Sweden looks fun. Interesting that the Nobel Prize is in the game only if Sweden is in the game.
I take it as an ‘inside joke’ regarding paradox…
I think it has more to do with Nobel himself being Swedish.
Are there any mods to make the game look less messy?
For those playing, do you have any other must-have mods?
I thought there was a tactical 2-d map mode that was much cleaner looking.
Yes, there’s a 2D “strategic” map view (it’s one of the buttons near the minimap). It’s clean and very pretty, and you can play entirely from that view if you like. I’ve done this, and it works great, sometimes better than the 3D view because you’re less likely to misclick on things.
What about a mod that changes the minimum city distance? or does that cripple the AI or the game too much?
Honestly, I’d say that jamming cities together cripples the game. Running cities at 4-5 tiles apart feels like the right distance when it comes to having space for placing districts, wonders and tile improvements.
There’s 4 mods I use with the game:
Australia - Better Colours. This swaps out the stupid green and black colour scheme for Australia with a much more appropriate green and gold.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1297979453
Quick start. Doesn’t really make the game load faster so much as it removes the logos at the start so I’m able to hit start and walk away.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1297979453
Community Quick User Interface. Much superior UI. It basically displays more information in a convenient manner. Think of it as being similar to BUG mod for Civ IV. The UI does have a few quirks on occasion with the city screen when it comes to reallocating workers I’ve found. However for the most part, it works well.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1125169247
Unique District Icons: What it says in the box.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=882664162
I meant increasing the minimum city distance even further.
Something to consider if you do tinker with city distance is the knock on effect of city loyalty.
Honestly, the AI is pretty good at founding cities. Or more to the point, the game is pretty generous when it comes to turning sub-optimal land into something useful. The AI isn’t always smart about district placement, but then it can not really see potential that I as a player can.
Contains info I hadn’t heard previously.
Yeah, that was actually a pretty compelling video. Now if only they didn’t price it so high, lol.
Looks like fun. I knew about the natural disasters and diplomatic features, but I hadn’t realized power is now a thing. Also, I like the idea of the randomized tech tree in the late game. (I kinda wish the whole tree were semi-randomized, the way Stellaris does it. One of the early MOO games did this too.)
+1
Yes, this is an enormous plus in most any game. And in Civ, where the tech tree necessarily pushes other activities due to inspirations, it would be especially helpful in keeping the game fresh.
Aggressors: Ancient Rome does a particularly good job with this.
Neither of those approaches would work copied wholesale into Civ, though I’m not against the idea of some randomisation in the Civ tech tree in general.
MOO’s tech set consists almost entirely of a relatively small number of essential concepts repeated several of times at different tech levels. Higher tech versions of the same concept don’t require the earlier versions. They provide better gameplay numbers and obsolete earlier versions of the technology. So for example the engine concept gives the techs Nuclear Engines, Fusion Engines, Sub-light Engines and so on. Each one provides additional travel speed when added to a designed ship. Rinse and repeat across the entire tech tree.
This would be extremely dull if not for the randomisation, which removes most of the possible techs from your tree at the start of the game. This is a brilliant design that results in great variety from game to game as the technologies you have available to play with are different. Working around a series of missing techs in your tree can be a big challenge, and you probably won’t see the same challenge in your next 30 games.
But I don’t see it working as it stands for Civ. A lot of the joy of Civ is the loose simulation of history. It’s simply absurd to be effectively told “Oh no, your nation’s brightest minds simply can’t conceive of Writing. You’ll have to make do without libraries until universities come along to obsolete them.” To work around that, your techs would have to become much more generic and have less of a gating effect on game mechanics. I can see why they want to avoid this as it loses flavour.
By comparison, Stellaris has a much simpler tech tree. There aren’t all that many pre-requisites except straight up a line of similar tech. Stellaris goes with completely randomising the techs available to choose from at any given moment, out of all the techs you could be able to research. That works well for avoiding players using the same strategy for every game but doesn’t really add much in the way of interesting decisions. It’s very rare to not have the next level of laser tech available within your next few selections, for instance, so the randomisation is more of a speedbump.
This is a much less interesting system but would work rather better in Civ. The big change required would be to significantly increase the number of techs in the game: right now there simply aren’t enough available to research at any given moment to randomise a choice between them. You’d also probably need to break some of the dependence between specific technologies and resources available on nearby terrain: it’s no good rolling loads of mounted unit tech to develop when the nearest source of horses is on another continent. One option for this would be to make any tech you had the inspiration for always available as a research choice, allowing the player limited control over the randomisation.
The way I’d approach it would be:
- Keep a similar number of techs as Civ currently has.
- Each time a civ advances to a new age (not sure quite what would trigger this), it unlocks new research choices.
- All techs would appear as options to research sooner or later. Specifically, a medieval tech would always appear by the renaissance, would usually appear in the medieval era, but you might get lucky and have the option to research it while still in the classical era.
- This would usually be randomised at game start but could be fixed for some techs for specific civs, as a flavourful advantage. For example the Greeks might always have Drama in the classical era when it would appear in the medieval for most civs. The Mongols might always get horse techs early but tend to get infantry technology late.
Not one of, the very first game did it. I still don’t understand why that particular element of the original MOO was left by the wayside. [Edit: explanation snipped since @rho21 did a much better job.] Honestly, it was a great system and I don’t think any 4X since then has done anything similar?
Sword of the Stars had a tech tree that had links with a given probability for each race. That meant it was quite possible to end up with no good heavy beams, or torpedoes, or point defense, or shields, or kinetics, or super colonizers, or fancy lasers. Every race had different probabilities, which was huge for adding unique character to each race’s gameplay with only minimal changes to the base ruleset.