3361

You mean that they are weaker because you can’t stack them full of units? That’s probably true. But at least you don’t have to worry about that single enemy cavalry unit taking out a city.

You did say:

So yes, I did assume you were thinking additively.

3362

I found that a good way to win a culture victory is to make 3 really good cities, then conquer a couple of neighbors, but leave all their cities as puppets. That gives you most of the benefits of a large empire, like lots of gold and research. They also contribute culture to policies without increasing the costs of those policies.

I could have won any of the victories in that game, it must be said, but I wanted to get a culture victory, because it is new (well very different to previous culture victory).

3363

Huh, I was totally unaware of that. Thanks all, I’ve added a note to the Manual Addenda thread. Will have to try a cultural victory with a mini empire…

So puppets don’t contribute to the increased price of new policies? That’s an important advantage, added another note to the Manual Addenda.

3364

I set some ships to (E)xplore and they all seemed to crash into the south pole. Has anyone else seen this?

3365

Did they have all the reachable world explored already? I found ships tend to park near the poles when they’re done exploring.

Sounds like a bad roll on the random number generator but not a bug. Cavalry is extremely vulnerable to ranged weapons, and the attack strength of cities is not reduced when they are taking damage.

3366

Do you guys use auto-explore? On land I certainly avoid it because the AI doesn’t care about parking units inside city-state territory, even if there’s no need.

3367

Yeah, I only use auto-explore for ships. The AI loves to annoy city state with trespassing, and I don’t trust it to keep scouts away from barbarians.

3368

Nope. I just got messages “musketman has been lost!”. No mention of any attacking unit in the message and it was always at the lowest longitude. That’s why I’m confused.

3369

I tried in my first game, but the diplomatic hit taken because they are stupid enough to end the turn inside city state borders, as you said, was enough for me to change that as soon as it happened. There should be a setting to say “do not end turn within city state borders if not friend or greater when on autoexplore”.

I manage my exploration manually, whether on land or water.

3370

Got my 1 city tiny map cultural victory with 3 turns to spare.

I initially had the Utopia project available to me in 2021, which said it would take 39 turns to complete. I got lucky with some great people (one local, one from a city state) that had me down to 15 in 15, but once it ended I was back to 19 from 15 turns.

I ended up completing it by going into starvation and losing 2-3 population to get me back to 9 turns with 10 years to go. Somehow it ended up being faster than that.

3371

Gratz!

3372

I was sweating bullets for the last 5 minutes though. Never been so annoyed and so delighted in such a short period of time.

3373

And I got my cultural victory, too! With Gandhi and four cities on an archipelago map. I founded the fourth city before I remembered Gandhi’s three-city achievement… doh.

Speaking of Steam achievements, you only seem to get the map type achievements (pangaea, archipelago etc.) if you explicitly select that map type, not if the random map selector picks it.

I’m getting a handle on empire management now. Having ginormous cities is crucial for victory because per-city population = base output for everything, especially raw gold. Works even better for Gandhi, of course, but the old Civ4 habit of having lots of small cities definitely doesn’t work well in Civ5.

And here’s a curious AI bug. Take a unit on the coast, then hold down the right mouse button to show the path it would take after embarking across the ocean. Notice something? The AI shows a movement speed of one hex per turn… for the entire path! In fact only the embarkation step takes one turn, afterward it’s 2-4 hexes / turn depending on the era. Could this be related to the AI’s curious idiocy with naval invasions?

3374

To any strategy, there should be a Montezuma clause where you worry about neutralizing him first if he’s within a continent of you. Having him in the middle of all my rivals in a recent game provided for my very own little Iran-Contra approach to war: liberate his capital, gift units, stand back, and then eliminate opponent of choice to where s/he remains a bruised buffer between you and Montezuma. Actually, it’s just Monty, now.

3375

Any one else having a problem where naval units sometimes won’t shoot at things more than a hex away using a right-click attack, it’s only if you select bombard that it works? I think it might be that it won’t attack if the attack is over land.

3376

While my internet connection was down the last few days I played a fair amount of Civ5 since it’s really good at sucking up time. No problem with Steam letting me play, by the way. At any rate, I managed a quick cultural victory game in about 400 turns on my new favorite map type, small continents. Although that was on chieftain, the AI seemed relatively decent, other then China’s 200 year unsuccessful war against one of my allied city states. They should have rolled over them, having brought a lot of archers to the siege. But somehow they failed to bring many grunts, and so for turn after turn the city shot at the archers and destroyed many of them but was never occupied. Then China did nothing at all for a while and I thought maybe I had missed a peace message, but no, both sides were just hanging around and eventually started fighting again for another couple of decades before finally making peace.

3377

There’s a distinction between ranged attacks that need line of sight and ranged attacks that don’t. I’m guessing the land is blocking your line of sight, so you can only use indirect fire.

3378

No, that’s the thing, I thought of that but once I specifically use the bombard command it attacks.

3379

It happens with siege weapons a lot as well. You can fire at the target, but if you right click the catapult/cannon will pack up and move next to the target for some reason.

3380

Wasn’t that hard on Warlord - gotta try Prince now.
12 cities total, pumping out 795 culture at the end.