3741

I’d argue that at the moment on middle difficulty levels the game actually rewards eXtermination above all else. The military AI is so ineffective and building units is so quick compared to anything else, that after a certain point doing anything other than conquering and razing is inefficient. You can sit back and exploit or expand, but you’re really doing it for your own amusement, not because you’re trying to win the game quickly.

As I said upthread, this game may be called Civilization but sometimes this iteration feels more like it should be called Barbarian.

3742

On any difficulty level, the game rewards an all out war of annihilation.

This has to be thought of as something of a flaw in a game with different victory conditions. Since after a while an otherwise peaceable neighbor nation will suddenly attack you if you don’t maintain a strong army, and since the leaders take the time to insult you whenever they can, apparently just to be annoying, the game makes it all too clear that war is the way to go. But of course a wartime economy often can’t sustain actual conquest, especially in pre-industrial eras, and that means that most conquered cities will have to be destroyed.

Really, they should have a strategic salt resource you need if you’re going to raze a city, because you do after all want to salt the scorched earth to make sure someone doesn’t settle there after your legions move on…

3743

I agree and think it should be tweaked.

With that said, all Civ games have shared that same issue. My top scores going back to Civ I were domination victories. The most expedient way to win has always been to expand voraciously (city spam) and then conquer. One thing in Civ V’s favor is the ability to pursue an alternative victory path without the city spam.

3744

Good point–I find myself not wanting to annihilate my neighbors not because I don’t have the force to do so, but because I can’t absorb their cities, even as puppets. And I can’t raze them because then the other civs will just settle there, giving me the same problem with a different color in a few turns. I’m getting better at managing the happiness issue, but it is tough (for me at least) to wage a war of conquest–the conquest part is harder than the war part.

3745

I dunno, what I definately don’t remember from previous Civ games is the degree of warmongering.
In most games (on Standard size maps), some AI will inevitabely conquer all others on any given continent.
So if there’s three continents, you’ll end up with three civs.
If there’s another AI civ on your own home continent, it’s pretty much inevitable that it’ll attack you at some point.

If you are isolated on a small continent and all you have is club wielding warriors in the year 2000, it’ll mostly matter little, as the AIs lust for conquest often stops when it has conquered it’s home continent.
The closer your continent is to theirs, the higher the risk they’ll eventually attack you regardless, but chances are the game is over by then.

Late game modern wars are often blitzkriegs, the AI is completely unable to defend itself even against other AIs and gets overrun in little time.
The AI leaders then conquer (often puppet) everything and end up with huge holdings.

Fighting these consolidated continents is often like stirring up a hornets nest, but due to limited AI doable even with a much smaller army.
So the military game is pretty fun.

The science victory can also be fun, because it’s essentially the builders victory - you’ll need a at least mid-sized properly balanced and well developed empire to pull it off, and it’s not neccessary to fully commit to it from early on, so your armies can see some action etc.

The cultural victory is very dull - unless you want to minmax is and deal with puppets and stuff, it’s best to have only one to three cities and buff them up with the tons of cultural buildings. Getting the relevant wonders helps a bunch, but with a very small empire emphasing culture it’s a doable victory condition - just very dull. You cannot really afford to get sidetracked too much.

Also, I alsways liked the exploration aspect of Civ the most, and in Civ5 it’s over all too soon. Once most lands have been settled, there’s absolutely nothing you can do in enemy lands. There’s not even exploration with a non-combat unit like the Diplomat in Civ1 or manual trading with caravans.

And there’s no cultural-strength that can push your borders without engaging in combat (and don’t mention that crap culture bomb ability).
The AI almost never offers actual trades, only open border agreements, secrecy and cooperation pacts. There’s no tech trading, either, nor are there options for other nuanced diplomatic deals of whatever kind.

So it’s either warfare or city building where the actual building takes a very long time and is running on slow turns which means pressing next turn, waiting a minute, pressing next turn, waiting another minute … you get the point.

This stuff needs some spice.

rezaf

3746

I think (especially in a game where having more than 4 cities isn’t essential) the AI puts too much of a premium on bordering other Civ cities which causes them to be the MOST hostile. Hopefully upcoming patches will have some variety with this behavior. It would be nice if some AI’s switched tactics and focused on small city victories (like culture) instead of declaring war.

3747

Wow, really? That is actually what I remember most about Civ 4.
Granted I didn’t play vanilla BTS that much, but the two things that come to mind when I think of Civ 4 are stacks of doom and the most dangerous enemy civ (or two) swallowing cities, territory and other civs at an alarming rate unless the player stops it.

3748

Well, yeah, I don’t remember what you describe at all.
Maybe you played on higher difficulties?
I’d usually play on Prince, with the occasional Warlord game thrown in to relax.

Even back in Civ1 it was possible to be something like the UN, because of the ZOC rules you could place units between warring civilizations and seperate them from each other, even when you were allied with both sides. Ah well, I’m kinda nostalgic for Civ1 stuff like ZOC and civs that were sometimes content with having a handful of cities.

rezaf

3749

In previous Civs the other AIs would always eventually attack you, but the game heavily rewarded defense as well. So you could just turtle up and concentrate on research and win “peacefully” … even though you were defending against enemy incursions most of the time.

Civ 5 strongly encourages offense. This is both because of the weak AI – you feel vaguely foolish if you don’t steamroller them – but also because of one-unit-per-tile. It’s harder to turtle up when you can only fit in so many units around a city, after all.

3750

That is incorrect, or at least only applies to the highest difficulties.
I played entire Civ games without ever engaging in a serious war - offensive or defensive. And like I wrote a few posts above, the same is possible in Civ5, it just requires some specific circumstances now, because it’s not as easy (almost impossible) actually befriending the AI now.
AI players in Civ5 will often beg for freebies, but they’ll never offer you something out of the kindness of their heart (yes, that actually happened in previous civ games) or even just give it to you when you ask. In fact, I don’t think you can actually ask kindly (as they sometimes do) - you can just make a demand, to which they almost never submit.

Actually, I think it’s often very easy defending against an invading AI if you have some territorial borders like mountains or water - even with embark the AI is still pretty bad at doing invasions.
In about half a dozen Civ5 games I played to completion now, I haven’t waged an aggressive war. I once DOWed a Civ for building a city right in the heart of my empire grabbing a critical resource from me, and I’ve done limited campaigns to liberate city states or secure resources abroad, but nothing I’d call “steamrolling”, except in defensive wars the AI refused to end.

Guess it’s just a matter of playstyle, like I wrote above, I often did silly stuff in Civ1 just for fun, like keeping all civs alive by isolating them as single city states or allowing barbarians to conquer some enemy’s city and then using it as Legion manufactury line by parking some diplomats next to it and bribing all the Legions the AI would build there. Heh.

rezaf

3751

Did Qt3 just get linked from the official Civ V forums with a post that said “LOOK! DEVELOPERS TALKING! LET’S GO OVER THERE!” or something?

3752

For some reason in my current game I can trade ivory with France but not England. Any ideas why?

3753

As I said earlier, this isn’t really required if you want to go cultural. Go for a big empire through conquest and expansion, and then switch over to cultural later and you’ll be fine, even if you aren’t using puppets at all. The increase in Social Policy cost sounds scary, but since it’s linear not exponential, it’s actually easier to do with more cities than with fewer. As long as every new city produces at least 30% of the culture of your capitol, each new city more than makes up for the increase in cost. Since the only Wonder than produces significant culture is Stonehenge, this is not hard to achieve. The key thing is to focus entirely on culture once you have Broadcast Towers, don’t build anything but culture buildings at that point.

I’m fairly certain that the only really vital Wonder for a cultural victory is the Christo Rendontor. The others are nice, but even the Sistine Chapel gives you a tiny bonus compared to +100% for Broadcast Towers and +100% for Wonders once you have Constitution (under the Freedom track). The Christo Redontor effectively multiplies your culture output by 1.5, and it multiplies with the x3 for a Wonder city with a Broadcast tower, giving you in effect x4.5 culture, or x3 in cities without Wonders.

I need to check if Free Speech multiplies or adds with the Redontor. I.e. if costs are 67% * 75% = 50% of normal, for an effective multiplier of x2, or 100 - 33% - 25% = 42% of normal, for an effective multiplier of x2.38. Civ is not exactly consistent with how it applies discounts in other areas.

  • Gus
3754

England probably already has a source of ivory. Possibly from a city state.

3755

I think that’s not quite right if you are also getting culture from city-states, in which case you’d want your new city to produce at least 30% of the culture you’re getting from your capital AND your city-states to make it worthwhile from a straight culture standpoint. That’s probably hard to do until your new city cranks out several buildings, but the extra city/population may still help in other ways like research, resources/happiness/Golden Ages, etc.

(Caveat: It’s after 5 pm on a workday, so my brain may not be thinking this through correctly.)

3756

Jon,
Thank you so much for posting here.

On behalf of a lot of Civvers I only have one request: Civ is about your epic march through the history of mankind, and with no graphs or replays you have no correlation of that history in Civ V… you only have a single moment in time when you look at the numbers. I can live with everything else in the game, but as modders have shown only your team can finish & integrate the replay feature of the game (and please add some historical graphs). Without them, it’s no longer a game about history, but a game of now. Thanks.

Sincerely,
-Jeff

3757

Correct, except that you can think of city-states as devices for converting gold into culture. A larger empire can afford more city states, so up to a point this scales with the size of your empire.

In practice, you don’t really need the culture from city states, though it’s nice. As I said upthread, I won a game on King on a Standard map with 15 directly controlled cities, and unlocked the Utopia project in the 1930s. I was producing 1300 culture / turn at game end from my cities, and the city-states contributed another 200. Thus city-state contribution was not vital to the win.

3758

Good point. Once your culture multipliers crank up, city-state culture would become much less important.

3759

2K Greg posted some info on the upcoming patch (the first Major patch) this morning.

Some really good updates here, including much needed AI and Worker tweaks and some UI updates, among other things (we can now sell off un-wanted buildings - that should totally change the mid game economy issues I always seem to run into!).

3760

Buildings can be sold. They made workers less likely to build TPs, which seems kind of odd without a TP nerf, since if anything that behavior probably helped the AI.