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Immortal is where TGL becomes impossible to get. Emperor is iffy but still has a pretty decent success rate on a straight beeline. Whether it's worth it depends entirely on the lay of your land and who you're playing of course.
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Apr 15, 2014 06:21
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Speedball posted:I just did this too and feel the same way. I don't think this game has aged well at all. I still think that lore-wise it has yet to be beat but, uh… I'm definitely not holding this game up on quite as high a pedestal as I remember doing any more. No grognarding from me. My only problem with Alpha Centauri is that it doesn't have an auto-explore button (cue someone pointing out the obvious). Please?
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Apr 15, 2014 09:59
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CommissarMega posted:My only problem with Alpha Centauri is that it doesn't have an auto-explore button (cue someone pointing out the obvious). So, the ridiculously powerful datalinks didn't bother you at all? My brother and I used to ban those playing multiplayer because being able to see into every city in a civ for the cost of a single unit was just stupid good.
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Apr 15, 2014 10:34
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twistedmentat posted:I've been trying to play the game at Warlord, because I play at chieftain all the time. I don't have any problems balancing my cities or expanding at a decent rate or falling behind on tech, my problem is always barbarians. They just are everywhere. I should have screencapped it because at one point there were 5 camps around my capital and at least 10 brutes and archers around there. And this was around 3000bc. I find that happens a lot of in the games I'm playing. I thought about turning them off, but I've done that before and it makes the game way too easy. Also make sure you didn't accidentally switch raging barbs on in the advanced menu once and forgot to uncheck it for all future games.
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Apr 15, 2014 10:35
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If you ever have trouble with barbarians, play the Aztecs, unlock the Honour tree as your first policy and have this as your starting build order: * Jaguar * Jaguar * Jaguar Send 'em out in pairs, use the resulting culture to boost you up the Tradition tree.
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Apr 15, 2014 11:01
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Gort posted:If you ever have trouble with barbarians, play the Aztecs, unlock the Honour tree as your first policy and have this as your starting build order: Aztec is ridiculously fun for warring. It's not so much fun when you're warring against atilla the hun that owns 1/3 of the landmass on pangaea (cusco owning the other 1/3 separated by an isthmus sitting on 30k gold). I'm always astonished by how many troops they can crank out if you leave them be until you unlock artillery. You take over a city and you see every hex filled with enemy calvary and cannons 
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Apr 15, 2014 12:37
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bef posted:Aztec is ridiculously fun for warring. It's not so much fun when you're warring against atilla the hun that owns 1/3 of the landmass on pangaea (cusco owning the other 1/3 separated by an isthmus sitting on 30k gold). I'm always astonished by how many troops they can crank out if you leave them be until you unlock artillery. You take over a city and you see every hex filled with enemy calvary and cannons I once tried to snipe out Atilla's capital because it was sitting right on my border with him. Problem was, he had four-five other cities within walking distance, so there was a literally endless supply of new units charging in to re-take it (and no matter how well you out-tech someone, a pop-4 city can't withstand medieval-era units). Eventually I realized the only ways I could hold the city were either to ring it with my own units immediately before/after taking it, or to take out at least some of his other cities first. Alas, before I came to that realization, I stupidly plopped a citadel down in an attempt to hold the capital...and it flipped to his side when that tactic failed 
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Apr 15, 2014 15:19
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Cities often aren’t worth having if they change hands too many times. You get the wonders (if any) and territory, but any buildings or population is gone. The worst is when it’s a coastal city and you don’t have a navy of your own, or at least an overpowering air force. There’s pretty much nothing you can do to stop them from retaking the city with boats.
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Apr 15, 2014 15:38
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If you burn down a city with wonders in it, what happens then? Do they get freed up for other civilisations to build, or are they gone forever?
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Apr 15, 2014 15:42
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Disgusting Coward posted:If you burn down a city with wonders in it, what happens then? Do they get freed up for other civilisations to build, or are they gone forever? Gone forever.
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Apr 15, 2014 15:48
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Gone forever. There's historical precedent in the real Colossus and Great Library.
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Apr 15, 2014 15:48
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Platystemon posted:Cities often aren’t worth having if they change hands too many times. You get the wonders (if any) and territory, but any buildings or population is gone. This is a good time to bring up that your strategy for taking cities you intend to keep (especially capitals) should include your ability to hold the city. Often it's a better idea to keep a city at zero health at the expense of a melee unit or two in order to thin any enemy units nearby so that when you take the city, it stays taken. Having 2-3 turns respite after taking a city to re-position units for defense and allow it to heal somewhat is crucial to maintaining it at a useful population level. Of course if you're planning on razing a city, the opposite strategy might be in order. Let a big city get ping ponged once or twice so you can raze it in 1-2 turns. Another very useful strategy for taking strategic cites is pure intimidation. Make sure your army has crushed your enemy's then sue for the city in a peace deal. No diplo penalty and the city is yours to raze or keep at your leisure. If they don't seem willing to give you the city but are offering most of their resources and gold, they can sometimes be persuaded into giving you the city with some additional GPT or a spare lux. edit: I guess instead of spamming posts I'll take this opportunity to talk about how much freaking fun I'm having with Germany+Pangea+Panzers+Autocracy's Lightning Warfare policy. Tanks that get +15 attack, move 7, and ignore enemy ZOC, most of them with a few eras of promotions thanks to some friendly barbarian horsemen. They're a pillaging and flanking machine. They're movement is absurd. They can surround an enemy unit from 3 tiles away, attack, and still have enough movement to retreat back to their starting position. The only thing this fantasy is missing is a certain other uniquely mustachioed German leader. dayman fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Apr 15, 2014 |
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Apr 15, 2014 16:17
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CommissarMega posted:My only problem with Alpha Centauri is that it doesn't have an auto-explore button (cue someone pointing out the obvious). Oh, actually, THAT it does have, or at least, a hotkey for it. Hit the forward slash button, (where the question mark is on most keyboards). Right-clicking on units to bring up their command menus will also show the hotkeys to the right and the important ones like auto-explore do have function keys, at least.
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Apr 15, 2014 16:31
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Bloodly posted:Gone forever. There's historical precedent in the real Colossus and Great Library. I had the most awesome hilly desert with perfect rivers running throughout and access to salt all over the place. It took me 50 gut wrenching turns to produce my Petra. I got to watch it get burned down by Harold loving Bluetooth and his horde of warriors a turn later.
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Apr 15, 2014 17:26
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twistedmentat posted:I'll give that a try. I could beat Prince on CivIV, but never bothered on CivV. Maybe I'm just not as devoted to games as I was a few years ago, and I don't hang out on Civfanatics discussing strategy anymore, but I have found the difficulty levels of Civ5 hard to climb compared to Civ4. I started out playing Civ4 on Warlord for a challenge and normally got my rear end handed to me and never won at Noble, and I ended up winning Monarch pretty consistently and able to win on Emperor if I was lucky. I started Civ5 at the "one notch above default" King level and ended up down at Warlord before I could get ahead of the AI. I play Prince now for a relatively easy game and still occasionally get beaten (although I do tend to quit if I lose a city in an early war so maybe I could recover some of those). King is about equivalent to Emperor on Civ4 to me still. A lot of it is that I'm not too good at 1UPT either, so I'm kind of in he same boat as the AI. I know I could get a lot more efficient use out of my forces if I didn't keep accidentally setting up situations where I lose units stupidly. Civ4 combat was real basic, you just needed the right mix in your stacks and enough of them to dominate the AI. I keep getting in my own way in Civ5.
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Apr 16, 2014 01:40
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I'm in exactly the opposite boat. Civ 5 lets you build infrastructure like you're playing Sim City and not only deter but utterly destroy the AI with only a handful of units. Civ 4 was an uphill battle for me and I never got above Prince, and even then my win rate wasn't 100% because I'm kinda bad at maintaining big armies. When you can kick the game around on Immortal because its combat AI is a little  , well.
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Apr 16, 2014 01:52
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Civ5 economy is much easier to manage. Rapid expand twice, build NC, expand one last time, then just grow your population upwards with farm spam, and just make sure you add more happiness via buildings and trades and city state quests, and then run scientists everywhere once you hit education. All cities are fundamentally the same. Everything builds painfully slow and have negligible benefits, so most buildings simply aren't worth building at all. Compare with Civ4, where you have a core of a few cities, and gradually expand outwards from there in successive waves. Cities are highly specialised, you have to decide between cottages, or farms and mines, or pure farms and specialists, or farms and whips, and also decide what buildings you have to prioritise in each one. And you need these buildings, they're much stronger than that found in Civ5, meaning that once you've built one there's a dopamine rush for your reward. Cities are tightly interlocked and you often find yourself trading tiles between cities as they prioritise growth or stagnation. One nice thing I miss from Civ4 is the ability to zoom in and see 3D models of buildings on your city tile. Only a couple are visible in Civ5, like walls and colosseums or lighthouses, but every single building is visible in Civ4. It feels like a real marker of your progress to zoom in on your capital and have a record of everything you've accomplished.
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Apr 16, 2014 03:15
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As Venice, should I turn river jungles into farms?
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Apr 16, 2014 03:52
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What is it that makes the majority alliance in the game declare war on a hated civilization on the same turn? Is it because one of them has asked the rest to do so?
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Apr 16, 2014 04:33
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snoremac posted:What is it that makes the majority alliance in the game declare war on a hated civilization on the same turn? Is it because one of them has asked the rest to do so? The AI mostly has a set of criteria that sets how much they hate someone. In the AI's case, since they're not applying penalties for buying tiles or whatever other nonsense, most of the modifiers tend to be from actions that will apply to all Civs who know them, such as war mongering, different ideology, DENOUNCING, that sort of thing. The result is that it's common for a bundle of AIs to hit the "war threshold" at roughly the same time, and then they'll all start planning to invade and invite you in on it. People say you should join in on the dogpile but I don't think there's actually a "fought against a common enemy" bonus applied until you've both actually fought the target. Edit: You'll see this a lot when the Mongolia AI stupidly conquers a city state and attracts the ire of every Civ on the continent. Eliminating a player, in the early game, impugns a MASSIVE warmonger penalty that everyone who isn't Genghis anyway won't ignore, so they all simultaneously decide "This guy's gotta go..."
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Apr 16, 2014 05:02
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The AI also wants in on the diplo bonuses of waging war against the same enemy. You may be right that you actually have to participate in the war to get that, but how hard is it to send a trireme over to bombard one of their coastal cities?
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Apr 16, 2014 05:08
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There's no good thread for this so I'll ask it here: In Alpha Centurai is there a way to upgrade a unit to a type that's not a direct upgrade? I have a bunch of infantry I'd like to slap drop pods on but previous models had ECM jammers.
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Apr 16, 2014 06:53
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I think only of it's the same chassis type and the design is of greater value than the old one.
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Apr 16, 2014 06:57
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So I was reading the OP and trying to figure out this Gold Edition vs Vanilla vs Expansions and I got very lost. The links in the OP for gold edition upgrade take me to the game I already own so I am not sure if I have to buy all the DLC separately or buy the Complete edition to get Gods and Kings and a Brace New World along with all the DLC. If anyone can break this down for me that would be greatly appreciated.
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Apr 16, 2014 08:57
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FoF posted:So I was reading the OP and trying to figure out this Gold Edition vs Vanilla vs Expansions and I got very lost. The links in the OP for gold edition upgrade take me to the game I already own so I am not sure if I have to buy all the DLC separately or buy the Complete edition to get Gods and Kings and a Brace New World along with all the DLC. If anyone can break this down for me that would be greatly appreciated. I think the gold edition disappeared. You’ll have to get Complete, but do note it goes on sale quite frequently.
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Apr 16, 2014 09:05
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Platystemon posted:I think the gold edition disappeared. You’ll have to get Complete, but do note it goes on sale quite frequently. That was what I had assumed but felt safer asking, thanks. Unfortunately I can't add the complete package to my wishlist so I put Gods and Kings and Brave New World on so hopefully if those go on sale the Complete edition does as well.
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Apr 16, 2014 09:28
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StashAugustine posted:There's no good thread for this so I'll ask it here: In Alpha Centurai is there a way to upgrade a unit to a type that's not a direct upgrade? I have a bunch of infantry I'd like to slap drop pods on but previous models had ECM jammers. If I remember correctly, you can't downgrade weapons or armour. Chassis can't be changed at all. Special abilities can be changed, but the model needs to be a total upgrade. I remember that the cheesy thing to do was to build units with the moral upgrade and then upgrade them to whatever, as moral level was kept in the process. SMAC/X was an extremely cheese friendly game.
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Apr 16, 2014 09:32
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bondetamp posted:SMAC/X was an extremely cheese friendly game. Ah, I miss supply crawlers. Insanely imbalanced, but the mental image of fleets of supply crawlers tearing up the land and supplying energy to my Morganite metropolises always brought a tear to my eye. I loved Alpha Centauri so drat much because it managed to fuse the broken-ness and insane power inflation in the Master of X games with the playstyle of Civilization, AND have crazy-rear end mechanics like terraforming and a "sentient" environment, AND have a really neat mythos and mood overlaying the entire package. Nothing else has ever come close or even tried, and I hope that Civ: BS's designers make the game with that sort of feel in mind.
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Apr 16, 2014 10:27
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The White Dragon posted:I'm in exactly the opposite boat. Civ 5 lets you build infrastructure like you're playing Sim City and not only deter but utterly destroy the AI with only a handful of units. Civ 4 was an uphill battle for me and I never got above Prince, and even then my win rate wasn't 100% because I'm kinda bad at maintaining big armies. When you can kick the game around on Immortal because its combat AI is a little I also find Civ 4 a lot more difficult, though I do play it with an AI-improving mod (this one) to make it better. I think the thing with Civ 5 is that you have to play it at higher difficulty levels since it's so easy at lower levels once you've got a few basics down, and the high difficulty level modifiers distort the game horribly. You end up with AI armies that are so large they fill every hex in their territory and they can hardly maneuver any more. Happiness becomes entirely meaningless to the AI, so flipping cities with Ideologies or getting people to switch to your Ideology because they're taking a big happiness hit never happens, and it's pointless to target a luxury resource for pillaging because you just reduced the AI from 68 surplus happiness to 64. You get stupid situations where the AI doesn't actually use the resources it's been given, so you get AIs with all the tech who somehow don't manage to build a spaceship in the 50 turns it took you to catch up and build yours, or AIs with 20,000 stockpiled gold who nevertheless let you bribe all the city-states and win. I think Civ 5 would be a better game if instead of giving the AI massive production/gold/happiness bonuses at higher difficulty levels, they instead got: * Bonus promotions on new units, specifically running towards the good promotions at the top of the tree. This would make the AI armies more powerful without them filling the entire map. * Bonus science, since science will straight-up GIVE you massive production/gold/happiness bonuses, but they're ones the player will get eventually and won't skew the game in favour of a few specific stats. Edit: Anyone know any mods that can do those last two? I had a brief look at modding Civ 5 but decided adding promotions to AI units wasn't a possible mod for Civ 5. Edit2: Hm, there is a Sid Meier difficulty level mod that gives AI units 45 XP when they're built, so it has to be possible. Gort fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Apr 16, 2014 |
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Apr 16, 2014 11:26
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The AI already gets those things. Or haven't you ever come against an army of minutemen all with cover II?
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Apr 16, 2014 14:31
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Putin It In Mah rear end posted:The AI mostly has a set of criteria that sets how much they hate someone. In the AI's case, since they're not applying penalties for buying tiles or whatever other nonsense, most of the modifiers tend to be from actions that will apply to all Civs who know them, such as war mongering, different ideology, DENOUNCING, that sort of thing. The result is that it's common for a bundle of AIs to hit the "war threshold" at roughly the same time, and then they'll all start planning to invade and invite you in on it. Usually the DoW chain is preceded by denunciations, though, and denouncing the same people does give you a nice diplo boost.
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Apr 16, 2014 14:40
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Putin It In Mah rear end posted:The AI already gets those things. Or haven't you ever come against an army of minutemen all with cover II? Nope. This is what I understand the difficulties to do - where are bonus science and unit XP, or is the list wrong? http://www.civfanatics.com/civ5/difficulties
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Apr 16, 2014 14:44
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StashAugustine posted:As Venice, should I turn river jungles into farms? Personally, I chop down riverside jungle for farms.
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Apr 16, 2014 15:14
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Gort posted:Nope. Been a while since I read that but I remembered there being a tech cost bonus to AIs on harder difficulties. Weird.
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Apr 16, 2014 16:35
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I don't think I asked this last time it happened, but has anybody had a bug in multiplayer where their borders move? I'm trying to play standard (hybrid) multiplayer with a couple of friends but every time we start a game, within the first three turns, everybody gets booted back to the loading splash screen. That's not a problem, but when we come back one guy's border moves about twenty-five hexes away from his city. He can see the road from his city in the middle of the borders, he can't access his city screen, his warrior was also moved in respect to the borders. I can see a few cases of people saying this had happened to them on various forums but no fixes. Anybody here have any idea what's going on?
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Apr 16, 2014 20:34
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Yea, prince feels easier than Warlord. First game I played I was placed in a massively productive area, but crummy food. Even though I was playing as Inca once my capital got to level 9 it was going to take 300 turns to go to 10. Though I could spam out wonders in like 6 turns. It was insane, but I over extented because of my production and ended up with -20 happiness and no way to fix that. Second game I started off right between the Huns and Zulu who declaired war on me in the 8th turn. Third I started in flood plains and with a nicely balanced capital. The AI loves Petra doesn't it?
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Apr 16, 2014 20:47
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Amused Frog posted:I don't think I asked this last time it happened, but has anybody had a bug in multiplayer where their borders move? That issue means the game is desyncing and the result of the resync is a bunch of crazy poo poo happening based on the host. When it happened with my friends, it was always on custom map scripts or things that had been modified (and for some reason on Continents Plus a lot). The solution I'd try is using different map scripts/rules and seeing if it stops doing the resync.
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Apr 16, 2014 21:02
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I'm four years late to the Civ V party and I just started playing a week or so ago--after buying it at full price the day it was released.  Last night I started my first Prince difficulty game and it was a blast. I randomly started with Murica (Tiny/Pangea) on the north end of an inverted Y-shaped continent, with a long N/S moutain range bisecting most of the northern end and a small set of mountains in the far north which sheltered a plague of barbarians. The Aztecs occupied the southeast peninsula and Japan and the Iroquois shared the southwest, with a mountain range separating the latter two civs. The layout forced me to set two cities farther from the capital than I would have liked, seven tiles for the second city and something like ten for the third, although both the capital and third city were coastal. Funds and happiness was a problem early on and only the capital had luxuries (two pearls and one silver--I later found that I had one iron, a decent amount of coal and no aluminum.) Japan had a load of nearby city states and must have felt squeezed, because Oda DoW'd me fairly early on, sending pikes and archers against my southeastern city. I suppose my lack of military enticed them too; I had two archers and a pike, plus a scout up north waiting for the inevitable barbarian raids. They flanked and overwhelmed my pike and I thought I was in for some pillaging, but neither of us knew that I had an ace up my sleeve. Edinburgh was the only city state near me, and in the course of establishing my second city I cleared out a couple of barbarian camps that had been bothering both of us. That led to them liking me well enough to want sleepovers, so they requested a road and I wound up building one more or less on a whim, probably a pointless whim since the city it connected to didn't have a road to the capital at the time. Regardless, with impeccable timing they gifted me a pike on the same turn that mine died. That was enough to halt Japan's momentum but the war dragged on for ages because they were in a narrow, hilly corridor between mountains and the ocean, and maneuvering my units into place was a pain. If I recall, the third time he offered peace it was without a demand for all my resources. We settled our differences and he offered me a research agreement a turn or two later.  Oda DoW'd the Iroquois immediately afterwards, then when that didn't work out he went after the Aztecs. By that time I had a few units at my southeastern city and sent them ahead of Japan's troops to slow their advance towards Aztec nation. Naturally, Montezuma sent me a DoW right when my troops were sandiwched between his and Japan's armies. He must have known that there was a reason I didn't want Japan occupying At some point in time I had gifted them a couple of spare pikes which were apparently upgraded to Riflemen. By the time I got to Monty's first city it was engulfed in a wave of infuriated Scots who threw themselves into the walls until the city crumbled. The next city was the capital and I had time to set up and fire one arty unit before it drowned in a flood of bullets. Montezuma sued for peace in a hurry and gave me everything, and Edinburgh wound up with the real estate. That freed me up to denounce Oda and complete Japan 2, this time with riflemen, infantry and eventually a couple of puppet cities. I went to bed way too late last night. I've been watching Diety LPs and though they're all BNW specific they have been super helpful with explaining some of the intricacies of resource and happiness management. As an aside, Washington doesn't seem to get much love but the UU's free movement through hilly terrain was super handy. snooman fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Apr 16, 2014 |
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Apr 16, 2014 21:41
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I have a couple of questions about BNW which I'll keep separate from the wall of text. Has the AI been tweaked? I notice enemy units happily moving into a tile which is two tiles away from two cities, sitting in place while attacked (instead of swapping units in and out) and generally behaving badly. Also, when I get the Complete edition, can I toggle between BNW and vanilla mode?
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Apr 16, 2014 21:56
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snooman posted:Also, when I get the Complete edition, can I toggle between BNW and vanilla mode? Yes, but there is no reason to do it because BNW is so much better.
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Apr 16, 2014 22:00
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