CiV (Demo) is out

[ChristofferC]

Another problem other than the lousy combat AI is that negative happiness is superor to positive happiness later in the game. -200 happiness has the same penalty as -10 happiness and negative happiness has no effect on production, gold income, research or culture. After your core cities reach size 10-12, start conquering AI cities and spam trading posts everywhere. Don't stop until you have won the game. This will give you loads of research, money and production. All the cities you get easily offset the growth and combat penalties you get from unhappiness, especially since the AI doesn't use great generals properly. You also save loads of money from not building any happiness or culture bulidings.

Even the AI uses this strategy it seems like, because on the contintents map, one AI tends to conquer the whole other continent very quickly and spam trading posts everywhere.

 

[Malakal]

LOL no effect, right -75% pop growth, -50% production and -50% combat efficiency for low happiness. Dunno about research its not as visible as building one unit for 30 turns. Dude You ever played the game?

 

[Grunker]

LOL no effect, right -75% pop growth, -50% production and -50% combat efficiency for low happiness. Dunno about research its not as visible as building one unit for 30 turns. Dude You ever played the game?

Yeah, was just about to add this. I'm getting my copy today, but I've read the forums, and CC's statement was pretty far out. Your research also hurts as an effect from -75% pop.

 

[ZbojLamignat]

LOL no effect, right -75% pop growth, -50% production and -50% combat efficiency for low happiness. Dunno about research its not as visible as building one unit for 30 turns. Dude You ever played the game?

And that's what sucks combined with retarded "happiness is global" and huge happiness penalties from occupation. You have an uberprosperous and happy empire, yet suddenly you can't produce shit in your capitol and your army doesn't want to fight because people in few recently conquered cities are butthurt.

Lolololol, gaem is broken'n'bad.

 

[Malakal]

LOL no effect, right -75% pop growth, -50% production and -50% combat efficiency for low happiness. Dunno about research its not as visible as building one unit for 30 turns. Dude You ever played the game?

And that's what sucks combined with retarded "happiness is global" and huge happiness penalties from occupation. You have an uberprosperous and happy empire, yet suddenly you can't produce shit in your capitol and your army doesn't want to fight because people in few recently conquered cities are butthurt.

Lolololol, gaem is broken'n'bad.

Quite true but OTOH serves as a great gameplay trick to dissuade rampant conquest. -50% production in pre medieval age is MURDEROUS and a huge penalty later while -75% growth will make Your huge empire technologically backward.

Still stupid however at least its easier to manage.

 

[ZbojLamignat]

LOL no effect, right -75% pop growth, -50% production and -50% combat efficiency for low happiness. Dunno about research its not as visible as building one unit for 30 turns. Dude You ever played the game?

And that's what sucks combined with retarded "happiness is global" and huge happiness penalties from occupation. You have an uberprosperous and happy empire, yet suddenly you can't produce shit in your capitol and your army doesn't want to fight because people in few recently conquered cities are butthurt.

Lolololol, gaem is broken'n'bad.

Quite true but OTOH serves as a great gameplay trick to dissuade rampant conquest. -50% production in pre medieval age is MURDEROUS and a huge penalty later while -75% growth will make Your huge empire technologically backward.

Still stupid however at least its easier to manage.

It's not a gameplay trick, it's dumbing down one mechanic and not giving a fuck that said dumbing down collides with another. Still, it collides only from logical point of view, as from a new, stupid civ point of view it actually makes sense. You just raze cities to get moar gold and insta spam moar zerg rush units to fuck everyone up. Lolololol indeed.

 

[Grunker]

Going to buy my copy now. Prepare to be enlightened by my analytical opinion in a day or two.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Holy fuck, and I thought that auto healing was bad. After reading the manual (lol nextgen) and figuring out the prerequisites, I found you can upgrade range and let units fire 2x a turn. Jesus fuck is that overpowered with crossbowmen. If you can get those upgrades on the unique crossbowmen with extra range I can't imagine the devastation you would bring with range 4 units.

IMO, the biggest problem is that the hexs are too big. When 1 ranged unit can cover a small choke and 2 can cover a big one, the whole game boils down to how many units the computer can try to move through a single square (hint: its 1) vs how many units you can kill per turn. What needs to be done is:

Hexs overall need to be reduced by about 50% in size so that you can fit 2x as many units into any corner of the map. 1 Hex squares should not be the norm for choke points. To go with this, double movement. Increase range slightly. I would say put archers at 3 range, musketeers at 2 range (I fucking hate how musketeers have 1 range same as melee, its stupid). This way melee units could actually rush archers instead of never reaching them. Archers should be supporting the front lines, but they wouldn't be strong enough to rape entire armies without taking a scratch. If you did this I think the AI wouldn't be too bad. Its just that with the current situation its almost impossible not to abuse some of the absurdities of the system.

 

[1eyedking]

Explain to me why were stacks-of-doom bad in the first place?

 

[ChristofferC]

LOL no effect, right -75% pop growth, -50% production and -50% combat efficiency for low happiness. Dunno about research its not as visible as building one unit for 30 turns. Dude You ever played the game?

Pop growth doesnt matter because cities don't grow much beyond 10-12 pop anyway. -50% production doesn't matter because you buy everything and your units never die anyway (I didn't know that production is reduced though). Combat efficiency is offset by great generals.

 

[ChristofferC]

I checked the manual now and it says nothing about reduced production when the empire is very unhappy. You can't build settlers, though.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

LOL no effect, right -75% pop growth, -50% production and -50% combat efficiency for low happiness. Dunno about research its not as visible as building one unit for 30 turns. Dude You ever played the game?

And that's what sucks combined with retarded "happiness is global" and huge happiness penalties from occupation. You have an uberprosperous and happy empire, yet suddenly you can't produce shit in your capitol and your army doesn't want to fight because people in few recently conquered cities are butthurt.

Lolololol, gaem is broken'n'bad.

Yeah, once I was just fucking up America and they gave me 5 cities in return for peace. Suddenly my empire ground to a halt because these 1 and 2 pop cities all screwed over my happiness. And since it tanks your production, good luck building +happiness buildings to offset it. You will finish them at about the same time the other civs get dinosaurs with jetpacks tech.

I'm wondering if you could happiness-bomb powerful civilizations by gifting them a bunch of crappy 1 pop cities in the middle of nowhere. Would be an interesting way to take down those civs that can spam waves of units every turn which is just plain

Explain to me why were stacks-of-doom bad in the first place?

It wasn't bad, but in theory giving the player control of unit formations would lead to more interesting battles. In practice the implementation is horrible.

 

[Destroid]

mom.exe

 

[Malakal]

Explain to me why were stacks-of-doom bad in the first place?

I take it You never destroyed 200+ (I am not joking) AI stack defending in a city? Or never had Yourself 200+ units to move each turn. It gets BORING as fuck, I dont play games to be bored or to set queues in 30 cities and movements for 300 units EACH TURN. There is a limit to my patience and playability and that limit was strained in civ 4 and crossed in civ 3. Thats why.

 

[dragonfk]

LOL no effect, right -75% pop growth, -50% production and -50% combat efficiency for low happiness. Dunno about research its not as visible as building one unit for 30 turns. Dude You ever played the game?

Pop growth doesnt matter because cities don't grow much beyond 10-12 pop anyway. -50% production doesn't matter because you buy everything and your units never die anyway (I didn't know that production is reduced though). Combat efficiency is offset by great generals.

What? They don't die? I'm really starting to think that you didn't play the game because my troops sure as hell went to oblivion numerous times. Also cities do grow beyond 10-12 pop. I just won a cultural victory with my capital with 21 pop. You know hospital+medical lab + farms = high pop. And yes, if you don't spam as a common retard trading posts everywhere you can have plenty of pops in the city whom you can use as specialists that give you gold/production/hammers in addition to giving you once in a while a great person. So yes, there are many ways to win this game, not only straightforward spamming trade posts.

Change to happiness is very good. I don't need to spend much of my time in cities that rebel every once in a while. What I need is to constantly monitor what trade goods do I have and can trade with other empires. It also gives you more reasons to deal with city states.

As for your retarded objections related limited expansion I find it very well thought out. You don't have to annex them right away. You can make them puppets and when annex them when it's convinient to you. I don't recall Warsaw building troops for Nazis during WW2, so there's a pretty good correlation with real world events.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I don't recall Warsaw building troops for Nazis during WW2, so there's a pretty good correlation with real world events.

I do, however, recall forced conscriptions on occupied Upper Silesian lands.

 

[dragonfk]

Dziadek z Wermahtu?

 

[Darth Roxor]

Nawet Afrika Korps B)

 

[Elwro]

I just used flanking for the first time in a Civ game

BUT

the worker AI wants to build farms EVERYWHERE. WtF?

Also, I cannot turn anti-aliasing on (it's greyed out in the options) and with all the jagged lines the game looks worse than Civ IV.

edit: OK, forced it by nVidia control panel.

 

[dragonfk]

Yeah, well I think we have it well established that the AI is lacking.

That's why I've only played games on King difficulty. Anything below doesn't give the necessary thrill.

 

[ZbojLamignat]

Change to happiness is very good. I don't need to spend much of my time in cities that rebel every once in a while. What I need is to constantly monitor what trade goods do I have and can trade with other empires. It also gives you more reasons to deal with city states.

Yes, it's like, totally awesome. When you stack it with other simplifications you just totally don't have to spend much of your time on anything, just choosing new things to build and research from time to time and clicking "next turn" which is, like, totally cool as fuck or something.

Unless, at some point in space and time, you'd like to actually play a civ game. But who'd like that? I mean, come on...

 

[dragonfk]

Simplifications?

Hmm yeah, you're right. They've streamlined combat to the extreme. Once we had like hundredths of units. Now we have like only dozens!

 

[Elwro]

This is starting to become ridiculous. I just signed a "Pact of Cooperation" with Alexander (no, not a "Research agreement")... which is MISSING both from the manual and the Civilopedia. How am I supposed to see what it does?

And a tip: go to $YOURDOCUMENTFOLDER\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\UserSettings.ini and set SkipIntroVideo to 1.

...now, instead of wondering why the hell the intro video is unskippable for 20 seconds, you can blissfully stare at the black screen for 20 seconds.

 

[attackfighter]

pact of cooperation makes the AI like you more

how I do not know

 

[mahdi]

Pact of Cooperation works like this:
Cooperating civ will occasionally ask you for stuff; free money, research agreement, WAR, or open borders. You are supposed to say YES to this (you agreed to cooperate). This makes them like you more. If you say no, you get a negative hit to your relationship modifier with them. They start to hate you. That is it.


Pact of Secrecy works like this (I think):
The civ you sign the pact with agrees not to do research agreements, trade, or open borders with the target civ. You are supposed to do the same thing. If you start playing nice with the target civ, the civ you signed the agreement with gets a negative relationship modifier. I know that research agreements are public knowledge so they know when you are not following your pact. I can't remember if trades are public though.