The Shrine

General stuff:

Happiness still renders the game basiclaly unplayable unless you just cheese through it (either ignore it or whatever). I end up setting unhappiness to 80% because otherwise you'll have a hard time expanding at all. I know the idea is to limit the number of cities but it's just dumb. I think cities should be generated similar to Merchant of Venice, i.e. basically a Great Person so you can just spam those. Of course it shouldn't be quite as slow as a Great Person but it shouldn't be something you could pop out 5 in 10 turns either.

Inflation for unit is still dumb. I set the inflation factor to 0 because otherwise you wouldn't be able to build an army at all because you'd never be able to afford it. I think the guys don't even understand what inflation means. Inflation is when you print too much money so everything is more expensive. In the game you're certainly not increasing your income as a function of just printing more money. What should've happened is modern units should cost more. Setting inflation factor to 0 makes an army a little bit too cheap but the alternative is use 5 units and play it like FFT (which works too, but is dumb).

Expansion speific stuff:

Venice is by far the most interesting to play as. They cannot train settlers at all but Merchant of Venice (replacement for Great Merchant) can convert any city state you're not at war with to your side, with all their units. Also you can buy stuff in puppets cities, so basically you should play somewhat passively but eventually you'd have to go to war because you're not going to have enough Great Merchants to take more than a few city states.

Culture victory is interesting because it's in theory nonviolent but of course when you get close to winning people will just try to burn down your cities so you can no longer produce as much culture. On the other hand, if there are guys who also produce enough culture to prevent you from winning, you can also attack them to lower their cultural input. Unlike diplomatic/science and the old cultural victory you can't just hide in one city and hold it while you're waiting for your final project to complete or the vote. Since you need your entire empire's cultural output to have a realistic chance of winning even losing a few cities can mess it up, so it's definitely related to military.

The new XCom unit has a strength of 110 and can paratroop FOURTY hexes, again showing whoever designed this game has no idea how the end game even works. I'm guessing nobody actually plays the game past the point you get bombers (and possibly as early as artillery) because the unit design in the information era is just stupid.

Trade routes are way too much pain to use. There should be an option like 'default all trade route to max money/science/whatever'. It's really not fun every 5 turns one of your trade route expire and then you've to check your available trade routes to see if it's the best one. The concept is fine, but you shouldn't have to sift through the tens if not hundreds of possible routes later on.

I'm playing a marathon / Emperor / Large world game right now. I am just reaching the early modern era, so I have yet to try out the Xcom unit. I played the Assyrians with the original intent to go for a military victory... Until I hit the Renaissance, and now I have been going for a cultural victory and am doing very well.

Trade Routes, I agree, but I am generally using them not for the highest gold efficiency, but so I can trade with as many different civs as possible. I agree though, some automation would be very welcome, I don't like having to reset routes every X amount of turns.

I like how declaring friendships are no longer a terrible thing to do. Some mooching still, but it's no longer enough to push your civ down. Diplomacy in general feels much more intuitive than previous efforts. There seems to be WAY less denouncing going on, and the addition of the World Council gives even more control over affairs.

Technology, before it felt like 4 out of every 5 techs were useless filler, not it's almost none. So a HUGE improvement here.

Positives:
* Vastly improved Culture system
* Much improved diplomacy
* Many more techs feel relevant
* Interesting new Civs

Negatives:
* While a great concept, city to city trade needs some interface improvement.

I've come to realize the game's combat system is terrible. Not even counting broken stuff like how air units can't even be killed, the problem is that most fights you're going to end up with one side's army completely annihilated in about 3 turns if the enemy is as good as you. It doesn't even matter if you've double attacking marching units of doom because 3 units with Shock 3 can basically take out anything and you'd have no chance to heal up or even attack. Now that's fine in like Civ 1 and 2 where you can build hundreds of units but in Civ 5 you're likely to be running 10 units if you use the default setting due to the time plus cost to maintain there's no way this can actually work. So against AI you just gain XP due to the fact they're dumb, and against human you basically have your entire army destroyed or his entire army destroyed in 3 turns and that's it. There's really no back-and-forth thing. Units simply die too fast, and you're always too close to a city anyway so if it was possible to have back-and-forth deal, the defender will lose because whatever city you're fighting will be out of commission for most of the fight.

Now if you look at a game like ROTK 11, the game is designed to have very large territory that is considered part of a 'city' but have no valuable estate near it. The infrastructure is generally placed wihtin about 5 hexes of where the city is, and a city's territory can extend about 20 hex in one direction. Therefore, as an enemy starts pushing into your line, initially there's no real loss to the city. As they get to wihin 5 hexes you'll start have to worrying about your buildings damaged, and once the army gets to 3 hex your city cannot do most functions besides hiring more troops. Further, mobilizing troops is very expensive so what generally happens is your backup cities has a ton of troops but you'll usually leave the troops garrisoned instead of moving them to help because it's just way too expensive to move armies around huge distances for every attack. Of course as your city is increasingly under attack you usually got no choice, and being forced to mobilize your reserves can be a heavy blow to your economy. I've had fights in a city that went for over a hundred turns before the attackers finally won, and the battle is also continous. This simply isn't possible in Civ 5 outside of some absurd scenario like your 3 units fortified on a position just shooting down the endless AI swarms.

Yeah I can't get excited for Civ 5 iterations any more. I'm definitely still in for any further series iterations since the last three have probably claimed 4-700 hours of my life but I'm going to pass on any more from Civ 5.

I really want to like games like Endless Space, but it ended up to be more about expansion in the first 20 turns than the remaining 200 turns.

Dammit, why can't somebody give me a really good game like Masters of Magic/Orion?

SineSwiper wrote:I really want to like games like Endless Space, but it ended up to be more about expansion in the first 20 turns than the remaining 200 turns.

Dammit, why can't somebody give me a really good game like Masters of Magic/Orion?

That's because unless you put in some ridiculous gimmick, having a big empire is almost always better than a small empire.

The only game I've seen where this concept is done right is ROTK 11 where the number of cities is fixed at start and they're already all occupied anyway so you don't really get to 'expand' anywhere, and it's risky to attack even the pushover AI warlords because someone could immediately invade you while you're out fighting or after you conquered a land, and that the post combat clean up costs you a ton of Action Points which means the extra territory you gain do not pay off until about 20 turns or so both due to the time you spent building the new infrastructure, and the fact that building such infrastructure prevents you from building anything else in your developed areas because you ran out of Action Points. Now, in the long run this is still always a good idea, but it's really easy to even get caught off guard by a computer player while you're building your new territory. Agaisnt human players, it's almost certain they will press that advantage, so the net result is that territory is valuable but you usually can't just expand your way to victory by just keep on building more infrastructure.

But, somehow this worked in MoM, where you started out with a single city and expanded. Even when you dominated, it was still fun playing around with the different magic abilities. Some of this may have been due to dumb AI in certain areas, like negotiation.

SineSwiper wrote:But, somehow this worked in MoM, where you started out with a single city and expanded. Even when you dominated, it was still fun playing around with the different magic abilities. Some of this may have been due to dumb AI in certain areas, like negotiation.

In MoM the backbone of your army is your hero and maybe a few unit with a ton of XP. Although in theory you could just keep on mass produce Paladins or whatever, ultimately your fights are decided by your heroes which isn't affected by how many cities you have. Also having a single city near Mithril or Adamantium is way more important than having a lot of cities in general, so quality of the city matters way more than the quantity of cities. Most strategy games end up being only the number of cities matter at the end.

Which is why more games need to be modeled after MoM. You would think people would distill this down to a formula, but I haven't seen it happen.

Well MoM was always more like FFT in the sense that all the strategy element in the game is still build a stack of 9 Orlandus since you're going to need it to take a Tower guarded 9 of the ultra rare summons (Great Drake/Great Wyrm/Sky Drake). So while you could mass produce Paladins or whatever that's not really the point of the game. In theory you could just keep on send one or two suicidal units and keep on cast Crack's Call on whatever uber non flying unit the enemy has and you'll eventually win but I don't think anyone actually played the game like that. The problem I think with modern strategy games is that they're really FFT like games in the sense you got units with experience and whatnot and yet they still pretend to be a strategy game. If you want to have a pure strategy game, the notion of 'experience' is actually pretty silly because people who die don't magically come back to life. That is, it'd be like Daisenryaku where say you start with 10 tanks, they hit max XP (255) and become awesome, except only 1 out of 10 original tanks survived that long, and since it is only the surviving guy that is this good you either have 1 really uber tank (who is still going to die horribly when going against 10), or you resupply that unit with 9 fresh tanks and drag its XP down to 25 which is nothing special.

In ROTK 11 your experience is essentially the general leading the unit, though most of the power of the general just comes from who he is. The famous commanders have stats that you cannot possibly come close to by taking a 2nd tier guy with any amount of experience. But generals can be wounded/captured or even killed so just because the opposing side has 10 uber generals doesn't mean you have no chance. I kind of like ROTK 11's where each city already has a predetermined value. The capital of China, for example, is worth at least 3 cities. Cities known to be huge geographic chokepoints are almost impossible to assault head on. Sure the map is fixed but even in a random map it's not hard to have somewhat predetermined worlds. In Master of Orion, Orion is always the best planet in the game even if the rest of the map is random. The whole 'all cities/planets/whatever are equal' is just a very dumb concept and it leads to a game where pumping out the most number of bases wins you the game.

I can never get into the Civ series - they always end up cheese fests after mid game (especially with the expansions -- tried both gods/kings and BNW). So I did play it to victory...I just didn't like it much. I keep going back to Paradox games when I want my sim fix.

Slightly off topic (...well, completely off topic...not going to create a new thread) -- anyone try that new Kickstarter Shadowrun game?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/234650/

I poured 9 hours into it in two days and quite enjoyed it. The major complaints are the checkpoint saves and I didn't have an issue with that.. for the most part. It puts a hamper on experimentation and healing is limited but it autosaves when you change maps and that's like every 10-15 minutes. You just have to learn to stop playing at the beginning of a map and not in the middle. It certainly aids in making the more more intense even if it is at the expense of convenience. I would not make my first play through of this game on a hard difficulty unless you're designing your character to be a 100% combat God.

Combat is right out of Fallout 1/2 and is very simple, but still concentrates a lot on tactics. Character creation is pretty cool and you're constantly getting points to put into it, as opposed to having to wait for a level. Dialog is all text based and the story is very cool, even if I've heard it called about as generic as Shadowrun gets, everyone seems to think it's a fun introduction. The dialog is almost always a treat to go through, as is picking your response. I could see playing through the game a second time and enjoying it about as much as the first.

I think the game is mostly a vehicle for future user generated content. I don't regret the purchase ($17 with the pre-order discount for the 9-10 hours I've gotten would be fine), but I think the real reasons to buy this game are coming months down the line. Conclusion: Wait for a sale unless you're bored.

I played a few weekends worth of Venice,
* 1 non-puppet state allowed. No settlers allowed
* 2X the number of trade routes - it should be noted trade routes are incredibly profitable.
* Merchant of Venice Great Person replaces Great Merchant, can use to puppet any city states.
* User can purchase in Puppet states.

They seem like they'd be interesting as a peaceful civilization; but I found myself generating a ton of cash and building a massive army. I got in a situation where a rival civ built a bunch of cities between my cities which I acquired with Merchants of Venice. They were major trade partners until they declared war... Me sitting on a massive fortune, just pumped it into a massive army which I proceeded to crush them with. After securing a very solid core of cities, and making a few enemies along the way, I ended up bullying my way to become by far the most powerful military state in the game. This was played on Emperor difficulty, so my rivals had reasonably large armies, but with the income of Venice I was able to comfortably support one of the largest militaries I have ever played around with in Civ 5.

A little ironic considering Venice is geared to be played as more of a peaceful trade Empire.

Venice ends up being ultra aggressive since city-states always have a ton of units and besides if you don't have an army to conquer stuff it's just a matter of time before you die since your 1 city that you can produce from sure isn't going to match enemy cities. You got to be very militaristic just to get the cities you can puppet to begin with.

The amount of cash Venice generates with maxed out traderoutes is staggering. They were even easier than the Songhai to just purchase a massive army. The city state troops are a very good added bonus, especially since the military states are generally the ones you want to use Merchant of Venice on, since they're the least useful to be allied to in most situations.

In a way, I was a little disappointed because I didn't want to play a military based game, but it became one. It was kind of fun, as I was far more careless with my military than I typically am, troops were fairly expendable. Even in Songhai games I tried to preserve my military.