SevenSpirits takes cultural relativism to the next level

[T-hawk]

It has a column labeled Social Policies where it lists policies that other players have taken, but it has stayed the same for a long time now, coincidentally since shortly after everyone got to 5 in liberty.

Maybe it doesn't include policy openers? There's really 6 policies per tree.

[SevenSpirits]

Maybe it doesn't include policy openers? There's really 6 policies per tree.

Oh right, that's true. So if the others have only taken one policy since then it would have been e.g. the Piety opener and not shown up - not because it's Piety, but because it's the opener. Very strange design choice.

[Rowain]

Very strange design choice.

Is there anything in this game that is not a strange design-choice ?

[Gaspar]

There are a LOT of weird decisions in the UI/What they tell the player/etc realm. Probably room for a good mod to fix.

[SevenSpirits]

Is there anything in this game that is not a strange design-choice ?

Yes, there are actually a lot of good design choices IMO. However, most of the edge cases and mathy bits are just insane. You probably remember when the game came out, and there was NO OVERFLOW? And now overflow exists but it's basically hacked in - production overflow doesn't show up (nor do chops) and research overflow doesn't distinguish between itself and beakers you've invested into the next tech. Or how about the absolutely ridiculous cost formulas (for growth, policies, etc) which have all kinds of precise, arbitrarily chosen exponential crap.

It seems the hard work of thinking about every little thing and carefully defining the desired behavior was never done.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

One nice thing are fractional hammers. That way you won't lose hammers to that kind of rounding, like a city with 13hpt and a forge.

Shame the multipliers are so weak that there's nothing worth getting excited about.

[Rowain]

Yes, there are actually a lot of good design choices IMO.

There have been several interesting (and good) design ideas. But the implementation was (and still is) completly awkward and sometimes I'm convinced they had several pots of a certain plant in their offices else certain decisions aren't possible.

It seems the hard work of thinking about every little thing and carefully defining the desired behavior was never done.

QFT

[SevenSpirits]

One nice thing are fractional hammers. That way you won't lose hammers to that kind of rounding, like a city with 13hpt and a forge.

I thought I would like this, but after playing I find it actually makes things harder to micro. You're making 14.85h/t, you need 187h to complete this item, you have 33.18 invested already. How many hammers can you afford to not work without delaying it? Ow. There is no reason they need 4 digits of precision when build times are in the single digits.

At least if all the multipliers were a multiple of 10% they could remove the .01s digit. And yeah, many of the buildings (especially the later ones) are just stupidly bad.

[SevenSpirits]

t94: As you can see I could easily capture crow this turn. However - quite irritatingly Yuri and oledavy declared war on me, costing me 8 happiness. I am pretty sure if I took another city it would throw me into severe unhappiness where I get a combat penalty and that seems like a very bad idea, so scratch that. Instead I will get some revenge on Yuri for his treachery. Why Yuri in particular?

1) We had a defensive pact.
2) It looks awfully like he offered a deal to oledavy of mutual war vs me. This is because despite declaring war, he did not move units in a way that he would do if he were actually declaring on his own turn. So I believe he proposed an offer to davy (who goes right before me) who accepted. The reason of course being to cancel all our resource trades. This also fits with oledavy holding the save a turn or two ago - he may have been investigating whether accepting would trigger the defensive pact and also cause war between himself and Yuri. I thought at first maybe Mist bribed them into it but that cannot be the case because you can only have one outstanding deal, and they both declared on the same turn.

So yeah, Yuri has been a big meanie. What to do? I guess I shall start by killing his two longbows, a sword, and a great general. Btw Pyramids and the 1t roads it enables are friggin' sweet for combat.







Then I will offer him another chance at friendship if he wants it.



Oh, I also tried to scout around the annexed american capital to see if Yuri was actually preparing to invade me. It doesn't appear so but the bad news is I forgot about the great wall, so my chariot ran out of moves a bit early and could easily die to e.g. a longbow.

In other news, I've built a couple lancers now as you can see. Also got the city state research policy which is worth a piddling 10bpt or so but will lead to the glorious +50% from city state luxuries.

[SevenSpirits]

Sneaky Englishmen happened to have a Swordsman boating around near my silver, and therefore pillaged it. This forced me to rush a Circus last turn lest I fall past 10 and get the combat penalty. But it's OK, units are on the way. You can see I had a Jaguar fairly nearby already; I upgraded him to a sword this turn and will continue upgrading him as needed. There's also a lancer and a knight zipping along towards this city at high speed. He's got a knight and another sword on the way but it shouldn't be a big deal.



Another place where Yuri is scrounging together an attack. I should be able to crush this - I will be able to road a tile forward so my cannon can reach his sword and eliminate it, and I have a lancer in range of his longbow, healing in a city this turn. Other troops are pretty close.

The scout you see in the picture was just produced this last turn - I decided having an expendable 3-move +1 sight unit would be well worth 16h, so Bad Governors (which has a Barracks and Armory) spit one out.



I am falling back from attacking Crow after killing off all the units around it. Why? Well the main reason is simply that I can't afford to capture it due to unhappiness. Instead I've sent most of the units southwest to liberate the city state and get my pearls back. The remaining units are heading northwest to defend my homelands.



Soon to be liberated. Just have to move the cannon up two spaces next turn, then set up and fire the turn after and the city should crumble.




Here's a demographics shot since I haven't shown one of those in a while. That unhappiness hurts.



And here are my current builds. Obviously I've minimized food production for the time being as there's not only no point trying to grow, but in fact succeeding would be detrimental at the moment. I'm pretty sure Apples! is running 5 citizens (+1h) while leaving quite a few 4f1g tiles unworked. Heh.

As you can see my military builds are Rifles and Cannons. I wish I were building some more Lancers but at the time I started these builds several turns ago, I thought I would be fighting Mist and not Yuri right now.