2981

This is one of the things I find most annoying about Civ 5’s “Small is not just beautiful but mandatory” mechanics – to conquer the world, I must either destroy it, or else go to a whole lot of extra effort to get over the “mistake” of not razing conquered cities.

This would be fine if the name of the game was Barbarian. But dammit, it’s called Civilization and if I conquer the world I want a vast host of cities who bow to my will, not just a mostly empty world of smoking ruins.

2982

Why would you destroy rather than puppet?

2983

Even puppeting runs against the Happiness limit pretty quick. Making puppets only reduces the amount of possible unhappiness, it doesn’t ameliorate it completely.

If all unhappiness did was reduce growth, it wouldn’t be a problem. But at higher levels it reduces combat effectiveness. So the world must burn!

2984

Very good advice about buying settlers. Early on, killing your growth while producing a unit for 15-25 turns is brutal, especially when you could be getting a Barracks up.

2985

On the first few turns. What do I do? Normally I make a scout, sometimes 2 then I start a settler. I guess “What is the build order?”.

Typically I find the barbarian menace a huge problem at once. If I were to use that gold trick to get two settlers at once, Id have to have a few warriors to escort them first. I would guess a build order might be something like: Scout, Warrior, Warrior, Settler + Gold bought settler?

2986

Yes, I’ve found the early game to be very slow. Things take forever to finish when you only have one city and not too many workers yet.

2987

I have to say that I really love the Social Policies mechanic. I think it’s an elegant way to give people a bit of choice without letting them go crazy.

2988

It’s for reasons like that that I don’t care so much for Civ 5. I feel that the strategic choices available are far more narrow than in Civ 4. It feels like… for whatever victory you’re going for, there’s one “right” way to achieve that. Good luck with a cultural victory with a modest sized nation. And good luck conquering the world… burning it to the ground, sure, but conquering? Not likely.

A game where it’s better to burn a city to the ground and slaughter the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants so you can replace it with your own settler just doesn’t feel very Civ-like to me. It’s one of my main complaints about the change to global unhappiness - I can see the citizens of THAT city being unhappy, rioting, refusing to work, etc… but why is it that just because I took over a city, everyone in my empire simultaneously decides to stop having kids?

2989

Ironically you can’t replace it with your own settler, that’s the whole point. You can’t actually HAVE anymore people. It’s like immigration reform run amok. It’s Finland saying “there are too many people for us to govern!” and then slaughtering everyone in Sweden and Russia to the last man, because it’s The Only Way.

2990

Today’s Civ5 update included:

[ul]
[li]Modding - Installer and permissions fixes. Should address any remaining mod download and install issues.[/li][li]Full screen crash fix. Game will now restart in Windowed mode if it cannot find a suitable full-screen resolution on first start.[/li][li]Hall of Fame now records data correctly when using a Windows username with special characters.[/li][li]Deal expiration fixes.[/li][li]Fix for Puppet State production exploit.[/li][li]Misc crash fixes.[/li][/ul]

2991

IMO a lot of the conquest stuff would be fixed if they let you create a puppet civ with a swath of territory, ala EU3. Or Civ 4 I guess for that matter…

2992

Bzzt. Start a settler at 4 pop or maybe 3 if you have nothing better to do. It will go faster and won’t hamstring you. Build a scout first to nab as many ruins as possible (goddam silly though it may be, it’s still fun), but I think two may be wasteful; possibly it’s OK on some maps. But build a worker instead of a settler. Unlike past civs, it doesn’t hose your city to do so, and it’s hugely important. After that maybe a settler, but I like getting writing early and then building the cheap Great Library to jump ahead to a good tech like horses.

I really don’t find barbarians very annoying in this game at Prince level. After all, they can’t breach a city wall in any reasonable length of time (yay, another good Civ 5 feature), and in the open a warrior shouldn’t have much trouble early on, especially combined with the city shots, but they’re really fine by themselves too. So I don’t even bother with building military units after that first warrior until neighbors become an issue most of the time. I don’t even escort my first settler unless I know it’s going near an encampment because you can generally see them coming. Admittedly on rare occasions my worker has to play hide and seek around the city until an ungarrisoned city kills a random brute (that first warrior is off exploring on the far side from the scout), but wasting 3 turns of worker time is better than wasting 7 turns of city time early on…

2993

Something I really like:
Montezuma holds his diplomatic meetings in front of a crowd. When he refuses or agrees to a trade deal, you hear the crowd boo or cheer.
Actually just Montezuma’s diplomacy screen in general. He’s terrifying.

2994

Not a bug. It even gets a mention in the strategy guide .

2995

Yeah, you don’t need a warrior in your city all the time. In fact, I frequently abandon it and go barbarian hunting. When I’ve cleared an area, I settle.

2996

Huh. I thought the entire point of the game having 5 different ways to win was that instead of picking an endgame victory condition on turn 1 and “going” for it for the next 6 hours, you could just play how you like and there’d be a reasonable way to win for just about any strategy and civilization size you wanted to try.

I won a game with a scientific victory where I conquered two entire other civilizations, made puppets out of all of their cities plus a couple city-states that were allied with them, and didn’t raze anything to the ground at all.

2997

My build order for the capital generally goes: scout, settler, Stonehenge, archer.

And I must say it sets me up for very successful games at Emp level (perfect for a culture victory push). If I’m on a Pangaea I’ll insert a second scout before the archer. Second city focuses on military.

2998

I haven’t gone for full world domination, but both times I beat the game so far, I was poised to complete it 3 different ways.

I find the tech victory the easiest to pull off so that was the first one I did. Second one was diplomatic victory, which by the way is cake easy if you have retarded amounts of money. Just bribe every city state on the map a couple turns before the vote. BAM! election won.

2999

The advantage of being able to declare then launch a first strike vs the AI in a war is HUGE. You can setup just how you want then decimate them. I think it’s worse than previous Civs because generally speaking there are less unit and cities in this version. You also can’t mass units inside cities fortified defensively. The AI usually has their units running around near their borders making them easy targets. Ranged units are pretty hard to use offensively but for a first strike they are very powerful as you can actually bring them to bear.

Agreed. Civ 5 feels like hard counters and sharp falls in army combat. The AI can’t handle the various modifiers. The defense combat policy modifiers are huge too. One of the earliest ones is +33% in your own territory IIRC. You can just sit and wait for their army to die to your defense then go on the counter attack if out numbered.

Yep. The problem is the AI is terrible at keeping units alive. You could almost say combat in Civ 5 is about not doing the most damage but not losing units since you have so few and they take forever to replace. In previous Civs even if you lost most of your army you could rebuild a big force just in the time it took the enemies to conquer a few cities and move around the map. In Civ 5 once a Civ’s army is gone you can basically destroy or take all their cities. Just being able to pull a unit back and heal it up again is a huge advantage as a player. Cavalry is the best for this and surprising the AI doesn’t use it? The Greek Companions are very strong and move very far. The AI does some decent damage to me but it hardly ever gets kills. Usually when it gets kills I know it will and I’m being overly aggressive in order to do something quickly.

Has anyone managed to play a game without a lot of war? It seems this Civ 5 is extremely focused around war, which I admit is one of it’s strong points and I enjoy. Playing peacefully however seems very hard, I always get randomly attacked at some point even if I have a decent army and try to play nice diplomatically. I like the longer game timing when fighting but playing peacefully it’s just boring. There is to little to build or choose from and buildings/wonders take forever. I just end up cycling turns and even that is much slower than Civ 4 since it takes Civ 5 a much longer time to compute the AI. I’ve started playing lowest detail settings to make it run faster and honestly I think I like the low detail look better for some strange reason.

3000

Well, the main thing is that it can be hard to switch horses mid-stream for some specific victory conditions. For example, if you want a Diplomatic Victory than you have to refrain from annexing city-states, since even if you don’t piss off all the city-states in the world you still need to have enough friendly city-states left over to get the votes. If you build or annex too many cities, Cultural Victory becomes nearly impossible (and it appears to take God-awful forever even if you harshly restrict your own expansion.) On the other hand, your science points are directly related to your population, so you need to expand aggressively and increase population in order to win a Technology Victory. That includes getting access to luxury resources, since the real limit to your population is happiness, not food, and your need for both lebensraum and specific resources will probably result in conflicts with other empires or with city-states.

I can appreciate the gameplay purpose of punishing over-expansion - the problem of any game involving territorial control of resources is that the territory is zero-sum, so once one player controls a plurality of territory, they have essentially won the game yet still need to steamroll the other players in order to actually win. Although you get benefits from expanding or conquering in Civ 5, the happiness hit means that it isn’t a purely linear relation.

It’s just that it’s rather ridiculous how the best way to manage your people’s displeasure when things get out of control is to… well:

ADVISOR: President Gandhi, the Persians have finally sued for peace! They have realized the futility of their blood-stained path and offered us generous terms to put this wretched war to an end.

GANDHI: At last, our long national nightmare is over.

ADVISOR: We have taken control of 10 Persian cities as per the peace treaty.

GANDHI: Let us govern them with kindness and mercy, and welcome these war-weary souls into our peaceable nation.

ADVISOR: Actually, sir, they seem to be quite unhappy. Something about India being too crowded and not enough luxuries to go around.

GANDHI: BURN THEM! BURN THEM ALL! LET THE STREETS RUN WITH BLOOD!