Arise! Time for a report on the latest release of Vox Populi (released 1/29/18).
I just finished a babymode (King I think, or maybe even a tiny baby Prince setting) military victory. The game is substantially the same, but there’s some good and bad since last I played.
Good:
The tactical AI is the best it’s ever been. I mean, I still won my wars because there isn’t a tactical AI on the planet that can survive a competent human who has a strategic advantage. But it made me play carefully, forced the kills it could, threatened to counter and almost successfully did so a couple times, and generally didn’t piss itself while drooling in the corner. The only time a ranged unit charged my lines was to secure a kill of some relatively high-value target, and I didn’t see any naked Generals or anything.
Happiness is less of a pain in the ass. You still have the “build everything everywhere” thing going on because of the way local (un)happiness works with the different “needs” that need fulfilling, but it’s been tuned down so that you don’t actually have to build everything everywhere. In fact, if you can get ahead of the tech curve and build most things, you get happiness out the ass.
Puppets finally feel like they do what they should. -80% faith/sci/culture/gold production and you don’t control them, but the governors are less awful and critically you don’t get much unhappiness and they don’t scale policy or tech costs. So controlling a bunch of lower-value puppets from conquests is totally legit. Then you get the Imperialism policy that changes the yield mod from -80% to -50% and things get nuts. Which brings me to…
Policies aren’t massively different, but different enough. I love that the later trees are much more powerful (seriously, Imperialism was nuuuuts for me) so it feels like you’re actually getting something out of your culture investment rather than another minor bonus that doesn’t make much difference in the industrial+ eras. The Lebensraum tenet of Autocracy does some other things that don’t matter and also increases Citadel (the GG improvement) land-grabbing radius by a tile. So plopping a Citadel grabs a massive chunk of land for I dunno getting your wave of artillery actually in place before the heat death of the universe. Good times.
Combat balance remains much better through the ages than vanilla. Seriously, if nothing else the unit rebalancing and placement on the tree is a huge boon to the game.
Bad:
Random events as they currently exist are crap. The system is fine – get an event and sometimes choose a response, and the responses available depend on game state like paying a big lump sum of gold to take advantage of the “Windmills getting decrepit!” event and give them a permanent production boost. But in practice it’s hurricane after hurricane, flooded fields after flooded fields, and market day after market day. This needs serious tuning and more content; right now it’s just annoying, particularly midgame+.
Build everything everywhere is still a thing. It doesn’t feel quite as brutal as it seems costs have been tuned down and hammers slightly up, but you still have a gajillion buildings, about 2/3 of which you pretty much want everywhere. I like the idea of specializing cities, and IMO there’s work to be done here.
Overall, positive steps for sure! I will totally play some more, particularly if I can figure out how to un-fuck or maybe just disable the random events.