techs can open up new units, new terrain improvements, new buildings, even
new wonders.
They can also open up new civics you can take advantage of.
So spending some time on the screen can pay off in guiding your research strategy.
Now, I want to talk for our last topic in this episode is about wonders and projects.
Now, every civ game has wonders in it.
And as that goes back to the very first and continues all the way through to the current
which, as I do this, is civ six.
We're all waiting for civ seven, but I don't know anything more than that.
So, wonders, you've got two kinds in civ four.
This is one of the interesting things, you know, there are changes from game to game.
So great wonders are wonders that can only be built once per game, which makes them the
same as wonders in every previous civ version.
But in civ four, you now have national wonders, which can be built once by each player.
So you will always have a chance to build these, subject to, of course, the prerequisites,
and can never be beaten to it by another player, the way the great wonders are.
Now one way these are distinguished is that great wonders are mainly available as soon
as you research a key tech.
So as soon as you research electricity, you can build Broadway, or as soon as you research
assembly line, you can build the Pentagon.
No wonders, on the other hand, can also require merely discovering a technology, but some
of them also tend to become available when your civilization reaches a certain level
of development.
For example, once you have researched drama and have built six theaters, you can now
build the globe theater.
But the key is that each player in the game can build their own globe theater, if they
wish, once they've met the requirements.
There are also two kinds of projects similar to the wonders.
World projects can only be done once per game, and there's two of them, the Internet and
the Manhattan Project.
So once they've been built by any one player, no one else can build them.
And with the effects of the Manhattan Project applying to every player as well, once the
Internet and Manhattan Project has been built, every player is now able to build nuclear
weapons and build bomb shelters.
Now I have frequently been in games right, deliberately avoid doing this project, even
though I met the requirements, just because I didn't want to deal with nukes from the
other players.
And there are national projects as well, SDI, which stands for Strategic Defense Initiative,
and the Apollo program.
Now the SDI project gives you a 75% chance of stopping nukes from other players.
Then the Apollo program is essential for a science victory, since this is the requirement
for building the spaceship parts you need to send your ship and claim victory.
So this is a hookah for hacker public radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you
to support free software.
Bye-bye!
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