The Shrine

Civilization series isn't exactly known for great endgame balance, but Civ 5's units seems especially bad. I made some duel maps starting in future era because otherwise I'd never get to build these units, and it's not even clear to me what the heck they're thinking when they're designed.

1. Nukes - Cost about 50% more than a Stealth Bomber with no diplomatic repurcussions. Well you need Uranium but you get it back after you detonate it. Given that most modern era units cost about half of a nuke that means if you can take out two units it's worth using. I guess the next patch will add some diplomatic repurcussion but unless it's something like the entire world immediately wars on you, it's not going to be a significant deterrent. In particular it's not like having the guy you nuked hate you even more matters since he probably won't be alive for much longer (if he has less nukes than you). I guess it might matter if the other guy has more nukes than you, but then that begs the question why didn't he alread nuke you given that nukes are just pure win.

2. Stealth Bombers - As far as I can tell this unit is supposed to have a 90% evasion rate (says Evasion 100 but game caps at 90%), and this unit pretty much can never die because of the 90% evasion unless you did something crazy like attacking while it's at a strength of 2. What is the point of having air combat if you have a unit that CANNOT DIE? It isn't really that overpowered since they do take damage, but there is basically no way to get rid of these guys except Nukes. In fact, out of the 4 units in the game that should be intercepted, 3 of them have 100% evasion (Atomic Bomb, Nuke, and Stealth Bomber). And given that all units that can intercept can usually be seen this means even units that could be intercepted will probably never die, since you'll just stop attacking when the next interception can kill you. The Civipedia has an entire section on air combat but I don't think it's even tested, and I'm pretty sure most games never make it to the point of Stealth Bombers. It seems like air combat is just about building more air units than the other side and only use them when they're not in danger of dying, and I guess the only way to counter that is to nuke the other guy's basing but nukes are broken in another way. Whatever happened to Civ 2 where Bombers just stay outside after attack so you can actually, er, kill them? Stealth Bombers are still very hard to kill but at least it's possible.

As a sidenote, even though Stealth Bomber cannot be intercepted in any realistic way, they still use up the enemy's interception, so if you still have Bombers around, Stealth Bombers are better at using up enemy interception than a Jet Fighter which has a mission that is supposed to use up the enemy's interception!

3. Giant Death Robot - As far as I can tell, nothing besides a nuke or another GDR can kill this unit.

And units like Helicopter/Modern Armor just don't seem to have very much use espcially given Aluminum is somehow always a premium (I've gone through an entire game without finding Aluminum in any of my cities while conquring the entire world). You might as well just build Mechanized Infantry and Stealth Bomber the whole time (and GDRs when you can), assuming you don't just nuke the other guy to oblivion first. Combined arms is not only useless, it's probably detrimental to winning the game.

Civilization is a very good empire building game, but the combat engine seems to be stuck in the stone age. I didn't understand how people were beating Deity until I saw how bad the computer was at using units, but for some reason people think computer marching an army 5 times your size to its death means they must be the second coming of Sun Tzu. The guys who make Civilization should go play the first Daisenryaku for the Sega Genesis where the computer can easily come within 50% of the optimal gameplay if not better, which is why in that game the computer doesn't have a resource advantage at all. In fact, it has a resource penalty and force penalty on most maps if you play as the recommendated player because otherwise it'd be too hard for most people because it makes very few mistakes on combat, and Daisenryaku's system is a lot more numbers intensive compared to Civilization (attack versus 4 type of targets, 2 type of defense, accuracy, ammo) not to mention it ran on hardware that's probably 1/1000th the power of a modern PC.

Sometimes I wonder if Deity level computer gets these ridiculous bonuses because the AI is incredibly bad. Given that your frontline unit should be one with no obvious counter (mechanized infantry or GDRs), this actually makes the computer's task really easy since if there's no counter then it should just send as many of its highest attack value unit to attack the closest one. I mean we're not even talking about learning how to use a helicopter to take out a tank here. I'm sure the computer is more than capable of winning with say helicopter versus mechanized infantry by just sheer force and yet it somehow can't even do that!

I have never actually started a game in the future. I also have never really gone up against an enemy who uses nukes and stealth bombers either. So I can't really comment on how they use them.

The second last patch that they put out fixed the rapid expansion exploit, but now the game can be exploited even more effectively by making a heavy science strategy.

1. Build a Library and National College in City 1
2. Built 3 more cities and monuments in each, as well as the capital (4 cities with monuments).
3. Get the civic for a free 4 temples (one in each of the 4 cities)
4. Head for Universities
5. Build Universities in each city
6. Put specialists in all Universities (they allow for 2 scientists)
7. Focus on getting specialist friendly civics that halve food consumption, halve unhappiness, add production, etc...

By this point, even on the highest difficulties, only the top opponents will be able to keep up. I usually try to build up economy as well; and instead of building military, have 1 or 2 Milataristic City States as allies to provide free units.

Allie with as many maritime city states as possible, that will provide additional food to all cities and help boost the capital to sizes over 50 population.


So yeah, with people who know how to exploit the game, Emperor can be decisively won every time without difficulty.

Also, Diplomatic victory is broken; once someone gets United Nations, just Allie with all the city states and it's a done deal. I sometimes forget to turn this off and it forces me to ignore half the city states when my strategy usually involves getting most of them.

That said, I have played this game more than any other Civ since Civ 2 and it's spinoffs, but I haven't and will not play thus one nearly as much; I probably played Civ 2 once a week at least for years, this one I play once every month or two. But 3 and 4 were less.

The future era has every technology researched except the one for GDR plus two more for spaceship parts. You start with 4 mechanized infantry too and can build basically any unit in the game, though you still got to build Manhatten Project first for nukes of course. It's a good way to see units you'd otherwise never see let alone use in a semi-realistic environment (e.g. I can get GDRs on a game I stomped everyone but it'd be GDRs against Spearman so it wouldn't be too indicative of what's happening, though every unit compared to GDR might as well be a Spearman).

Due to the way the technology tree is more like 5 paths, you can also easily jump way ahead of your era (usually in military units) with a Great Scientist or two. Research Agreements are pretty broken too even when used like they're intended let alone when exploited (narrow your research path to 2 choices and research the one you don't want and this will force all RAs to go in the other path). It's pretty obvious that, if necessary, it's more beneficial to give a weak player the money they need to sign a RA with you since the cost in gold is in no way comparable to the benefit of a free tech, and even on Deity there are still computer players who are of no threat to you (either from geography or just beaten up by other comps).

I find the City-State interaction to be a joke because in the end it's just a matter of who has more money, and on higher difficulties the AI has an unbelievable amount of money compared to you, yet they somehow fail to bribe the city-states where there isn't even strat involved as they'll always join the side with more money. Alliance should only be possible if you fulfill one of the requests. The UN should be like the Orion Senate where voting is some function of power and you must choose between two candidates and abstain, and your vote will carry significant diplomatic repcurssions both positively and negative, though hit for abstain will be less than voting against the guy.

I don't think you can outresearch the computer on Deity even with a tech-flavored startup. I believe all the Deity level plays depend heavily on signing as many RAs as possible to make up for the technology disadvantage. Honestly I think most of the 'impossible' settings in western strategy games aren't even tested. If you try to play Deity with anything that resembles normal strategy (research breadth-first, expand normally, don't sign RAs with every possible person) you'll almost certainly just get clown-stomped given the AI's massive advantage. Even if you somehow survive you'll just die when the first dominant power gets nukes before you do, as there is no strategy to counter them at all. Rather than acknowledging the highest difficulty setting is really no winnable, people manage to find loopholes that basically turns Deity into a King or Prince level game and bypassed the computer's impossible advantages.

Of course the game is responsible for having these exploits, but just think about what would happen if you weren't allowed to exploit like that. You'd almost certainly lose every Deity level game no matter how good you are, and sure you can say 'but it says only for Godlike players' but what's the point of a difficulty setting where you already lost the game as soon as it started no matter how good you are barring some unfathomable luck?

Even on Civ 1 I recall beating the Emperor level usually involved Pyramid -> Democracy in the ancient era to keep up with the computer. Civ 2 you need to exploit Caravans to pool enough production to grab the key Wonders to stand a chance, though CIv 2 is probably the most reasonable of the 'Deity' as you'll still be behind the entire game, but not so far behind that you've no chance. It's pretty ridiculous to see the computer put together a spaceship in 5 turns, though at least you have 10 turns to prevent it from getting to Alpha Centauri after it's launched as opposed to just lose the moment it launches.

Another thing I noticed is that since computer sucks at actually killing any of your units for good, it's a matter of time before you get units that have like double attack, +75% in all terrain, heal continously, and whatever other promotions you might need. Also, since upgrading a unit keeps special promotions for that class of unit you end up with some really broken combos. For example Mustetman upgraded from Pikeman would counter Cavalry even though they're not supposed to because they still have +100% versus mounted units. This is not even an overpowered example but you basically eliminated an entire type of unit's viability in the midgame. It's basically like playing with a bunch of Orlandus once you get your unit up to a certain level, except Final Fantasy Tactics doesn't pretend it's a strategy game while Civ 5 does, and a lot of combat toward the end game looks a lot like Orlandu doing Lightning Stab and demolishing everything in the way with no possibility of losing.

It depends on how you attack. I sometimes get surprised when laying siege to a heavily defended city and lose a few units; usually it involves naval units as they can stack with ground units in port towns.

Landing on an upgrade ruin with a scout gives you an Archer that ignores terrain penalties - these units make for GREAT hunters when attempting to eliminate a badly beaten enemy on the retreat.

With the GDRs... In my last game, I was playing on the Huge Earth map with my starting point as the British Isles. I quickly colonized England, Ireland, and Iceland, and wanted to move into Europe and North Africa, but others were already there. Instead I bolted for North and South America which were unoccupied (I was playing a setting which had all player's start on the largest continent, that being Eurasia and Africa). When I got my GDRs in the UK, lets just say I did manage to easily get Europe and North Africa, and other players had already built it up for me =P

GDRs going up against all other future and modern units is a complete joke. It is essentially the same as what would occur if the United States went to war against the Empire of Solaris.

10 HP isn't exactly much especially since you're guaranteed to take one damage no matter how much the difference is. Some of the terrain have rather nasty defense penalties and it's not always easy to tell what's a bad terrain given that the terrain type sort of blends in with the background. It's probably not realistic to never lose any unit on the offense, but you can certainly get away with losing almost no units while defending assuming you didn't accidentally fortify in a -33% defense hex.

The bonuses modifier in this game is a bit too big. Fortify is 50% (after 2 turns) and 50% more strength is more like a 2 to 1 advantage. The GDR has about 100% more strength than the closest units (modern armor/stealth bomber) and it's practically indestructible. It's just too easy to pile up enough promotion and other modifiers to the point where your units are invinicible against equal era troops since computer doesn't do a good job at finishing off units.