Strategy Civilization V

[Captain Novaforce]

Read the past couple of posts, and realised I'm probably quite a boring player. I occasionally go for wonders / build up the economy / tech.... But then I get impatient and go to war with everyone I can do so every game that I finish or walk away from I've got a hegemony that is pretty much unbeaten. Once I remember the Germans looked like they were going for some cultural victory... So i nuked Berlin and razed it to the ground.

I should never enter politics.

[PaulM]

I've stopped kidding myself that I'll be able to wait until this is cheap and jumped on that GMG deal. That's my summer gaming sorted out! (someone remind me that I said that when the Steam sale hits in a few weeks...)

[Frosty]

HMRC have kindly refunded my overpaid tax from last year so I've decided to indulge myself and get the GMG deal as well. It could be £100 and still represent good value considering the hours I'll no doubt pour into it.

Which Civ are people fancying to try first?

I'm thinking Morocco is my first choice, followed by Portugal and the Shoshone.

[imp]

I'm going to try Brazil, I'm definitely interested in going for the tourism cultural victory!

[WinterMan]

I quite fancy Venice just for the whole no building settlers part. That should bring a different way of playing. I've tried one city challenges before and liked them, this could be an alternative take on that where you can only puppet conquered cities.

That and the extra international trade routes.

I love the changes in this expansion, it definitely opens up new ways of playing. It'll make multiplayer that much more exciting too!

[Mentazm]

Want this bad, but think I'll have to wait for a Steam sale. Still got loads of unplayed DLC as it is.

[K]

I got this a couple of weeks ago after it was £7.50 on Steam; having not played a Civ game properly since Civ II, it's blowing my mind a bit - I have no idea how to handle culture or religion to be honest, but it's fun experimenting.

How do city states work? I've just been treating them like fun-size snack civilisations that I can conquer as a little snack without ruining my appetite for destroying the big boys. Is it worth keeping them going, and trading and shit with them?

[Frosty]

City States give you bonuses according to your relationship with them. 30 influence means you're friends, 60 influence you're allies. You can increase influence by either giving a gold gift to the City State or by completing the quests they set for you (click on them for their city state menu). Influence degrades at a rate of -1 per turn - this can be slowed however by policies or the Greek unique ability (completing the patronage policy tree causes everyone else's to degrade faster as well).

You can improve your influence 'resting point' (how low your influence can drop to without you doing anything to increase it) by offering protection and from religion and the patronage policy tree. This can mean being friends with every city state without actually having to do anything for them.

They are absolutely worth bothering with and give some very strong boosts if allies or even friends. Allied city states give you access to their strategic and luxury resources and will declare war on anyone you're at war with but note only one civ can be a city state's ally at a time. In addition the different types give unique bonuses that increase with the era:

Mercantile - these offer happiness. They also have special unique luxuries inaccessible through other means (save for conquering them). Not unusual for a mercantile city state to give you 12 happiness when allied from its two resources and happiness bonus.

Maritime - give you food. At friends they give + food in the capital. At allies they give + food in every city.

Militaristic. At friends they will occasionally give you a free unit contemporary to your tech level. At allies they will gift you another civilization's unique unit provided you have the prerequisite tech and haven't obsoleted it. So for instance the Greek hoplite provided you have bronze working, or the Swedish Carolean provided you have rifling. It also means that specific civ is not in the game, which can be handy to know. You can see what type of unit you'll get by hovering over the 'militaristic' text in their menu.

Cultured - Gives + culture. Doubles at Allied status.

Religious - Gives + faith. Doubles at Allied status. Very useful early game because they give a gift of faith instead of gold when you discover them. 8 faith at the start of them game can give you the lead to get your first pick on pantheon and well on the way to founding a religion.

You can also bully city states for gold/influence with other city states by having a strong military presence and selecting their tribute option on their menus. I've almost never done this though.

Finally City States are the key to the diplomatic victory. Once the UN is built you need to attain 10 votes from all the city states and players left in the game to win. Only way to achieve that is to ally city states to you.

[Scruff]

I never knew that, about the type of unit a Militaristic state will gift you. I'm going to petition Firaxis to have you write the instructions for BNW Frosty.

I also shamefully never knew until last night, that Conquistadors could settle on foreign continents. I guess I should look on the civipedia more often; I mean, I've only racked up several hundred hours on the game so far

[Lujin]

I recently upgraded to gods and kings and agree it's a massive improvement over the original.

I've only played one big game so far (King difficulty and didn't use standard timimg as I find units become obsolete before you get a change to really use them) where I was trying to geta domination victory with the Celts. The bonus faith from forests earlier on meant I was able to use Holy Warriors to wipe out the Romans and Korea but now I'm in the renaissane era I'm stuck with the US who have had the whole of South America to themselves for the whole game and are now a good bit ahead of me technologically and I can't see a way to claw it back.

I'd assume that any culture can win in any way if you make sensible choices of social policies and religious enhancements but am I right thinking faith based cultures are better suited to cultural victories?

[Frosty]

The Piety social policy tree used to be the 'culture' tree. Then G&K added religion and so they wound up sticking faith stuff in there too. This is changing in BNW with 'Aesthetics' being a new policy tree to do with culture/tourism leaving Piety just for faith. So it is true that at the moment they go hand-in-hand so to speak.

Religion also gives you access to things like Cathedrals, with their +3 culture and artist slots. And lots of faith gives access to extra great artists in the industrial era.

This is countered though by religion actually working better in wide empires with lots of cities - which obviously does not suit a culture victory.

As to whether the faith based civs are better suited to it though I'd have to say "not especially".

The faith based civs are:

The Celts who as you've probably realised are best suited to warfare. Their UA isn't even that helpful when it comes to founding a religion. It's fiddly and semi-random and also quite limiting. It gets you a pantheon nice and early and then it's served its purpose. The Pictish Warriors are the faith generators and if you're playing culturally you often don't have the opportunity to churn out a vast army.

Byzantium who have the incredibly powerful ability to add an extra belief to their religion but lack any faith based UBs to help guarantee them a religion which means if they really want a religion they need to play wide to generate enough faith.

The Maya who have the excellent Pyramid UB, which grants faith and science. They probably could do a good job playing culturally actually, using the bonus science as a means to compensate the usual science drop off you suffer by not picking Rationalism. Their UU compliments it nicely as well, allowing you to pick up more important techs early on before getting archery. They're still a lot better at science though, especially as the way the Pyramid works it is beneficial to just have lots of cities with them.

Being generally just good at anything applies to Ethiopia as well. Their UA gives a combat boost if you're smaller, which you will be if you're playing culturally. Their UU also benefits from being in a smaller empire geographically. Their faith generating UB however like all faith buildings works better and better the wider you play, and the UA giving combat strength is obviously great if you're aiming for domination, giving you a boost especially in those early days of a war where the enemy is still larger than you before it disappears when you've probably got the momentum on your side anyway.

So basically the two that do seem suited to a faith fueled culture win are actually just brilliant all rounders. It doesn't help that a culture win is also the most difficult or certainly the slowest route to victory.

[RubberJohnny]

So Brave New World is out, any impressions?

[Hexx]

12 June July isn't it

[daveodeth]

12th of July you mean

[RubberJohnny]

Oh, well the review embargo is up.

[PaulM]

I've got it installed, fingers crossed I get an hour or dozen to give it a go

[imp]

Ooh, I got my DL code from greenman this afternoon, is BNW out in the UK now then? I assumed we might have to wait until tomorrow evening.

[Hexx]

Steam says it'll unlock in 5 hours

[deerokus]

It'll register it to your account but it won't unlock until midnight.

[imp]

Cheers. Guess I won't be sleeping tonight then.

[Garwoofoo]

Ah, I wondered why it wasn't downloading.

[Frosty]

I was going to wait for my SSD to be replaced to play this...

... but then again.

[deerokus]

Ah, I wondered why it wasn't downloading.

For actual games you would be able to pre-load just now, but I don't know if that exists for something is treated as DLC. (Unlike Civ IVs expansions, which were treated by steam as separate games that happened to require Civ IV)

You might have to close steam and relaunch it after the unlock time to force the unlock and the download to kick in.

[JPR]

If anyone else is puzzled to find a copy of Civ IV in your inventory it looks like Brave New World shouldn't have been reduced, so it's an apology to those who pre-purchased it or bought it early.

I wonder who is paying for that, decent of them whoever does, though admittedly I got BNW for £8.40 anyway.

[imp]

Just finished my first campaign, I chose Brazil and went in aiming for a cultural victory.

A lot of my opinion is going to be coloured by the fact I've only played the one campaign, and it was only on a small continents map (I just wanted to get stuck into the new stuff before doing a big campaign, which I undoubtedly will next time).

I was lucky enough, or perhaps unlucky enough that 4 out of the other 6 enemy civs were going for a cultural victories too, which meant a long, drawn out campaign. However, it also meant I was fairly free to experiment with the new stuff as there wasn't all that much warring after the early game rush for land.

I really like the changes a lot. Trade routes make a lot of sense and really get the cash flowing early. The fact they also feed into your tourism-influence rating on the civ you're trading with is also excellent, and encourages you try and trade with as many civs as possible, rather than sending them all to the most profitable one. Tourism on the whole is pretty cool, but felt slightly too slow a burn to me, but that just might have been because of who I was matched against. The era mixing and matching "theming" mini-game for tourism bonuses is pretty cool too. Just make sure you don't fuck up like me and dig up too many artefacts - you can trade them for other artifacts, but I couldn't find a way to chuck them away to make space, or even trade them for paintings (which occupy the same slots), which meant I was locked out of a bonus or two because of my carelessness. Sending out archaeologists is pretty fun though. Who doesn't like Indiana Jones?

The world congress can be really useful provided it's on your side. Seems like if you just focus on making money though, it's very very easy to buy your way into power... well, in the late game at least, but I'll get to that in a bit.. The Ideologies are a cool new idea, they force you into something of a balancing act in choosing between them and social policies in the late game. Also the way great artists, great writers and great musicians have been introduced and rebalanced is great too. I particularly like the great writer, which you can use either create a great work to boost tourism with, or have him write a political treatise that earns you about 40% of the culture you need to buy your next policy or ideology - useful from the early stages of the game, to give you that little edge in times of panic, and stays useful right up to the end of the game, where slots to place great writings might already be used up, and culture costs are running steep.

Anyway, the new units, buildings and wonders are pretty cool. Well, the culturally/tourism themed ones at least. You can really turn your civ into a culture pumping machine (I didn't have much choice, the map I was dealt was pretty shitty for production and science for the first half of the game, so I went culture mad, and it paid off so far down the line I thought I was going to reach the end before it happened. Luckily there's something of a snowball effect.) My favourite thing about Brazil specifically is the Brazilwood camp tile improvement, which adds something like three culture and two gold to jungle tiles you build it on. Once you get universities, and +2 science from each jungle tile, you're getting something like 2 food, 2 gold, 3 culture and 2 science from each of these!

However, I didn't really feel like the game gave you as many options to pursue different types of victory to go with the flow of the random ins and outs of the campaign, like they said it would. I felt like if I hadn't gone in hard for culture very early on, I wouldn't have managed that type of victory. I was pretty far behind on science, so I'm not sure I could have managed a science victory in time (maybe if I'd chosen the ideological tenet that allows you to buy spaceship parts I could have done it - I was fucking loaded the whole time). I didn't feel like conquest was a likely choice either - I had been keeping my Civ small for the sake of culture, and didn't really have much of an army. I did however, have shit tonnes of cash. I could definitely have just bought out every single city-state and voted myself World Leader for the diplomatic victory. That definitely seemed doable from the time the UN was introduced, with a little espionage to help smooth things over, and a little extra cash to buy other civs' votes...

Anyway, from my first go, it's not quite everything they promised it to be, but it is fucking marvellous anyway.

[imp]

I went back about 30 or so turns in the same Pedro II Brazil game yesterday, just to see if I could win a Diplomatic victory before my inevitable tourism steamroller crushed my enemies. Bear in mind I wasn't (and never had been) the leader of the world congress, so I had a more standard number of delegates, and couldn't just roll the UN with my delegates alone.

First time, I miscalculated. If you have a spy in a foreign capital acting as a diplomat, you can actually trade for that civ's UN/World Congress delegates. So I paid Byzantium and Ethiopia for their delegates to vote me into world leadership, and thought myself well on my way to victory. But... in my desire to see things through as quickly as I could, I accidentally let some of my allied city-states lapse into friendship as I was frantically clicking "next turn", meaning I didn't have enough votes to carry me. Bollocks. Try again.

This time I made sure to buy the fuck out of all city states right away. This time I would definitely have enough delegates, except oh, now the computer realised I would win if I bought other civ's votes, so they wouldn't sell them to me. Not even for over 10,000 gold and all my resources! Well, this time I didn't restart straight away, but continued to play on for a while. You actually gain more delegates from attempting to become world leader, so after a few tries, and with all the city states in your pocket, you can do it. I couldn't do it before the cultural victory happened though.

Third time was easy. Buy the other civs' votes, then get all the city states on your side! Boom, dark horsed my way to a Diplomatic victory, and was greeted by a nice surprise, an achievement called "Vote for Pedro". Heh.

[RossW]

After failing miserably with Venice and Portugal I gave Poland a go. Started out aiming for a cultural victory (free social policy every scientific era?) but backstabbing from Germany and Indonesia led to that being dropped and gave me a chance to try out the Winged Hussar. It didn't disappoint. Forcing enemy units to retreat is pretty handy

[WinterMan]

My mate played Poland in one of our multiplayer games and he pushed hard for culture and tourism and for most of the game the effects were not very interesting. His influence was slowly affecting other Civs but wasn't showing him any benefits whatsoever :S He pushed on and completed 4 policy trees and the full ideology tree, but the tourism just didn't seem to have any effect. Until he got the Internet and it doubled his tourism. After that he managed to become influential with every civ in about 10 turns and win the cultural victory.

We talked about it afterwards and we can't see that happening in many games. We both decided to not declare war on each other so we could see how Tourism and the new trade routes work, so in a normal game he is never going to reach that far in science to get a cultural victory. There doesn't seem to be much benefit in aiming for a cultural win, nothing in the interim is helpful. He didn't even flip a city to his cause.

Maybe we missed something about the system, anyone else had more success with it? It seems like a good idea, but being a late game win... very very late game win (The Internet is one of the last techs you can research) with no other benefits we can't see the draw of going that route. We'll prob end up sticking to science and military as usual.

[Scruff]

I started to get influential with other Civs in a playthrough with the Shoshone (I feel sick everytime I play as a different Civ that happens across some ruins) quite early on (Industrial or Modern, I can't remember which) but then I'd been really lucky with getting WW that boost tourism and was getting lots of GA and GM spawns (seriously, once you can dig up relics they should stop GA from spawning as you end up wasting half the relic sites). I can see that playing as Brazil and having about 40-50 tourism and then hitting your Golden Age (with Chichen Itza) would pretty much have all the other Civs at influential in next to no time.

[WinterMan]

Perhaps our game the other civs had a healthy amount of culture to combat his tourism... but I forgot about Brazil, they'd probably be the best to try. An option for the next game!

I was playing Venice last game and had a great time with them. With no particular victory in mind I just focused on making money. I've never had as much money coming in as quickly. Making on average 300 gold a turn I was just buying city states, buildings, units... anything I could get my hands on really. They are a brilliant civ. I was somehow keeping pace with science and once the world congress kicked in I was ruling the votes. In a more militaristic game I'd be interested to see how I keep trade routes open, but that makes me want to try some of the seafaring civs to try out some of their bonuses and rule the high seas!