I have been playing it for about a week, and I am liking it. Had my first victory on The Great (highest level) with Hittites on the Seaside map (basically pangaea, which is usually better for AIs). The main downside is the obscene micro with workers. You end up having to control like 25 workers for mundane things like tile improvements.
Overall impressions
Strong points:
- The AI is not bad on Divine. OK with tactics, backstabs you when you're at your weakest.
- Exploring is pretty fun. It is important to understand the geography, both for the resources, the potential diplomacy, and of course for the mountain choke points.
- The war is time-consuming but dramatic. Sometimes every next turn seems like a massive shift in fortunes. It also rewards resilience. I lost a couple of fairly serious cities, but kept fighting and managed to retake them with the help of allies.
- The unit system is solid and enables some degree of tactics like formations with zone of control, knocking units about with elephants, AoE strikes, etc. I want to try building up a good defence formation.
- I enjoyed the economic system. It offers a fair challenge on the highest level because you get real resource scarcity, and you need to pick between a small number of impactful but mutually exclusive options (e.g. which families to choose for first cities).
- I appreciate how the economy is a major component of the game and not just a footnote to war. It seems viable to only wage defensive wars and to concentrate on the economy.
- The starting characters offer significant diversity for early game, which is usually the most fun part in 4X.
- The pace of the game is pretty solid in terms of turns. The endgame is relatively short if you know you're victorious.
- The character interaction and events can be amusing. They also shake up the gameplay, like for example you can get a self-governing city.
- I really liked the portraits, great style. Apart from the aging, they also have charming Might and Magic 6 expressions sometimes. It's so much better than the tedious 3D portraits.
regular/in love
Weak points:
- The micro is insane. The limit on the number of cities reduces the micro a bit, but the workers drive it up beyond any reason.
- The interface for building improvements is subpar for that level of micro despite some inventive approaches (like sticky windows).
- The AI is a little too easy to manipulate via diplomacy and generally too generous. My very friendly ally literally gifted me a city. Come on man, it's the last difficulty level. But then it's consistent with the description of their attitude.
- The improvement map is very hard to read. Why couldn't they just add little icons instead of words.
- No way to fully zoom out.
Mini-AAR
I did try several games before but kept restarting because it's fun to try new positions and I was learning. I decided to stick with Hittites because they were the first faction I tried. Hittites seem a bit less mainstream than the others except maybe Kush. One of the big considerations was that one of their leaders (Suppiluliuma) is a tactician, which seems like an amazing profession because it freezes the enemy (super valuable whilst the barbarians only have 1-2 units). He also looks like a mixture of that famous wog muscular chad and Nikolai Tsiskaridze.
I went with traders as my first family as it gives a huge monetary boost early on while the resources are cheap. The families for Hittites synergise really well: you get these traders, artisans who create literature that gets a bonus from traders, and landowers for early expansion since they can buy tiles. I had a fair start with pastures. Pastures are solid because they're required for Judaism, which is the easiest religion to found. Rushing for Zoroastrianism is unreliable (maybe it's different for other civs). Here's the starting location (Hattusa). Having a good amount of food also means that you can create caravans fast as a trading family. They both bring a ton of money and give a solid diplomacy boost. I like it how the cities are quite full of character based on their geography. Like you can see a desert city in a mountain overpass, a mountainous city in a lush river valley, and a steppe city with pastures.
On this type of map, you always start in the middle. It's supposed to simulate the idea that all real historical civilizations in the area are surrounded on all sides except for a coast or two. The other civs were Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, and the Greeks whom I discovered much later. The terrain is mountainous and has some tracts of land where you can't really found any cities. This makes it more defensible. There is an intense rush for city sites early on, so when I saw a half-dead Babylonian unit stealing a site from me, I just declared war and took the site. The rest of the game, I was dealing with the Babylonians as my main enemy. I like it how an event like that sets in motion the whole narrative.
Another weird and important event was establishing a national alliance with Egypt. Egypt had been extremely nice to me. At one point they just flat out gifted a city for no reason, which was bizarre. Then they also returned an old city that Babylon conquered from me. On the other hand, I saved them from Greece. Greece was beating them at one point, but I made the Greeks declare war on Assyrians, distracting them from the annihilation of Egyptians. This really saved Egypt from conquest. Anyway, here is a GIF with expansion. Blue = Greece, red = Egypt, brown = Babylon, yellow = Assyria, teal = Hittites. Overall, I mainly achieved victory via diplomatic manipulation as the Babylonians would have been too tough to beat alone without Egypt.
Here are some economic dynamics. Since it was my first full game, I wasn't sure how resources play out in the long run. Interestingly, the AI wasn't really outproducing me by much, which is always the case in Civ on Immortal/Deity. The one big exception was science. It's also nice how reactive the prices are. You can see how iron reflects the period of intense warfare, and then it goes down in price.
A table with my cities at turn 50 and at the end. Some of these are Babylon's key cities but Hattusa is my native metropolis.
For some additional immersion, I listened to a few lectures on Hittites, like these on their
religious practices (in Russian).
Not sure which civ I will try next. Probably Greece or Kush.
