- i am not as big fan of the gameplay after that. seems you just want to max production and influence.
Influence is crucial in the early expansion stage, but as you hit the city cap and it's no longer productive to attach territories because of stability issues and the diminishing returns on spent influence,
so it becomes secondary to other things.
You actually want to maximise production and population, stack a bunch of bonuses on top... and that's how you come ahead of everyone else.
- i did nothing to get more gold, but still bathed in it.
Might have been due to trade and just getting luxuries.
I found that once you hit early gunpowder stage, military becomes a legitimate money sink because upgrades and upkeep start costing a ton.
Funny thing is, even if you say you're swimming in it, it probably wasn't enough to get any era stars from that dosh.
Not sure if they wanted to force you to specialize, or they just pulled the thresholds out of their asses.
- game start with some kind of cold war or skirmish mode and after that it is mostly no war at all.
There's plenty of skirmishing around outposts, and getting an expansionist civ lets you do a lot of trespassing.
But yeah, after some point you basically need to start all wars yourself because the AIs get pretty docile.
Not sure how it happens, perhaps it's too easy to outgrow the AI and they know they shouldn't be fucking with you.
I suspect it is an issue with strategic resources - the AI can seize one, two at the most, which bars them from building a lot of the good stuff.
- Battles is 70% about getting higher ground.
This is true for early combat with scouts and animals, because the +4 bonus is significant when unit strength value is around 10,
but similarly, river crossing is a -3 penalty, charge, rear attack and forest defense also give the same +4, so these factors are mathematically just as important. I think we see elevation in play the most often because how the standard map resembles a Vietnam terrace farm.
It becomes less of a factor with higher unit strength values. Perhaps they didn't exactly think it through, because a % would scale so much better.
- You kind of ignore the civs you choose in every Era, they just feel like different bonuses.
That's a bit superficial. All the legacy traits you pick will stack for the rest of the game, and there are clear superior, situational and outright inferior choices.
Like, in the early game: do I grow like a motherfucker on steroids as the Harappan, or do I outbuild everyone else as Egypt.
(or, you know, the endless horde of ransacking horse archers of doom). Then you can pick another civ based on a weakness you want to fix,
(say you have no food production, so switching to Celts can fix that, and e.g. Norsemen get insane food in coastal areas).
Then there's the consideration of a Civ's affinity. E.g picking a science civ lets you convert all the production into science output, so your industry powerhouse now shits out science like there's no tomorrow.
Or, being expansionist, you can trespass anytime and annex stuff, racking up all those grievances for easier casus belli, etc.
A lot of this shit is rather obstructed by the interface, or not tooltip'd well enough, and therefore very easy to miss.
I think this system has good potential, but the balance is out of whack.
Also, there comes a point when the game is kinda decided, no matter what you do.
So yeah, a lot of the time it doesn't matter that much what you pick for the last couple of eras, or even if you just transcend into the same culture.
i think i will probably drop it soon.
Well, the game more or less unfolds in the same way in each playthrough, you find a way to setup a favorable position for yourself, perhaps use an OP civ combo, or abuse an OP wonder,
and steadily rise above every other AI, perhaps by securing an entire continent or two. At this point the game is decided, and you're basically just pushing around the outclassed AI.
So, while there's a bunch of ways to have fun by abusing the game's systems, twisting them into broken combinations, there's only so many times you can do it until it gets boring.