Civilization V Solo Reports

[Zherak_Khan]

The early game acceleration is off the charts. Starvation settlers seems like a huge boost to liberty openers.

[Sareln]

Man, so much flattery. Can't stop writing. Or playing Sacred Sites games.

http://www.dos486.com/civ5/bnw10/

http://www.dos486.com/civ5/bnw11/

Fantastic, I love the speed. The starvation settler loophole makes my head hurt - I wonder if it was design-intent or just accidental.

[Hail]

Man, so much flattery. Can't stop writing. Or playing Sacred Sites games.

http://www.dos486.com/civ5/bnw10/

http://www.dos486.com/civ5/bnw11/

Fantastic, I love the speed. The starvation settler loophole makes my head hurt - I wonder if it was design-intent or just accidental.

neither. the devs do not play their own game.

and, yes, civ4, was an exception in that regard.

[T-hawk]

neither. the devs do not play their own game.

I'm starting to perceive this is actually pretty common in the industry. The people making games are the people who want to make games. It's a different skill set and interest area from playing games. Sirian has commented on this around here, that he hasn't really played the games he's worked on much after release.

It took me five years to find it (and I have a great eye for exploits), no real surprise if the devs never did. They would've been playing their own game the way you're supposed to and we always do too, with granaries and farms in the capital so you never end up with a food shortage. It's not like the game tells you it's happening. You only notice if you actually run a shortage on a settler (why would you?) and carefully check the food storage box (who does that?) If you're building a settler, you're probably at size 5+ with the food box size at 40+, and you're not planning to grow anytime soon, so why would you look.

Anyway, I started a game last night that pushed that exploit pretty heavily. It'll be a while before I finish it to report (it's going to a science win, not Sacred Sites.) But for amusement, we could guess what civilization it might be. I didn't have the exploit in mind when starting the game, but quickly realized that the civ choice lent itself perfectly to doing that, perhaps the most suitable civ of all.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T-hawk: Penultimate Tease

[Ichabod]

My guesses, from the top of my head:

Shoshone: settle near lots of hills. Use early huts to speed up Collective Rule. Use later huts to grow the capitals while starving/building settlers.

Poland: gets to collective rule before any other civ.

[Dragar]

Long time lurker. Just dropping by to say I love the Solo Reports (and have many of the same frustrations with Civ V as everyone else does - I quite prefer reading the reports to playing the game!).

Regarding the starvation/settler 'bug'/'feature', I believe this has been well known for a long time. I noticed it myself when I first started playing, and it's reported from way back, e.g.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=466935

One telling comment:

"When the game first came out, extra food was converted into production while producing settlers. However, one of the patches nerfed that down to a max of 3 or so bonus production, then a future patch nerfed it again so that excess food doesn't add any production for settlers at all. However, a city cannot SHRINK while producing settlers, so I always ignore food completely while producing settlers. Just remember to switch it back after the settler is produced!"

[Zherak_Khan]

I seem to remember micromanaging around this bug myself, though I have never bothered to fully test it. Generally, the governor in Civ5 is much too obsessed with gold over food and hammers, which is very noticeable in the early game. Manually moving citizens from 2f2c to 2f1h is often a good decision. When doing this, you'll sometimes also find that moving from 2f2c to 2h2c saves you a turn or two on producing a settler. Similar things could happen in Civ4 with %-bonuses from Exp/Imp.

However, in Civ4, the governor actually accounted for this, though I think it struggled with some rounding issues. The Civ5 governor doesn't even seem to try.

[T-hawk]

Epic Science Battles Of History. Shoshone Vs Spain. Who will win?

http://www.dos486.com/civ5/bnw13/

http://www.dos486.com/civ5/bnw14/

[naufragar]

Thanks for another fun read. Btw, I think the AI can build policy dependent wonders even if the policy doesn't show up in the diplo screen. It's happened to me at least twice. The explanation I've read is that the opener doesn't show up; I don't think I've ever seen the number of policies on the diplo page at 6, which supports this theory.