f13.net forums - Civilization V- Might actually be good now. Stay tuned.

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June 21, 2025, 09:37:31 AM

we're back, baby

Quote from: Shannow on June 13, 2013, 01:11:09 PM

Quote from: Ragnoros on June 13, 2013, 12:46:32 PM

They retain scout abilities. At least my upgraded scout > archers retained the one movement point rough terrain ability.

Yep, which is awesome. Started a game last night with the River guys? (Some west african empire) That get triple cash for taking out barbarian encampments. This is a rather nice plus at the start of game. Especially when Russia got all uppity and I didnt have much of an army. Quickly bought a cpl of spearmen and sent her packing.

SONGHAI IS BEST HAI

Quote from: Flinky on June 13, 2013, 10:31:09 PM

Yeah, most units keep their current promotions when upgraded. Makes some UU a lot better than you might realise.

And it works both ways, which is quite nice for the Koreans unique artillery (H'wacha?). It would normally lack any bonus vs. cities like all other artillery has, but if you upgrade to it from a catapult it retains the bonus. Considering it replaces the treb but hits harder than a cannon it makes them fairly powerful.
Somewhat surprised it didn't make that top 10 tbh, I love my fireworks of doom.

I don't think it does anymore - wasn't it a bug that it didnt gain the city penalty it's supposed to have?

wtf is up with Russian AI? She's declared war on me three times now, and we were friendly on two of them. Did someone take away her vodka?

Didn't someone on here tell me that Catherine is just a vindictive bitch. Once she decides you have to go, she will never stop trying to kill you.

Japan and I just got into it. I built an island city on a place that was untouched. He prepared to send a sneak attack down there. Denmark tipped me off through their spy network, and I got my Ships of the Line there in time to stop him. However, now I'm embroiled in a full scale island on island assault, and the GOD DAMN MONGOLIANS ATTACK.

Nobody expects the Mongolians!

Quote from: Paelos on June 14, 2013, 12:53:13 PM

Quote from: Teleku on June 14, 2013, 01:05:31 PM

Nobody expects the Mongolians!

My latest game was as the Mongolians. Just heads on spikes slaughter and fun for hours at a time. I only started one of my wars...the rest I managed to bully and piss off the AI into declaring on me. I love to teach little life lessons such as 'Thou Shalt Not Fuck With The Mongol Horde' by razing a few cities. It is very different from my normal style, which is to be science and culture pussy and hope no one attacks me Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Quote from: Teleku on June 14, 2013, 01:05:31 PM

Nobody expects the Mongolians!

This made me laugh out loud, now getting strange looks from my son.

Just ran through a game with the Ottoamans to remind myself of the Jannisery. It's definitely overrated - possibly people remembering it from pre gods and Kings. Whilst it's a decent unit, there's no way it comes close to the others mentionend earlier.

I cannot get the hang of military units -- I mean, I do okay once I hit a certain point, but when I try to focus on a military victory I spend a ton of time with an unhappy empire and struggling to grow and produce troops.

And half the time I'm quickly out-teched because I'm slow-growing, broke, or churning out units instead of improvements.

My latest attempt (as Augustus on Panchea) is doing okay -- I've been annexing (no need really to puppet them at this stage, by late game my happiness problems have been resolved through the Honor social policies on, you know, lots of weapons) city-states, drove Persia out of the game -- but I'm looking at China which has me out-teched and is the same damn size as me.

I ran into China's units doing the same thing I was -- taking a city-state with same dang useful resources -- and China was fielding bombers and rocket artillery to my Great War infantry and regular artillery. And she got nukes about 15 turns ahead of me. I'm working on the Manhattan Project and she's building SS parts....

Invade them, cut the road from their SS producing cities to their capital. IIRC, the SS parts have to go there to build the colony ship. I've been in this position and the only way I won was to go nuclear. Nukes are super-effective.

For a military victory you need to be aggressive early and constant. Few tips:

- start with tradition or liberty first rather than honour. You need a good established empire first rather than the handy military stuff from honour. My recommendation would be a tradition starter then followed by honour, then autocracy but liberty can work just as well. Tradition allows you to get rolling earlier on in the game as it only goes to 4 cities max, whereas with liberty you really need to be settling 6 or more to get the most value out of it. Tradition has an extra synergy with honour because it makes all your units in cities cost nothing to maintain and giving you one happiness and two culture which is very handy.

Honour is a weak tree generally at the start because it doesn't affect your actual base Empire. It gives a ton of really handy nice bonuses but Tradition & Liberty determine the shape of your core empire which is much more important. tradition based civs will have a few core very powerful cities, liberty will have a large number of much weaker cities. My gut feeling is that tradition is better for domination because it starts faster and once your 4 cities are up and running you can focus on warfare, whereas liberty you want to be constantly expanding and your cities take a lot longer to pump out units. (And won't have buildings like barracks etc for auto-promotions). Either can work fine though - either a tradition based empire that has 4 cities churning out units and a vast array of puppet states, or a liberty based empire which has settled half the continent and expands through the sword as well as the plough.

- ranged units are the key to victory - first the archer line, and then switching to artillery when it becomes available. Generally an early attack force should be 4/5 archers and a couple of melee units tops just to take the city and finish off any stragglers. You should always have twice as much ranged as melee - that's just how the game balance works right now,

- you should be aiming to have taken the Capitol of your nearest rival by turn 80 or so if you use the tradition start. Focussing early on on your victory type really helps, and its all too easy for players like me to screw that up by wanting to build the perfect attack force and then leaving it too long (I like to turtle in starcraft as well!).

- if you aim to win by domination you should always be looking for your next victim. Keep those central core cities churning out units whilst your puppets and annexed cities build up your empire. You will be behind on science for a large part of the game but it you should never be more than 5 techs behind on the literacy score. The only times you stop building units are when you need a happiness building or a new science building becomes available.

- puppet cities, don't annex, unless they are fantastic cities (generally capitols). Once you unlock the courthouse option in autocracy you should start annexing them all as it will increase your happiness.

- don't take over city states. With honours gold for unit killed option you should be able to buy the affection of city states, and their bonuses are generally much more powerful than what you get from having them as a city.

- once you have cleared yourself some local space, you need to work out who the leader is and figure out how you deal with them. Different civs require different approaches, and also their victory method can affect what you do. For example in my janissary game the Germans and Persians were ahead. Germany was going wide and settling everywhere in second place, and Persia was going tall and building wonders like crazy. Tall cities are a tough nut to crack but once you take their main city they effectively die, and Persia was in a very hard to defend island - city had 3 coastal tiles, lots of flat terrain etc. So rather than go after the weaker and closer target I surgically took out their Capitol, annexed the city (which had 14 wonders or something stupid) and used the science and culture from that to power my entire empire.

- in general their are some civs that require specific tactics. The Chinese are a pain because you either need to take them out before cho-Ko-nos or you generally have to wait till you get artillery. They are probably the best defensive nation in the game - their unique units are just that good. England should be the same but for some reason the AI tends to fail with them - suspect its because the 3 range requires greater skill to use properly. Similarity Korea is a pain for naval invasions because their unique ships are extremely, extremely tough for the era they get them in.

- also certain civs are much better at war than others. Take Rome for example - whilst it has two unique units in the same era, its not actually that great at warfare. Both require iron, and swordsmen just aren't that good. Meanwhile the Roman ability is actually contrary to warfare - to take advantage of it you need to be building buildings in your cities instead of units. Rome is a good ICS civ for going wide, but surprisingly poor at domination victories. Use their units to carve out expansion room early game, but long game you should be aiming to out produce and out science every other civ due to the number of cities you make. Same with the Aztecs - they look like they should be good at war, but actually its tall cultural and science victories they excel at.

- good civs for war include England, China, Mongols, Germany, The Huns, The Ottomans, Japan, Songhai. Of course any civ can win any victory type, but if you are still picking the game up and exploring things I would suggest one of those civs as they generally revolve around warfare.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of domination victories just because you have to kill everyone. I much prefer the civ 4 route of requiring a certain amount of the map. You end up breaking alliances that have lasted 2000 years just because you need to take your friends capitols even though they are 15 techs behind you and have been best friends the entire game. I also hate the penalty you get for completely eradicating enemy civs - you should always leave one city alive to avoid the massive diplomatic penalty.

God damn it, why does talking about civ make me want to play civs. The new expansion is coming out soon and all I want to do now is play an ICS game as Rome and build a pretty empire...

My intention in this Egypt game was to be the usual tech turtle/build tons of wonders. I only got three wonders as everyone started snaking them. Then all the aggressive folks on my island started hamstringing each other, it was just too much to pass up. Pachy is gone, and I'll just roll over Rome whom he was at war with. Might have to take a short break to bump up hapiiness after razing a few poorly placed AI cities, then "help" China in their endless war (I think she's been fighting Sweden since the game started, half of each empires cities are named for the other civ) and then stomp China.

By then I'll have the start of a decent navy and control of an entire continent and be in decent shape. My tech is taking a hit since I focused on units so early on...but cannons make short work of opponents with catapults and crossbows. My own crossbows are just to hold off their units long enough to set up the cannons and roll their cities.

Thanks, Maledict. I'm going to give that a try. Playing civs since the original in my buddy's dorm room, I've had a total of 2 domination victories, ever. *EVER* Once in Civs1 where we beat ass with India by 1200 AD and once in Civs3 where I took over the world as the US via Nuclear Weapons.

I just suck hard at the military part of the game.

I always play as nice cultural science guy until I get punched. Then one of us is going to die. There will be no peace.

I'm doing pretty well as the Incas. I dropped the difficulty a notch -- I figure that trying for a domination win was sorta against my playstyle, so it was effectively harder anyways.

Mostly I stopped dropping off garrisons on conquered cities. Didn't really consider how much that was killing my army. I tend to play no barbarians too, so putting together a scout and sending it out really helped. By the time I rolled over the Russians, I still had two or three melee units and 7 or so ranged, and so I kept their numbers up and rolled over the Koreans. Had to pump out a few replacement units before I hit the Dutch, and now I'm after the Carthaginians.

And just got Trebuchets...

The Tradition tree helped a LOT.

Turns out I've only ever played Egypt in a scenario, so decided to play a religious based ICS game and abuse the piety tree to spam burial tombs everywhere. Huge Pangea plus map so endless space to settle - took out the Maya early on so their damn religion didnt extinguish my own, and then a small war against the Greeks to slow them down.

Piety is an interesting tree but it absolutely feels weaker than other trees, and locking you out of rationalism is a killer as rationalism is amazing for wide empires which generate huge amounts of raw beakers. Not entirely sure how I'm going to win - cant do culture as I'm playing ICS, domination is dull and on a huge Pangea map will take forever, and science without ratIonalism is just unpleasant. May use the ridiculous amount of gold I'm earning and go for diplomatic - it's not even the renaissance and I'm already earning over 100 gold a turn with my religion and my huge number of small cities.

Not really using the Egyptian ability at all (have only hard built one wonder, the Oracle), and war chariots are hardly amazing anyways so my entire strategy is basically coming down to my religion + burial tombs + piety tree. The shocking thing really is how effective it seems to be!

Quote from: Maledict on June 14, 2013, 09:10:42 AM

I don't think it does anymore - wasn't it a bug that it didnt gain the city penalty it's supposed to have?

It doesn't cry

Hadn't played as Korea in a good while, in part 'cause it was just too silly with that artillery, but it seems to have been patched out.
Might have to try for a small and focused Science win with them now.

I kinda like Piety tbh, so much so that I both hate and love them for making it exclusionary with Rationalism (which was a total no brainer must have before imo) and it basically puts Egypt on steroids if you combine it with Freedom.

Infinite City Sprawl. (I think.) Basically it means place cites every 4 hexes across the entire map. Not sure how you don't die a death of infinite unhappiness though. Wide empires never work well for me.

Yes ICS basically means placing as many cities as possible on the map regardless of location to squeeze the most out of your space. It starts off slower than tall empires (few cities with huge population) due to the way science works but in the end will be generating vast amounts of resources.

Thanks to GnK the happiness can be dealt with through a combo of factors. Each city generates 3 unhappiness for existing plus 1 per pop. So assuming you let each city grow to size 3, you can counteract that unhappiness with :

Ceremonial Burial - 1
Meritocracy (the liberty sp that gives one happy per connected city) - 1
Pagoda - 1
Colleague - 2
+ an other happiness affect (from social policies generally)

That doesn't even take into account the happiness you'll be getting from luxuries - of which you will have tons as you spread far and wide. Or the -5% from the liberty tree.

It is pretty key getting a religion though to do this, so you have to aim very early on for one. It's one reason why the Maya are so freaking good at ICS. As the game progresses you can lift the cap on happiness more - grow the cities to 5 pop, then 8 etc.

The problem is piety directly harms this strategy because rationalism is so vital for getting those small cities to generate a lot of science. In the new expansion you can take piety and rationalism at the same time - they no longer lock each other out.

While true, the contents of the Piety tree are different in BNW, and my impression is some happiness related stuff moved to Aesthetics (new tree). Piety is all faith/religion related stuff - probably some happiness stuff in there too, but I tihnk that stuff is generally spread out more through different trees in BNW. Exploration has a thing that gives happiness for naval buildings, for example.

Yes - piety is a mess at the moment as its trying to do two things and ends up doing both badly. Right now it's part culture and part faith which doesn't work. It's also the only tree that doesn't have the ability to increase your happyness which is a major flaw.

Commerce has similar issues - part sea based, part money based and in the current game those two don't synergies that well either - you don't get extra gold as a sea based empire, indeed they often have less. Again it gets split into two different trees to resolve that issue which will be good.

Also the cost of social policies has been reduced, and in particular the 'wide empire' penalty goes from 15% to 10% per city which is good. Always felt it odd that giant empires have less culture than a solitary city...

Some bizarre happenings in my Songhai game (playing on Emperor)...After the 3rd time of Russia DoWing me I kicked her ass, methodically chewing my way through her 7 city empire (3 trechubets, 4 crossbows and a bunch of swordsmen fodder). At this stage (around 1400 AD) I found there was a 3rd empire on my continent. Now mind you I had done almost no exploring, having had to focus on buildings units to fight Russia and any spare time for buildings but how the fuck do you go 3000 years without running into a unit from another empire on the same continent? AI took a stupid pill on this map I think.

Settled down into my 15 city empire, churning out wonders and science and happiness...Arabia is my closest competition, bigass empire but I've already eclipsed in science.

Sweden was the other empire on my continent, only 4 cities or so, always been nice to me when he suddenly decided to plonk down a citadel stealing a bunch of hexes in my territory. Sigh. Oh Sweden, my army has had nothing to do for 400 years, don't you think that they were chomping at the bit already? (and I've basically been in a golden age for the last 30 years with a combination of wonder building and excess happiness so I have money to burn).

I haven't found this difficulty to be much of challenge so a little dissapointed. Going to go for something other than a science win though since that's a little boring. Maybe diplo or cultural.

I've found that on lower difficulties, the AI doesn't explore across continents at all. I had to do all the intial exploring in order to even know they were there. I can't tell if this is just due to the technology gap, but I'm not exactly building boats the second I get navigation.

I generally stick to Prince/King because I like to win and not feel cheated.

Emperor is my usual - I find civ 5 to be one difficulty easier than civ 4 so have bumped it up a notch. Could never beat emperor difficulty on civ 4 butits definitely the 'hard enough to be interesting, easy enough to not feel a chore sweet spot for me'.

Maybe try immortal when the expansion comes out but I have no doubt ill be creamed.

Managed to get a single city culture win on Immortal. Have made many attempts at Deity single city games, but that's looking like it may be nearly impossible. Or at least on my default setting of Pangea only maps. May have to cheat and see if I can get a good city start on an island map or something, just to see if its possible under any circumstance.

Morocco will probably be my first civ for the next xpac. I want to investigate the trade route and arch systems first. Maybe use that for a culture victory.

I am leaning toward Shoshone. They sound nice and broken Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Finished my ICCS game as the Egyptians. Ended up a diplomacy win as it seemed the fastest way to go.

Burial Tombs are a fantastic building, but overall the Mayan seem a better race with a similar strategy. The Egyptian UA is not that great compared to the Mayan's free great people, and as good as burial tombs are Pyramids are probably one of the best buildings in the game.

Was thinking about doing another ICC game as Mayan's using a "super shrine" strategy - you can end up with each shrine giving +3 faith, +2 science, +1 culture, +1 happyness, +1 food which is a fairly insane amount of bonuses for a very basic building. could even possibly drop peity to go for the science win...

Ended my Songhai game with a quick lesson in how NOT to achieve a diplo win (city states count...who knew? I didnt..:P). Oh wells. Was kinda boring anyways as I could've scienced the victory with ease.

Started a new game on random map with the Huns....I will admit while its easy mode I LOVE the fact I'm on a nice bigass island with no other empires and just two city states.
The builder in me can now proceed to layout my civilization exactly how I want it with no annoying interuptions. Basically the perfect Civ game for my inner child. I think we'll go for 20 cities.