2961

Yep. I turned down the graphics options for the leader screens (nice of them to make that a separate option!) and restarted and it seemed to get better. I’m guessing maybe the texture resources aren’t evicted after you close the leader screen, and you run out of free VRAM. But if that’s true, how huge must those resources be? Geez. Either that or maybe something associated with it continues to update erroneously.

2962

Also, some units, Calvary, aren’t affected by terrain bonuses. Positive or negative. I put them in the open.

2963

I’ve found that a good tactic earlier in the game is to use a scout or two to help attacking a city. The AI seems to target the scouts first for whatever reason.

2964

Imagine if one or two of them had March as well (heal regardless of action).

I was mostly throwing out ideas on how the issue could be resolved, not necessarily implying that all of the ways to gimp healing/promote attrition be applied at once. I think limiting healing when inside enemy territory and eliminating Medic and March would pretty much fix the issue.

One thing I’m not sure is a bug or not is that Scouts have the unique ability to ignore all terrain penalties to movement. If you can grab an upgrade ruins they become an Archer unit that STILL retains the terrain penalty ignore ability. You can later upgrade the Archer up the normal upgrade paths and it will always have that ability. Awesome.

2965

I again ask, anyone who finds Prince Level easy, please give us newbies who get trounced some tips. Surely you have some words of wisdom to impart.

2966

I’m pretty sure that’s intended (otherwise you’d dread sending your scouts into ruins.) It’s probably a promotion under the hood.

2967

Explore with a warrior and scout. Save up your first 440 gold to buy a settler which should happen around the time you build your first one without paying. Build 3-4 cities close together and connect them with roads. Build some military units and attack the nearby cities. Win.

2968

Well, that depends on the map. Civ tends to be very land-centric, but I’m playing my current game on an archipelago map and having Ships of the Line with the English ship movement bonus as well as some wonder and social upgrades means that my navy can freaking fly all over the map. It’s like having instant firepower to support a beach landing or race back to take out marauding barbarians.

2969

If you’re playing for conquest, start a war early. When your foe is down to just one or two cities and whatever warrior/spearman units he can produce, park your units next to his cities and just farm XP. I had two ships at full XP (910) by the time I researched Frigates. I also had one catapult with logistics (two attacks per turn) and a core of units with heal.

Ships are overpowered. Well, not overpowered, it’s just that the AI doesn’t know how to use them or counter them. A city that seems impossible to crack will go down like a house of cards to bombardment from any up to date ship that has logistics. With amphibious forces (not horsemen, some sort of infantry unit that can take advantage of defense modifiers), you will capture a city with a single ship and single unit that would have taken an army before.

Get logistics for any ranged unit. To get it, max out an attack to top level (for ships, either naval attack or bombardment. For artillery, either accuracy or the other one). Once you get logistics, you will be farming XP at a ridiculous rate.

Get healing for your ground units ASAP. All of them.

Protect your core units with high XP. Don’t worry so much about mounted units, because they become outdated once armor is discovered, but definitely any infantry unit. Create some fodder for enemy cities/armies to focus on, then let your core melt faces.

2970

I am loving this game. I guess I am finding Prince ‘easy’, but it sure is fun. My first game was the tutorial, the duel on the really easy setting. Domination victory for the Turks!

My second game was America on Prince. Time victory, I dont remember too much about this one and I did a little of everything, and nothing well except hang on.

Third was Egypt. I was going to wonder whore it. I think I built all but two of them thanks to Marble, the national ability and that early policy in the Tradition tree. Diplomatic victory, thanks UN!

Latest game was Germany. My plan was conquest. I started on a continent with 2 of the other 5 civs on it and 6 of the 12 city states. The German ability where you get a unit 50% of the time when you conquer a barbarian camp is pretty damn good early. It fueled my warmongering for sure. I kicked the crap out of Siam first, I dont know what he was doing, cultural path I guess. He had one city when I had 4 and like no military.

Then I jacked a city state for a luxury. Then George Washington chastised me for it and I gave him some stick too. They had a vastly numerically superior army, at the same tech level, but sticking to good terrain and keeping a great general in range along with a catapult dropping rocks, lead me to victory. Then I attacked another City-State for a different luxury. Then one more, which lead 2 of the remaining 3 on my continent to declare war on me so they got theirs too. So its just me and Singapore left on the continent. I had 5 cities I founded, 3 I annexed (puppet first), and 3 more that I left as puppets. This was right around pikemen era so I didnt get much use out of my Landsknechts.

Anyway. England was the last Civ standing along with 2 other City-States on her continent and I planned on bringing the hurt. However at some point I decided to go for the UN victory for three reasons. The first one being…1 oil resource which gave me like 4 units of oil, enough for just 4 panzer units, which I had been looking forward to using.

My upkeep started to overwhelm me at this point to. I had 5 of my own cities and 7 puppets initially. I annexed two cities at once, they were in great spots, but that was a mistake, should have just done one at a time. Anyway, consuming Great People for Golden Ages barely kept me in the black for centuries

Mostly though, England had a ton of units and way more land than me and I didnt just want to beeline for London and cheese it. I wanted to chew them up if I was gonna do it, but it seemed like a ton of micro to get it done. So I went for Diplomatic which had served me well as Ramysses. So I cranked out the UN and thought I was golden, except that you need 9 votes to win via diplomacy and there was only 5 votes left in the game. Whoops. So I turned to Science.

I could not figure out why I could not build the Apollo Project, greyed out WTF. Did I need to build Manhattan first? No…one of my goddamn puppets was building it, ha! It finished and I built a spaceship factory but I didnt think I would be able to assemble the ship in time. So I went for cultural, as I had been making efforts there already, and got it about 2040. I ended up maxing Honor, Piety, Order, Commerce and Liberty.

The Hall of Fame seems jacked, my highest score was from the tutorial map, but I think all 4 of them are ranked above Caesar or whoever is #1. Poor Dan Quayle is still last, I wonder if he knows that. Unlikely. Not sure what I want to do next, I have not played a map bigger than small and I dont think I want to, too much to keep track of. Japan or China maybe and ramp the difficulty up one.

2971

In reference to my earlier post about my late game rush to take down Bismarck (I was Arabia), it was a complete (and surprising) success. It wasn’t about 20 turns left, though; it was 20 years. I’m thinking there’s something wrong, however, with an AI that gives me dozens of cities, all their resources, gold, etc, and basically fully surrenders to me for the sake of a peace treaty just because I was about to take his capital again, all so he gets to keep it and the little spot in the middle of the continent. I ended up controlling most of the world, liberated almost every city state (except one which I puppetted) and brought back all the eliminated civs. I could easily have won a diplomatic victory (I had massive votes) but without the UN and the focus on the war, I didn’t have the time to get there.

Frankly, it felt wrong. Especially since I was ranked as Caesar (that certainly never happened before; I agree with olaf, the Hall of Fame seems strangely off). If Bismarck had just held on to his cities and let me continue my drive across the single land mass, he may have been able to squeak in a time victory on points (although at the point he surrendered we were about 250 points apart). Even if he didn’t win, he’d have landed in second for sure as I don’t think I’d have been able to manage any other type of victory other than points. I wonder what it was that triggered such giving up on his part? It was the third time he asked, getting progressively more desperate each time. Odd.

Time to up the difficulty again and start losing. I’ll like it even if I lose, so I’m not concerned about it. I know it’s not my skill that’s driving my wins. I’ll have to concur with all the earlier discussion about the difficulties being easier than their Civ4 counterparts by a fair margin.

2972

I think farming XP is just too easy. I think there should be more of a risk in doing it, if the benefits of it are so strong.

2973

That style of gaming, though, is entirely up to the player. While I’m all for developers creating gameplay where no player can ever find a way to get an unfair advantage, I don’t see it as a problem. If you don’t want to have the advantage, you don’t do it. If you do, you do it.

I can’t be bothered with farming. If I didn’t do it in D2, I’m sure as hell not going to do it in Civ5.

2974

Since Prince was a pushover I tried a game on King… and promptly got wiped out. Well, not “promptly”, I was friends with the AI players as usual and could probably have survived until 2050 but there was no way I’d win the game. So I saw that my friendly neighborhood Iroquois had only longswordsmen and crossbowmen along the border while I was just getting infantry and thought he must have spent all his money on his many cities (twice as many as mine). When I declared war he said I just made a terrible mistake… and promptly rolled out another army of mechanized infantry. Oops.

Granted, the experience is somewhat soured by the knowledge that he could only research, build and upgrade so many units because he got a generous bonus compared to me, but at least I know that I don’t need to go higher than King to compensate for the AI incompetence.

2975

Yeah, at King difficulty, it’s all about the early wars and harassment. Again… navy. The AI is utterly incompetent at stopping it. Conquer your continent, build a fleet, go raping.

Doesn’t work on Pangaea for obvious reasons.

Actually, I never tried a Prince game on Pangaea. I bet it’s a lot harder, since I’m so navy-dependent.

2976

Then watch your Civ collapse due to unhappiness.

Actually, Miramon has some of it right. But it’s not quite that simple.

  1. Build 2-3 cities quickly, then really expand only as you can effectively absorb new cities. It’s going to cost you in road expenditures and happiness if you expand too quickly. If your new city site doesn’t have a happiness resource that you can almost immediately exploit, you need to really think about building there.

It’s just too easy to slide into unhappiness at higher levels. You simply can’t city-spam anymore. So while that terrain may look like a nice juicy spot for a new city, you may need to think again before creating that settler.

After each city gets to size 2 or 3, turn off the normal growth option and flip on gold/research/hammer production. Early in the game, you simply can’t absorb a huge population and keep everyone happy. So unlike in previous versions, you need to keep things very manageable in the early game. You just can’t expand willy-nilly.

  1. Don’t sign Open Border agreements. Ever. The AI only uses them to scout your territory for weaknesses.

  2. You must build mixed armies (unit composition is important) and position them accordingly. You must maintain enough of an army that you can fend off a joint attack by multiple civs. Find the defensible terrain in your area and move your military to that point. Much like the real world, a defender with a good defensible position can hold out against a much larger force. Think about war when building your cities too!

  3. Puppets are good. Yes, it’s very tempting to want to control cities in your domain but leaving cities as puppets is very handy to manage your overall Civ. You may very well find that your overall Civ performs much better with puppet cities than actually trying to take them over. So when you do create your army and you attack, leave the good cities as puppets and raze the mediocre ones.

Furthermore, Puppets don’t count against the requirements when building some of the Civ Wonders. There are twice as many City-States as there are Civs in Civ V. You may want to shoot for having twice as many Puppet States as controlled ones.

  1. Gold is still supreme. While it doesn’t fund your research anymore, Civ is still all about the Bling. Gordon Gecko would say Gold is Good in Civ V and he’d be right. A lot of gold means you can buy units and buildings at the drop of a hat.

  2. Civics are all dependent on the way you’re going to play, but I always recommend going for Civics that allow you to upgrade your units cheaply. Being able to upgrade that Warrior to a Rifleman for just a couple of hundred gold means that you’ll always have a very competitive military.

Maybe someone else can suggest a few things too…

So, if I were going to use Miramon’s post and change it, it’d go as the following:

Explore with a warrior and scout. Build your worker next and connect your happiness resources ASAP. Save up your first 440 gold to buy a settler which should happen around the time you build your worker. Build one more settler to create a 3rd city and connect them with roads. Churn out 3-4 archers and 3-4 spearmen and attack the nearby cities. Conquer and leave as puppets. Turtle and build. Do the same to the next Civ. Win.

2977

Yup tactical AI is really sucky. It is strange I watch the AI take out city states and the AI seems vaguely competent. Setting up a catapult, a few archers and than sword and spearman attack the city. Generally they succeed sometimes if the city state has decent defense they fail. The city state and its archer do seem to attack targets and random.

But I have to say I was dumbfounded by how stupid the AI is against human. In my latest game, I expanded rapidly as France (5 cities before AD) two of my cities were near Athens (Lyons) and Istanbul (Orleans). The diplomatic AI was fine. It let me know it was unhappy, and then when I refused to cooperate or sign pacts of secrecy it told me that it was upset. So I was not at all surprised when the Ottomans and the Greeks and formed a pact of secrecy and attacked me. In fact I said way to go AI two weak countries should gang up against a more powerful asshole neighbor. I immediately bought walls for cities and stuck my Pikeman inside each city. The attack on Orleans was classic stupid piecemeal attack. To be fair my Pikeman rushed out and killed the catapult before it could fire and than ran back to the city barely surviving the sorte. As great timing would have it my military ally (next door!) provided my with a trebuchet I set it up on a great position on the coast. Now frankly taking a walled city on a hill behind a river with defensive fire is hard!. Although sending an archer or two and at time is just stupid.

However the attack on Lyons was pure brain dead AI. First Greece has two kick ass early units so why he attacked with a dozen archers and warriors was puzzling. . It starts out ok warriors around the city and archers on the hill. He quickly flanks the city but for some reason doesn’t pillage the road leading of the city. Then the AI just sits there, not only do the warrior not attack but the neither do the archer shoot ever at the city. The only attacks they make at all are at my pikeman when he sorties to finish off a wounded attacker. This goes on for a least 6 turns it was like some Monty Python skit.

"We are going to capture Lyons for the glory Greece, hurrahs. Does this means that we should attack the city? Naw if fortify around the city they will surely give up. Uh is that before or after the city defenders stop killing us with arrows and rocks?

I started building a longsword and then finished gunpowder during this time 500-800 AD and bought a musketeer, these two units finish of the remaining greek units quickly (and then raze Sparta and capture Athens) but frankly I didn’t them a pikeman and a walled city were sufficient.

2978

Almost all that matters when choosing city spots at the higher difficulties are luxury resources. Unhappiness is such a crippling handicap you’ve got to almost always be thinking 50 turns ahead about how you’re going to be dealing with unhappiness as your cities grow.

This is one reason why Greece, and the Patronage Civic, is such a powerful combination. Greece’s City-State relations decline at half speed, which in practice cuts the cost of maintaining those relations in half. Add the Patronage bonuses and your City States will be producing a wide variety of resources you’d be unable otherwise (including food).

2979

Actually, Miramon has some of it right. But it’s not quite that simple.

Yeah I just didn’t bother saying the obvious. Obviously you don’t annex enemy cities willy-nilly. Maybe just the occasional really good one, and you either puppet or raze the rest, depending how much happiness slack you may have. You really need your money and happiness, so you can’t be silly about conquering. But destroying is important. The main thing is to crush the enemy, because the enemy is so weak. Whether you expand or not to actually take those cities for yourself is up to you.

2980

My current playstyle is to never settle any cities at all. With only a single controlled city, you get more concentrated power through more social policies, practically unlimited growth, and after you’ve gotten lots of luxuries, frequent golden ages. Use conquered puppets for additional gold production, and befriend city states to boost your military and culture.