You might want to spend some time with The Dominion series. I think they are on 5 now. By far the best way to play is to play multiplayer and the reason is that you will see some fantastic variation in strategy.
There is no happiness. Replaced by amenities. If you fall below the amount you need, all your cities get increasing penalties to yields…which never seemed severe enough to me to bother fixing (beyond just keeping a lookout for luxury resources you didn’t have yet). I guess MAYBE if you get a really huge empire you could build one single centrally located entertainment district or Colosseum wonder?
Housing is simple. It’s a semi-hard cap to population. If your city is only one away from the housing cap, you get a minor growth penalty (-25% I think?). Hit the housing cap and you get a major penalty (-50%). Exceed it and it virtually halts growing (-75%?). You increase housing if you want it to keep growing.
Campus, industrial, and trade districts are obviously useful. Faith remains a dumb sinkhole (unless you decide early on to go for a religious victory). At the very most, one in ten cities will have an entertainment district. Theater districts never seemed worth it to me. Their only value was letting you climb the civics tree faster. Great artists were by far the weakest great people. The idea was that tourism for a culture victory would be driven by great artist works, but the numbers don’t back that up. You can totally ignore tourism up until the Radio tech because seaside resorts are by far the biggest tourism generators, not to mention that all the big tourism boosters don’t come until the modern age anyway.
I’ve yet to see the AI win a single victory. Even the space race one which you’d think would be very straight forward, but it just seems to stall out once it hits the 3 ship parts requirement.
I consider Civilization VI to be the worst game of the series. Whatever happened to the fun that Sid Meier emphasized should be in the games with his name in the title?
Kinda hope for Civ VII they just do Civ IV with updated graphics, interface, and hexes plus something that feels like real learning AI for diplomacy.
I just want Imperialism 3.
Or Alpha Centauri with updated Civ features like resources and borders (no, not Beyond Earth).
Hexes but not one unit per hex. AI will finally have a chance.
“Gathering Storm”? Is this a working title? Is it a joke?
This too!
I have always wanted a system in Civ V/VI where food production dictated how many units a single hex could support. Tundra, forest and desert tiles would allow for smaller stacks, but bigger defensive bonus while plains and grasslands allow for bigger stacks but no defensive ability. And as technology and farming methods improved, a single hex could support a bigger army based on the food increase. Pillaging food tiles would also permit that defensiveness.
Then again, I really wanted a Civ:CTP army system when I heard about Civ VI and was totally disappointed there!
That would be awesome!
So say we all.
Tom Chick’s essay about Imperialism II is really spot-on. Fun to read it again.
Yup, the main reason I prefer Imperialism to Civ is that it avoids the mid to end game slog by having production take place entirely in the capital all game; more territory just means more resources coming in, not more production queues. BUT it also keeps the fun worker improvement aspect for individual tiles WHILE abstracting army movement to large Risk-like territories instead of individual space crawling. Why haven’t more 4x games copied this system?
I would correct Tom’s article in 2 areas: railroads are never worth building in Imp 2 (the game will end long before they or level 3-4 improvements ever pay off), and it’s totally possible to win by ignoring the new world. In fact, my best games are when I entirely ignore the new world and concentrate on old world infrastructure (spend zero $ on research, let spies do it all and don’t bother with upgraded workers). Grab a new world diamond territory when you eventually declare war on a great power and that’s it. You don’t need money from new world stuff since you’re not spending anything on research, and you don’t need luxury goods because you have plenty of labor from unskilled workers by expanding your food network in the old world.
There are a couple things I prefer about Imp 1. The visuals, the humor, the greater importance on markets, the fixed technology discover rate.
The theme of the expansion is climate change, and it features hurricanes, storms, and other extreme weather events. So “Gathering Storm” seems appropriate to me.
I just love Imp2. I have just 100s of map keys, the very cream of the crop of map keys out of 1000s I’ve found through the years, carefully curated. I probably only use the top 10-20. But every 6 months I’ll play through 3-4 of the best maps and I have them on rotation so I’m only repeating about a map about once every 2 years.
I’ll bite. What makes a map key the cream of the crop?
Do share!
I put them in the Imp2 thread I’m pretty sure.