I’m having a bit of a problem- is there any reason why I haven’t been given the option to set up a religion? Is there a necessary tech or something? I’ve created a pantheon and have been given no further options. All of the religions have now been taken despite me having 5000 faith points and several prophets.
Get a Great Prophet and click his Found Religion button.
That’s the problem- there was no ‘found religion’ button. Is there some sort of requirement for him to have that?
There are only so many religions that can exist in a game … it might dependon the size of the game, but I think it’s 4 or 5. Go into the Religion Overview screen, and under World Religions see how many there are, and at the bottom it tells you how many left can still be formed. I imagine you took too long popping out your first great prophet.
tgb123
6225
This may be obvious, but is your Great Prophet in a city? You can’t found a religion unless he is.
Ah, this may have been the case. Thanks for your help!
Installed Gods and Kings on Friday and started a new game. 5 Civs, Prince difficulty, continents.
I’m now at the Atomic age with just me, Russia and France left, though France are about to become extinct in the next few turns. There are 2 main continents with me as the Celts completely covering one and Russia and (what’s left of) France on the other. I’m leaps ahead of Russia in technology and a Science win is a sure thing at this stage. Russia has had the significant expense of constant wars with the other Civs on her continent (I wiped out the Ethiopians pretty quickly).
Religion and espionage. I decided to pick the Celts to give me a proper insight into religion, but in reality, despite some early game spreading of my newly created Budhism to battle Unhappiness I’ve been stockpiling faith points with nothing much to spend them on. My Great Person creation rate is so good at this stage that I don’t need the faith points to buy them. And my cities are so unaffected by other religions that I have a monopoly on their faith.
I think I’ve spend a grand total of 5 minutes in my 10 hour game using espionage. Spying on other cities seems pointless and I am so far ahead technologically that there is nothing to steal. So I leave them carrying out couter-espionage in my own city. However this seems to be an invisible activity, I have no idea if I am preventing the pesky Russians from stealing my discoveries.
So all in all the expansion seems to have a minimal affect on my game. However I’ve been sucked right back into Civ again and am already planning my next game, hurray!
Dejin
6228
If you’ve got nothing else to do with them, stick a spy in a minor city-state that has some resources or bonus that you want. They’ll slowly help raise your standing with that city-state.
tgb123
6229
I have an old friend that got into computer gaming the same time I did - late 70’s, early 80’s. We both cut our teeth on the old Scot Adams adventure games on the Atari, but while I gravitates to TBS and war gaming, headed in the opposite direction -FPS.
Anyway, during Steam’s free weekend a little while back, he wrote to ask if I had ever heard of this game Civilization(!), and to say he would check it out. Since he’s retired and on a fixed income, the $7.50 sale price was appealing.
He just wrote to tell me that he was up until 3:30 playing it, and to damn me to hell.
As much as I generally like the game I am beginning to come around to the opinion that the AI deficiencies are more than a minor annoyance. For one thing, I actually won a game–pretty unheard of for me–and in the process the enemy’s “wars” were truly, truly pathetic. The leader would declare war, a bunch of units would show up on my borders or cross into my territory–and then nothing. They’d dance back and forth within range of my cities, but never attack, let themselves be picked apart by my mobile forces, and eventually withdraw and sue for peace.
In another game, one I lost, both the Aztecs and the Egyptians (the eventual winners) managed to prosecute horribly inept naval attacks. The Aztecs surged a bunch of ancient/medieval ships against my destroyers and battleships, with predictable results. The game-leading Egyptians (perhaps distracted by contentious elections back home) tried to invade with a mix of wooden ships, modern-era transports, ironclads, and WWII type ships–right into the face of my nukes, which annihilated their armada in no time flat.
In short, even though I’ve lost several games with the expansion, it’s been because I suck, not because the enemy does anything. I find that as long as I have a decent reservoir of good troops, I really don’t have to fear declarations of war much. Rather disheartening; in Civ IV I’d face actual invasions that worked once in a while at least.
As for religion, in the game I won, early on I founded Zoroastrianism–and never had a single city follow the faith. Some Christians converted my entire realm, and from that point on it was a non-starter. It’s not helped that when you create a missionary it seems to be determined by the faith of the city that produced it, not the empire’s official faith, so if all of your cities are following an alien creed, I’m not sure how to ever get away from that. Not that it mattered much.
Espionage seems so hands off–all you can do really is move the spies around, it seems?–that I pretty much just send the spies to places where they can either steal tech or influence city states. Ho hum indeed.
I starting cussing out Firaxis when I built the UN only to be told I couldn’t vote for myself. What? When did THAT change? It still makes me mad.
I was hoping that religion would invigorate the game, but it doesn’t feel like that to me. I like the concept behind what they’ve done of creating your own religion. But it really feels very much tacked on.
I had come around to liking Civ V for what it had to offer (the key was for me to stop thinking of it as a “real” Civ game and more like another spin off like Call to Power), but this feels like, if not a step backward, at least one sideways.
Regarding espionage it’s had notable effects in my game. Not in a way that revolutionize gameplay but it adds an interesting element.
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Stealing tech: I sent my spy to Berlin to steal tech since they were clearly more advanced. After some time I can view the city the spy’s in to see what buildings it has, where the people are working, and what it’s building. Not vital info but nice to have.
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Finding intrigue: Then I get a notification that Bismark is planning a sneak attach against an Incan city so I talk to the Incan leader and share the intrigue. Events like this happen fairly often.
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Protecting state secrets: I capture Bismark’s capital but no one else on the continent has tech worth stealing and someone is stealing my tech in my capital so I bring my spy home. Eventually I’m told she killed a German spy which prevented them from stealing a tech. Another time a civ steals a tech but I find out who did it. Their leader contacts me and apologizes “for the misunderstanding”.
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City state relations: I’ve also lost an alliance with a city state as a result of Byzantium sending a spy to it. I assume it was Byantium since they’re next door and became the new allies.
Currently I’m delaying capturing the second German capital (they rebuilt their palace in another city in the middle of our decades long war) because I’m 2 turns away from stealing another tech.
It doesn’t drastically change the way the game plays but certainly adds flavor. I wonder about ways the intrigue angle could be built up in the next iteration of Civ. Perhaps implement it with a casus belli system involving diplomacy that allows war declarations without causing as much anger among friends of the other civ.
I routinely get notices from other leaders that so and so is embarking an army for a sneak attack on wherever. It almost never materializes; apparently the other civs embark their invasion fleet first, then check and see, oops, there’s a navy in the way, and think otherwise. You’d think they’d do their recon first, but whatever…
KevinC
6234
I find it interesting that ARMA2: Combined Operations (thanks to the DayZ mod) has already displaced Gods and Kings as the #1 seller on Steam.
It’s even worse when they embark their invasion fleet against a completely landlocked country. The portage portion of that invasion must be brutal.
I suspect many people regard Gods & Kings as just a larger package of DLC in a long line of Civ V DLC. More civs, more units, a couple of scenarios, and some added tech in the form of spies and religion. You either want this right away, or you can wait for the inevitable Steam sale down the road.
DayZ is getting reported on and showcased all over the web. It’s new and exciting. There’s no reason to wait for a sale. The Arma games haven’t really had great sales in the past, and with the persistent MP nature of DayZ people want to join the fun now.
Just how many Spearmen does it take to portage an Ironclad, I wonder?
Deep into an Immortal game with Dido of Carthage. Like half of the newer leaders, her special abilities strongly encourage linear play, but she’s an insane “boomer” leader if you are patient enough to bide your time to turn 150-175 or so when you can start flipping through the Commerce tree and literally have positive GPT output in the around 200 by the late Renaissance era.
One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is just how much better this game is balanced for Immortal and Deity level play. Previously there were a set of strategies for these difficultly levels that was clearly better than anything else, regardless of starting disposition or leaders (exception possibly being Ghandi). Now everything is more balanced-the tech trees, the social policy changes (HUGE), base game concepts that were heavily abused (RAs), the number of decisions has increased because the number of overpowered things in the game has greatly decreased.
I did want to address this point:
more than ever, with Gods and Kings I felt like I was reliant on the seed of a map, my location and the unique qualities of my people combining to set my path for the next six thousand years or so.
Each Civ is somewhat “baked in” with a starting biased area for the map script that matches their Civilization abilities and traits. If your Carthage, you start near a coast. If you are Egyptian, you usually start near Marble, Mongols get Horses, etc.
You have a lot of very powerful tools to deal with map seeding beyond that. Pantheon choices, social policy choices (both starting tree and second chosen tree), and tech bee-lining/wonder targeting can all deal with map seeding issues. I would say that the reason why the series has been so replayable is the struggle to find the best solution to the map seed that you can using the various tools you have to work with.
So I don’t think that statement is really true at all. If it is, my suggestion is to reload the same map from the start and think more about the choices you are making.
KevinC
6239
What makes Dido such an awesome boomer? I know they get free harbors, but is there a really good UB or something?
routlaw
6240
It’s mostly the free harbors and the way that, just by existing, they encourage a certain sequence of development. So with my free harbors, I naturally want to (and can!) settle near plenty of fish, it’s they pretty abundant on shore lines in the map scripts. This, in turn, drives large food surpluses with a lighthouse (and say, 2 or more fish tiles), and large cities+large capital+free trade routes is a lot of money due to the way that route income is calculated. It snowballs more in the mid to lategame as you can use your income to colonize more (more trade routes) and faster (more bigger cities funded with rush buying essential improvements, an Aqueduct, and work boats).
What also happens is that you get these huge cities with a lot of flexibility on how you develop your land tiles-you don’t need to farm everything since you get a lot of food off a few concentrated tiles. So you can put down trading posts. Since you are already going to go into the commerce social policy tree (too syngeristic not to do so), those trading posts get 3 gpt with economics and the commerce social policy. That kind of cash adds up fast when you can spam the trading posts, which gets a lot easier to do as the game progresses. New cities on small island-like landmasses in the midgame generally don’t need farms at all if you can found them w/ three fish.
Inland Carthage cities are nothing special and I’d only settle there is the site had very compelling reasons for doing so. Good seafood tiles though and the Civ just sparkles, in my Immortal game I can literally covert cash into hammers at a rate that no other Civ can possibly keep up with. It’s possible to do this with any civilization, I suppose, but the whole “free at the start of the game” part changes everything.
