Civilization V Solo Reports

[T-hawk]

Thanks for the good words, old friend.

But it is good to see that there is plenty there to strategize over for those who can enjoy the game as it is.

There is, but there isn't. All the strategy in Civ 5 is on a very small level. All my work optimizing the path through the culture policies added up to maybe three turns difference on the ending date. All the work of picking the best city location means maybe one more citizen because the food cost is so brutal and maybe four more hammers because the tile yields are so homogenized and flat. My work on optimizing the payoff of research agreements was a small corner of the fact that buying maximum research agreements is always correct and dominates any other way to spend gold.

There's no big-picture strategy aside from the single branch of win condition. Games of Civ 5 always develop the same way. There are no drastically different approaches like a Pyramids-Representation economy, or Great Lighthouse economy, or deeply beelined slingshots like Lib-Democracy, or crazy Great Person farms with twenty specialists, or Globe Theater drafting, or a workshop-powered State Property empire. Social policies appear to provide branching options (and fool the reviewers into thinking so after their single game), but really just serve to feed your chosen win condition. Culture always wants Piety, space always wants Rationalism, diplomacy always wants Patronage, military always wants Honor. The strategy is illusory.

That single strategic point of win condition captured my attention for about six games, but now I have hardly any desire for more. The one thing left to do was Always War, and I started that, but lost interest after 100 turns since it was playing out just like every other game of Civ 5. I was trying to use the Aztec ability to catapult through some social trees, but the exponential cost of policies means you really can't ever get ahead. Always War itself is surprisingly uninteresting when conquest does you no good, thanks to the happy cap.

There is strategy in Civ 5, but once you've seen it, you're done. It doesn't vary. I enjoyed solving it, but now it's solved.

I've always been a Large Map lover, so it didn't hit the spot for me.

I picked large for this map, for exactly the wrong reasons. Not at all for more cities and land and room. The large map provides more ruins freebies and more city-states and more AIs for gold-bilking and research agreements, all of which overshadow your own civ's development. Civ 5 strategy is dominated by exploiting external resources, not by developing your own civ.