(August 27th, 2015, 19:00)Azoth Wrote: I dunno, I think trade routes work pretty well. Early game, you want food to build that snowball. In the mid game, external trade routes become more important: you need gold for building purchases and city-state gifts and unit upgrades, and you can't sell all of your luxuries any more.
It's more that internal routes work too well, and overshadow the interesting complexity of the foreign route system. 8 free food for a newly founded city is just too much. And I'm finding that you don't switch them to external routes later. Food or production always does more at least as long as you're researching fast enough to have things to build. If you want gold, don't do it by trade routes, do it by food to work trading posts or merchants, or production to build banks. I think the game should have cut the internal route part entirely - we've already got city connections for that.
Like everything glued on to Civ 5, the trade routes are a look-at-me mechanic overly generous to get your attention while subsuming the terrain yields that are supposed to be the core lifeblood of Civilization. It's a serious strategic loss that ocean tiles got eviscerated into uselessness.
Industrial era start for focusing on the ideologies, I like that idea, may try it out.
Quote:I was reading an interesting guide on Civfanatics the other day: Piety Small.
I saw that too, browsing through the forum. It's more of a gimmick than a real strategy, and the author kind of admits it. The entire space section is theory and he says so. There's no real reason to go Piety over Tradition/Liberty, it's just a guide for doing it for kicks. There is a real thing about keeping your own cities small so that they convert from pressure, but that's hardly an entire game plan, just one small point.
that guide Wrote:Total # of bribes to AI for DoW: Zulu 4 (to occupy his army)
Found the mechanic he's really abusing there.
