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Wide tourism is mostly based on using faith/religion and that one Piety policy. Build a new city, get shrines/cathedrals/etc. going then move on to the next city. Each faith purchased building is roughly the same as a single Great Work, but you can pump them out so much more quickly. Theoretically, you can win without having to hit the lategame for all the massive tourism multipliers.
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Nov 24, 2014 19:04
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| # ? May 24, 2024 00:43 |
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isndl posted:Wide tourism is mostly based on using faith/religion and that one Piety policy. Build a new city, get shrines/cathedrals/etc. going then move on to the next city. Each faith purchased building is roughly the same as a single Great Work, but you can pump them out so much more quickly. Theoretically, you can win without having to hit the lategame for all the massive tourism multipliers. This strategy kinda works, but only produces impressive results if you play on a map type that lets you find everyone quickly like Pangaea. If you haven't met someone, Tourism doesn't do anything to them. I guess you could do it as Polynesia if you were on more sea-based maps. The other problem is that anyone else following your religion can build the Tourism faith buildings and get some free Tourism of their own, though that matters less.
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Nov 24, 2014 19:34
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Mathematically a sprawling empire can beat out your typical 4-city tall empire pretty easily but you need pretty much a near-perfect start and excellent luck with city states and happiness for it to be worth it. The biggest limiter is that growing population and generating science in a tall empire is much much easier and more lucrative than doing so for a wide empire in the first half of the game barring exceptional circumstances, and everything you do in the first half will snowball to the second half.
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Nov 24, 2014 20:06
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VerdantSquire posted:People in this thread keep saying that a tall empire is objectively better than a wide empire. Why is this the case? I'm not seeing the reason why having more cities is anything but a bonus. Is there some kind of hidden modifier or complication to having a lot of cities that I'm not seeing? In addition to the other answers, while wide empires can churn out more hammers in many cases, a lot of these hammers are wasted on buildings. If you have ten cities, you have to build 750 hammers worth of libraries (on Standard speed), whereas a four‐city empire is only spending 300 hammers for the same effect (one science per turn for every two citizens). You pay more in maintenance as well. Some building effects do scale with the number of cities—two hammers per turn from workshops and the number of specialists you can (and should) put in universities—but you’re still squandering a lot of your hammer advantage for low returns. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Nov 25, 2014 |
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Nov 24, 2014 22:25
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Wide empires do have the edge in raw faith production, mostly because there are no multipliers for faith like there are for other yields. You cannot reliably pull off a religious strategy on higher difficulties due to the ridiculous AI bonuses however, so even in the area where wide has a clear advantage it's a losing proposition.
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Nov 24, 2014 22:35
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Population is generally king. The highest amount of population with the smallest amount of unhappiness, with the greatest coverage by the National College is why Tradition's brilliant.
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Nov 24, 2014 22:36
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Tall empires are horribly boring and slow down the momentum of the game, which at it's core is I think is always about expansion. Expansion to more land, expansion in borders, expansion in military, expansion in production capacity. Tall empires halt that for some lovely arbitrary happiness mechanic, devolving the game from one about expansion to one about adding to the laundry list of buildings in each city. I have no idea why they decided to change the gold maintenance mechanic in Civ IV. I thought it was brilliant, as you could run some wildly risky gambits that were slow to payoff but highly rewarding if they did. I also liked that cottages matured over time, making grassland a good tile long-term.
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Nov 25, 2014 00:41
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Civ5 was streamlined to make it more accessible compared to Civ4. Gold maintenance, while a mathematically sound system, is difficult for a new player to quickly grasp without tanking the economy a few times as part of the learning experience. Players generally aren't having fun when they need to restart the game because they shot themselves in the foot and don't know how to perform first-aid.
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Nov 25, 2014 00:52
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isndl posted:Civ5 was streamlined to make it more accessible compared to Civ4. Gold maintenance, while a mathematically sound system, is difficult for a new player to quickly grasp without tanking the economy a few times as part of the learning experience. Players generally aren't having fun when they need to restart the game because they shot themselves in the foot and don't know how to perform first-aid. To be fair, you could fix this by just having the advisers explain it better, as well making it more prominent on the city menu. Just because a mechanic is complex doesn't mean that it's impossible to make it more manageable to new players.
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Nov 25, 2014 00:59
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Both of you have excellent points, and I think having a better tutorial would help such a problem. RTS games (such as Rise of Nations) do excellent jobs explaining basic, intermediate, and advanced game concepts. Why can't Civ?
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Nov 25, 2014 01:07
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VerdantSquire posted:To be fair, you could fix this by just having the advisers explain it better, as well making it more prominent on the city menu. Just because a mechanic is complex doesn't mean that it's impossible to make it more manageable to new players. Thing is, you can't really know the costs of that extra city in Civ4 without a ton of experience. Managing that slider bar is practically an art by itself. Maintenance scaled in a way that a difference of one tile distance can make a huge impact on costs. I don't know of a way you could clearly display it without a 'empire planning' mode where you can drop fake cities and have it crunch numbers for you for projected cost/benefit. Civ5 tries to be lenient in that building a city is never a step backwards. This backfired spectacularly around launch when ICS was king and scaling policy/tech costs had to be patched in, but overall it's incredibly simple. Do you have ~5 free happiness? You can afford another city. It's a flat cost instead of a multi-variable formula. It's not perfect, especially with conquest unhappiness and the whole local vs. global happiness that got patched in without ever being clearly defined in-game, but it's easier for someone to pick up.
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Nov 25, 2014 01:13
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It wasn't just about cities costing maintenance though, it's about Civ 5 introducing a brand new economic paradigm that people are divided on. City maintenance in Civ4 mattered because your gold generation was inextricably linked to your science generation in that you were forced to use potential science to subsidize your growing monetary expenses if your generated commerce couldn't keep up. It was in theory a delicate balance between generating commerce to fund your science and expenses, generating food to grow your cities and get more of everything else, and generating hammers to build buildings that allow you to generate your yields more efficiently and/or build units to actually protect your empire, among other things. Of course Civ 4's "problem" in this regard is that the slavery mechanic completely skewed this balance highly in favor of food and commerce. There was never a need to worry about hammer yields at any point before the late industrial age (when hammer multipliers from powered factories and yield bonuses from civics/boosted improvements finally outproduce slaving. Unless you get Kremlin in which case just keep slavery the rest of the game!) because the food-to-hammer conversion ratio after granaries was so obscenely in your favor in all but the highest pop cities and local happiness limits ensured that'd you'd always have excess food that would otherwise go unused. This I think is the crux of the whole "just build cottages and win" critique many have of Civ 4's mechanics. The only reason you're even able to do that early on without crippling your empire's production (and trust me, you NEED production in the early game more than at any other point) is because of slavery. Civ 5 obviously is nothing like this. Your science generation is completely divorced from your economy by design. You can't convert money (or anything else really except hammers or population via specialists) directly into science in any way shape or form so gold maintenance for cities as a limiter would do nothing. Heck, buildings in Civ5 require maintenance on their own so in a way, the game already does this. Since science is directly linked to population and little else, it stands to reason that the only method to curb out-of-control expansion is to directly limit population growth. Local happiness already existed for this purpose in earlier games but they reworked the mechanic into a global system, partly for simplicity's sake and partly to control ICS directly. The funny part is that it took two whole expansions for this method to actually work. So in short, maintenance for cities in Civ 5 wouldn't do anything to actually limit expansion unless money actually did anything other than buy stuff, which would require an entire rework on Civ 5's economic paradigm. It's not as simple as saying "they should have kept [X] mechanic from the previous game, it was way better!"
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Nov 25, 2014 01:30
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isndl posted:It's not perfect, especially with conquest unhappiness and the whole local vs. global happiness that got patched in without ever being clearly defined in-game, but it's easier for someone to pick up. I immediately understood what local unhappiness was when I realized what it was trying to fix. It's an obvious "No, the circus in this city can't make citizens of a completely different city happier" kind of thing. I admit to having trouble coming up with a concise way to describe it though. And yeah, Civ5 in general was trying to make the game more accessible, but they weren't able to achieve this without sacrificing a lot of depth.
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Nov 25, 2014 01:33
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Giant Multiplayer Robot is back from the dead. Everyone who was in my game Ashurbanipal’s Trapper Keeper will have to re‐join, as GMR’s back‐ups pre‐date its creation. Note that no more than one turn of in‐game progress will be lost. Invite links: The God Emperor, King of Magi, majormonotone, Christo, BrotherMagneto, Guildencrantz Platystemon fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Nov 25, 2014 |
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Nov 25, 2014 23:55
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Platystemon posted:Giant Multiplayer Robot is back from the dead. Everyone who was in my game Ashurbanipal’s Trapper Keeper will have to re‐join, as GMR’s back‐ups pre‐date its creation. Note that no more than one turn of in‐game progress will be lost. Are any games close to ending any time soon? I'd been interesting in maybe joining a game sometime.
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Nov 26, 2014 00:10
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Platystemon posted:Giant Multiplayer Robot is back from the dead. Everyone who was in my game Ashurbanipal’s Trapper Keeper will have to re‐join, as GMR’s back‐ups pre‐date its creation. Note that no more than one turn of in‐game progress will be lost. Joined (I'm BrotherMagneto). 'Murica will rise again. 
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Nov 26, 2014 00:32
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Platystemon posted:Giant Multiplayer Robot is back from the dead. Everyone who was in my game Ashurbanipal’s Trapper Keeper will have to re‐join, as GMR’s back‐ups pre‐date its creation. Note that no more than one turn of in‐game progress will be lost. Joined as The God Emperor. I think. GMR is being really slow for some reason.
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Nov 26, 2014 00:43
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Whoa what happened? Did GMR lose 2 months' worth of data?
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Nov 26, 2014 00:45
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I have a list of every save file from all my games saved on my hard disk. That could be used as a backup for the games that I'm involved in, assuming that the save file stores the status of every single player.
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Nov 26, 2014 00:48
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KKKlean Energy posted:Whoa what happened? Did GMR lose 2 months' worth of data? ...Huh. Apparently. Askia and Monty are now active games in my desktop client. Are you just going to kill them, or what? Edit: Same with Wu. Didn't Fart Laffer take my place in that one? How does that work? Edit2: What the hell, Askia is all AIs except for me and Toaster Ghost.
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Nov 26, 2014 00:49
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Yeah, it looks like everything is as it was about 2 months ago. I'm so glad I took all the necessary screenshots for my blog. I'm surrendered from the games that have 'already' ended. For me that just leaves Wu's Gongs (and technically Monty's game too, since there was one person left to surrender from that after I pretty much bagged the game) VerdantSquire posted:Are any games close to ending any time soon? I'd been interesting in maybe joining a game sometime. A new one can be started even if others haven't finished yet, depends how many games at a time people are willing to play. I'll probably join the next as I'm down to one now. Phobophilia posted:I have a list of every save file from all my games saved on my hard disk. I think it does, since the save file is technically a literal hotseat game for use on the same computer (however I'm not sure if any GMR jiggery-pokery will gently caress with it, I'm thinking particularly of player "passwords" and the stats that the website used to track turn counts) Microplastics fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Nov 26, 2014 |
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Nov 26, 2014 00:54
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I am game for another, so that’s three out of five or six right there. I’ll start a new game once GMR has settled down.Lord Justice posted:...Huh. Apparently. Askia and Monty are now active games in my desktop client. Are you just going to kill them, or what? GMR doesn’t recognise win conditions, so that’s just how games end. Everyone says their goodbyes and clicks “Surrender”, till only AI is left. I think the host can delete the game, actually, but I neglected to do that for Attila’s Spittoon. Lord Justice posted:Edit: Same with Wu. Didn't Fart Laffer take my place in that one? How does that work? Either leave so he can join or, if he agrees, stay in and play it out.
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Nov 26, 2014 01:17
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Jesus christ I still can't believe that Civ5 didn't even ship with a functional PBEM system and the community has had to hack together a PBEM-like system from the hotseat function, that isn't even allowed to properly read and sanity-check the save file. PBEM games have been a staple of turn-based strategy games from Chess onwards, how did they gently caress this up?
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Nov 26, 2014 01:42
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Oh no, my short (first) game has been ruined. Is there anyway to recover a GMR game? Do I just remake the game, set up everyone's Civ selections, then load from the last save file?
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Nov 26, 2014 02:36
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Trivia posted:Do I just remake the game, set up everyone's Civ selections, then load from the last save file? Yes. Make sure you set the player order, too.
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Nov 26, 2014 02:49
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Platystemon posted:Giant Multiplayer Robot is back from the dead. Everyone who was in my game Ashurbanipal’s Trapper Keeper will have to re‐join, as GMR’s back‐ups pre‐date its creation. Note that no more than one turn of in‐game progress will be lost. Rejoined, thanks! Is it just me, or is the GMR website unbearably slow now?
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Nov 26, 2014 12:58
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I was in Wu's Gongs, but I'm down to join whatever else, too. Any games open?
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Nov 26, 2014 16:35
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Putin It In Mah rear end posted:I was in Wu's Gongs, but I'm down to join whatever else, too. Any games open? Not yet but Platy says he's gonna when GMR stops being slow
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Nov 26, 2014 17:20
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I'd like to try GMR, but the closest I've come to multiplayer is casual games with my brother against the AI. Is the learning curve steep? I specifically don't particularly enjoy combat, but from this thread it sounds like most games end with Domination victory.
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Nov 26, 2014 19:19
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I don't particularly like combat but found it's fun in GMR. Expect to get your rear end handed to you the first couple of games by the more experienced players. There's also a league on a third-party site that did theme games, including things like "science only victory." So you could always get into one of those games if you'd rather not be in a giant battlescrum.
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Nov 26, 2014 19:38
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Peas and Rice posted:There's also a league on a third-party site that did theme games, including things like "science only victory." So you could always get into one of those games if you'd rather not be in a giant battlescrum. Best way to win a science victory is to nuke your opponents into the stone age. Similarly, the best way to win a diplomatic victory is to ruin your opponents' ability to buy out city-states, and the best way to win a culture victory is to steal their best cities so they stop generating so much culture. Multiplayer culture victories are kind of dumb though anyway.
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Nov 26, 2014 20:43
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 Oh come the gently caress on. I already knew it was a bit cheesy to play the Inca on a Highlands map, but this is just ridiculous. Only one or two salt resources would have been great, but what the gently caress am I going to do with six?
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Nov 26, 2014 23:42
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River-mountain-salt city will be amazin'.
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Nov 27, 2014 00:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Best way to win a science victory is to nuke your opponents into the stone age. That's what I was afraid of: Even wins that technically aren't domination are because a player used their military might to crush everyone. Is the answer just to suck it up and learn how to go to war? Can you say what makes MP culture victories dumb? My guess would be that it's partly because people don't trade great works so theming bonuses are harder to come by.
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Nov 27, 2014 00:38
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Mad Jaqk posted:My guess would be that it's partly because people don't trade great works so theming bonuses are harder to come by. This always annoys me. There's no reason for an AI to want to trade you great works since you get what you want, but they get a completely random great work that might be no use to them at all. But the system has to work that way because otherwise you'd have no way of getting most of the theming bonuses. Culture victories in MP are just another word for domination victory, same as the other peaceful victories - unless the other players were too dumb to see it coming, which doesn't tend to happen twice.
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Nov 27, 2014 00:51
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Mad Jaqk posted:Can you say what makes MP culture victories dumb? My guess would be that it's partly because people don't trade great works so theming bonuses are harder to come by. As soon as anyone looks like they're going for a culture victory, everyone else will embargo them and refuse open borders, which completely tanks their tourism output. Not to mention most MP games are decided well before the major culture multiplier buildings become available.
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Nov 27, 2014 00:53
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As promised,  New Giant Multiplayer Robot game Invite 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 For those unfamiliar with GMR, here is an FAQ (and house rules). Civs will be assigned in a hybrid random/player’s choice approach. Everyone names two civs to ban from the game. Venice is banned by default. Each player is then given a choice of three civs, drawn randomly from the remaining pool by Fruitstrike’s Fabulous Civ 5 Drafter. Trading is allowed. My standard settings are small Pangæa, Emperor difficulty for all players (to make city‐states less pathetic), and all other options at their default values, but feel free to argue for different settings in the comments.
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Dec 1, 2014 06:09
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Platystemon posted:As promised, Joined using link 1, but if anyone not in a GMR game already wants the spot I can shift it over to them if we have too many people.
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Dec 1, 2014 08:05
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Currently attempting to claim Number 5, but steam has decided to be super slow today. I would prefer it if no one else tried to join in that particular slot for the time being. Edit: Took way longer than it should've, but I'm in! VerdantSquire fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 22:30
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| # ? May 24, 2024 00:43 |
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Grabbed Slot #4!
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Dec 1, 2014 23:18
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