KevinC
3481
It’d be very simple to display a red X or something on the obstructing tile, or a tooltip over the enemy unit that says “No Line of Sight” or something.
Quite honestly, I’d agree that you’re missing something if you can’t get in the black. What it is, I couldn’t say without seeing your actual game.
ANY units have a maintenance cost. Don’t carry more than you have to
Roads/railroads have a maintenance cost, so in most cases it is best to create only a small network for trade & defensive purposes.
Markets, Banks, and Mints all make money for you without costing a dime of maintenance. Several other structures will also help rake it in.
Look at what tiles your population is working by hitting the little plus sign by citizen management - “default” tends to go for food first.
Think about trading posts - placing them on grass tiles that aren’t near water which give you some food and production makes for a nice multi-purpose tile to work (those near water are often best for farms).
Yeah, when I click on ranged attack and click on the hex, no “line of sight” rather than nothing would have been helpful.
Your aren’t getting the reddish borders that encompass all valid target tiles?
Miramon
3485
Another annoyance: the camera will sometimes warp to one unit when another unit is still selected, causing me to think that the next move will be for the zoomed-in unit instead of the selected one. Yeah, I know, there’s a highlight and a unit display for the selected unit, but when you warp the camera a hundred hexes and zoom in on a particular unit, you should goddamn well select it too.
Steam stats for number of concurrent and peak concurrent players. Civ V is major.
1. 61,269 66,217 Counter-Strike
2. 61,123 65,550 Counter-Strike: Source
3. 57,701 62,879 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Multiplayer
4. 36,824 40,839 Sid Meier's Civilization V
KevinC
3487
Regardless of my own personal apathy towards much of Civ5, I have to say that I just have to cheer to see a PC-only TBS game at #4 behind Call of Duty, in this day and age. Maybe there’s hope for TBS nerds like me yet.
maxle
3488
When I glanced at those stats maybe a week ago, it was at 70k peak. A bit of a drop, there.
Well sure, but not significant to Civ’s success. There have only been a few games in Steam history that have broken 20K concurrent, and all of them except MW2 are made by Valve.
Just keep in mind that a lot of the buildings that cost money also have a shot at giving you back a lot more later on when you acquire the ability to convert production into science and cash. If you use Gus’s math on road connections vs harbors relative to the population of cities (either in this thread recently or in one of the other two), you can start to take better advantage of trade routes. Finally, consider finding a way to make friends with city states who need something and have luxuries your people could use (eg ones you have none of), especially if the opportunity arises to liberate them, as that makes the last parts of the game a lot easier to manage.
It’s good to have diversity on your city spaces in terms of trade posts, farms and other things, as then you can go into the city window and play around with the AI suggestions for maxed money, production, etc (always with manual specialist control unchecked, so you can see the full range of min max) and get a better idea of what each city needs. Once your tech advances to include a certain number of expensive improvements, you have to transition from puppets to annexation more quickly to avoid having a bunch of stuff built far out of sequence, such as before basic food, culture (to cover more hexes with city influence sooner, at the least) or finance improvements have been put in.
If you can pay more attention to the city management screens earlier in the game vs later, you’ll get the hang of optimizing them a lot faster when the impact is a lot more significant. Consider keeping a general around, so that you can use him as a “break glass in case of emergency” source of a golden age…that’s gotten me much needed cash during a few serious wars. On that note, think about the wonders that extend/grant golden ages, as they will help you build capital quickly if you’ve got a decent empire built, and try not to expend those opportunities before they will really make you lots of money.
Unsurprising. Naturally everyone will want to play it at release. I know that I told my wife to expect to be a Civ widow for the first couple of days after launch. Two weeks later and people start working in other stuff into their rotation - their favorite MMOs, shooters, Sims, etc.
skyride
3492
Just because it’s a PDF is no excuse not to RTFM.
Also read this thread - http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=61441
Dejin
3493
Keep in mind that in contrast with Science, your cities won’t earn Gold naturally based on population. Unless you are specifically working squares that generate Gold, you won’t earn any. So a population 10 city will earn 10 Science. A population 10 city will earn 0 Gold, unless it is working squares that earn Gold.
There are a few other ways to earn Gold, such as Trade Routes (see manual page 103) but almost all of your Gold will come from working terrain squares, particularly Luxury Resources and Trading Posts. Also Coastal squares earn Gold when worked, and River squares earn +1 Gold regardless of the type of improvement placed on them.
If you’ve got all the economic improvements (e.g., Marketplace, Bank, Stock Market) and you aren’t working any gold-earning terrain squares, your city will still earn 0 Gold, unless you start staffing the economic improvements with specialists.
Reldan
3494
I’m not sure I follow this. The Production->Gold conversion is 1 Gold per 10 Hammers. Aside from the generic +% gold buildings that don’t cost maintenance, I cannot think of a single one that actually improves the gold you get through the production conversion process.
Dejin
3495
The conversion rate is shockingly low. I’ve switched over some of my larger medieval era cities to gold production and gotten a pathetic 1 gold, sometimes even less than one gold. It almost doesn’t seem worth it, except anything else I build will end up costing gold maintenance. In fact, the amount is small enough, I wonder if you would be better off building units and then disbanding them to earn gold than switching the city to gold production.
You are. You can disband a worker for 20 gold.
There’s a flat 20 you get refunded? Interesting. Either way, there’s always the question of whether delayed income is worth the wait.
Well, a decent city, one that would get you 3 gold from switching to wealth, can make a worker in 2 turns.
That would seem an exploit in multiplayer, unless everyone is doing it. But then, it becomes a much more micromanagey way of a city producing gold. It’s something I think should be looked at, after the AI of course.
I meant as a long term investment. My impression was that he was crippling his cities for fear of spending money on each turn’s maintenance, which leaves you with large (but nowhere near as large as they could be) cities that aren’t effectively using their population. Add in trade routes and the ability to effectively churn out wonders that can have a tremendous impact (eg, Pyramids, Macchu Picchu) before someone beats you to them, and the game seems scaled for you to build all but the “extra” buildings (eg Seaports for cities with relatively few sea resource tiles, military buildings in most cities) in cities that are reasonably well placed in order to maximize the overall health of your empire. Prior to hitting the green revolution techs, you’ll need more people on the ground. As that shifts out, it makes sense to have all of the buildings you can get in a timely manner to allow you to optimize for shifting needs.
