Civilization V Catch-All

I love how organic religion is in the early game, a simple belief based on the local environment, develops over time to a slightly more complex,more organised but simple faith that in later years is re organised and "enhanced" and expanded upon and then later years becomes a somewhat insignificant part of your empire.
The diplomatic influence of religion is done artfully and changes over time, weakening as religion itself becomes less powerful influence over the world.

MacBrave wrote:

that Female Doggo Elizabeth

Oh. It's you.

Broke down... bought it on sale... 22 bucks isn't bad. 10 minutes until the download is complete and my night is shot!

Bah, had started the wonders of the ancient world scenario and i crashed to desktop in 20 minutes. Never had a crash in Civ 5 before then.

I decided to fiddle around with Boudica last night, to test out the new features. I really like the Faith mechanic, it's a nice improvement on religions from Civ 4, which I made liberal use of. I enjoy being able to customize the religion to the strength of my civ and the terrain/situation I'm in. I look forward to building Embassies and exploring more diplomatic options too.

Got beat by Germany last night via a space race victory. Bismark got a continent pretty much to himself and that bastard seems to churn out cities like rabbits. By the time I discovered what he was up to my puny Persian empire was overmatched.

I didn't get into this game when it first launched like I did with Civ IV. I'm not sure if its due to the new expansion or just from having much more distance from my last Civ IV game but I'm really digging it now. I'm not sure why they hide the Tera map under advanced options. I think allot of players like the idea of having a second barbarian inhabited continent to discover and fight with other civs over.

EvilDead wrote:

I didn't get into this game when it first launched like I did with Civ IV. I'm not sure if its due to the new expansion or just from having much more distance from my last Civ IV game but I'm really digging it now. I'm not sure why they hide the Tera map under advanced options. I think allot of players like the idea of having a second barbarian inhabited continent to discover and fight with other civs over.

Yeah it took some looking for me to find that.

Tried on the Swedes for size. The Nobel Prize mechanic is hard to get off the ground early, but the Caroleans are incredibly strong - March promotion! I'll take this over promoted Jags any day.

I was super excited about Boudica's civ bonus, until I re-read the description and noted that it's unimproved forests near your cities. Still really useful for a lot of Faith in the early game, but I don't think I'll play her again, since I prefer civ bonuses that are useful throughout the game.

Well, unless I misunderstand the mechanic (which is entirely possible!), when one religion picks a specific bonus, no other religion can then use it. So while her faith bonus is only really useful early in the game, it does provide you with very long-term benefits that can make a big difference.

Ok, might as well ask again since the new expansion is 25% off during today's daily steam sale.
I put off buying Civ5 for 2 years. Is G&K a must-have, or can I wait until it's more heavily discounted during the winter sale?

Scaphism wrote:

Ok, might as well ask again since the new expansion is 25% off during today's daily steam sale.
I put off buying Civ5 for 2 years. Is G&K a must-have, or can I wait until it's more heavily discounted during the winter sale?

IMO it's a must-have. It improves upon vanilla Civ V in a wide variety of ways. To be honest I had lost interest in vanilla Civ, but since the expansion has come out I've complete 4-5 different games. Two thumbs up.

Yeah, G&K has seriously revitalized my enjoyment of Civ V. The more I play it, the more I grow to consider it the "Beyond the Sword" expansion that Civ V needed.

Farscry wrote:

Yeah, G&K has seriously revitalized my enjoyment of Civ V. The more I play it, the more I grow to consider it the "Beyond the Sword" expansion that Civ V needed. :D

Very accurate.

MyBrainHz wrote:
Scaphism wrote:

Ok, might as well ask again since the new expansion is 25% off during today's daily steam sale.
I put off buying Civ5 for 2 years. Is G&K a must-have, or can I wait until it's more heavily discounted during the winter sale?

IMO it's a must-have. It improves upon vanilla Civ V in a wide variety of ways. To be honest I had lost interest in vanilla Civ, but since the expansion has come out I've complete 4-5 different games. Two thumbs up.

Agreed 100%. It's not just adding stuff (which is good!), it's also fixing broken or lame aspects of Civ V that needed to be addressed. Get G&K and don't look back.

Thanks for all the input! Money's a bit tight, so I wasn't quite ready to pull the trigger, but then Amazon went and matched the steam sale price ($22.50). I have a fair bit of trade-in credit at Amazon...so I'm in!

I just fought my first real war. I always play for Science or something. I had the technology and I wanted to see what it would do, and besides, the puling quisling had lied and stole his way through the whole game.

I've defended myself plenty of times over the course of my play but with this one I started it, and with five Giant Death Robots, I bloody well finished it. I feel a little sick to be honest.

Does anyone know know what happens when you nuke someone? I'm morbidly curious, but not sure I'm curious enough to actually swallow my gorge and pull the trigger.

Just save your game and start an alternate universe "in your leader's mind" see what he "thinks" would be the repurcussions and then go back to your save file when he thinks better of it, thus causing the alternate universe to collapse.

Keshiks rule. Good god, Played Attila on a huge map on king. Rolled through Gandhi, Bismark and got rid of the annoying Aztecs early on which put me at odds with Ramses, who was ahead of me in science; however, the fully experienced Cavalry that were once Keshiks were ridiculous. After that, those same Keshiks were Giant Death Robots that attacked three times a turn and could decimate large cities in one turn. Got awesomely ridiculous. This upgrade is the absolute bomb.

I'm playing the Celts now, which is a lot of fun as I'm exploring religion.

This game is weird. It's a continent, normal size map, but Catherine and I are on a relatively small land mass with two city states. I grew to four cities (seems like a good size) relatively quickly, and Catherine has been hostile to me since very early on. I have chosen culture and religion bonuses as well as wonders that make my civ very, very good at defense since I live under constant threat. She keeps attacking, but I keep slaughtering her incoming forces, and eventually she begs me for peace - only to repeat the process again some turns later.

I'm concerned that the war effort is derailing my attempts at going for a cultural victory, even though I am generally successful. Since I haven't met the other Civs I really have no idea how they're faring - and the lack of city states means I don't have any to buy culture from.

One of my issues is I get overwhelmed with the tech trees and always seem to forget something important. I know generally what I want (culture and religion buildings, wonders that boost those) but I keep forgetting techs which ends up putting me way behind.

gore:

Four cities is generally the size that's considered a minimum good one. That's a "small" Civ. You can compete fairly with large Civs even when you only have four cities. Technically, you could do it on one, but there's a reason that's called a One City Challenge.

In Gods and Kings, the Pantheon benefit you want to have when you're a small Civ suffering a lot of internecine war is Faith Healers, which adds +30 HP to healing every turn your unit is adjacent or in a friendly city. Combined with the 20 HP base health healing inside friendly borders, that's 50 HP healed per turn. If you have a Medic II in the city, 60. This makes fortified units around a friendly city very nearly invincible; I highly recommend.

As a small Civ, you want certain things - massive single Wonder happiness injections means more to you than it does to a large Civ, that generally benefits more from things like Forbidden Palace. Also, make sure to beeline for and build the National Wonders. As a small Civ, you can more easily build and benefit from National College and National Treasury. Build them ASAP.

Get Astronomy fast, and find other Civs and City States.

Finally, if you're going for Cultural Victory, keep small, ally the Cultural City States, and get Cathedrals!

LarryC wrote:

gore:

Four cities is generally the size that's considered a minimum good one. That's a "small" Civ. You can compete fairly with large Civs even when you only have four cities. Technically, you could do it on one, but there's a reason that's called a One City Challenge.

In Gods and Kings, the Pantheon benefit you want to have when you're a small Civ suffering a lot of internecine war is Faith Healers, which adds +30 HP to healing every turn your unit is adjacent or in a friendly city. Combined with the 20 HP base health healing inside friendly borders, that's 50 HP healed per turn. If you have a Medic II in the city, 60. This makes fortified units around a friendly city very nearly invincible; I highly recommend.

As a small Civ, you want certain things - massive single Wonder happiness injections means more to you than it does to a large Civ, that generally benefits more from things like Forbidden Palace. Also, make sure to beeline for and build the National Wonders. As a small Civ, you can more easily build and benefit from National College and National Treasury. Build them ASAP.

Get Astronomy fast, and find other Civs and City States.

Finally, if you're going for Cultural Victory, keep small, ally the Cultural City States, and get Cathedrals!

That's some solid advice. On some other things to consider: Many people with small civs will specialize their cities so they maximize their outputs, a great person captial and a money making city, in particular. The only thing you need to take special care on is strategic resources late. With a smaller civ footprint, the chance for aluminum, coal, or uranium popping up is obviously smaller -- of course as Larry mentioned, if you go the patronage route and friend up all the city-states you can, then this problem is largely mitigated.

BlackSheep:

Great Persons are usually generated first from the capital, but it isn't always best situated as the GP factory in CiV. That's a relic of cIV where you're more flexible about what you can do with a city. In CiV, you have to play it closer to the terrain.

A GP city in CiV is, in particular, very food and hammer-rich; with a strong emphasis on food. A riverside location with multiple Wheat resources is ideal (Granary adds +1 food per Wheat resource, Water Mill adds +2 more). Capitals don't always have this situation, since they are biased to have starts that favor having more hammer and/or gold resources, so they're often better suited to being Wonder sites, and/or Gold Cities.

The UI has a Resource Yield overlay that makes it easy to tell at a glance how much hammers, food, and gold can be produced from a prospective city site; and how much a current city is getting from its developed tiles.

You can often tell how a site will do just from how many green, brown, or yellow icons are on the undeveloped tiles.

Started my first game last night and was overwhelmed by all the new stuff. Love the new graphics. Struggling to figure out where things are in the HUD. Couldn't decide which leader/civ to play as, so I went random and ended up with Ramses. And stone, and marble nearby. So I built the pyramids, and I have cranked out a few other wonders as well. I'm about 90 turns in and steam says I played for 4 hours (I lost track, obviously).

I like the way that culture appears to work in this game, and so far the social policies seem promising. I do have a question about borders though - is the border pop from culture always a random tile? Can you affect which one is snagged? And also, can you push another culture back if it encroaches and snags a resource you were aiming for?

It still feels quite a bit like Civ4 to me. The tech tree in particular looks very similar and I haven't had time to figure out the key differences there yet. I'm playing a lot like I would in Civ4 and it feels like I'm in a commanding lead at this point (on Prince I believe). I aggressively pushed my borders out and now I'm backfilling. I think I have around 7 cities with 1-2 more on the way. I managed to complete the Pyramids right around the time that the Liberty Policy gave me a free settler, and I was building a settler of my own at that point as well. So I had 3 workers and 3 cities fairly early on (my first build was a worker, then a scout, then archer, then settler).

However I did get pulled into an early war when Ethopia asked me to declare against Siam, which would have been pretty unusual in Civ4. I don't have a clue about religion, maybe I will try a game with Boudicca next time to explore it.

Scaphism:

Border expansion has a particular algorithm and favors taking flatland tiles and resource tiles.. You can sometimes influence border expansion by purchasing tiles with money. Getting the border over a hill may be all that's required to bias it to expand towards a key resource on the other side that's on flatlands. Settling to capture strategic forest and/or hill tiles can be helpful towards influencing favorable border expansion later on.

The tile/s that's currently favored will be shown in the City View screen as outlined in pink.

You can't push back borders in CiV usually once they're claimed. I have over 700 hours in it and I have never seen the kind of tiles switching common in cIV. Claiming land with money is often a means of limiting your rival's territory and is rightly seen by the AI as an aggressive action.

Technically, you could claim previously held enemy territory by constructing a Citadel with a Great General, but that's often used for warfare, not for peaceable settlement. Claiming tiles this way in peace time is also often a great way to provide the AI with casus belli.

momgamer wrote:

Does anyone know know what happens when you nuke someone? I'm morbidly curious, but not sure I'm curious enough to actually swallow my gorge and pull the trigger.

I've used nukes to pretty good effect on cities, usually launching them from carriers or nuclear submarines. Any units within the blast radius takes a lot of damage (usually knocks them down to about %50 of their HP) and all the tiles become irradiated. You can send in workers to clean up the radiation but doing so destroys whatever improvement was on that tile, so you'll have to rebuild it.

How did I only just recently find out that this game has Giant Death Robots?

I mean, I did semi-deliberately avoid reading this thread when Civ V was new and I didn't have the time to play it anyway, but... Giant Death Robots!

Just typing "Giant Death Robots" is satisfying. And actually building them and unleashing them upon my enemies...

MacBrave wrote:
momgamer wrote:

Does anyone know know what happens when you nuke someone? I'm morbidly curious, but not sure I'm curious enough to actually swallow my gorge and pull the trigger.

I've used nukes to pretty good effect on cities, usually launching them from carriers or nuclear submarines. Any units within the blast radius takes a lot of damage (usually knocks them down to about %50 of their HP) and all the tiles become irradiated. You can send in workers to clean up the radiation but doing so destroys whatever improvement was on that tile, so you'll have to rebuild it.

Doesn't sound like it's worth it then, other than to perhaps make the Alpha Centauri launch more "historically" accurate.

A nuke is for devastating an enemy's economy and production, or for weakening their defensive units before taking and razing the city. I'd only use them before actually occupying if you need to take the city really quickly for some reason, or their defense is just too tough a nut to crack with conventional units.