Usually I only notice when a harbor survives, since I’m always pleasantly surprised to find the trade link immediately established. But in general I find the crippled cities you take over a little strange, and it would really annoy me if for whatever reason I ended up retaking a city of mine and it was suddenly down to one or two buildings.
I’ve encountered the “puppeted city insists in needs orders” bug from surrenders as well. I believe it’s a timing issue, because I had another dialog pop up over the “annex / puppet / raze” dialog. It’s possible that if you refuse the offer during the AI’s turn, and then renew it during your turn it may not occur. I haven’t tried this, though.
DeepT
3563
Travel around Italy. You would be quite surprised at the number of Egyptian obelisks that have been stolen to decorate their cities.
Look in the buildings.xml - most buildings are set to have a chance to be destroyed when conquered. If you use the Tuner in the SDK you can look in them during the game and see that they have a few buildings before you wipe them out.
I’ve got to say this is one thing that’s always bothered me - when I’m asked if I want to raze the city or not, I have to wait until later to find out if it’s worth saving.
There’s no real difference between “raze” and “annex” followed by “raze.” So if you say yeah, burn it down, you can check the city immediately to put out the fires if there’s a Wonder or something in there. “Puppet” is therefore always the correct choice to that question, because you can decide later if you want to annex / raze.
The real problem is that you can’t tell what’s in a puppet city. You may decide to raze a new conquest due to unhappiness issues, only to find out that it has something vital in it when you annex it to burn it. I guess the best choice in that case is to pick some other city to burn. Of course, the penalties for -10 unhappiness or more or so severe that you may have to put that off, if annexing another puppet will put you over the edge. I’m mostly talking about the city production penalty, not the combat penalty.
Also, I meant to mention that I finally broke down and tried the DirectX 9 version. The difference is really night and day in terms of performance, even with all the settings at “high” I’m not noticing any delays, though I haven’t been in the late game yet. In particular the leader screens load instantly instead of taking 10-15 seconds. I guess my 2x 8800GT/SLI setup really, really isn’t up to whatever they’re doing in DirectX 10. I’m not really noticing any meaningful decrease in image quality, either.
This was pretty much my experience. The game runs like a dog in DX10, but isn’t too bad in DX9. The water in DX10 looks better, but overall the graphics are very similar between the various versions.
I was hit by that bug twice. First time, I annexed the cities and took ther unhappiness hit.
Second time, I couldn’t afford to. Someone suggested I try and hit SHIFT+ENTER to end the turn anyway and bypass the “choose production” prompt and it worked.
Try it. It might work for you too. It’s like ENTER, but it ignores some of the usual end of turn prompts.
Wendelius
Thanks for the tip! In ended up loading an auto-save and declining the peace offer and asking Montezuma for peace terms on my following turn. It worked (got the same insane offer too), but obviously the SHIFT+ENTER solution is much better.
Still had a negative happiness for the rest of the game until I won a diplomatic victory, but as it doesn’t affect your economy and I was by far the top-dog with Monty gone it didn’t matter. As a sidenote I discovered how insanely powerful adopting Freedom social policy is for a large empire. The -50% unhappiness for experts is huge! Knocked my happiness from -28 to +52 (adopted the same turn I won though).
The 8800GT only supports DX10 natively, and Civ5 uses DX11 features when you select DX10/11 mode. I suppose the driver had to emulate those features in software, that’s why it was so slow.
Great tip, I’ll add it to the Manual Addenda!
Meanwhile, I tried playing a game on a large map… and now I can empathize a whole lot more with the Civ5 haters. AI turns are extremely slow, even early in the game, and the massive numbers of city and units that the AI spams all over the map (on Prince) show very clearly that it doesn’t play by the same rules as the human player. Playing on tiny and duel maps is much more enjoyable.
Enidigm
3572
It should be quite obvious that the AI plays differently when a handful of turns on King difficulty into the game, you get one of those “smiley-est kingdoms” popups, and you have 3 happy and all the AI have 25.
Poking around through the AI files what’s interesting is there are references to “bonuses” given when the AI chooses a different strategy. For example, there is a “200” listed under military strategy; so, when the AI “decides” to make a military, does it suddenly get a 200% bonus to production? And when it “decides” to go economy, does it then get a production bonus? That might explain why the AI seems to vacillate between -XX gold a turn, and YY gold a turn, with just a handful of turns in between. It probably runs “economy” bonuses until it has enough money, then runs “military” bonuses and depletes its saved gold reserves. But i’m not sure.
It is unbearable. Originally, I’d been playing on max settings (on a 4890), but in order to accommodate large maps I had to switch everything to medium (or low, in textures) and completely shut off AA. Then I make cuts to the total number of city states, usually 1/3 to a half of what the default is. Finally, I have to have great save discipline and only make new save files and load from the main menu after exiting my game, in order to avoid the savegame overwriting glitch that completely demolishes performance.
After all that, I finally have decent performance that’s comparable to the first few games on smaller maps.
Enidigm
3574
What’s you guys’ CPU? I’m running a 4890 @ 1900x1200, full detail (well, don’t rem if i have AA on or not), and the middle game turns (250+) are slow but not unbearably slow. Using a Xeon 3360 quad-core.
pg1
3575
I wouldn’t be surprised if it cheats at all levels. I’ve seen lots of strange stuff now that I understand the game mechanics better. Usually you end up with a few giant AI Civs that seem to have massive armies and massive amounts of cities. They gobble up all the other Civs expanding. Yet these same Civs don’t necessary seem to have many happiness luxuries so I have no idea how they manage their empires. Many times they will also have negative or low gold income in the diplomacy screen. Given now important gold and happiness are in Civ 5 you’d think they’d have a hard time to keep expanding but somehow they just get bigger and bigger.
The Greeks and China seem uber powerful. I was going to shelve this for a while but I wanted to try China out after I read some posts about them on the CivFanatics forum. I went for massive expansion but I only expanded next to new happiness luxuries first then filled in blank space after. I have a massive amount of cities and I’m making ~250g a turn at 400ad with 10 cities. Paper maker is really nice for that extra income.
Good idea. I should have thought of posting that in that thread too.
Wendelius
Well I simply put them on Cash production when that happens. You can choose that. not that they produce anything but the problem is circumvented.
flyinj
3578
How the heck do you get Destroyers to attack Submarines?
I run an i7 920 with a 4890, @1900 x 1080 with everything medium or low, otherwise I pay the price after 300+ turns. Since I play almost exclusively on epic or marathon, that’s a bit of a problem.
A lot of the economy mods boost that wealth production option to 25%, which I find far preferable to most of micromanaging options for wealth generation that I “should” be using instead. Other than that, for people that play on Epic or Marathon, there’s a big chunk of time before either that or science becomes an alternative where you’d rather not be dealing with mini productions of no use while waiting for the next big thing you really need to come up.
