Civilization V Catch-All

syndicatedragon wrote:
BlackSabre wrote:

Well, Pawz, Recon and I have had quite a few multiplayer matches. It's worked fine. Had it working locally and online. Only problem is if you have dlc, all people need to have it in order to use it.

Huh. I thought that DLC was still disabled for multiplayer. Thanks for pointing that out.

No problem. It's an option to tick which ones you want to have enabled... but again, everyone in the match has to have them to even get the option to tick it off.

All mod talk reminded me to try out this: http://civmodding.wordpress.com/ less drastic changes, something that should appease players looking for more interesting core gameplay. So far I'm midway through my first gme, really digging it.

I tried the mod and while I like some of the changes, it doesn't quite gel for me. I'm keeping an eye on it and hoping it'll get there eventually.

Meanwhile, I've dipped my toe in the modding waters and have started to make myself a mod. Right now it removes the XP limit from barbarians and increases the happiness from luxuries to 10. There are two changes I want to make - have the three happiness building provide happiness of 25% o a city's population and have luxury resources provide 5/4/3/2/1 for the first five instances of a luxury you have - but it's going to mean delving into LUA programming. The programming aspect is easy enough, but getting a handle on the built in variables that will need to be changed; the hooks to call the script; and the UI changes needed is pretty tough.

If you've any ideas for rule changes, let me know.

I'd really like to try my hand at a FfH kind of mod, but I'm sure there are tons of folk out there already trying...

Rather than trying to find happiness variables, I'd pick a specific luxury, find all instances of it, and follow the thread from there. I haven't looked at the code, but I sling code for a living, so that's my educated guess on how to find a starting point.

I've looked at a few mods that do the % happiness thing and in the LUA scripts, they all loop through {for each civ {for each city}} and then update a civ-based global variable.

Same thing *seems* to be happening for luxuries, but I can't isolate the luxury count variable.

I used to sling code for a living, so I've a few tricks I still vaguely remember. Once I get a decent test harness - probably a save with a city with the buildings and multiple luxuries - rigged up I'll be able to start hacking away

UCRC wrote:

All mod talk reminded me to try out this: http://civmodding.wordpress.com/ less drastic changes, something that should appease players looking for more interesting core gameplay. So far I'm midway through my first gme, really digging it.

Maybe I just got nice dice roll when generating map, but my first game with this mod turned out to be by far the most enjoyable and challenging Civ V game I had.

UCRC wrote:
UCRC wrote:

All mod talk reminded me to try out this: http://civmodding.wordpress.com/ less drastic changes, something that should appease players looking for more interesting core gameplay. So far I'm midway through my first gme, really digging it.

Maybe I just got nice dice roll when generating map, but my first game with this mod turned out to be by far the most enjoyable and challenging Civ V game I had.

I'm going to try that one.

I didn't like Civ Nights, it felt to me like the developer was homesick for Civ IV while writing it.

dejanzie wrote:
UCRC wrote:
UCRC wrote:

All mod talk reminded me to try out this: http://civmodding.wordpress.com/ less drastic changes, something that should appease players looking for more interesting core gameplay. So far I'm midway through my first gme, really digging it.

Maybe I just got nice dice roll when generating map, but my first game with this mod turned out to be by far the most enjoyable and challenging Civ V game I had.

I'm going to try that one.

There is a way to turn gameplay improvements on and off, I think, check for that. They were fine for me, but subtle as they were, I'd still like to play vanilla Civ with just fixed AI.

Shame we can't play mods in MP

/tagged

The GOTY edition just hit Steam and is $50. It includes:

All 4 Cradle of Civilization Map Packs (Mediterranean, Asia, Americas, Mesopotamia)
Civilization Pack: Babylon (Nebuchadnezzar II)
Double Civilization and Scenario Pack: Spain and Inca
Civilization and Scenario Pack: Polynesia
Civilization and Scenario Pack: Denmark - The Vikings
Explorer’s Map Pack
Official Digital Soundtrack

But not the latest DLC, Korea and Wonders of the Ancient World. Weird.

In my game as the Americans I'm working my way down the Liberty path, and feel that they could have worded "Representation" a little bit better:

Each city you found will increase the Culture cost of policies by 33% less than normal.

Why not just say "decrease"?

UCRC wrote:
UCRC wrote:

All mod talk reminded me to try out this: http://civmodding.wordpress.com/ less drastic changes, something that should appease players looking for more interesting core gameplay. So far I'm midway through my first gme, really digging it.

Maybe I just got nice dice roll when generating map, but my first game with this mod turned out to be by far the most enjoyable and challenging Civ V game I had.

If other people try this mod out and get quality generated maps, please post or send me a PM. One of my nitpicks of Civ 5 is the often poor maps that get spit out. I'll have to d/l this and give it a go. CivNIGHTS looked a little too bloated for me.

Michael wrote:

In my game as the Americans I'm working my way down the Liberty path, and feel that they could have worded "Representation" a little bit better:

Each city you found will increase the Culture cost of policies by 33% less than normal.

Why not just say "decrease"?

Because the culture cost of the policies doesn't actually decrease with each additional city you add to your empire due to the policy. So if they said that each city you found decreases the culture cost, then you might plant a whole bunch of cities thinking that would make culture policies cheaper. Then when you saw that the cost actually ballooned (even with the 33% discount), you'd be angry and file it as a bug.

Farscry wrote:
Michael wrote:

In my game as the Americans I'm working my way down the Liberty path, and feel that they could have worded "Representation" a little bit better:

Each city you found will increase the Culture cost of policies by 33% less than normal.

Why not just say "decrease"?

Because the culture cost of the policies doesn't actually decrease with each additional city you add to your empire due to the policy. So if they said that each city you found decreases the culture cost, then you might plant a whole bunch of cities thinking that would make culture policies cheaper. Then when you saw that the cost actually ballooned (even with the 33% discount), you'd be angry and file it as a bug. :D

Oh, I see. I wasn't understanding how it actually works. That makes sense.

I'm having a hard time finding a balance in this game. Prince difficulty is too easy, and winning seems to be a give-in, but King is grinding me down. No matter what I do, I seem to always be in a state of perpetual war, and falling way behind my neighbors in tech. Even though I've been crushing their attacks for a literal millennium, they keep coming at me, and by the beginning of the modern age (like when they get artillery or something of the like) the tech difference is just too big to keep holding them off.

It's very frustrating.

Are you specializing your cities, or are you trying to do too much in too many places?
What's your focus?

The jump between Prince and King in Civ V is believed to be the largest difficulty jump. You can't keep up with the AI bonuses just by smart management, and the AI script starts getting wonky because it can build lots more troops than you do. King's where you need to start doing things asymmetrically just to win. Not as bad as higher settings, but it starts at King.

Danyboy, for what its worth, King level is also where things get tough for me. I could have written exactly what you did. And I agree with the follow-up posts, i.e., that's the level where you really need to start grinding in terms of focusing on the little things, specializing the production within cities, etc.

Any tips on how to specialize cities? Should I be manually assigning my citizens and specialists, or can I just trust the auto-governor to focus on whatever I set it to? Citizen management is definitely one part of the game I've ignored up to this point. I only really choose what buildings to construct and leave it at that.

Coldtouch wrote:
UCRC wrote:
UCRC wrote:

All mod talk reminded me to try out this: http://civmodding.wordpress.com/ less drastic changes, something that should appease players looking for more interesting core gameplay. So far I'm midway through my first gme, really digging it.

Maybe I just got nice dice roll when generating map, but my first game with this mod turned out to be by far the most enjoyable and challenging Civ V game I had.

If other people try this mod out and get quality generated maps, please post or send me a PM. One of my nitpicks of Civ 5 is the often poor maps that get spit out. I'll have to d/l this and give it a go. CivNIGHTS looked a little too bloated for me.

I like the plate tectonics map generator. I used the Civ IV one as well. Generally it makes maps that are less nonsensical than the other map scripts which are based on fractal landscape generation. I wrote my own tectonics map generator for Civ IV that I was quite happy with but Civ V changed the script engine from Python to Lua (boo!) so I haven't updated my old script.

The things that turned the corner on King difficulty for me were setting specific goals for myself, focusing cities to accomplish those goals, and constantly managing my relationships with other civs. At King difficulty you can't just leave the game on autopilot or it will kill you. For example, when you find yourself in a surprise war, you immediately need to switch your strongest production cities to production focus and start pumping out units.

As a baseline, gold is very important so you can rush build and support a decent sized army, so you need one or two cities that have a lot of luxury resources around them, for the gold income, only build gold production buildings there, and focus them on gold.

Don't build a building unless you have a specific need for it. Not every city needs a factory, a bank or a university. The only "must have" buildings for me are the ones that give a flat baseline bonus, like the granary (+2 food), and the water mill (+2 food, +1 production). Small cities don't need libraries, because their bonus depends on population, and you only need a market in a city if it has some gold income already. +2 gold +25% doesn't do much for you if you have no other gold income in a city.

You have to be trading all the time. If you have an extra resource (and that includes luxuries you only have one of, as long as your happiness is okay), you should be selling it. Get the best price you can get, but if you can't get a great price, sell it anyways, because it's better than that resource sitting there doing nothing.

Staying ahead in tech is important too. At King difficulty you can and should keep ahead of the AI in military tech. If you can make a research agreement with anyone who isn't likely to declare war with you soon, you should do it. Grow your cities as fast as you can, because more population = more science (and more gold in trade with your capital, which should be your most growth focused city).

I'm really loving the new maps. I'm in the middle of a game on the Eastern US map as Hiawatha and am finding the huge swaths of virgin forest just a delight.

I just wish I could replant forest.

Nightmare wrote:

]I like the plate tectonics map generator. I used the Civ IV one as well. Generally it makes maps that are less nonsensical than the other map scripts which are based on fractal landscape generation.

I've been playing using plate tectonics after reading about it here and have really like the maps so far. Especially mountain ranges.

Does anyone have a mod that allows you to replant forest?

Paleocon wrote:

Does anyone have a mod that allows you to replant forest?

Hippie.

BadKen wrote:

The things that turned the corner on King difficulty for me were setting specific goals for myself, focusing cities to accomplish those goals, and constantly managing my relationships with other civs. At King difficulty you can't just leave the game on autopilot or it will kill you. For example, when you find yourself in a surprise war, you immediately need to switch your strongest production cities to production focus and start pumping out units.

As a baseline, gold is very important so you can rush build and support a decent sized army, so you need one or two cities that have a lot of luxury resources around them, for the gold income, only build gold production buildings there, and focus them on gold.

Don't build a building unless you have a specific need for it. Not every city needs a factory, a bank or a university. The only "must have" buildings for me are the ones that give a flat baseline bonus, like the granary (+2 food), and the water mill (+2 food, +1 production). Small cities don't need libraries, because their bonus depends on population, and you only need a market in a city if it has some gold income already. +2 gold +25% doesn't do much for you if you have no other gold income in a city.

You have to be trading all the time. If you have an extra resource (and that includes luxuries you only have one of, as long as your happiness is okay), you should be selling it. Get the best price you can get, but if you can't get a great price, sell it anyways, because it's better than that resource sitting there doing nothing.

Staying ahead in tech is important too. At King difficulty you can and should keep ahead of the AI in military tech. If you can make a research agreement with anyone who isn't likely to declare war with you soon, you should do it. Grow your cities as fast as you can, because more population = more science (and more gold in trade with your capital, which should be your most growth focused city).

I still fire up this game once in a while when watching TV but don't have a solid grasp on it like I did with Civ IV. These seem like they will be useful tips (at any difficulty).

I'm enjoying the Nights mod tremendously. The greater ability to grow large, without being able to ICS is really nice.

Thai's Vanilla Enhanced Mod is great! Really like the reworked scouts that keep them relevant through the ages and barbarians are more interesting now.

Between both these mods Civ V is still my go to game when nothing else strikes my fancy.

I snagged a copy of Civ V for a buddy during the Thanksgiving sale. He's loving it so far and asked me about multiplayer. I told him another friend and I tried it a while back and it left a lot to be desired.

Have there been any improvements to the multiplayer in the last several months, or is it still lacking?

Started playing this the other day after a friend wanted to play a multiplayer game. They seem to have fixed the multiplayer at least to some extent; it no longer requires a blood sacrifice and careful positioning of the stars to make a game work properly.

I managed to get some games against other players done a couple of years ago; playing against other players makes the entire military side of the game amazing. The only issue is the way the turns work; the simultaneous turns means there needs to be some sort of "gentleman's agreement" whenever you declare war on another human.

So far I've only been playing in team games against AI. One thing I noticed while playing single player is that the AI player can't seem to handle invasions on Archipelago maps.