The problem with the pacing of Marathon is only a problem because of the computer's limitation. If the computer speed was like ROTK 11 (i.e. 1-2 seconds for 20 computer players to act) there's no problem with hitting end turn 45 times while you're waiting for your first warrior to build, but of course in Civ 5 you'd spend half an hour just from loading each turn. Heck I run a hotseat game with no computer players and it still takes like 20 seconds for the city states + barbarians to move at the end of everyone's turn. I really have no idea what the heck is using up so much time for computer between turns, because it sure doesn't look like it's spent on thinking.
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Civ 5: Gods and Kings
- Because playing them is not enough, we have to bitch about them daily, too. We had a Gameplay forum, but it got replaced by GameFAQs.
I just bought the expansion during the Steam Summer Sale. Is there a good FAQ or guide I should check out? I've never been very good at Civilization, but I find it enjoyable.
www.civfanatics.com is probably the best community. I haven't checked it out in some time but www.apolyton.com used to be the biggest.
Although, if you have any questions, I would be happy to answer.
Strategies do vary from game to game - for example, on Marathon/huge games, there is no doubt in my mind that the Songhai are the strongest civ (3X plunder from cities and barbarians; you can easily buy a large military and focus your cities on everything else exclusively) - but in quicker games on a medium sized map, the Chinese, Romans, or French are superior due to the lower income %'s from plunder. Of course, any civ can work out.
Although, if you have any questions, I would be happy to answer.
Strategies do vary from game to game - for example, on Marathon/huge games, there is no doubt in my mind that the Songhai are the strongest civ (3X plunder from cities and barbarians; you can easily buy a large military and focus your cities on everything else exclusively) - but in quicker games on a medium sized map, the Chinese, Romans, or French are superior due to the lower income %'s from plunder. Of course, any civ can work out.
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For the plundering stuff the barbarians takes 3 times as long to spawn, but on Marathon games you've a ton of time to find all the Barbarians while waiting for your units to build.
Gods & Kings really doesn't change the base game very much. Espionage allows you be able to catch up against the computer on higher difficulty where they'll always out-tech you no matter what but it's otherwise not very interesting. Religion can be interesting but it's pretty hit & miss because the computer will almost always be able to get a religion before you do on higher difficulties due to their massive bonus in everything so it's luck whether they picked up the useful traits before you get them. The best thing about G&K is the general rebalancing of units so you no longer can just get away with 2 archers and 1 warrior on defense. Although the computer still doesn't know how to attack well, it's at least harder than before to fend them off.
Gods & Kings really doesn't change the base game very much. Espionage allows you be able to catch up against the computer on higher difficulty where they'll always out-tech you no matter what but it's otherwise not very interesting. Religion can be interesting but it's pretty hit & miss because the computer will almost always be able to get a religion before you do on higher difficulties due to their massive bonus in everything so it's luck whether they picked up the useful traits before you get them. The best thing about G&K is the general rebalancing of units so you no longer can just get away with 2 archers and 1 warrior on defense. Although the computer still doesn't know how to attack well, it's at least harder than before to fend them off.
Yeah; add in (if using the Songhai) that they get 225 plunder per barbarian camp, so 2 of those affords one Archer; and on Marathon-Huge games, you'll encounter dozens of them early on; so there's all sorts of things that you can afford for your cities on top of the military.
One tactic I used to use, but haven't attempted since Gods and Kings, due to rebalancing, is spending lots of money on forming alliances with Merchant City States (for extra food) and putting cities into production focus. Although I find things usually turn out fairly good without the extra food; it just means more cities than before due to all the extra happiness.
Later in the game, when the freedom chain opens up, get that along with the bonus that halves specialist unhappiness and the one that halves food consumption; once you get to this point, if you're not expanding militarily, you might want to shift cities from production focus, and instead trigger population explosions (especially once you et Hospitals) and fill up the specialists slots - who at this point will be far more valuable than regular citizens.
One tactic I used to use, but haven't attempted since Gods and Kings, due to rebalancing, is spending lots of money on forming alliances with Merchant City States (for extra food) and putting cities into production focus. Although I find things usually turn out fairly good without the extra food; it just means more cities than before due to all the extra happiness.
Later in the game, when the freedom chain opens up, get that along with the bonus that halves specialist unhappiness and the one that halves food consumption; once you get to this point, if you're not expanding militarily, you might want to shift cities from production focus, and instead trigger population explosions (especially once you et Hospitals) and fill up the specialists slots - who at this point will be far more valuable than regular citizens.
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Currently playing a game on Price difficulty as Persians. I'm trying out the immortal rush. I've already managed to take out Alexander and am now working on the Spanish. Once they're disposed of I have have 4 puppets cities and just tech and go from there.
While you've a bit more luxury compared to before G&K, it's still not easy to find a bunch of them since they're usually spread out strategically throughout the world. I mean the Martime stuff is pretty much no brainer but I always find myself limited by Happiness. It seems like it's better to just conquer the Mercantile CS because they usually get you 2 luxuries (the special one plus whatever they already have) assuming you're not running some kind of exploit (siphoning money off computer) because the cost for keeping CS allied gets prohibitive later on unless you go heavy Patronage. Religion gets you more Happiness to work with too but you have to really get all the good stuff before the computer do, i.e. Pagoda and the +1 happiness per city, and preferably a Mosque. Now, since the computer absolutely has no need for more Happiness due to how much it cheats, it doesn't prioritize the Happiness modifiers but there's still no guaranteed you'll be able to grab those before the computer do even if they appear to pick religion traits completely at random.
Happiness is really a lame mechanism. I know why it's there so you can't just keep on build/conquer more cities but it leads to stuff like say if I play Hotseat and give a city to myself as part of peace treaty (I try to make these deals at least reasonably fair and honor them), then I'd raze the city I just got because it's going to cost my empire more to keep a puppet city that contributes like 10 unhappiness then just raze it. I think in Civ 4 they've city upkeep equal to number of cities you have squared? Either way it's pretty dumb.
I think they should just get something from Daisenryaku, make it so that only cities with X hexes of your capital can produce units and that's it. This would also mean you might actually have a reason to relocate your capital too. In Daiseynryaku you can easily have a runaway economic advantage but even without the unit limit (64 per side), it's difficult to have an army advantage because you can only produce so many units each turn no matter how much money you have. Sure, you can definitely produce the best units with unlimited money but you still can only get 3 tanks out of your cities. Even with a huge economic lead, you've to wear the other guy down by attrition and if you make a bad mistake on the battle you can completely lose all your progress on enemy territory since your new units are going to take too long to get to the battlefield, not to mention you can't replace them very quickly due to limited capacity even with unlimited money. In fact it's because it's so hard to have a unit advantage no matter how much money you have, you end up building just air force when you have a ridiculous money because air units reach the battlefield fastest and hopefully that's enough to overwhelm the enemy, though of course if you can easily lose 10 to 1 in terms of unit cost when you've only air units versus a defender with mostly anti air units.
Happiness is really a lame mechanism. I know why it's there so you can't just keep on build/conquer more cities but it leads to stuff like say if I play Hotseat and give a city to myself as part of peace treaty (I try to make these deals at least reasonably fair and honor them), then I'd raze the city I just got because it's going to cost my empire more to keep a puppet city that contributes like 10 unhappiness then just raze it. I think in Civ 4 they've city upkeep equal to number of cities you have squared? Either way it's pretty dumb.
I think they should just get something from Daisenryaku, make it so that only cities with X hexes of your capital can produce units and that's it. This would also mean you might actually have a reason to relocate your capital too. In Daiseynryaku you can easily have a runaway economic advantage but even without the unit limit (64 per side), it's difficult to have an army advantage because you can only produce so many units each turn no matter how much money you have. Sure, you can definitely produce the best units with unlimited money but you still can only get 3 tanks out of your cities. Even with a huge economic lead, you've to wear the other guy down by attrition and if you make a bad mistake on the battle you can completely lose all your progress on enemy territory since your new units are going to take too long to get to the battlefield, not to mention you can't replace them very quickly due to limited capacity even with unlimited money. In fact it's because it's so hard to have a unit advantage no matter how much money you have, you end up building just air force when you have a ridiculous money because air units reach the battlefield fastest and hopefully that's enough to overwhelm the enemy, though of course if you can easily lose 10 to 1 in terms of unit cost when you've only air units versus a defender with mostly anti air units.
I agree on the happiness foolishness. It essentially exists so that when you're winning you won't win as quickly as you want to. Civ 5 makes conquering a vast enemy empire an unhappy event for your civilization's people.
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I mean I get that it's supposed to be some kind of 'war weary' thing except most of the governments in the game are supposed to be somewhat despotic in nature anyway, and at any rate this would be like if USA was at war with Canada for a legitmate reason, and USA started conquering Canadian cities, your own USA citizens would go on riots/strikes because they'd prefer to see Canada wiped off the face of the world than just being occupied. In fact your citizens will be quite fine if you burned Vancover down to the ground and then settle it as New Washington on top of all the bodies.
I think Civ and probably a lot of other games get this concept wrong. It is supposed to be a good thing to conquer the enemy territory. It should be progressively harder to push into an enemy's territory but the fact that you're gaining territory should not be a hinderance. There's multiple ways to deal with this. In Daisenryaku the unit production near capital limit prevents you from just pouring more and more troops even if you're winning since it takes increasingly longer for you to reach the frontline compared to the enemy side so that even if they're getting less economy they can at least defend. In say ROTK 11 you've serious logistics issue to deal with for fighting an extended frontline. You can have twice the economy output but there's no way your supplies can stretch twice the distance since resupply units are trivially killed, and on top of that battle is mostly decided by tactics as opposed to sheer economy, as it is relatively easy to hit the army max per city (100K) even with a weak economy and it takes a relatively long time to retrain your army if they get wiped out, and pillage effect wipes out a % of your total treasury which means the defender don't even have to take territory from you after a successful defense. They just have to push you far enough where they can pillage your stuff to set you back.
I think Civ and probably a lot of other games get this concept wrong. It is supposed to be a good thing to conquer the enemy territory. It should be progressively harder to push into an enemy's territory but the fact that you're gaining territory should not be a hinderance. There's multiple ways to deal with this. In Daisenryaku the unit production near capital limit prevents you from just pouring more and more troops even if you're winning since it takes increasingly longer for you to reach the frontline compared to the enemy side so that even if they're getting less economy they can at least defend. In say ROTK 11 you've serious logistics issue to deal with for fighting an extended frontline. You can have twice the economy output but there's no way your supplies can stretch twice the distance since resupply units are trivially killed, and on top of that battle is mostly decided by tactics as opposed to sheer economy, as it is relatively easy to hit the army max per city (100K) even with a weak economy and it takes a relatively long time to retrain your army if they get wiped out, and pillage effect wipes out a % of your total treasury which means the defender don't even have to take territory from you after a successful defense. They just have to push you far enough where they can pillage your stuff to set you back.
A play style that I find kind of odd - A few co-workers of mine like to jack up the amount of civs they have on the map (playing smaller maps) so that the world gets settled fairly quickly. I did attempt this once myself around the time when I got the game - but I found that it led to too many issues - Barbarians were non-existant (no early xp or extra cash) and there was very little opportunity for exploration and expansion. The general consensus was that they wanted to simulate early border conflicts.... The thing about civ is that it doesn't involve state against state, it is civilization against civilization (I.E. Persia vs Babylonia, rather than Corinth vs Sparta). I've found that the world gets populated far too quickly; the Romans didn't succeed in settling all Europe for example, just the first half of it - it was after the fall of the Western Roman Empire that Germanic tribes began to build up the rest of Europe. So it is not like the world was fully colonized in ancient times. The official borders of everything weren't filled until very recently - the 19th century - and that is about the time it happens in civ playing at recommended settings for civ and city state numbers on a given map size.
Anyway, I am playing an all forest world now; one city (Constantinople) on difficulty setting Immortal, large map, Romans as permanent allies... It's turning out to be fairly fun playing sort of a Vatican state. While avoiding war is most beneficial to me, the way things go is if I capture a city, I give it to te Romans.
Anyway, I am playing an all forest world now; one city (Constantinople) on difficulty setting Immortal, large map, Romans as permanent allies... It's turning out to be fairly fun playing sort of a Vatican state. While avoiding war is most beneficial to me, the way things go is if I capture a city, I give it to te Romans.
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Well in a game where you immediately bump into borders you really don't have much you can do because puppeting a city usually costs you unhappiness so you end up just razing a city and then re-settle it but since you're really close to the enemy territory that might even be dangerous if they counterattack, so you just get these standoffs until you can get enough tech and happiness to actually do something. Computer likes to settle cities in totally random places since they're not affected by happiness but this makes it very hard for you to take those cities as a random pop 5 city with no luxury or strategic resources just isn't worth conquering.
I never considered this before because I always ignored air. Essentially I was playing a hopeless game. Persia essentially had a perpetual Golden Age and owned most of the world with an army of incredible size. I'm sitting on a dozen cities (over half of them are small cities which I am just using on distant islands to farm resources and generate some additional gold. and they have about 45, mostly all good cities. Seeing as how I was the only civ left with anything decent (they had either wiled out everyone else, or driven them to unimportant islands leaving them with 1-2 tiny cities). Anyway, they declare, and about a 2 dozen units pour over my borders. Effectively it's hopeless because their output is about 4X what mine is, and they are 12% more further ahead on the tech tree; and are allied with all of the city states except 1 which the Celts have (the celts are sitting on one city with a population on 5 up in the snow and tundra)
I have cash, so essentially I use it to buy a bunch of bombers. To make a long story short, 30-50 turns later, the Persian army is wiped out, I am marching into their capital. I only lost two units total (two expendable land ships which they bombed as I approached their capital)
In the entire conflict, despite their huge armies and superiority in every aspect, they were hopelessly outgunned. Essentially, by the end, I could hit them whenever I wanted with gigantic firepower. In my opinion, air strikes are supremely overpowered. Realistically, I should have lost my capital and essentially that war within 10 turns. It was just a matter of rush buying a bunch of planes in one city.
I have cash, so essentially I use it to buy a bunch of bombers. To make a long story short, 30-50 turns later, the Persian army is wiped out, I am marching into their capital. I only lost two units total (two expendable land ships which they bombed as I approached their capital)
In the entire conflict, despite their huge armies and superiority in every aspect, they were hopelessly outgunned. Essentially, by the end, I could hit them whenever I wanted with gigantic firepower. In my opinion, air strikes are supremely overpowered. Realistically, I should have lost my capital and essentially that war within 10 turns. It was just a matter of rush buying a bunch of planes in one city.
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Bombers are pretty much broken because these units are immortal. You can't actually kill one without using a nuke since all you have to do is stop attacking as long as you're methodical about sweeping the enemy fighters. Besides if you can't sweep their fighters then they should be using bombers on you instead. Stealth bombers are more broken but it's just bad design. I mean the whole point of waging successful aerial battles involves shooting down the enemy planes before they take off but this is simply not an option. In fact, a plane in the equivalent of an air strip (city) is actually invulnerable.
The old incarnation of bombers in Civ 2 was much better, i.e. bombers have to take one turn to attack and one turn to return so at least you can nail them on the turn they return, even though they can pretty much get to almost anywhere in one turn and hit whatever target they want and blow it up, at least you got a turn to hunt them down after they did their damage. I mean, it's not a good or realistic way to depict it, but it at least works from a balance point of view. I remember Stealth Bombers are really hard to kill in that game too, but at least you could try to swarm one after it takes off instead of just watch it evade 100% of all counterattack.
The old incarnation of bombers in Civ 2 was much better, i.e. bombers have to take one turn to attack and one turn to return so at least you can nail them on the turn they return, even though they can pretty much get to almost anywhere in one turn and hit whatever target they want and blow it up, at least you got a turn to hunt them down after they did their damage. I mean, it's not a good or realistic way to depict it, but it at least works from a balance point of view. I remember Stealth Bombers are really hard to kill in that game too, but at least you could try to swarm one after it takes off instead of just watch it evade 100% of all counterattack.
I think one major issue is that not only are bombers among the most invulnerable attackers in the game, but air units are the only units that you're allowed to stack; so if you've got enough oil (and oil seems to always be one of the most abundant resources) then you can build a great number of bombers and fighters. Units become very rarely safe.
1. Charge money or production shields to repair air units.
2. Limit the stack, and allow the construction of air strips outside of the city (like in civ 2).
3. Just do thing exactly like Civ 2; you're absolutely right here - while the least realistic approach, it was still the most fun and most functional.
1. Charge money or production shields to repair air units.
2. Limit the stack, and allow the construction of air strips outside of the city (like in civ 2).
3. Just do thing exactly like Civ 2; you're absolutely right here - while the least realistic approach, it was still the most fun and most functional.
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Sometimes I think the Civ guys never played any other strategy game which is why Civ can never make that leap to *the* strategy game. Sure Civ guys tell you it's not all war but if your goal is just to outbuild your opponent to The Utopia Project every game without fighting you might as well be playing SimCity, not to mention it's even less believeable that you'd outbuild stuff without fighting against computer given how much they cheat (you can, but that's only because they purposely avoid winning in these ways).
Airstrips is going to be problematic in maps that are generated randomly because it might be too easy or too hard to defend them. Usually stuff with airstrips are in games with preset maps so you know which one needs ot be attacked/defended how. At any rate the first issue you have is that the sweep model makes no sense whatsoever. You can sweep fighters but no other strategy game I'm aware of lets you sweep ground based anti-air. It simply makes no sense. Do these ground units mysteriously shoot at the first plane they see leaving them incapable of shooting the bomber? In real wars bombers do get shot down by ground stuff even with fighter escort. The fighter escort is there to deal with other fighters because if you don't deal with them it's like a 100% chance your bombers get shot down eventually since fighters are faster than bombers. But the ground stuff is quite capable of hitting your bombers too. You just worry less about them because at least they can't chase your bombers and you'll accept the losses.
The second issue is that air units are supposed to be vulnerable in some kind of 'return' phase. In a simple 'fuel' system (i.e. aircraft crashes after X turns or Y moves) you can kill air units by simply using 2 air units to ZOC them. Now of course this isn't because in real life 3 air units stay midair for days or years (in Civ timeline) until one ran out of fuel, but rather it simulates the fact that if you can't hit a target and quickly disengage your planes are going to go down. In Civ 5 there's no 'return' phase at all.
Of course that also highlights how dumb the whole computer AI is. They can pull exactly the same trick on you by just massing bombers/fighters and there is absolutely no way you can stop it because they can trivially outbuild you, and they don't even have to worry about unhappiness so they can just pop down cities left and right as launching points for air units. But they simply don't do this which is why you can actually beat them, but it's so artificial you have to ask why do you have computer purposely pretend it doesn't know massing air units lead to guaranteed win when you could just eliminate the ridiculous resource advantage it has so that it cannot just mass air units?
Airstrips is going to be problematic in maps that are generated randomly because it might be too easy or too hard to defend them. Usually stuff with airstrips are in games with preset maps so you know which one needs ot be attacked/defended how. At any rate the first issue you have is that the sweep model makes no sense whatsoever. You can sweep fighters but no other strategy game I'm aware of lets you sweep ground based anti-air. It simply makes no sense. Do these ground units mysteriously shoot at the first plane they see leaving them incapable of shooting the bomber? In real wars bombers do get shot down by ground stuff even with fighter escort. The fighter escort is there to deal with other fighters because if you don't deal with them it's like a 100% chance your bombers get shot down eventually since fighters are faster than bombers. But the ground stuff is quite capable of hitting your bombers too. You just worry less about them because at least they can't chase your bombers and you'll accept the losses.
The second issue is that air units are supposed to be vulnerable in some kind of 'return' phase. In a simple 'fuel' system (i.e. aircraft crashes after X turns or Y moves) you can kill air units by simply using 2 air units to ZOC them. Now of course this isn't because in real life 3 air units stay midair for days or years (in Civ timeline) until one ran out of fuel, but rather it simulates the fact that if you can't hit a target and quickly disengage your planes are going to go down. In Civ 5 there's no 'return' phase at all.
Of course that also highlights how dumb the whole computer AI is. They can pull exactly the same trick on you by just massing bombers/fighters and there is absolutely no way you can stop it because they can trivially outbuild you, and they don't even have to worry about unhappiness so they can just pop down cities left and right as launching points for air units. But they simply don't do this which is why you can actually beat them, but it's so artificial you have to ask why do you have computer purposely pretend it doesn't know massing air units lead to guaranteed win when you could just eliminate the ridiculous resource advantage it has so that it cannot just mass air units?