I thought you were joking when you said you google cbf and my post came up! Btw that would have been a great joke. Now you tell me you were all serious… [Darth Vader]Nooooooooooo[/Darth Vader]
Actually if I google cbf, Confederation of Brazilian Football came up as the first hit…
As long as we’re not using this thread for anything else, I’ma keep spouting about the CPP.
City siege - man, just don’t even bother without siege engines (or ships!) unless it’s literally undefended or you’re in the battleships-versus-pikemen stage. Too many HP.
Combat AI - Ehhhh, it’s okay? Not too much egregious nonsense, but it does occasionally forget to fire with ranged units and I saw it try to run a GG away into an empty tile he was easily murdered on. TBF he was going to die with his army and there was no way out as the One True Dutch Republic of the Totally Willing was finishing rolling Sweden up to the sea, so shrug.
Strategic AI - At least on babymode (Prince, currently) it’s capable of out-teching and out-Wondering me at times as I’m still feeling out the economy, but as usual a good player can guns-or-butter it to death over the long haul by focusing on long-term investments (well, let’s be honest here: Hammers, hammers, uber alles). But though the tactical AI may be better, that doesn’t mean much when I roll in with 2x Gus’s army.
Combat rebalance - The unit rebalancing feels fun! Not really sure why, but I think it’s just smoother progression overall. Tighter tech race means you can’t have it all and end up fielding Spearmen for way too long or whatever, but that makes it interesting. Skirmisher-type units (Chariot Archer -> Skirmisher -> Heavy Skirmisher->uh…) tend to be fast and be able to move after attacking, but with only a range of 1 you have to be careful. Cavalry seem way, way more useful - not sure if they got balanced up or spears/pikes got balanced down or what, but I’ve been leaning heavily on War Elephants and Knights. They kick butts all day long.
Strategic rebalance - Verdict still out on this one. It feels a lot easier to go wide due to the changes in happiness mechanics, and assimilating conquests is way less punitive - if you Annex right away, you get a free invest (double build speed) in the Courthouse there. But I haven’t tried going tall really, so I can’t really make much of a comparison.
Civ rebalance - So far, so good. The Dutch Polder improvement is awesome and again encourages you to look at the map in a different way - it can only be built on fresh water, gives crazy bonuses, and +1 gold to adjacent villages/towns. Oh, and villages/towns (I still have no idea if they level up a la Civ IV or if it’s a tech thing or what, heh), which I mostly ignored in my Shoshone game, are really neat - they give okay money in general, but awesome bonuses if you build them on a trade-route-bearing road. Again, encourages you to look at the map differently. Fun stuff.
Overall - I’m having a ton of fun with the CPP. Hats off to everyone who contributed.
I also found the cpp happiness system to be considerably better than the original.
However the improvements and buildings allowing hyper optimization allows you to blow the AI out of the water and makes it even easier.
Sorry for the cross-thread post, but curious - is the reported change of happiness in Civ VI (CVI?) where it’s per city and not global the same as the change the CPP introduces, or are there subtle differences?
Happiness is still global but its more driven by limiting unhappiness than getting happiness and unhappiness tends to be caused by individual cities, usually being out of balance.
It’s much harder to straight up get happy faces but it feels better to get happiness through doing normal things than chasing happy faces.
Apparently -20 happiness is still bad.
OK, with the wait for Civ VI, I decided to actually try Civ V. Just upgraded to the complete edition. The last Civ game I played a lot of was Civ 2 and Civ Rev on the Ipad. Didn’t really try the two iterations of Civ 3. What would everyone think the best expansions to start with are and which scenarios, if any, are worth playing?
Hopefully it will take me a couple of years to get my use out of this and then I can pick up Civ VI.
Alex.
Make sure all of the DLC is enabled within the Steam Library interface, and just choose SP and set up a game with whatever parameters you like. I’ve never played any of the scenarios, so I can’t comment on those. But I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb to say that most players prefer playing the way I suggested.
Yep - play with everything enabled. Hmm; I’ve logged over 3500 hours according to Steam (most of it while not actively playing - I just let games sit in the background while I engage in digital ADD/do other stuff). I wonder if a few more might be worthwhile during the wait.
The only reason to disable any DLCs would be if you don’t want the AI to pick some of the more OP civs (Mongolia, Ethiopia, Korea, for example) but want to leave the rest random.
Scenarios…meh. Base game is stronger IMO.
Once you’re familiar with the game, I highly recommend the enhanced UI mod (it’s really dense with info, though – I wouldn’t suggest it to a new player until they grok the basic game mechanics). Activating any mods disables Steam achievements if you care about those, though.
Agree. The games depth comes from interactions on long time scales. Scenarios shorten the timelines, or area, or both. This makes them far more shallow than the regular game.
Has anyone played the Vox Populi Community Balance patch for Civ 5? A friend and I have been playing it multiplayer and it has really reinvigorated the game. It completely reworks the entire game, pretty much, and attempts to rebalance everything. It also vastly improves the AI. We’ve been having a ton of fun with it, and it really makes you think about your strategy.
Yep, we had quite a bit of discussion about it upthread. There’s a search function around here somewhere.
Yeah, is salvaged Civ5 from the garbage heap for me. It’s a great mod.
Arise! Time for a report on the latest release of Vox Populi (released 1/29/18).
I just finished a babymode (King I think, or maybe even a tiny baby Prince setting) military victory. The game is substantially the same, but there’s some good and bad since last I played.
The tactical AI is the best it’s ever been. I mean, I still won my wars because there isn’t a tactical AI on the planet that can survive a competent human who has a strategic advantage. But it made me play carefully, forced the kills it could, threatened to counter and almost successfully did so a couple times, and generally didn’t piss itself while drooling in the corner. The only time a ranged unit charged my lines was to secure a kill of some relatively high-value target, and I didn’t see any naked Generals or anything.
Happiness is less of a pain in the ass. You still have the “build everything everywhere” thing going on because of the way local (un)happiness works with the different “needs” that need fulfilling, but it’s been tuned down so that you don’t actually have to build everything everywhere. In fact, if you can get ahead of the tech curve and build most things, you get happiness out the ass.
Puppets finally feel like they do what they should. -80% faith/sci/culture/gold production and you don’t control them, but the governors are less awful and critically you don’t get much unhappiness and they don’t scale policy or tech costs. So controlling a bunch of lower-value puppets from conquests is totally legit. Then you get the Imperialism policy that changes the yield mod from -80% to -50% and things get nuts. Which brings me to…
Policies aren’t massively different, but different enough. I love that the later trees are much more powerful (seriously, Imperialism was nuuuuts for me) so it feels like you’re actually getting something out of your culture investment rather than another minor bonus that doesn’t make much difference in the industrial+ eras. The Lebensraum tenet of Autocracy does some other things that don’t matter and also increases Citadel (the GG improvement) land-grabbing radius by a tile. So plopping a Citadel grabs a massive chunk of land for I dunno getting your wave of artillery actually in place before the heat death of the universe. Good times.
Combat balance remains much better through the ages than vanilla. Seriously, if nothing else the unit rebalancing and placement on the tree is a huge boon to the game.
Random events as they currently exist are crap. The system is fine – get an event and sometimes choose a response, and the responses available depend on game state like paying a big lump sum of gold to take advantage of the “Windmills getting decrepit!” event and give them a permanent production boost. But in practice it’s hurricane after hurricane, flooded fields after flooded fields, and market day after market day. This needs serious tuning and more content; right now it’s just annoying, particularly midgame+.
Build everything everywhere is still a thing. It doesn’t feel quite as brutal as it seems costs have been tuned down and hammers slightly up, but you still have a gajillion buildings, about 2/3 of which you pretty much want everywhere. I like the idea of specializing cities, and IMO there’s work to be done here.
Overall, positive steps for sure! I will totally play some more, particularly if I can figure out how to un-fuck or maybe just disable the random events.
Whenever someone mentioned playing a Civilization game in Co-op, especially hotseat co-op, my reaction was always “are you crazy? Do you know how long that would take?”
Well, I always wondered. Here’s one possible answer I enjoyed reading about.
I haven’t played Civ V in ages and after playing AoW Planetfall I wanted to play a 4X with more building in it.So I installed Vox Populi and started a game on a large map at epic pace. It didn’t take that long before turn times started to get annoying. I like the features of a 4X like Civ, but damn, I’m actually playing the game such a small percentage of the time. If I’m not in war, I usually do one or two things in a turn and hit next turn and wait.
Vox Populi seems like it adds a ton of stuff. So much so that it is a little overwhelming so I just pick what looks like the best choice for research and city development and move on. There are a ton of buildings.
The Civ V leaders still have very long memories when it comes to warmongering. Pretty much everyone is attacking me. I make peace and another attacks me for warmongering. I’m like, “hey I stopped attacking people ages ago but you guys keep trying to kill me”.
Vox populi is much better. Be prepared to sit down and think if you pick “epic” lol
Bad as Civ V was, I still like it better than VI.