So I started messing around with the Community Patch and all its funky changes last night, and you guys - it got its hooks into me good.
There’s a lot to like, and a lot more to wrap your head around. Impressions:
City-state diplomacy is way more interactive and better now. Instead of dumping money into them, you build a Scrivener’s Guild in your capital. This provides you with one Paper resource, which is used by diplomatic units. These civilians can then go to a CS’s territory and perform a “diplomatic mission,” which gives you a bunch of influence. Also, CS quests feel like they’re more frequent and interesting - and give you stuff based on the CS type as well as influence. I haven’t fought a war, but a couple quests for Almaty (militaristic) got me enough GG points for a Great General, who proceeded to snake a few key resources from Ethiopia for me. Thankfully he didn’t declare on me, I probably would have been screwed, heh.
Not sure if the AI is way better or I’m worse/unfamiliar with the game, but my gut says it’s a combination of the two. In either case, I’m an Emperor Civ V player (which I’m pretty convinced is the highest level you can consistently win without silly exploits) and I got my ass thoroughly handed to me on King. I’m playing on freakin’ Prince, you guys, and it wasn’t until mid-Medieval that I took a lead, and that only because I was able to ignore military entirely thanks to the map. I don’t know if my ego is going to survive this.
Rushing production is done before you start construction, and only gets you double speed rather than instant build. I love this. You really have to plan/invest your money instead of just sitting on a cash reserve to upgrade/buy units when Hiawatha comes a-knockin’.
Mother of god, how many buildings are there now? Don’t expect to build everything everywhere, not that you really could in vanilla - but you really, really can’t now.
Policies are…different. Not sure how I feel about these yet. Again, a lot to wrap my head around. I think I like them better just because they’re different, and I’ve never loved how massively OP Tradition usually was. Free Settler is gone too, thank goodness.
There’s just a lot more stuff now. This game isn’t nearly as friendly and inviting as vanilla Civ V - it’s not nearly as clean of a design, and there are newbie traps freakin’ everywhere - but for those of us with some silly number of hours in Civ V, it’s certainly new and interesting.
Also the Shoshone are awesome now. Big ups to whoever designed their new superpower: the Encampment improvement, which only goes on flat land and can’t be next to another Encampment, but gives +2 food / +1 hammer / +1 culture and 15% defense. Feels very thematic, and fits perfectly with the free territory they get at city founding. I love that it makes me look at the map differently.