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Hesitated on this because of the reviews but the impressions in this thread convinced me to give it a go, and well, I quite like it! The comparisons to Caveman2Cosmos are apt in certain respects, especially in trying to manage the many production chains and the feeling that there's a ton of fiddly levers you have to push and pull pretty finely in order to actually do anything. In particular I really like the domain system, you have a fairly simply abstraction of different facets of empire building that reminds me a lot of Monarch Power from EU4, but instead of giving you a hundred different things to spend those points on piecemeal that have incremental effects as in those flavor of GSG games, you instead have a narrow but powerful selection of options that can have game changing effects and also have real opportunity cost. And you don't just get all those options for free for playing the game, your range of options are determined by the given Age, your choice of National Ideal and your choice of Government (and maybe more? I still have a ways to go in my game). In that sense it also reminds me Old World where the actual mechanics of how you interact with your empire change drastically due to higher-order factors. The improvement system is fine I guess. I quite like micromanaging workers but that may just be Civbrain etched into my very being. At the very least the abstraction is a straightforward one; improvement points are a dedicated resource that you spend on improvements you can put wherever. This is functionally the same resource as "worker turns" in Civ so it's all the same core loop: more IP means faster improvements, which means more food and production to get bigger cities and more stuff, which lets you build improvements faster and get more pop and etc. etc. I will say, that tiny little button on the corner of the screen is not ideal, nor is the button vomiting every available improvement in a basic menu with no organized UI whatsoever, a fact made even more confusing by the fact that clicking on terrain does give you an organized infographic menu that categorizes improvements and tells you specifically what you can build on that tile. Combat is straightforward enough, which is fine by me. A combat which would definitely result in a kill being cut short because of morale loss is kind of irritating, but I get what they were going for there. Just get another stack to clean them up nbd.  It's far too late to post more but I definitely don't regret my purchase, expected jankiness aside. I mean, I tried (and failed) to fully LP Caveman2Cosmos, there's no way anything in this game will be able to compare to the experience of queueing 37 buildings in Civ 4's hilariously cumbersome city queue to ensure that you get all those buildings without accidentally wasting gobs of overflow production 
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Mar 30, 2024 09:49
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:03 |
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Restarted with better knowledge of what the heck I was doing, decided to take the +1 culture starting perk and oh boy, turns out spamming Local Reforms in your capital is exactly what you need to be doing at all times with your culture. That or building towns to get your region level or peacefully revolting but when there's nothing absolutely necessary that needs to be done, just Local Reforms all the time, every time.
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Mar 31, 2024 07:42
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Eschatos posted:I was extremely amused at the age of heroes quest that unlocked Oni as warriors from a Demon Gate. Yes in the description it says they're just people inspired by the legend but still. I enjoy when game is willing to get a little silly. The mods for this game can pop off like crazy if it gets popular enough. So much design space for so many off the wall Variant Age chains that can just wildly diverge into utter nonsense, but in a good way.
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Mar 31, 2024 18:57
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OperaMouse posted:With all the different XP ticks, a fantasy total conversion mod can be amazing. You start out in the genesis of a Tolkien fantasy world that eventually leads to the LotR-esque age. But with variants ages that lead to ASOIAF or Frieren instead
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Mar 31, 2024 19:09
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twistedmentat posted:How are people unlocking the age of heroes? I've never even seen a a landmark, let alone discovered one. Just luck I guess. In my first game I saw all of one landmark on my entire continent, whereas in my current one I fulfilled the 3 landmark requirement within the first 15 turns, with plenty more landmarks around the AI areas to spare.
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Mar 31, 2024 19:12
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twistedmentat posted:What causes chaos? I suddenly am making 13 of it a turn but mousing over it doesn't explain anything about it. Certain events will cause chaos like razing neutral settlements (I wish the game was clearer to new players that you're increasing the rate of chaos gain rather than the discrete amount), though it should tell you if it does that in whatever tooltip accompanies the choices. Also having unrest in your cities adds to the chaos buildup, perhaps you haven't been keeping abreast of that? (check the circular meter to the left of the city name window).
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Apr 1, 2024 02:40
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One thing I noticed that isn’t super obvious is how growth works. There doesn’t appear to be any proportional relationship between your food income and your growth, it’s all entirely based on the average of your needs met, of which food is only a component. Furthermore, growth isn’t directly proportional to the needs satisfied, instead there are needs thresholds that determine a specific growth percentage per turn, with 25% growth being the max when 200% is reached on all needs. I’m unsure if that specific amount is modified in other ways in my relatively short play time, but this effectively means that, oddly enough, population growth is almost entirely linear and you need at least 4 turns for every pop growth no matter how big your cities are.
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Apr 1, 2024 15:20
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Also somehow left out what I meant by thresholds, i.e. the growth rate is a constant dependent on certain ranges your needs fall on, so, for example, at average 200% it’s 25% but if it falls anywhere in-between 150% and 200% then it’s Iike 18.75% I think (not on my computer right now to check), and that value doesn’t go down again until it hits below 150%. So basically you absolutely want to be at 200% needs on everything at all time, as even a tiny blip in one need will slow down your growth rate by more than you’d expect.
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Apr 1, 2024 16:19
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LordSloth posted:Started listening to the latest 3MA podcast on Millenia before I lost my patience with it. We can go further, include an option for completely random ages, maybe also include toggles to guarantee a variant age at chosen Age stages, have the choice to exclude Crisis Ages and/or Victory Ages or maybe only one Crisis Age per game and only trigger Victory Ages when someone meets the criteria. Or no variant ages at all if you just want a straightforward vanilla game (no fun allowed lol) toasterwarrior posted:Would you say that once you hit a pop threshold that requires a new need you can't fulfill (which is very easy to do TBH), that's when you're probably way better off shifting pops off the growth mechanisms and into something else? Well low needs leads to unrest and potentially chaos, and furthermore most improvements that fulfill needs also provide some other useful yield so it wouldn't be worth unworking those anyway. And even ignoring that managing workers that way sounds like micromanagement hell, even more than this game tends to be already. Super Jay Mann fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 04:22
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The key to early wealth generation I find is proper town placement and merchants. A town surrounded by improvements provides 6 wealth on its own, multiplied by the town level. And of course merchants are big time moneymakers as the AI will often have very large capitals to take advantage of it. Towns are much like districts in Civ 6 in that their yields are completely passive and free, so beyond the initial cost of placing them down and leveling them you don’t have to invest anything else. You’re going to build improvements around them regardless and there’s relatively little opportunity cost in using that culture power because every region needs at least one town to continue growing anyhow. Whereas working improvements always requires a pop to work the tile, and early on you’re not gonna have enough pop to work everything you want to. EDIT - Misspoke on the town wealth bonus (I thought 12 sounded too high) but everything I said still applies. Super Jay Mann fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 05:49
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The discount from other nations having a tech and for being in a later age is kinda ridiculous (-10% per nation means older techs eventually become virtually free), so if you think you can get by in your build for a while without certain techs it’s almost always a good idea to get into the next age if you can ASAP. Just be very sure you’re not skipping anything important. Also I always try to go for Innovation bonuses if I can as those seem to bring some of the best bonuses in the game and any way to get them going faster is well worth prioritizing. Super Jay Mann fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 18:29
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Finished up an Age of Harmony victory, can see why the first patch specifically addressed AI forming of religions because my religion basically took over my whole continent without me lifting a finger which allowed me to get into Harmony and get the stuff which lets me tell my friend AIs across the ocean to convert and it snowballed from there, partly because everyone else was so late getting their own religious foothold. Even managed to demand conversion from several of my enemies, probably because of my overwhelming power advantage? At that point I could just end turn to get to the 2/3rds threshold but it was slowly stalling around the 63% mark so I just took some stacks of Age VII units to Islamic Spain and ganked some of their cities to reduce the global population and convert them with my stock of Arts points. Definitely not doing that again, partly cause it was only Age VII and I wanna see the rest of the game, partly cause it seems these devs still haven't solved the "religious victory is incredibly dull and agonizing" problem from Civ 6 and other similar titles. Went Ancient Seafarers->Explorers->Colonialism in my game since I started coastally which meant the seas were mine to command and I was swallowing up all the endless resources and XP from expeditions, hidden remote camps and deep sea discoveries. Feudal Monarchy is really dumb btw, I was spamming towns with all my culture for a good portion of Age V and VI and couldn't keep up with the growth at all and my 15 vassals were supplying about 70% of my total yields, it's pretty funny. Will probably bump the difficulty up to Grand Master and see if I can do a proper "tall" game and see how much of a mega capital I can pull off within the constraints of the game. After a full playthrough I am quite in love with a lot of the systems and the way they interact with each other, even if the balancing feels very off in some areas. What I am less in love with is the barebones UI, which becomes even more of a frustration as the game goes along and it adds more and more interworking systems with information that the UI really, really should be better conveying to the player. What I absolutely don't love at all is how poorly the game performs later on, making turns take way longer than they should cause there's all sorts of lag everywhere. Super Jay Mann fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Apr 3, 2024 |
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Apr 3, 2024 23:23
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Castles with abbeys are a good way to get some needed faith if you really don't want to invest in the other buildings/supply chains and can spare the pioneers.
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Apr 4, 2024 08:10
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Victory Ages are a brilliant way to help solve the “you already won but there’s more game to go” problem, I only wish they were available to be chained from variant ages. It’s a bit odd that they aren’t considered a special case in that regard.
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Apr 6, 2024 08:41
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Been doing a three region tall build using God-King->Machinists->Sultans on Grandmaster and boy, the AI is no joke here. Some random scattered thoughts * The automatic -30 diplo penalty is painful. It basically means everyone will always hate you by default unless you put some major work in and even then trying to get stuff like open borders, much less an embassy and treaty, seems like a royal pain in the neck. Diplomacy is definitely something that will need to be fine tuned and fleshed out later on down the line. * I didn't realize until partway through the playthrough that the civilian units you deploy into cities aren't actually lost, you can just click the city and there's an option to take them out to be used elsewhere. That means you don't need to spam envoys and merchants to build up your vassals, you only need a few that you can jump around from city to city. It also means that buying artists early on can be quite worthwhile for early luxuries since you can always pull them for their culture bomb whenever you like. Good to know for future games. * Space is seriously at a premium at every stage in the game. I wish there was a way to switch control of tiles between regions. Part of me also wishes that Clear Cut were available earlier but honestly, I get it. Later in the game getting a ton of paper is valuable for making books i.e. research at an efficient rate, but as far as I can tell you will never get more than 1 log from a tree tile, so you have to make some tough decisions regarding how much forest you want to keep around for generating logs vs clearing out that space for more improvements. I kinda like this specific push and pull of managing the terrain and I wish there were a bit more interactions like that. As far as I can tell there's no way to flatten hills for example, but maybe that becomes a thing in Age 10 or something, who knows. * Speaking of ages, the Grandmaster AI techs really fast and I find myself falling behind even late into the game, as multiple AIs are in Rocketry while I barely just got my first two techs in Revolutions, with no time to spare to backfill anything unless it's impossibly cheap. You can forget ever beating an AI to a new age (on the bright side, the AI bonuses do seem to ensure we don't see crisis ages) I kinda like this pacing, in my previous Adept game I found I could just leisurely tech everything without fear of losing out on first age progression, but here I have to make some very difficult choices about what techs to prioritize before just moving on. I suppose that's the intended experience the devs wanted, and while clearly I'm handicapping myself by staying on three regions I'll enjoy the difficulty while it lasts before we start getting optimal builds that will trivialize the game even at hardest difficulties. * With all that said, even on Grandmaster the AI seems pretty incompetent at war. They will gladly step their armies piecemeal in front of cities with capital attacks and attack into fortified locations containing your armies with reckless abandon. They probably could overwhelm any human player with the amount of units they field but they never even try to reach critical mass. I'm approaching the endgame to this world so we'll see if I can make a stunning comeback.
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Apr 9, 2024 05:26
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  Man I pulled this one right out of my rear end. Got to Age of Rocketry, picked Democracy (was somehow the first one to an Age VIII government despite being 15 turns behind most of the AIs) and Silicon Valley and just went completely ham on computers to the best of my ability, helped along by having 3 rare metal deposits. A combination of extremely aggressive use of the research city project, extremely aggressive use of Eurekas with the help of like half a dozen artists, and finally managing to land an 85 Research treaty with India as it was reeling from getting rolled by my neighbor Zulu allowed me to just barely beat the runaway AIs to triggering Age of Singularity. The AI apocalypse is upon us! Sadly the last age was pretty disappointing. The win condition is merely to build 10 AI Personality Core improvements which requires only a single tech and hefty investment of specialists without really needing to engage much with the swarming AI drones at all. Oh and did I mention that they upgrade from the supercomputers I had to spam to oblivion to force the singularity crisis in the first place? With 400 max specialists and plenty of specialist improvements to blow up to make up the difference I got all 10 of them in one turn upon finishing the tech. I suppose since this is supposed to be the very definite end of the game that it makes sense for the victory condition to not be terribly difficult, but at the very least you shouldn't be able to upgrade them from your supercomputers. As for the endgame as a whole, mostly more of the same but with some interesting wrinkles. The Faction system is neat and adds another axis of competition to juggle while handling all the other stuff without getting all that complicated. I do wish we got information on how much ideology other nations are generating per turn, that's pretty difficult to infer just from the Faction interface. I wish I could've at least seen what all the space/moon stuff was about but there was no point in competing with the AI for that. And combat I barely dabbled with until the robots started showing up since Zulu kept keeping himself busy with India. Speaking of, Zulu was a thorn in my side the whole game, so I sniped two of his regions and forced peace via a Truce because lmao I can't believe you can just do that. Those regions stayed as vassals the rest of the time as I was committed to the three regions play (also I couldn't be bothered developing another region from scratch). I did end up save scumming quite a bit just to figure out how certain things worked while also dealing with the game continuing to not tell me important things I need to know to inform my decision making, but I'm fine with it. Dunno when I'll play another game, but if I do in the near future I'm just gonna try killing the world and seeing what happens 
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Apr 10, 2024 04:47
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The AI is more than happy to throw their armies into yours at fortified positions and take crippling losses in the process, or even better overextend into your land so you can clean them up without fear of counterattack. Note that even a routed army dies instantly to even 1 unit’s attack, so just having one or two high mobility units roaming around the frontlines to clean up routed stacks is useful. Also don’t forget that you can split your armies any way you like, even when attacking, so if you keep having issues with overwhelming combat victories resulting in routs rather than wipes, you can always withhold one unit from the attacking army to clean up the stack afterwards. Or just use forced march if you have the warfare XP income, that’s what it’s there for after all.
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Apr 11, 2024 21:30
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Staltran posted:I completely missed that castle towns give culture. That's really good, 15 improvement points for 1 culture and 3 food (4 in jungle). I was using absorb outpost a lot, but I'm starting to think pioneers are to valuable to waste on that. Maybe I did something wrong but I think you only get the food once from castle towns, at least if they're not on a resource.
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Apr 14, 2024 01:31
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Staltran posted:Let's see... I have three outposts linked to one of my regions, with 6, 5, and 3 castle towns. The region gets... 4 wheat? Oh, it only gets wheat from grasslands. Deserts and scrubland give nothing. Jungles should give maize, I think? Not sure, I don't have any jungle tiles in my outposts. Oh yeah, you build them for the culture anyway so it's not an issue, just didn't realize that bit from the terrain. Incidentally, one shouldn't forget the 40 engineering XP cost for making a castle in the first place (which is on top of the pioneer cost), which can be a relevant cost if your income in that area is lacking.
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Apr 14, 2024 22:40
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Local Reforms going from 50% for 5 turns to 25% for 8 turns is quite the nerf, gonna be interested to see how that affects early game builds.
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Apr 16, 2024 00:09
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Is the lumber in the capital being immediately consumed for paper or timber?
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Apr 16, 2024 06:38
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Yeah I mentioned it earlier in the thread, towns and merchants are absolutely the best way to generate early wealth as they do so passively without continual investment. Much like any official Civ game, any yield bonuses you can get that don't require you to assign a worker to it is incredibly valuable.
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Apr 25, 2024 17:43
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:03 |
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RIP castle spam. Losing the culture from castle towns hurts a lot, but only being able to place 3 abbeys max is pretty bad too if you’re focused on a religious game. Guess we better get those Religious Texts production chains going for real.
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Apr 29, 2024 18:02
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