3581

That’s interesting, Chris, I was kind of wondering about that when I asked a few pages back what size of maps people were playing on. I play on exclusively Huge maps in my Civ games, which may explain my general unhappiness with the game despite sinking countless hours into trying to like it more than I do.

I’m not sure if some of my core problems are something that can be addressed with a patch/expansion either, unless Firaxis gets more ambitious than I expect them to. Time will tell, I guess!

3582

Civ 5 should come with a warning: Does not work correctly on Epic or Marathon speed. Also, anything larger than Large is probably broken. It’s immediately clear, due to the happiness issues, that the game rules don’t scale at all on larger maps. It’s disappointing to see a Huge map nearly empty by 1500AD because of all the limiting factors involved.

3583

Epic and Marathon to a lesser extent can be done right now with the economy mods available, but Marathon vanilla is ridiculous unless you really enjoy waiting until 100AD for your first archer to come off the production line. It’s too bad, as I was off to a fantastic start in pursuit of some achievements but I got frustrated with the pace.

3584

I am playing epic right now, and it works fine, tbh. I have never settled one city, and I have probably 10+ right now tbh. My strategy has been to take all the city-states during the medieval era, when I had samurai. This is even WORSE for my happiness, since you can’t raze them and the happiness is lower. Just make sure you have a lot of puppets, or if you DO annex them, get a courthouse first and any happiness increasing buildings next (colosseum, etc). Getting city states will also get you the different luxury resources. Connecting them all with roads is VERY expensive, so you have to get a lot of income producing buildings in them too. For policies, there are several you can adopt that will increase your happiness by a TON. Lastly, burn all of your great people (except engineers) on golden ages so you can keep your income up to connect your cities and speed build happiness structures.

Oh yeah, and raze any city that you can while expanding. That is how I kept my money from going negative :D My income has been like, -10 or -20 for most of the game except during golden ages. I just keep razing cities after getting the 100 or so gold from pilllaging. Samurai rocked! haha

3585

I’m kind of wishing for a difficulty between King and Emperor. King has proved too easy, but Emperor is proving too difficult. So far, anyway.

3586

I don’t find Emperor to be too difficult, but I find the handicaps… not as fun to play with. The penalties just make the game feel more like a chore than having fun. I wish there was an easy way in the game UI to break out player/AI modifiers separately rather than each successive difficulty level increasing both.

3587

Is there any way to up the maximum number of turns mid game? I was having a blast playing for a cultural victory and trying not to get squashed when a thing popped up and said “Sorry you lose because 750 turns elapsed!”

Screw that!

3588

I find it best to turn off most of the victory conditions in advanced options before starting a game, especially arbitrary ones like x number of turns or ones that I think are really boring to play for.

3589

It’s clear Civ 5 was developed with entirely with Standard and smaller maps in mind. Which would make sense if Civ 4 had some kind of massive multiplayer community and nobody had ever played the larger maps in the past.

But historically it’s always been the reverse. Civ multiplayer has always been a niche interest (which is hardly surprising, given the pace of the game.) Meanwhile there’s always been a zillion people over on CivFanatics saying “Huge is too small!” and modding even bigger map sizes.

(I’ve always played Large myself.)

3590

While I have no data supporting it I think those people are a minority. There are often vocal players demanding larger and larger maps, but I would bet my hat that only a tiny portion actually ever finishes a game on those.

3591

Sure they’re a vocal minority, but the point is that they’re an long-standing, well-known part of the player base. And Large and Huge maps are official parts of the game. So why annoy us large map lovers by making an AI that can’t handle a map size bigger than Standard? It’s not like 2K couldn’t anticipate the response.

Personally I couldn’t bear to play a game on Epic or Marathon myself, but if the options are there, you’d kinda expect that the game would support them.

3592

I’ve been playing standard maps and smaller and usually putting in extra AI Civs and city states above and beyond the suggested numbers. Seems to make it a lot more interesting. I can’t even imagine playing the longest setting on the largest map, that’d absolutely glacial.

3593

Sorry, another repost but-

How do you get a destroyer to attack a sub? I get the red circle over the sub, but clicking won’t have the destroyer attack it.

3594

That’s odd. When spotted, any naval ship should be able to attack them afaik.

3595

It is submerged. Do I have to wait for it to surface? Is there some trick to it? I thought destroyers had depth charges…

3596

You’ve got me a little stumped. Have you tried moving on it as if engaging in melee with a land unit?

3597

I had a sub detected by a destroyer, and then promptly sunk by an Artillery unit in the fog of war, reminded me of trying to attack a Frigate with a Jet Fighter, taking some damage and being like wtf?

3598

I moved to smaller maps and standard because my huge map/marathon game became unplayable, with minutes between turns. I might start a new one with less City States this time and see how it goes.

3599

I started by cutting down to 6 cs and 10 civs, and scaled up gradually back to 10/12 with no problems. It’s just not worth it to have a few extra city states if it’s going to have that kind of AI issue.

3600

Emperor is baby mode compared to Immortal. With the extra worker and happiness bonus the AI starts with they’ll quickly be twice your population 50 turns in, blasting ahead in technology. In Emperor I feel like if I don’t focus on winning, there’s a chance the AI might. On Immortal I feel like if I don’t get lucky with ruins, resources, and rolls that I won’t win.

Multiplayer is always niche except in MMOs. And maybe stuff like playing with strangers is niche even there.