Civilization V Solo Reports

[Olodune]

I merged the two user accounts and set Olodune's email to your new one (initials c.c at gmail, right?). You should be able to do a password reset on Olodune now.

Also, this would be more suited for this thread in Civ General, since it's not a tournament game. I'll merge this thread into that once I know you've seen this pointer.

Yes, please do. I was wondering where to put this. Thanks!

And thanks for the quick admin work, impressive as always

And so: A Casual Shadow to T-Hawk's "Religious Celts" game.

To Turn 100

To turn 100

Since it has been a few years since I played a Civ game, I think Civ 5 might not initially annoy me as much as it otherwise would. I remember being dubious about Civ 2 -> SMAC, disliking SMAC -> Civ 3, and hating Civ 3 -> Civ 4. So it was a pleasant suprise that I enjoyed Civ 5 right off the bat

For clarity, this is the game that I am shadowing: http://www.dos486.com/civ4/civ5celts/

While I am very thankful that T-Hawk posted the initial save (and somewhat surprised that I could load it without some sort of DLC crapout), it looks like my initial city has already been established in this inglorious location:



This is my third game of Civ 5, so while I am certain that there are still major features/quirks that I know nothing about, I don't think that this is a great start. No river, no Granary boosted food (Wheat, Deer, and Bananas, strangely enough). We do have two luxuries. And cows. Cows are good in Civ, right?

In Civ 5 starts all get smoothed a little by the power of the +3 gold, +3 beaker, +3 prod palace which feels a little weird at first. I think I actually like the outcome though: more starts are playable, and, regardless, by turn 40 player actions matter as much as they ever have.

The basic plan for this game is to "play the map" while trying to leverage the Civ 5 religious system somewhat. Probably not entirely peacefully ...

Initial build is Scout -> Scout -> Monument. The early game income is actually from map exploration, so I am not surprised at my Gold, +1 Pop, Mining, + Weapons (a Pictish Warrior!) haul. 3 -> 5 goody huts of decent impact seem to be the norm. Combined with the "discovery bonus" of early City States the initial scouting is critical to a solid game.

I meet more AIs than expected on a standard sized map. Wait, what's an "Oval" map? Some sort of Pangaea is seems. Interesting. I am on the Eastern edge. There is good land to my north between me and Ethiopia/China and to me East encroaching on Austria.

First settler is going to build on the dyes to grab all these juicy bananas:



I will buy the silk tile to ensure this is a happy sufficient city (more on that later). Plenty of food. Too bad we are missing a river. Rivers are great in this incarnation of the game: early gold, mid-game food, and late-game prod!

Since this is a religious game, I get one:



I chose +1 culture from pastures before realising just how much marble and stone is in the vicinity. I think +faith from quarries is likely better. Still, culture is useful for some powerful slingshots, I think. I will be going Liberty -> Piety. The free GP (engineer) from the Liberty finisher should be useful. I have my doubts about the Piety path, but since this is supposed to be a religious game, well, lets give it a try.

Civ 5 is full of opportunities for barb farming to get +Influence on city states. I actually really enjoy the Archer/Barb dancing party:



I ended up at T100 with 4 cities. I used the Oracle to open up Piety, and the Engineer from Liberty to finish the National College. I think that's the obious choice.



Demographics look good:



Ok, I will take a break here to check out T-Hawks opening .... time to learn something!

To turn 150

To turn 150

This phase of my game is focused on warmongering (China and Austria), trying to understand religiosity, and some happiness quandaries.

A human player doesn't end up first in Soldiers without "coveting those lands". China has really nice tiles.



Lots of salt. Many pastures (which will help leverage my pantheon). And rivers. Apparently the AI can anticipate war, just fine:



Yeah. I like those. Almost makes me feel guilty for having a dark warmongering soul. Almost.

The 1UPT wars are a satisfying puzzle game (at least to me). Hills! Rivers! Pay attention to terrain. The AI does a good enough job at counter attacking somewhat intelligently to keep me engaged. In earlier games I've lost all my city takers, had city siege engines focused down, and been slaughtered by Japan's samurai in full Jungle / Great Wall bloodiness. I need a solid diversity of units to be effective. Fun.

Happy Cap Mechanics

Civ 5 has a pretty punitive nearly-hard (and then truly-hard) happy cap. All 4X games need to have some sort of progressive income tax to keep the early leaders from snowballing too easily. In the past we've seen inefficiency (yuck. huh?), corruption (double yuck. huh?), high GPT costs (huh?), softer happy caps, health caps, diplomatic penalties, etc. (In addition to the happy cap Civ 5, also has other mechanisms (higher hammer costs for national wonders based on city count, higher SP costs, diplo hits). I think I actually prefer the current implementation: it is relatively transparent and very noticeable! There are also ways to increase it effectively (if slowly). Lux trading, buildings, SP, religions, wonders. The net result is a slower expansion progression which means the game diverges a little from the REX->Develope->Win paradigm of Civ 4. I mostly like this.

However, holy moly does the happy cap hit hard when conquering cities: +2 unhappiness for the new city + normal pop penalty + (a 1.25*pop?) multiplier for unrest. If mindlessly blitzing in the early/mid game it is really easy to bury an empire in dysfunction. Warmongers need to pay particular attention to the happy cap when deciding whether to capture cities. The +8 below is insufficient to cover the happy hit of annexing Beijing. I already have salt. I'll need to fix this before taking this city (which I would like to keep!).



After taking down the last Chinese city (a meaningless tundra outpost that I puppeted (smaller happy hit), my veteran army is too much for Austria. Especially since of my seven(!) city state allies three are directly bordering the Austrian empire. They nearly captured Salzberg (What happens if they do? Auto-raze? Gift for me?)



By 800AD (the T-Hawk Assessment Audit?) I have a dominating position. Large faith*, culture*, and science income on a powerful landbase. The current -1 happiness will be solved by the Notre Dame (hopefully), coliseums, and a courthouse in Vienna. I went down the bottom of the tech tree to get Chemistry (really need more infrastructure), and will pick up Fertilizer since I could use the food in the Celtic Core - and the game rewards depth first teching with era bonuses (extra spy, bigger city state bonuses (still? only once?), etc).

The Core + Chinese acquisitions



The South. Note the way of avoiding the happy hit from taking Salzberg (gamey? yeah ... ). It feels wrong to have insufficient happiness to raze a city.



Faith

I've been generating plentiful faith from city states and piety boosted (and cheap!) shrines and temples. The latter counts as a culture booster thanks to my religion enhancer perk (+2 culture each). I've spent lots of faith on missionaries and inquisitioners. About a third of my total output has gone to a religious battle with Ethiopia. At one point I let a Christian great prophet wander to my capital to see what would happen. Big mistake. Bye-bye holy city. I wasted an inquisitor (totally ineffective. Are they broken without a holy city?) and a missionary or two to convert it back. I think this might have messed up the faith cost progression of missionaries. They went something like this 200 (multiple) -> 140 (Piety perk, multiple) -> 210 -> 240 -> 300 -> 400 (lost religion in holy city) -> 210 (multiple). No idea what that's about. However, the religion is gaining a lot of power.

As of turn 150, Tengriism has spread to 21 cities! I get:

10 CPT for God of the Open Sky pantheon.
10 CPT for Temple enhancer
37 GPT (!)
About +1 food per city when not a war. Not at all worth it.

In other words, all my surplus income and 1/3 of my culture is coming from the religion. However the biggest benefit is actually through City State relations. I think I've completed 3 or 4 quests of "please spread your religion to us". The relations also deteriorate more slowly (25% less, I think). This snowballs nicely -> 28 of my 68 FPT is actually from city state allies. Eg, Geneva has 164/60 influence so I basically have a perma-ally for the remainder of the game. Five other CS are at least 90/60.

Tile Purchasing

I don't understand it. Sometimes there are discounts, sometimes not. However, often, I think the most efficient gold -> stuff conversion is through tile purchases. Since there are many options to choose from this adds a nice layer of strategic depth. Although, sometimes the decision is clear. I'll take a +2 food, +4 faith, +2 happy cap relief tile. Thanks!



Of course, I did settle that mediocre city in large part to pick up the natural wonder Sri Pada, so in reality it's a bit of a wash. At the time that was my only source of ivory making the city come out ahead overall. Aside: I like the natural wonders. They are a nice bonus without being overpowered (I am looking at you Monsoon Jungle).

Capital Embassies

So I guess that a benefit of getting embassies set up is that we can see world wonders being built on the game board. Ok, so I want to build the Notre Dame. Lets see what Addis Abada has going down. Unnnh. If you are going to add this feature why make it so opaque. Clearly those who have played the game a few dozen times will be able to instantly tell what this is. I don't think it's the Notre Dame. But that is based on my memory of the Civ 4 rendering

To the End

At this point conquest seemed to make sense. Ethiopia would be a pushover, but attacking the "other" side of our oval Pangaea was a little tricky. There is a spine of mountains that nearly divides the map in two. A gap in the middle is filled with four tightly packed city states and I didn't see the need to try and dance my largish army through all their units. No thank you. I briefly considered teching to Astronomy to take the long way round, but ultimately decided to divide my army in two and take the frozen (and long) routes through the tundra.



The German (and Greeks in the South) were quickly intimidated



The final assault on Mecca leading to a turn 214 conquest victory



This was a fun game, so thanks for posting the save T-Hawk.

Some thoughts

I think Boudicca is actually a strong leader for this kind of game. Getting an early Pantheon + Religion meshes nicely with a conquest derived wide empire. Tithe (+1 gold per 4 followers) was strong, but it trailed church property (+2 gold per city) at every point in the game. I think "initiation rites" is even stronger. +100g on city conversion seems to be a better option than a 2GPT income stream. The Celtic UB, an Opera House with +3 happy helped too. Initially I wasn't too thrilled with Pictish Warriors, but after some experience and upgrades I like this:



That is a Lancer with +15 on rough, + 15 on flat. +20 outside our boarders (Pictish) and +15 inside (Himeji Castle). +30 against mounted and double upgrades against ranged attacks. Best of all it can pillage without using movement, so can easily heal 50-73% health and then attack in the same turn. Crazy. Incidentally hero units are much easier to keep alive in Civ 5 due to the non-binary combat outcomes.

I was almost finished this game before I realised I could put trading posts on top of Jungle. One of several micro mistakes.