Civilisation V

This is working brilliantly now on my new setup, so might just pick it up again while I’m waiting for my connection to be fixed. My ping’s probably fine to play strategy games online though, so if anyone fancies a game give me a shout. Mulitplayer games tend to play a bit slower than single player, but there are ways to tweak this, and Turks if you were put off by the time it took us in our initial game, it’s safe to say a lot of that was down to my crap PC, which was loading turns as you finished yours.

I am indeed. I’ll be online sometime between 7 and 9, most likely half 8ish.

Speaking of the space bullshit, as you put it, I totally agree with that sentiment. I fail to see any point in Space, Culture, Diplomatic, or Time victories, despite them being popular amongst civ fanatics. For me this game has always been, and will always be, about conquering the world through war mongering. The only possible case I’ve ever considered as being valid for selecting anything other than Domination/whatever it’s called, as a victory condition during game setup, is that perhaps some of the AI civs will perform better when they have a peaceful route to victory. If you see a civ nearing a space race victory, it can be fun because you have to launch an attack on them to prevent it. Considering lots of AI types are probably not far behind in the race, this can result in war on several fronts vs the most powerful AI nations, and if you’re in that position it is fun. So my advice is to always set out your stall for a military victory 🙂

The late game wars are also the best in the game, since you’re normally vying for control of the seas and air, to aid your land assaults. If you ever manage to get a fleet of fully loaded aircraft carriers around an enemy’s continent, you can very quickly bring them to their knees, destroying their infrastructure and units in equal measure 😈

That was a much better game last night Turks, and has helped me get back into it again. I had a short game the night before when I got completely steam rollered by AI, demonstrating how much I’d forgotten in the few weeks I’d not been playing, so I was a little worried going into our game last night 🙂 A couple of interesting things I noticed though, given the circumstances I was in, and along with a few of the questions you asked me as we were logging off, that sort of prompted me into posting this. This might also help a few others, but bear in mind the level we’re playing at is Prince, which is the level where neither the player nor AI receive any penalty or bonuses that may affect their game, and you may need to specialise more on harder levels.

Anyway, we both started off in similar circumstances last night in terms of how many cities we could build, but you were lagging behind slightly it seems in how you were coping with this. I had managed to build a relatively early second city, but that greedy land grabbing bastard Egyption very quickly boxed me in to the top corner of the land mass, preventing me taking control of some strategic and luxury resources nearby, which happened to also take up alot of the arable land I was hoping to expand into. Not to worry though, I had Iron (albeit 2 pieces), and my captial at least had some good farming tiles near it which would allow for quick population growth, and this appears to be the approach you take when you’re having to cope with a small number of cities early on.

Cities have a lot of drawbacks, and obviosuly you need to have enough happiness points and culture output to offset the penalties for building a lot of them. They each have a massive area of control, compared with earlier versions of civ, but it takes a long time for culture to naturally take advantage of this, and if you have a lot of cities you’ll not actually be able to make use of all the land they grab anyway. The only reason in my eyes for founding a city is to take control of strategic or luxury resources but, even then, the cost can become too much. Obviously with more cities you have more population potential, but again you’ll find this doesn’t actually come into play until much later in the game when you have enough happiness to afford the growth. The automatic happiness hit you take by founding a city, means that it’s actually easier to maximise your population when you have fewer cities, and that seems to be why I’ve been doing so well in this particular game.

To ensure you don’t fall behind larger civs though, you need focus on food production within the cities you have, but strike a balance so you’re losing not out on cash (which is king in civ 5) and production. This is why I suggested using the maritime city states, via which you can boost food production across all cities, without having to dedicate too many tiles for farming. I started off with one such ally for the early game, and this has allowed me to expand two cities into double population figures, and a second one now to keep things going. In the meantime, I’ve been able to place trading posts on almost all the plains around me, and about half the grassland, which gives me more than enough cash to maintain the ally status with the city state, and food comes in at a rate that keeps up with my happiness pool.

As for workers in general, your comments last night, regarding the automated workers clearing forrests, convinced me that automation is a bad idea. There might be an option somewhere in the game where you can instruct the AI not to remove forrests and jungles while automated, in the same way you can tell it to leave improvements you make manually, but even then it’s not optimal so I’d try to avoid automation. Obviously I’m still new to the game, and I’ve yet to find the perfect balance, but I’ll describe my thought process when choosing improvements below:

Grassland – best farming tile in game, but also has a good base rate for food production. I’ll build farms on them if early game I’m seeing double figures for the number of turns it takes for the next population gowth, but later in the game double figures can be a good thing as you’ll have less happiness to work with. The decent base rate for food production also allows you reasonable growth if using a trade post to improve it.

Plains – I’ll almost always put trading posts here, unless the city’s struggling for growth and there’s a lack of grassland around.

Forrest – Almost always a trading post, except maybe when you have a costal city surrounded by a lot of water and few production tiles, when a lumber yard might become a consideration. The only exception to never removing them is when a forrest is on top of a special resource. Forrests are much better in this version of civ, as they give you some food, production, and the trading post gives them a lot of trade.

Hills – The mining upgrade is disappointing, in that it only boosts production by 1 shield, and for this reason there’s an argument that the trading post boost of 2 gold, makes the trading post the more sensible option for them. The early problems I’ve had with production in this game though make me edge more towards building mines, although I find they’re normally left unworked until I select Production focus for my workers from within the city menu.

Any other land tile gets a trading post, unless there’s a resource on it.

That’s probably long enough a post for now 🙂

Battle at the end really was quite satisfying, that’ll teach him 😉

For that level though I think you were doing fine. The only problem you had was when the Aztecs war decced you, which seemed to catch you slightly unprepared, but tbh I get caught like that quite a lot as well. On my side of things the biggest difference was that I was managing to get hold of quite a few decent wonders which was inflating my score, and you seemed to be just missing out on them and others the AI was building. I’m not even sure if building wonders is really a good approach in the game, as the resources devoted to them could be channelled into an army instead, but it’s a real kick in the teeth when you invest so much time aiming for one and then miss out on the benefits of it.

The best guide to how you’re doing in the scheme of things is how fast your technology is going, and how much cash you’re bringing in. Your figures there seemed to be only slightly behind what I had, and it didn’t sound like you were wanting for much. That suggests you were doing alright, and maybe if you concentrate on your army, then steam roll Ghandi, then you’ll be flying.

I liked your tactic of keeping those aircraft carriers in reserve though, quite cunning not to panic and show all your cards at the first sign of trouble 🙂

There was a massive update to Civ5 at the end of June which I missed, details here:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/06/28/civilization-v-patch-improves-ai-and-adds-hotseat-multiplayer/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0

AI’s been improved and a lot of balancing fixes applied…looks interesting enough for me to reinstall the game anyway.