Strategery Thoughts

[grahamiam]

Yeah, 1 unit per tile. Makes it more like superchess than Civ, but I am coming around to liking it.

KC, cats should be killing those low level units with 1 shot. I've not played immortal to experience that sort of volume though. Also, the heal promotion seems to be one of the key skills to focus on since metals and horses can be limited, thus limiting swordsman, cats, and knights. Also, you can spam Archery and gunpowder units since they don't require a resource. Interestingly enough, cannons don't require a resource either. I'm thinking, at higher levels, it may be required that the focus be on the lower half of the tech tree to aim for gunpowder and chemistry. Haven't played enough to see what that would require giving up, though.

[killercane]

Originally Posted by grahamiam

Yeah, 1 unit per tile. Makes it more like superchess than Civ, but I am coming around to liking it.

KC, cats should be killing those low level units with 1 shot. I've not played immortal to experience that sort of volume though. Also, the heal promotion seems to be one of the key skills to focus on since metals and horses can be limited, thus limiting swordsman, cats, and knights. Also, you can spam Archery and gunpowder units since they don't require a resource. Interestingly enough, cannons don't require a resource either. I'm thinking, at higher levels, it may be required that the focus be on the lower half of the tech tree to aim for gunpowder and chemistry. Haven't played enough to see what that would require giving up, though.

Yep killing em with 1 shot. Its hard to move your horses in with all the mountain terrain and such. Lower half seems like an interesting idea . I'll give it a try!

[Robboo]

Playing babylon and using their bowmen is a great civ for an early rush for domination. 4 to 5 bowman plus a melee unit results in quick kills. I send in the archers 1 tile ahead of the melee unit. They start bombing the city. They bomb it twice while the other unit walks in. Usually 2 rounds of bombing is all thats needed.

I have only two capitals left and I dont know where those bastards are. So I will most likely have to adjust that plan. I can see it being powerful on a small tight map with a few AI probably won't work on humans.

[Rik Meleet]

From another (not THE other) site:

Originally Posted by Sullla

Well, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase the game last night. Even if the game is a dud, I figure it's still worth my $50 to try it and see how things go. I bumped things up to King difficult this time around, and set out to conquer the world as Rome.

Just over 100 turns later...

Oh my. Errr... Umm, how can I put this. Let's come right out with it: Civ5 is a fundamentally broken game in its basic game mechanics.

I will probably try to do a longer post on this later, but here are a quick list of the problems with the game as I see them currently:

- Opening difficulty extremely dependent on starting location. A poor starting location makes the game massively tougher. [OK, maybe this isn't new to Civ5, but it's not good.]

- Related: game is too dependent on having the right resources near the start. If you lack strategic resources, you are really screwed. Having the good luck to start near multiple luxuries makes the game enormously easier.

- Exploration yields ridiculous rewards. The goody huts are already extremely strong, then you can pull hundreds of free gold from the ether just by meeting city states. Ridiculous.

- Different civs are horrendously unbalanced. Some of them are all but useless (poor Ottomans...) Companion cav is as bad as the Civ3 Immortal, brokenly powerful, since the AI is too dumb to build spears.

- No feedback from diplomacy. No tooltip help explaining wtf a Secrecy Pact actually does. I have no idea how any of these AIs actually feel. Firaxis, I am not interested in trying to read Wu Zetian's "body language" as she speaks to me in Mandarin Chinese!

- The AI is abysmally dumb when it comes to combat. I watched the big, bad Persian Empire walk one unit at a time into the killing fire of a city-state, losing about six units over the course of two dozen turns while achieving absolutely nothing. It was... painful to watch, given how expensive units are in this game. When I went to war, the AI mindlessly walked archer units right up next to me to be killed (just stand 3 tiles away and counter-attack), and continued to bombard *BARBARIANS* with their cities while my units were at the gates ready to attack. My Roman ballistas, the units doing all the city-killing, were never targeted even once. Oh... my... God.

- Production is now the key economic indicator. Yes, precisely backwards from Civ4! You can easily get more food from other sources, but you can't get more production. If you have no hills at the start, you are REALLY screwed now. This would make for an interesting game mechanic, except for two things:

- You can't choose where your cultural borders expand, and the game always gives hills a very low priority. Argh, those are now some of the best tiles in the game!

- The city-states are broken in this game. Horribly, horribly broken. They are free mana from heaven, easily exploitable tools to let you dance past the AI civs. The cultured and militaristic ones are nice and all, but the maritime ones are the real culprit. I disliked the corporations in Civ4 because they broke one of the fundamental rules of the game: that cities have to provide their own food, shields, and commerce. Maritime city states in Civ5 are the new corporations, just like running Sid's Sushi, only now you can do it right from the start of the game. Benefits from befriending maritime city states:

Friend: +2 food/turn in the capital, +1 food/turn in all other cities
Ally: +4 food/turn in the capital, +2 food/turn in all other cities

Free food, raining down from the sky! I was able to befriend two maritime city states, and got a disgusting +8 food/turn in my capital. Why even bother building a granary? I get QUADRUPLE the benefit for free without doing anything! So the new "One Right Strategy" (TM) is to emphasize as many mines as possible in your capital, and let the city feed itself with magical maritime food. Of course, if you don't have any maritime city states near you, you're out of luck, but it's not like this is a "strategy" game or something...

Oh wait, you might say, "the city states are still OK because you have to pay them gold for influence!" Well - sometimes. Not always. I had a request to kill a barb encampment for a city state, so I did, and boom! Instant "friendship" status. Gimme gimme gimme all that free food for pure dumb luck. Then the city state happened to have wines, which my capital wanted, so I received another +33% growth bonus on top of everything else. Sheesh! The We Love the King Day thing is purely random, and the benefit (33% growth benefit for 20 turns) is not at all trivial. The whole thing is completely absurd.

Giving out free *FOOD* in the early game?! Did they test this thing at all?!?

Yeah, I could go on. I've played this game for maybe 5-10 hours total, and I am once again annihilating all of the AIs in the Demographics on King, more than double anyone else in every relevant category after ~110 turns. There's no point in playing on, this game is already finished. Do I have to go on to Immortal to get any kind of challenge?!

This ain't looking good folks. Believe me, I paid my money, I want this game to last for years and years. There might be a good game here somewhere, but Civ5 is very badly broken at present. The AI code, the diplomacy, and the city-state mechanics all need a total rewrite. I... am not optimistic that that will happen. They screwed the pooch badly on this one.

[ProPain]

IMO Sullla is a great civ player, I've always read his walkthroughs with high interest. When someone like him has comments like this that worries me.

[Shabbaman]

It sounds like we are embarking on an epic betatest. But then again, that's business as usual with Firaxis.

[Lt. Killer M]

Originally Posted by ProPain

IMO Sullla is a great civ player, I've always read his walkthroughs with high interest. When someone like him has comments like this that worries me.

it don't worry me, it makes me not buy Civ V. end of story.

[grahamiam]

I agree with some, but I'm still having fun. Maybe I just enjoy annihilating AI too much

Opening start location has always effected game difficulty. That's civ, no? How many starts without copper have caused heartache over the years? How can that really be a complaint?

I don't understand the border expansion gripe because you can buy any border tile?

It costs 250g to be a friend (30 influence points), and then that decays at 1.5 ppt, so gone in 20 turns. Translates to 12.5gpt for +2 food. That part is unbalanced as long as you are making enough gold or if you get a barb quest.

Anyways, good post by Sullla for thought.

[Socrates]

Originally Posted by ProPain

IMO Sullla is a great civ player, I've always read his walkthroughs with high interest. When someone like him has comments like this that worries me.

I garee. A few years ago I read his tales with attention. Probably not the best player around but one of the best writers for sure. Some of his games really are epic. His rant about so-called broken features surely stands some truth. What I can relate to without even bothering playing the game is the amount of luck he describes in Civ5 : I.just.hate.luck in strategy games.

[Shabbaman]

Firaxis showed they like big swings with civrev (pyramids out of goody huts...) so I'm not surprised they're pushing it in civ5. But randomness was always a great factor in civ5.