Civ 5: Gods and Kings

[Don]

Expansion announced for Spring 2012: http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.ph ... -amp-Kings

This is apparently $30 which highlights just how bad the $5 for a single civilization DLC are, which you can pretty much get by just editing the game anyway. Most of the stuff sounds pretty cool and definitely worth checking out if you're into the series. I hope they fixed the issue where Hotseat with 10 players take like 2 minutes to end turn even though I'm controlling every player and wiped out almost all the City-States so there is clearly no AI doing anything after I hit end turn.

More in depth info here: http://pc.ign.com/articles/121/1218810p1.html

[Shrinweck]

Considering I put 200+ hours into the original, I guess it would be worth my money haha.

I liked religion in 4, so it's going to be interesting what spin they make on it this time.

[Don]

From the screenshots it looks similar to the policies but I guess your religion can spread to other guys too, and you get some benefit but so do they? I'd assume the guy who founded the religion gets the most benefit but the followers would still get pretty good stuff. Once a bonus to religion is picked no other religion can get that, so while the other guy could start his own religion, if your religion has all the good stuff it might be better for the other guy to follow your religion.

[Shrinweck]

In four, the city a religion was founded in could build a wonder (by a special priest or some such, not through normal building methods) that would give +1 gold/turn per city with your religion in it. This made it so that if you discovered all the religions and spread them to your allies and enemies they would basically make money for you. There was other stuff, but it made technology rushing viable since if you spread your own religion and then denied races finding their own, then you would be fantastically wealthy and have a ton of friends.

[Julius Seeker]

Religion was a very interesting part of Civ4, maybe the most interesting part (Since the franchises/corporations came in too late).

"Religion. That's right; quite possibly the most requested major addition to the game is coming in the Gods & Kings expansion. Using the new "Faith" resource, you'll be able to found your own religion and grow it from a simple Pantheon of the Gods to a world-spanning fully-customized religion."

But I think this sounds somewhat more fun.

I think the big issue right now with Combat is that there really is no good strategy the AI can come up with; It seems whenever the devs re-balance a unit, they end up making something way too powerful, last year it was Archers. There's also selling resources that is overpowered in the same way that chopping trees in Civ 4 was.

"New Scenarios. Three new scenarios will be coming in Civilization V: Gods & Kings. Experience the fall of Rome, explore the medieval era, and my personal favorite: a unique scenario in a Victorian science-fiction setting."

I am excited for these =)

"Victorian Science Fiction setting".... You mean Steam Punk? =P

[Don]

The problem is that units do too much damage to each other. If you look at say something like strenth X versus strength 1.5X, it usually ends up with like say a 6-3 in favor of the side with higher strenght. But if the lower strength guy is a ranged unit, that's still 30% of the enemy's HP so with enough range units you can pretty much kill anything before they get close.

Artillery is pretty much unbeatable once you can mass them since they got a range of 3 and indirect fire. The infantry unit (happened to be named infantry) of the era can't counter it because it'll die before getting in range. You need mechanized infantry with their move of 3 to make up for the range of 3. It says they're making HP values up to 100 so I'm guessing units will do relatively less damage to each other so you don't have an overwhelming advantage by spamming low damage range attacks.

[Julius Seeker]

I think ultimately, I would like to see a fusion of Civilization and Fire Emblem at some point. They're getting closer.

The goal was to have people use fewer units in civ 5; yet somehow I am seeing gigantic battles still; and due to non-stacked movement, battles are taking much longer than they did in civ 3 and 4 (still not the levels of some Civ 1 and 2 battles though). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but only if variety is involved - not 'send 17 archers and 2 horsemen to crush Persia.'

[Don]

It's hard to balance a game when you roll offense/defense into one stat like Civ does. For example it makes no sense why would Pikeman be good against Cavalry on offense (are they supposed to chase horse down with pikes?) but this is clearly true in any Civ game. In general the damage done, as a % of total HP, is too high for ranged units. Artilleries can usually do at least 3 damage against an equal era unit and they can often fire at least twice before the enemy gets into melee range even if completely unprotected.

Ranged units are probably supposed to be countered by mounted units except a lot of mounted units only have a move of 3 which is barely faster than the standard 2. Also again due to attack/defense rolled into one stat you can only defend but not easily counterattack with a ranged army + a few Pikeman. But right now all you need is a couple Pikeman to annihilate a mounted army, and even if you've an army of Longswordsman (hard to get with limited Iron) you can just run since you're the same speed until you get into some really good terrain to take advantage of the range.

If mounted units have a movement of 4 base that'd at least make mounted units are reasonable counter.

[Julius Seeker]

I agree, and also the idea that pikemen are always good against mounted units is not correct either. That should be an ability acquired by leveling up. I think the Civ guys were too inspired by the tactic used in Braveheart, and it just kind of stuck through the years.

A Phalanx or pikemen type units should be much more powerful than they are, against all units, not just Cavalry. They should be limited to 1 move per turn. This is how the phalanx was historically, just the powerhouse tanks of the early classical era.

Mounted units should have a high chance of withdrawing from battle if attacked by slow units like the Phalanx.

How to defeat the phalanx? Ranged weaponry, and this should be an upgrade for all sorts of units, Legions should be able to have an archery + javelin upgrades - they should make ancient tech level archers obsolete, but would be quite inferior to medieval level bowmen in terms of ranged weaponry.

When ranged units attack ground units, the ground units should be able to retaliate with their ranged weaponry (if they have it) to do some damage to the siege equipment (it won't be much, since ranged units already have extra defense against ranged weaponry, but it will be something, and much more realistic and gameplay balancing).

[Don]

Pikeman should be something like +50% defense against normal units, +100% versus mounted on defense, and no offense modifier. The point of these guys is that they move in a formation realtively slowly so they should not be able to pursue (which is in theory what happens when you initiate an attack) an enemy and still gain their power which is derived from a formation.

Right now the model works well enough at least with Horseman (which have a move of 4), but when you get to Knights, with their move of 3 what invariably happens is you attack a Crossbowman, maybe you kill it maybe not, and then next turn their Pikeman kills your Knight in one shot and Crossbowman are considerably cheaper than Knights in all ways, so it's a net loss. If the Pikeman can only gets the modifier on defense, it'd still protect your Crossbowman but you can't count on them instantly killing a Knight on attack.

From my understanding of mounted warfare, the reason you use pikes in formation is because without it, the guy on horse can just run you over with his horse. You put enough pikes in a formation so you can hopefully kill the horse before it ran over your guys, not because pikes do elevated damage against guys riding on horses. The fact that guys on horses usually don't use pikes even though Knights are basically the elite so they certainly can get whatever weapon they want suggests it's not exactly a great weapon.

Using in game values, it should be say Knights 18, Longswordsman 18 combat, Pikeman 10, +100% on defense versus mount, +50% defense versus other and none on offense. So Knight (O) versus Pikeman (D) is 18 versus 20, Longswordsman (O) versus Pikeman (D) is 18 versus 15, and Pikeman (O) is 10 versus 18 in both cases. I think that's pretty fair since horses/iron isn't exactly an easy to get resource in this game, and Pikeman are already cheaper.

I think Crossbowman's combat strength is too high. Their ranged strength is okay, but they can basically fight anything that doesn't require special resources head on until Musketman.

[Julius Seeker]

One thing that bothers me about civ 5 is the global happiness system... It makes no sense that the people of Bismark should be unhappy that Germany swiftly conquered a neighbouring civ... This was the opposite of how things actually went. The happiness of conquered states should be considered a separate issue from the rest of the Empire. Although, one thing civ 5 did well was have different levels of ownership... Unfortunately the whole vassal state system was removed - it would make sense for a defeated state to offer vassal-hood in exchange for their territories returned to them. When Bismark defeated his neighbours, he only took small territories, certainly no where near the amount of land his troops actually conquered.

[Don]

Happiness basically means your chance of winning is dependent on how many luxury happen to be near you, since everything is still driven by population in some way, at least in the early game. But since defense is extremely advantaged in this game, without it, it'd just be a mad dash to pump out more settlers.

In my hotseat games I find myself building a lot of Lancers because they're the only unit that have some chance to hit the weak units behind. You pretty much can't get past a line fortified by the equiavlent infantry unit with range units behind them. Knights/Cavalry are too slow unless the enemy cut down all his forest/swamp/jungle (which you should never do in this game).

[Julius Seeker]

This is why I think non-ranged units should be able to have a ranged sub-weapon upgrade.

I.E. Legions gain javelins. Otherwise, armies which are 60-75% ranged will always have an advantage in almost every era.

Also, cultural differences should really come into play: I.E. some sort of strong mounted archer for Germany, Russia, Mongolia, Vikings, and English; but not any of the other civs; and this should appear at the end of the classical era.... Speaking of which, none of the above tribes I mentioned should have a "classical era" so to speak, as they followed a different sort of timeline, they had an iron age instead.

[Don]

I think their plan to address that in the expansion is to increase HP and decrease the relative % of damage done. Right now if you look at an equal era range versus melee, if melee attack ranged it'll usually be like 10-2 or whatever, and ranged attack melee would be 3-0 or 4-0. That looks balanced until you realize it often takes two turns for the melee to get to the ranged if there's any rough terrain in the way. If units have 100 HP and the same ratio is preserved, you could have say melee do 25-5 and take 0-10 but now you'll be able to get into melee range with most of your HP intact to actually do damage.

[Julius Seeker]

[Don]

Hmmm I saw some formulas and it actually worked like what I thought, range minimum damage is about 2 for equal era units, and melee is 3. But this means 5 ranged attack can take out any equal era unit, and it doesn't really matter if the melee can take the ranged out in one hit (and you usually can't) because there's a lot of rough terrain in this game. But I'm guessing when they change the HP to 100, it's no longer going to be the case where units do an excessive amount of minimum damage. I mean you can fortified in a citadel and an equal unit era can still hit you for 2 damage most of the time, even though your strength is probably 3 times compared to the enemy's (more than an era ahead).

[Julius Seeker]

* No more buying out city states for the easy diplomatic victory, a new quest system is in place. Maybe they'll have "provide gold" quests.
* Linking espionage into city state loyalty is another great improvement (rigging elections, and it looks like bribery and such).

I really like the new religion system. In Civ 4 it was more or less just a way to determine alliances and get some gold bonuses; Civ 4 came out in a time period where stuff around religion still had to be very politically correct (as secular as possible) - which, unfortunately, REALLY limited the potential of this franchise and the overall genre.

I do, however, disagree with their stance that religion becomes less important as time goes forward towards the modern era as it was in earlier eras; this much isn't really true. Rather it was the opposite in the western world:

* While the spread of Islam in the 7th-9th centuries included many battles; many Christians were actually happier under the rule of Arabic Rashiduns and Ummayads than they were under the Christian Byzantines; largely because the Byzantines/Romans were fairly bad leaders by this point, they were warlike, and spent WAY too much money on things not productive to society - whereas the Caliphates improved trade, education, and general stability very rapidly. The conversion of Christianity to Islam in the region was actually a very gradual and slow conversion period lasting centuries; not a quick stomping out of religion. In fact, many Bishops throughout the Christian world (including England) still came from the Middle East and Egypt, as even under Islamic rule, this area was still largely the most successful center of Christianity.

* It was actually only after the Viking age, when Europe had become militarized and warlike, that there came to be a very large importance on what religion you were; this is when the Crusades and first inquisitions took place.

* The modern era is when what religion you were became really important. Inquisitions were rampant, executions were common for religious insubordination. During the 15th to 18th centuries, what religion you were was more important than at any other era in history. There were brutal clashes and bloody wars over not just religion vs religion, but also how you believed the same religion. This continues to this very day, especially in the Middle East.


Although, the new Espionage system is nice, but my one complaint is that it is a late era thing. The Romans and other older civilizations used espionage very effectively.

[Julius Seeker]

With the expansion of Archery, it still looks like Archer armies will dominate. Even on high difficulties currently, 4-5 archer units with range, logistics, indirect fire, will dominate just about any army thrown at them. This effectiveness can be carried further with crossbowmen which will chew up any medieval or Renaisance army just as long as a few horsemen are around to act as eyes. With the new archer units this should be able to be carried even further. It's not just army-army combat, upgraded archers/crossbowmen accompanied with simple horsemen can swiftly and effectively defeat the cities of more advanced civilizations in 2-5 turns without even taking a point of damage until the horseman moves in for the final blow.

On the bright side, it looks like naval combat could be more important than ever before in the series.

[Don]

You're not going to get units with indirect fire/logistics/etc en masse if the enemy isn't terribly bad at killing them, and since the Civ 5 AI is dumb there's not much point to discuss a combat system relative to that. In my hotseat games units rarely get past level 4 in experience unless you had a city-state to farm XP.

[Shrinweck]

Went ahead and gave them their money for this.. although at this point I'm much more interested in the Sins of a Solar Empire expansion coming out the week before.

[Julius Seeker]

Available for discount pre-order on Steam now.

[Don]

I preordered, but I didn't see it advertised on the strategy game section and had to search for it specifically.

[Shrinweck]

Just use the coming soon tab on the home page for stuff like this - there's usually so few games under the tab that anything is relatively easy to find if it's actually coming to Steam

[Don]

Yeah I found it but I'd think something like this should be advertised on the deals thing. I mean I see a lot lesser game show up on the top of the genre page telling me to preorder it. Then again maybe they figure they don't need the advertisement yet.

[Shrinweck]

Sweet the expansion got Steam Workshop support. That'll make modding as easy as Skyrim and Portal 2. I would have never gone searching for mods but it's hard not to at least look at whats popular and top rated once in a while in the Workshop.

[Don]

Civ 5 is pretty much a game asking for mods. It's got some serious balance issues to begin with and even if not, different people want different kind of things but you can't just ask everyone to become programmers to tweak the game for their style. For example a simple fix of changing unit HP from 10 to 20 makes the combat game very different (ranged dominates far less since their min damage no longer accounts for a huge amount of total damage), and there's certainly a lot of other interesting things you can do.

The only issue I have mod is that it can be more user friendly. It should be more like StarEdit where you can just change basic stuff like unit HP, cost, attack power, and so on instead of writing SQL update statements to do it. Sure if you want to add a new civilization you'd still have to do the work but if you just want your horseman to have 15 strength instead of 12, it shouldn't require a SQL update statement.

[Shrinweck]

I'm minimizing my game long enough to say this is pretty fun.

[Julius Seeker]

Haha! Yeah, I won't be able to play it until at least Saturday morning. At the bare minimum I want 2 hours.

[Shrinweck]

The religion and espionage both add layers of micromanagement that manage to be fun without being annoying, although I imagine if I didn't get lucky and convert 3 out of the 4 AIs in the game to my religion that I'd be having a harder time. Going to have to up the difficulty once I finish this round.

[Don]

Going with religious stuff seems to take a pretty big commitment since most of the stuff that amasses faith aren't useful for anything else for a long while.

The game feels roughly like what it'd be playing regular Civ 5 with unit HP tuned to 25, though the general rebalancing of unit strength helped some too.

[Julius Seeker]

A co-worker of mine has played the game, and says that he didn't feel the changes were as large as he liked. He wanted things like Vassal states to be brought back in.

I still have no experience in Civ 5 with the new system yet; in Civ 4 though, dedicating yourself to religious expansion took a lot of resources; and later on you would probably transfer that dedication over to Corporations (another thing still missing from Civ 5); but aside from gaining a lot of friends who share in your faith, the primary benefit was reaping wealth from around the world; of course, in Civ 5, wealth is much easier to come by - it's happiness that is almost always in short supply.

[Shrinweck]

Religion lets you boost just about anything you need (defense boosts, happiness, culture, population growth, etc.) not just aid in currency gathering. I've found that if you expand your religion to an AI before they get their own that they'll typically just run with your religion since converting their entire population to their new religion can potentially be a tremendous undertaking. Other than the odd city state I didn't have to bother with anything but reaping the rewards of my pre-0AD missionary work. Once they have their own religion you might as well be declaring war on them if you push to convert in more than a couple instances.

[Julius Seeker]

I am playing Emperor/marathon/huge and have 4 composite bowmen at Range +1 and Logistics accompanied with 3 Cataphracts; these composite bowmen are REALLY overpowered. I didn't want to play this way, because I know it is somewhat cheap, but I find it very difficult to not play this way =P

* My strategy involves a focus on economy and plundering, purchasing military units, especially archers and horsemen, and then using my archers to farm cities for xp until I have Range + and logistics, which are the 4th and 5th promotions; I then just go after capitals with resources I want. This game I ran with only one non-occupied city until I had a National College, and it worked out for me in this case - typically I try to pump out 4 cities to take full advantage of the Tradition chain.


It seems that they took away indirect fire which weakens archers a little; but the fact that composite bowmen can survive 1-2 melee attacks makes up for it.

On religion: Right now, religion looks like it could be fun, but so far it seems a fairly slow process when compared to Civ 4. I founded Zoroastrianism, and then got one missionary. Building the Hagia Sophia should help this process out though (if I get it, I assume I will since I just took down the capital of the most advanced civ in the game, and that city was also very likely the largest and most productive in the world).

I am playing the Byzantines for my first game, they seem a lot of fun and might just be a top 5 civ (With the cataphracts and the religion bonus). The Songhai still look to be the best civ in the game.

I am not noticing a huge difference in AI opponents; two of them declared war on me despite the fact that the two of them combined were no match for me; they had more military units, but mine were stacked with promotions.

So far the game actually feels somewhat the same. Although I have largely ignored city states and espionage to this point (I don't think I am even there yet).

[Don]

There's really not much point to talk about how dumb the AI is. It's really easy to defend a good position against even a human but then no human's going to just send his units to their doom against a bunch of guys fortified behind a hill. The general model is pretty much spear > horse > ranged > spear. Iron unit gets you > spear at the cost of inabilty to disengage after attacking.

Byzantine is strong but they don't have anything that adds +faith. In my game where I play as everyone they barely got the last religion slot and by then nothing interesting is left. It's interesting to note that their bonus belief can be anything, even another enhancer belief.

Religion is interesting with human players. In my game the guys who cannot have a religion would actually purposely move their units out of the way so that a missionary can spread religion at full strength (you get missionaries before you can sign Open Borders in most likelihood), while obviously you do the opposite if you have a religion you want to keep. That said, if the guy with the religion has say Pagoda, you usually want him to spread it to you because that's pretty much the best religious building in the game. I think you can even build the building and then send an inquisitor to get rid of their religion?

At any rate you're supposed to spread reilgion to people without a religion (they can't build Inquistors to throw you out since any Inquisitor they built will be yours), or spread them to people you have no intention of fighting. The +20% combat bonus near enemy cities that share a religion makes an interesting tactic though I think if you have it, a human player will just kill your missionaries rather than risk eventually having to fight you with a great disadvantage.

[Don]

Thoughts on religion:

Religion is pretty much messed up in terms of versus computer because you should NEVER be able to found your own religion against anything beyond Prince given there's exactly one source of reliable Faith in the game (Shrine). If you didn't happen to find some in a ruin or have a natural wonder nearby that gives faith, the computer will always be able to build their shrines before you do (they get more resources + bonus) and you'll never get your religion. So I assume the AI purposely not get religion at certain times so you can actually get them.

Byzantine, supposedly the religious civ, has no +faith bonus of any kind. But it's interesting to note that if Byzantine gets the first prophet it's pretty much instant game over, because their bonus can be used for a second follower belief. You'd just take ceremonial burial (+1 happiness per city following city) + Pagoda (+2 happiness +2 faith) and Mosque (+1 happiness + 3 faith). You can just spam cities because each new city you found you can build a Pagoda and Mosque for +4 happiness which more than offsets the city negative happiness, and you get more faith and even quite a bit of culture on the side. Without a penalty to found cities you'd pretty much be unstoppable against anyone. Perhaps that's why it's actually pretty hard for Byzantine to get the first Great Prophet. The Celts are strictly fastest to the first GP (+2 per city near 3 unimproved forest) followed by Ethopians (their monument replacement gives you +2). After that it usually tends to be like the third guy who found a panetheon who would have to settle for +faith instead of the no brainer +10% food and +1 production pantheons.

One of the weird side effect is that if someone has Pagoda + another building, and heck just have Pagoda, it's almost always worth it to drop your religion for their religion instead. And if someone has Pagoda + Mosque you should definitely take their religion for sure and the result would be a whole mess of cities of everywhere.

[Julius Seeker]

I am actually successfully doing something similar to strategy you mention, in combination with my archer strategy; and yeah, I'm playing Emperor and was able to get the third religion (and if I recall, I was fairly far ahead of whoever got the 4th). I've already topped the demographs in all areas except Manufacturing where I rank 2nd, Literacy where I am 3rd or 4th, and Approval. I'm only in early renaissance, and if I recall, I am usually ranking around 2nd/3rd in most areas at this point. Although I was only able to incorporate religion to this degree starting in the later middle ages, I actually ran with just one city for much longer than usual (until I had an NC); the main reason was that I was conquering faster than usual thanks to Composite bowmen.

[Don]

I started a game on King and the AI was like how I remember it. They have no idea how to use their units so they count on superior numbers + tech but it's still not enough since they don't ever protect their siege/ranged units.

Religion seems to be pretty random. I've had several game where I have 0 faith throughout most of the game since once you get beaten to the pantheon you might as well save the money for the religious buildings until the person with the best religion spread it to you. There are only 3 civilization that focus on religion (Celt/Byzantine/Ethiopia). You really can't afford to build a shrine early on against computer because you need the units, so it basically boils down to whether you can find some ruins with faith, or have one of the faith natural wonder near you. Without those boost you won't beat the computer to the first prophet no matter what (no way you can pump out as many shrines as they can) though computer picks totally random beliefs.

In my hotseat game it pretty much always goes like this.

Pantheon -> +10% food, +1 prod for city pop > 3
Founder belief -> +1 happiness, +2 gold
1st follower -> Pagoda, Mosque, Cathedral
2nd follower -> Shrine provide +1 happiness, Shrine/Temple +1 food, and a few other ones that involve cheap buildings/easy conditions
Enhancer -> +20% combat strength near friendly cities that follow religion, 40% cost reduction on missionary/inquisitors

[Julius Seeker]

So I finished off my game with a conquest victory; and I think this might actually be the first time where I won ranking 1st in all Demographic categories - simply because there are many more avenues to happiness now. In my next game, I am going to try and Infinite City Sprawl on Deity to see how much success I can get there; I think that this strategy will work excellently with the new rules.

Espionage was disappointing, mostly because there wasn't really anything productive I could do with it. I found myself on top of Science (thanks to getting an early National College, and then rapidly increasing my cities, population, and with a scientific focus), so my spies were limited to Coups, but I found those too dangerous to perform, so my Spies typically were just for defense and intel.

Maxed out machine gunners are more destructive than tanks. I didn't even make it to tanks on the tech tree, but machine gunners, which can be acquired immediately after researching flight, have 60 strength and 60 range damage - combine that with maxed out experience levels (+1 range, fires twice, heals every turn, +75% damage to both open and rough terrain, 25% defense from ranged attacks is just icing) and these things will just mow right through entire armies and heavily fortified cities.


Anyway, from a gameplay perspective - religion is best used as a way to get more happiness; the largest change to the game, in my opinion, are the additional ranged units; those, more than anything else, effected my game from strictly a surface level (obviously the additional happiness allowed for bigger conquests, but they didn't change the feeling of the game in the same way that more ranged units did - I was able to play MUCH less cautiously).

EDIT

In order to get religion in Deity, you really have to sacrifice, or get good luck. So I am rather going to do my ICS Deity game as the French ; so far I have 10 cities and 31 happiness - I fully expect to lose, having the most advanced civ just next door and me hogging all kinds of resources, but I'm not dead yet =P

[Don]

I noticed that computer AI really doesn't care about happiness beliefs probably because they never need it to begin with.

This also means spreading stuff like Pagoda + Mosque to them is no problem because you don't have to worry about them building it (they could, but it does them literally no good).

The computer AI is just very bad at using its units. A lot of the time it sends them to attack without any chance of winning which just gives your defenders more XP. I don't think I've had a human player game where a unit got past level 5 and even level 4s are rare because by the time you get close to it that unit is going to be exposed to a lot of danger.

[Julius Seeker]

In my Deity game, I farmed XP on city states; and was able to do so to level 6 without any declaration of war against me. It's actually a little surprising that I have made it so far in a Deity game without any declarions of war against me. It might be that my hoard of tiny cities are just too worthless; but the resources I control certainly aren't.

I have not yet played a multiplayer game with Civ 5; I am wondering how well I would do? I think of I did play such a game, I would play Songhai and go heavy on the archers and horsemen; Hunting barbarians with low level units and aggressively hitting City States with high level units before going after other humans.

[Don]

I'm sure you'll get thrown out for farming city states when it's obvious you're not making any attempt to actually take them.

[Julius Seeker]

I find the game a lot of fun to play at the Immortal level. It's very winnable, but the rival civs aren't pushovers... At the Deity level, I find it difficult to keep up with tech (so far).

I picked the Swedes, standard (8 civ) map, and Marathon; while the start was a little rough (I was fighting the Germans and Romans for pretty much 400 turns), I found that they really pick up in the late-Renaisance and early industrial when there are a lot of great people appearing; even on Immortal, I feel like I have a bit of an edge over all of the other civs now. This is a standard game on archipelago, to test out fleet battles; and they are a lot of fun this time around, more so than any iteration of civ I have played before.

When you get Privateers, you can capture enemy ships by defeating them; I built only 3 of them and used them to expand my fleet to over 15 ships. I recommend trying it out.

[Don]

The espionage system helps human a lot since computer is almost invariably ahead in research and it espionage pretty much does nothing for the guy in the lead on tech.

I think the combat AI of Civ is just beyond redemption. I can say with certainly that any halfway decent player would never lose any game against the best Civ player in the world with even the advantage you get from Emperor, and it's not because Civilization is a hard to solve game. I really don't think the AI even understands how to attack because with the amount of units plus usually an edge in tech, if everything just attacked something you'll probably lose in a war of attrition.

[Julius Seeker]

One way to fix the balance issue (based on the way I play) is to simply remove the +1 range promotion; they seem to be aware of the balance issue, and already removed the indirect fire promotion, which really changed things up - now I have to be in open territory or on a hill; before I could sit anywhere I wanted and hit cities 3 tiles away. Although adding in new ranged infantry units really requires a little more nerfing; even with removing indirect fire, Immortal difficulty now feels like Emperor did before the expansion - this is largely due to the new range units and espionage.

The AI doesn't know how to handle a promoted military.

One more thing; beefing up the Honor civic chain made that incredibly overpowered; honor + Oligarchy is all you need to have a serious advantage.

Although, with the Swedes I have added freedom and Patronage, and it is wirking out very very well.

[Don]

+range doesn't help you unless you're in some really rough terrain and even then, range units simply aren't as devastating as they used to be so you can break through fine assuming you put all your units at where they're strong (Shock units in open ground, Drill units in rough terrain). Indirect fire is really not that powerful if it was at all obvious how the game's LoS actually worked but since it's not very obvious where you can shoot into or not it's a necessity. With Knights getting 4 moves now you simply can't rely on hiding range units unless it's a perfect chokepoint and it shouldn't be too hard to recognize such a situation, not to mention you don't really have any control on whether such a point exists.

For the most part I'm not sure if the AI is even aware of stuff like Shock units should be in open ground.

[Julius Seeker]

+1 Range is incredibly helpful in siege situations, it allows you to fire upon the city without the enemy having the ability to retaliate. Sight issues are solved by sending cavalry into visible range of the target city at the beginning of the turn, and then pulling them out at the end of the turn once the archers have fired their arrows. This whole process can allow a civilization to be swept across without any fear of losing a single unit; and while Cavalry units have a huge disadvantage in attacking a city (often one attack will take down all their hitpoints, or so the battle projection predicts), sending them in to take a city with 0 hp always means victory.

I usually keep infantry on hand as sacrificial troops when they are required. Once in a while the enemy will send in a mass of troops to try and take out your units; that's when the archers need to flee to the hills (literally) and sometimes Infantry come in handy to slow the enemy down - better than sacrificing a horseman.

[Don]

A 4 move cavalry can pretty much hit a ranged unit anywhere when you're inside their territory since they got roads and whatnot unless you already pillaged everything and even then there's usually some kind of path for cavalry to get there. Computer isn't very good at using cavalry so you're usually pretty safe from that. In my hotseat games it doesn't matter where your ranged units start, multiple cavalry units start out behind the city and with the help of roads they'll always get to an uncovered area unless you've so many infantry units to completely cover all your ranged units, which you usually can't do because you don't have that kind of production. Remember that inside their territory, the defender can always see where everything you have is at but the reverse is not true for you.

At any rate the city usually wastes its bombardment on the infantry unit instead of the siege unit when it comes to computer, even though a ranged unit + city bombardment usually can kill a siege unit easy, especially if you've the +50% for garrison policy.

[Julius Seeker]

I am playing Emperor - Romans - Standard - Epic for a change. In all this time I have played the game, I don't think I have yet once picked the Romans. I have been playing peace focused flow expansionist; although I believe I have about twice as much land as my nearest rival. I have made it a point to not farm city states this time around; and I successfully made it to the Industrial age with only a single level 4 Crossbowman (War with Ethiopia, they're trying to figure out how to take the border city of Ravena while their allied city states skirmish with my Longswordsmen and Knights on my other borders (because I have no patience for manual management of workers, and the worker AI does not recognize enemy city state soldiers as a threat, I ended up losing 4 or 5).

Anyway, on Emperor, standard non-cheap tactics should work to allow you to dominate with relative ease ; just make sure to focus production; get Graneries up in all your cities, wall (and castle) up all of your cities and keep borders well defended. I went with a mix of honor, liberty, tradition, and got a few horsemen out early backed with some bowmen (most overpowered early game unit IMO).

I think I actually like these standard/epic games more, it takes a week to finish a game (I usually play a bit in some mornings, more so on weekends) rather than a month.

[Don]

Well the standard pace is simply too quick because by the time you're done building something it might already be obselete. It takes a lot of time because Civ 5 is pretty slow for whatever reason even tohugh it sure doesn't look like the AI has a clue in all the time it's taking to think. I mean if you put a game on Marathon it'll take like 90 turns to research Iron Working instead of 30 but really about 87 of those turns you're just hitting 'end turn' so it should not take that much longer if not for the fact that the AI takes forever on each of those turns.

[Julius Seeker]

To date a couple weeks ago, pretty much all of my games have been Huge-Marathon, but now I am doing Standard-Epic, seems to be much more fun. I agree, anything Standard speed and faster is to quick a game for civ. Marathon is too long and huge maps are too large...