Playing Civ 5 again

[Don]

Decided to play with these settings on Marathon (note: Marathon = 300% speed)

Research - 350%
Culture - 200%
Unit - 100%

No inflation on unit maintenance (at least trying, hard to figure out the code behind the modifiers)
Unhappiness is 2/3 of normal

I control all the players like I usually do, because playing against computer is a complete waste of time. The idea is to see if it's actually possible to build a big army and empire without using exploits. You know, actually founding these cities and build enough unit to defend it instead of relying on 4 level 7 units to kill everything. All the civs will try to play similar to whatever their trait suggest, i.e. Greeks will try to get CS. All winning criteria besides military victory disabled. No nukes or stealth bombers. Bombers must attack something whenever possible (otherwise they'd never die).

So far it's pretty liberating to have 6-7 units when you only have one city and just finished research bronze working.

As a random observation, what exactly is the point of Youtube Civ 5 movies? They seem to be invariably on Deity which basically means you'll see a guy start with improbable luck and all the computer players will magically wipe themselves out just so whoever is playing can actually win. I mean luck is part of the game, but on Deity it's pretty much required all the powerful players magically leave you alone AND happen to declare war on someone that you can also attack and pick up all the pieces. It's not like you can learn anything about styles, because it doesn't matter who you play as, the computer will easily beat you at whatever your strength is on Deity and you still need to abuse their utter inability to use units and you still need a good break on diplomacy. Dating sims makes more sense in terms of managing personnel relationships than trying to figure out why a particular computer player hates you in Civ 5.

In fact, Civ 5 seems to be a game where it's utterly pointless to try to learn how to play better. The game is actually ridiculously simple (spam some powerful unit, abuse AI, collect profit). The only thing interesting to do would be like say you want to build more Lancers or you want to go with a Patronage-based strategy when you're not Greece/Siam. Some victory path, like Culture, more or less requires the computer to magically leave you along on the higher difficulties let alone Deity. If you somehow pull off a cultural victory on Deity there's no way whatever you did is replicable (unless you consider save & load as replicable) because you'd need to be super lucky to pull it off.

I mean I played some strategy games that are very un-strategic, but at least even there you can see the difference between good and better. Nobunaga's Ambition 12/13 had a ton of fan made scenarios and those are hard to beat even while using the usual AI exploits, so it makes sense to actually check out what other people did to clear them. Of course most of the time it is luck but because there's actually some skill involved you can tell it's not just improbably good luck. Here we're talking about good luck as in you're A and your neighbor B and C happened to attack each other head on early on instead of just gang up on you, and usually it's beneficial in the sense that you didn't get hit by 2 players at the same time, not necessarily because B & C wiped each other out. There's none of that in Civ 5. I figure if you can beat the game on King relatively comfortably, you're probably every bit as good as anyone else is in this game not counting any specific exploits you might not know about.

[Julius Seeker]

It's really difficult to ignore the exploits; I always find that when I do ignore them I feel like I am cheating my potential.

[Don]

Well I don't think it's remotely possible to fight the AI straight up on the higher difficulties which is why you got to exploit. It wasn't always like this, though. In Civ 2 you can play Deity straight up. Have to play quite defensively usually but you don't need to rely on any abuse to win and really it takes more than just finding a chokepoint to defend to win.

[Julius Seeker]

Playing Songhai is usually a fairly effective choice against AI at the highest difficulties due to all of their uniques being incredibly useful. Lots of cash, extra culture, and the most useful unique unit in the game (Mandekalu cavalry are essentially the equivalent to Civ 2 Crusaders).

While hoarding XP is a cheap strategy, it is also one that is somewhat forced upon you while playing high difficulties. On Deity, it is inevitable.

I do agree that Civ 2 is a much better game in terms of balance; I do wish that a civ game could be made that would bring together what Civ 2 accomplished, but managed it while including many of the interesting features of the future titles.

[Don]

After playing a bit I remember why I stopped playing. This game has a huge memory leak issues with large maps. I really don't understand how Civilization is always so resource consuming when the AI is ridiculously dumb and the graphics are passable at best, but you can see the game definitely slows down the later you go. I suspect it's probably trying to render what has happened to a tile since every turn the game has started because whenever you load the game you'll often see a spot that had a barbarian encampment shows up as having a barbarian encampment before it eventually goes away even though that spot clearly has no barbarian encampment at the moment. Why would you even do such a thing is completely beyond me. I mean I guess you could always play smaller maps or faster paces, or just suffer through the really slow times but really it's inexcusable to have these issues in a strategy game where the AI is dumber than dirt.

On the plus side I messed around with some settings and seems like 75% unhappiness (have to change global mod, changing unhappiness per pop below 1 makes it 0) + 1 happiness per luxury works out pretty well with the aforementioned modifiers, though maybe tech needs to be put to 400% instead of 350% since without being totally hosed by unhappiness you obviously have more of everything via having more people. Now with two players starting next to each other you can actually fill your area without going deep in unhappiness. You still have to manage it but it's not like the standard Civ 5 where if you have more than 3 cities you're going to hit unhappiness almost certainly. This also makes conquest more viable since you actually have some unhappiness to absorb the conquered cities, instead of just having to raze everything you conquer because you can never come up with the happiness to support it.

Still I don't understand how such a high profile game can have such bad memory management. Since Civ 5 is not a complicated game, you'd think even if you approach things pretty naively you should never run into any memory/performance issues, but you obviously do. Apparently having your workers toiling the field is just as cutting edge as anything else out there.

[Julius Seeker]

Poor optimization on the coding end; either a lazy coding team or a bad producer. These issues really should have been fixed by now.

Civ 2 was such a stronger product.


On the balance side, I am surprised at how no one has noticed that the Songhai are overpowered.

[Don]

Songhai is a strong civilization but I don't think they've any particularly abusive tricks you can do. Since it's difficult to beat the AI straight up most people probably pick civilization that cater better toward exploiting tactics. For example I saw this deity replay of a guy playing as Rome and just conquered everyone because he magically started with an Iron 6 in his starting city so he can build Ballistae/Legion right away (I believe Catapults require iron at the time of the replay). AI tends to build way too much Pikeman anyway which makes Songhai unique unit less effective.

[Julius Seeker]

I agree that the Romans make a great civ due to their power gained early on - but I feel the Songhai are more reliable, and have a much greater potential as a war and conquest civ - which is about the only really effective means of winning on higher difficulty.

At the beginning, plundering Barbarian camps with the Songhai is particularly profitable; you can buy a new archer for every 2 camps. This is something that can have immediate benefits on any map (provided you don't change the settings to overpopulated the world with city states and rival civs) which allow for the player to stay relatively close in early military strength to the AI civs, and at the top for Immortal and lower.

Archers are fairly great at destroying most of the enemy field army, including the Pikemen during the medieval era (if playing marathon, bowmen will have enough xp by the time to be highly effective at the medieval stage); the best use of the Mandekalu Cavalry is to send a swarm of them to sweep right through the target civilization once most of their army is taken care of; pikemen don't create any serious problems in small numbers. The Mandekalu Cavalry, without the mounted unit siege penalty, cut through enemy cities like butter; I find they're particularly useful against those cities which are surrounded by terrain such as hills and forests. In the end of a campaign, you'll probably be down in happiness, but you'll have a great deal of money from plunder.

As an additional bonus, Mud Mosques provide two additional culture points over regular temples, and have a maintenance cost of 0. Essentially, a game long superior version of the French culture bonus. Having the extra social policies can really help with additional happiness and building up an effective specialist population throughout the empire, especially in core cities.

[Don]

Let's not kid ourselves here, beating the game on Deity takes more than 'solid'. Having 6 Iron in your starting city is improbably lucky and it's pretty clear you needed that kind of luck to make use of the Roman's early iron units. The problem is that if you're already cheating in the sense of 'restart until 6 iron in starting city' then the Songhai starting traits isn't really all that powerful. For example if you look at the Spain deity videos they invariably find El Dorado immediately for 1500 gold and again nothing the Songhai has is going to touch that. Sure, Songhai is very strong for any standard game but it takes more than that to beat it on Deity, and since people only want bragging rights on Deity I feel that's why Songhai isn't viewed as very strong.

There's no doubt Songhai is a very strong civ. I find that they're consistently top tier in the games I control all the players but they're not like France who often can have a runaway advantage against other human controlled civilizations. Also in the original civ, embarkment defense actually hurts you versus ranged because you take 4 damage if you've a defense of 0, but embarkment defense puts your unit at a strength of like 5 which is guaranteed instant kill against anything stronger than a composite bowman that's capable of doing ranged attack. Gods & Kings fixed this though.

[Julius Seeker]

True, when I go Songhai, It's Immortal I play - and I can finish it before flight. Deity really is a huge jump in difficulty though. I think I attempted it a couple of times on Gods and Kings with bad results.

I think the last time I finished it was while the AI was still easy to trick - and when buying out all city states was simple.

[Don]

Another thing I noticed, attacking someone in rough terrain is basically impossible because you can't use roads while the enemy can, so you'd be moving at one hex at a time usually while the enemy can pretty much completely outmanuever you. It's not a problem against computer (who are just plain dumb) but it's pretty much impossible to attack anything in rough terrain until you got Artillery to force them to come out to fight you (and that's only if they don't have Artillery). Sometimes I'm tempted to bring workers to attack to just chop down forest/jungle though that wouldn't do any good against hills. The problem is that in Civ 5 there's really no disadvantage to have a city completely in rough terrain, even though traditionally those aren't supposed to be where you want to have a city. Historically the best cities ought to be ones in flat ground not one in the middle of the Amazons but in Civ 5 a city in the middle of the Amazons is arguably better than one in flat terrain because you get +2 science per tile on jungle. You should want to chop down your forests and drain your swamps to have better cities, and the cost of that is you can't hide behind the terrain. It doesn't resolve what happens with hills (which are basically 100% beneficial terrain) but at least forests/jungles shouldn't be universally positive which they currently are.

[Julius Seeker]

Battles over rough terrain are one of the main reasons why the Songhai are my favourite civ =)

This sort of warfare is where Mandekalu Cavalry become very effective. They're usually fairly well protected in rough terrain, and can move fast enough in it to receive minimal damage on the way. Mandekalu Cavalry are one of the most effective units for attacking cities since they hit them much harder than traditional knights do since they don't have the same city siege penalties that other mounted units suffer from. In my opinion, they are the best unit for city siege until Gatling Guns and Artillery; and they're also highly effective on the field as well.

I had some screenshots to show me defeating the Russians (8 cities in less than 10 turns, on a Normal sized map with Immortal difficulty - and a fairly heavy unhappiness penalty towards the end.) in rough terrain with Mandekalu cavalry, even though I only had Composite Bowmen to back them, while the Russians had Crossbowmen and Musketmen; just to show the strategy I use.

I couldn't post the screens due to this error 'It was not possible to determine the dimensions of the image.' Although I had set the dimensions when I posted the images on the site.

[Don]

Taking city is kind of weird. Like for the most part it's sort of hard but because you can't have a double KO in this game, this means if you do enough damage to take the city you'll always take the city without dying even if your unit only has 1 HP. So usually you sort of just skirmish a bit and then suddenly 3 or more melee units surround the city and do 100 damage on first turn and take it the next turn and you can always use the unit that's about to die to take the city since double KOs are impossible and unit have precedence over cities in such scenarios. Although Malduke Calvary is only 3 move in theory, since most rough terrain takes 2 to move through it's almost like double the movement of a generic 2 move infantry.

It's kind of like Nobunaga 12 on the challenge scenarios where you have these sieges that can go on for 15 minutes continously and then suddenly the computer entraps you and tunnels your city and instant kill, but even with computer's crazy reflexes you still have like 5 seconds to react to it (because one unit has to take a very weird path to get to the last spot to entrap a city), but of course in Nobunaga 12 it's probably by design that sieges can take forever or end very quickly if you didn't protect at least one front of the city while in Civ 5 it's either a total waste of time or it's something that ends in 2 turns.

[Don]

Actually got a hotseat game halfway into Renaissance era despite the general laginess.

Austria is god tier civilization because 1500 gold for a City-State is just way too powerful. It's supposed to be nerfed next patch but currently you probably get more gold for just disbanding the units the CS has. It costs 1300 gold to buy a settler on Marathon and for 200 more you get a city that's usually in a prime spot too.

Unit maintenance inflation really makes no sense unless the point is that your army should consist of 5 units. I got rid of inflation and have units build at 3X speed and you actually have like 20+ unit size army fighting each other which is pretty interesting, though it's easy to get bogged down in a stalemate.

The jump to Gunpowder is too big on offense. In the future I'm going to make it whoever has Gunpowder can't declare war on another nation that has doesn't have Gunpowder researched because there's just no way you can fight Musketman with Longswordsman/Knights, not to mention Longswordsman are only one tech behind Gunpowder which means if you're somehow able to build a ton of them you must be able to research Gunpowder anyway.

Chu-No-Kus are really annoying. I don't know if they're overpowered, but you can do some extremely cheap stuff with them. I don't think they're well designed. I had level 9 Chus with China in my game, though eventually China got ran over by Greece's Musketeers.

Speaking of Greece, their speciality is really strong in an all human player game since you can't just outspend them like the computer. If you try to attack their CS, just send your army there to defend. The CS generally have top of the line defense structures, and top of the line units if there's any fighting involved (they don't replace their obselete units until killed), and obviously if you see someone trying to sneak up to your CS you can just declare war on them first.

As an aside you can trivially knock out a CS by doing something like move a bunch of units next to it, declare war, attack, make peace, and then repeat next turn. Yeah you'll get a Warmonger penalty in the long run, but honestly if your game has a strong city-state nation and you're not, you're probably going not going to get any of them to begin with. Greece can have a -0 adjustment with religion + policy, i.e. if they have 200 influence it stays at 200 for the rest of the game (or at least until enough people research the Patronage policy tree finisher). Austria is another city-state gobbler (I made Austria stop buying City-States after 2, or there wouldn't be any CS left by now). Mercantile CS are, ironically, better conquered than befriends since you get all their unique luxury. Next patch will fix that (only way to get unique luxury is by being an ally).

I find that 75% unhappiness modifer and +1 per luxury of any type works out pretty well. You can generally fill up your available area with cities and generally still positive on happiness but you still need to pay attention to it. I really don't see how it's fun when you can only have 3 cities before you run out of your happiness and then you either have to just brute force it and go way negative or effectively have no growth until you research some happiness related tech.

[Julius Seeker]

Speaking of Civilization - one aspect that the game series has simply never really made a successful attempt simulate is the creation of new nations. Most of the nations of the world today were not formed by some founder settler, they were formed by breaking off from a parent civilization:
I.E.
1. Canada - broke off from the British Empire
2. British - (if focussing on the civilization's beginnings - ignoring the Angevins, Normans, and Germanics) broke off of the Roman Empire
3. Romans - broke off of Etruscans (traditionally they were founded by descendants of Troy)
4. Etruria - founded by unknown settlers (probably celts)

They have some mechanisms which allow for similar behaviour, but they're fairly cheap - I.e. Civ 2, if fewer than 7 civs are on the map, then having your capital conquered splits your civ in two.

[Don]

Schism was more like a way for you to even up the odds if a computer player has a way bigger empire than you but you abused railroad + any ignore ZOC unit to march your way to their capital and take it.

I've seen games that attempt to do that but it really doesn't work out well. In Genghis Khan 2 for SNES your generals are mostly randomly generated guys and some of them randomly declare their independence and toward the end you usually just spend your whole time retaking territory you've taken before. In the ROTK series you got this loyalty rating but then you'd never put anyone under 100 to lead a province, and in fact by default the game will prevent you from doing that unless you try to override it. Now there's this hidden 'ambition' rating and in some games like ROTK 2 a particularly ambitious general will declare independence even with 100 loyalty like Lu Bu, but all that means is you can never let Lu Bu lead any province and it's more of a 'gotcha' thing since unless you know the history well, you wouldn't know why this guy with really great stats can never lead a province because he rebels at 100 loyalty.

I guess games don't really want to have a sub dimension of just managing your vessels. It'd probably end up looking like a dating sim anyway, like you'd have to talk to general X and find out what he likes to increase his loyalty or whatever, and that'd be pretty dumb. Nobunaga's Ambition sort of have that as people who are hard to satisfy tend to demand raises more often or their loyalty drops quickly, but in that game rather than risking them rebelling, you either banish the guys who wants a pay raise too often or better yet you send those guys to their doom so you don't have to pay for them anymore. Now from what I understand during that period of time some of the really awesome guys really did get paid so much that it's a strain on your nation's resources (and I guess Japan isn't exactly that resource-rich to begin with) but of course during the real historical period you'd get in trouble if you just sent an overpaid subject to his doom while there's no such implications in a game.

[Julius Seeker]

I guess the real issue is the genre of game that Civilization is. It is a game about being a perpetual tyrant; even when your government style is freedom, democracy, or republic. Your goal is always for the nation to dominate. Whereas true democratic nations do not have tyrants whose entire path to power is through conquest. Nowadays empires are formed by corporations rather than armies. Empires run by armies are not very desirable anymore, they're expensive and usually don't benefit anyone over their cost...

The US military empire costs more to run than the people who exploit it can make; they offset the cost by charging hundreds of billions to the public who does not benefit from the exploits of war; no other nation can effectively afford to do this other than the US. This is unlike the Romans, for example, where the primary invasion funds came from the very people who invaded and reaped the rewards at a profit; and the rest of the free people did not share the burden.

Anyway, the point I should be making is in today's world is not based on empires of conquest, it is based on empires of commerce; civilization does not really reflect that well. So because of this, and the fact that the game is based on perpetual tyranny with just different bonuses based on what social policies you pick, having your country splinter apart would just be annoying in the game; so I agree. If the game had mechanisms so this would not disadvantage the player, it could be really cool.

[Don]

Well Civ 5 has the unit inflation but it's just so crazy that your army ends up always consisting of about 5 units because you can't afford more than that.

I think ROTK 11 has the right idea. It is very cheap to raise an army to defend but to mobilize them for anything is extremely costly. The max troop in a city is 100K, and you'll often see like two frontier cities with 100K troops each and they'd have like 4 friendly cities behind them with 100K troops too and yet you want to avoid sending replacements for as long as possible because it's really, really expensive to move people around and it's worth attacking certain weakly defended positions just to force the other guy to move his army even though you know you can't possibly take it before the reinforcements arrived. In Civ 5 it's both expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain so you end up just having almost no army. I think Civ 1/2 had a pretty good idea with how the most commerically powerful governments have the biggest equivalent of war weariness penalty (1/2 unhappiness per unit outside of home city). It is pretty trivial to build a huge army in Civ 1/2 under Republic/Democracy but using them to wage war means you got to have a boatload of luxuries to offset it (or Women's Suffrage).

I also like ROTK 11's action point system to simulate the fact that you're not a tyrant who oversees every inch of your territory. You can technically do that but in ROTK 11 you generate like 30 AP for your leader's stats, and then 30 AP per city directly under your control plus some other mods, but you can only have 255 AP max (anything unused gets carried over the next round to the max too), and building units and whatnot all costs AP. So eventually you have to delegate your cities to your generals because you can't use up more than 255 AP a turn and it's certainly quite possible to generate more than 255 AP a turn even in a competitive game and you can also spend 255 APs a turn very easily. So while ultimately you could control everything at any given time, due to your lack of AP you have to trust the delegates to do their job. It probably helps that your delegate is actually pretty competent compared to Civ 5. It is in theory possible for a mass defection if whoever is your regional delegate defects too, but of course you'd never let anyone with less than 100 loyalty lead a delegation, and honestly I don't think it'd add anything to the game if say your Great General decided to take your 6 level 9 elite units and all the cities they've conquered and start as a new nation.

[Don]

Had my first major war broke out, Spanish with Tercios against Austria (nothing special, but they're always a powerhouse due to the ability to suck up CSes). Spanish sent like 30 units across the sea and hit 3 cities at once. Half of the units got killed by Austrian Gatling Guns while trying to land but it looks like the Spanish will be able to raze a size 13 city. Austrian just finished research Rifling so the Spanish were doomed anyway but taking out a city would be pretty significant since Spanish has a bigger navy and can defend a counterattack from the sea very easily.

I've come to realize there is literally no point to play a game before the Renaissance era. You basically either go all ranged or you defend with spear/pike until you can get Musketman. Occasionally you might be able to actually attack successfully against a computer player, but due to a lack of a strong frontline unit + decent mobile unit (horses get countered hard until Musketman era). Also without Astronomy, amphibious attacks are basically impossible. Once you get to Musketman, there is no automatic counter to the horse units (Lancer/Cavalry). You got Gatling Gun coming up soon which is a very strong defensive unit but not so great on offense (they can simply run away from it due to its range, and it gets no promotion bonuses on defense). I find that the only way you can even attack is if you got Gunpowder done before your opponent does and that's just a pure tech game. Yes starting at Renaissance completely negates half of the specials in the game but most of the early stuff is completely useless anyway. I never used Hoplites or Companion Cavalry offensively against computer or myself. At best it means you only need to build 3 Hoplites instead of 4 Spearman or that they accumulate XP a bit quicker because they take slightly less damage and don't need to stop as often. Not counting ranged special units (which just turns the game into turtling) the only useful pre Renaissance special unit is the Maladuke Cavalry.

[Julius Seeker]

I've usually won the game by the end of the renaissance with inferior tech. Although, it is largely as a result of having heavily experienced military units and a very aggressive play-style.

I think I may attempt a Deity game.

[Don]

Well city states pretty much always play at Deity level and in my game they got triple unit build speed and they don't even have to pay the upkeep and automatically gets the most advanced tech in the game and even then you can usually hold them off with like 3 units that are an era behind. In my last game I had several Chinese Chus that are level 8-9s from just shooting the CS guys. Of course if you have a siege unit getting range + indirect fire you can usually take a city easily because the computer doesn't seem to priotize in killing units first and I have no idea what they do with their promotions (with Armory you start with Drill or Shock 2, which means even maxed xp units only have a 20% bonus against it, and most likely you won't have Drill + Shock 3 anytime soon).

In the pre Renaissance era games invariably either your two siege units get hit by ranged first and you've to retreat, or your 2 melee units get focus fired and then their melee come out and you've to run away. From a game development point of view it's unlikely to have a large army before the Renaissance era since you usually have barely enough time to even finish building all the buildings, not to mention in any normal game you would never be able to afford the units due to the insane inflation on upkeep, so it's actually pretty safe to assume you either only have 2 melee or 2 siege units because the army size you can field is extremely small.

That said even if you do say build 80% research 600% you still won't have anything interesting going on when you Spearman/Pikeman dominate as the basic unit in the game and have no counter because iron is usually pretty scarce, so you're just going to have massive amount of pikeman clash against each other. If you got a unique ranged unit you can easily cheese the computer (Longbow/Chu/Keshik/Camel). Chus can even cheese a human player though I've found it turns the game into a 'tech to Gunpowder' even more because only Musketman can take Chus from front, and usually you have to tech to Rifleman to be safe so the presence of the Chinese turns the game into a very defensive one for its neighbors once they have Chus.

[SineSwiper]

http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/18/tech/gami ... index.html

All you guys are pussies compared to this guy.

[Julius Seeker]

http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/18/tech/gami ... index.html

All you guys are pussies compared to this guy.

...Or maybe he is just insane =P

[Don]

I think that game is rigged to go on forever because in my experience once the computer just ahead with nukes they really do just nuke you to oblivion and you can't recover from that unless you nuked them first. Civ 2 also has the railroad cheese and it really hard to lose to computer once you have Howitzers.

[Julius Seeker]

Also, unless I am mistaken, doesn't the entire landmass eventually sink if the world is over polluted?

[Shrinweck]

I guess not all of it does. The PC Gamer article said that a bunch of the cities had been destroyed by the rising water level.

[Don]

I thought global warming just changes the terrain in Civ 2? I don't remember ever having any city going underwater but you can certainly end up with a lot of junk land from global warming even when no nukes are launched. You only need like 9 polluted squares on the world I think to trigger it.

[Julius Seeker]

I could have sworn that I once played a game back in High School where the entire landmass sank and the only reason I won is because I had the last two remaining cities on the last little bits of land above water.

[Don]

Played a bit after the patch though it didn't change anything meaningful.

Interception promotions do not even work when your fighters are being air swept so basically there's no unit that can ever beat a fighter doing an air sweep because the counterpart promotion doesn't even work. For example say you take identical unit (Great War Fighter or whatever), one has Interception 3 and the other has Air Sweep 3, the unit with Air Sweep 3 will totally slaughter the other one (winner takes 15 damage loser takes 50 damage). Also since you should pick up Air Repair as your third promotion which should be 15 xp away by the time you can build those and thus heal 25 HP each turn, this means you'd never die running Air Sweep missions. Now interception appears to work when you attack something and get intercepted (as opposed to air sweep it) but unless you're crazy you should always sweep first. With air recon it's not like there's any surprises and even when fighters start having ridiculously range where you might miss some of them, you should easily be able to afford to have an extra fighter to check if there's an anti-air in whereever you're planning to attack.

This also means air attacks are basically unstoppable because whatever units they use to intercept you just use figthters to sweep them and you'll never lose this fight because Interception doesn't work on Air Sweeps. In my hotseat games fights devolve into two cities with 1 HP in a standoff (because any ground unit gets killed immediately the moment they leave the city) and eventually you have enough tanks coming in at the same time to take the 1 HP city and destroy the 25 bombers that were stationed in that city. It's kind of funny people complain about the 1 unit per hex but stacking air units in a single city hex is far more insane than I can recall in the older civilizations simply because all the air units in a city hex can't even be attacked directly outside of nukes.

[Julius Seeker]

The ability to mass store bombers in one city creates a HUGE imbalance in the game. It is probably the main thing that is broken with the game right now. It's the one way I find that Deity can be consistently won... Keep your cities within a highly defensible territory, hold out and stay fairly close in the tech race while amassing loads of cash, get bombers and win...