Civilization 5 Announced

[thyrwyn]

Another incentive to grow (in pop) is that the value of internal trade routes (ie: cities connected to your capital) is determined by the size of the populations in the two cities (your capital and each other city). International trade is handled through the diplomacy screen.

Given that roads now cost gold to maintain, it seems obvious that the best way to maximize the return on those roads is to grow your populations. An empire of many small cities will have to work more gold producing tiles per population just to stay afloat. This means that all those happiness buildings will take even longer to build.

Also, buildings like the Library increase output based on Population (eg: the library produces 1 beaker/2 pop) in addition to specialist slots.

Will this be enough to ensure that ICS is not the optimal strategy? We'll have to wait and see. But there seems to be as many incentive to grow vertically as well as horizontally.

[MJW (ya that one)]

1. I think that you will not be able to get around the happy cap; much like city maintenance in the opening of game of Civ4. If you can get around it will be just patched out much like they patched out Moonslinger's chain-anarchy strat because the way to get around it would be very artificial.

2. It is unlikely that they will overlook the strength of ranged units. Why?http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ3/conquestsed.html.

Look under #1 (Trip is Jon Shafer)

[Gold Ergo Sum]

From reading these articles, it certainly seems to me that the fears over city spam are unfounded:

http://gameinformer.com/games/civilizati...oming.aspx

Speaking of cities, my experience so far is that you tend to create fewer of them on normal-sized maps. I was hitting the BC/AD calendar flip with around four cities, which is slightly more than half of what I generally shoot for in Civ IV. The happiness cap on non-trivial difficulties is brutal, and requires careful management of expansion. While I often felt like I was being unnecessarily held back relative to Civ IV, I did like that wilderness areas persist beyond the classical age now.

In fact, this update to the previous article makes it sound like they went pretty far in the other direction:

http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2...tates.aspx

Still, Patronage is proving incredibly powerful in my current game. With just five cities in my empire itself (last I looked I'm the third-largest faction, behind the Aztecs and Songhai) I'm crushing my rivals in technological research, culture generation, Wonder production, and revenue. However, there's no overhead – Civ V punishes over-expansion with penalties to happiness, maintenance costs, and the natural difficulty of defending more territory. You don't have to worry about any of that with city-states, letting you keep your empire lean and mean while still producing at a high level.

If you look at the picture at the top of page 2 of the second article, it appears that adding one more city will increase the cultural costs of social policies by 30%.

[Dantski]

so is the rising costs going to discourage early warfare?

[Sullla]

It certainly sounds different than what we feared, although if you go too far and make expanding a bad thing, that's an even worse situation! Jon Schaefer has posted a number of times in various places that he likes to play the game with a mere three cities... which sounds great and all, but I really hope that if capable people are playing, having ten cities will allow you to stomp someone with only three cities. Hopefully they're walking the fine middle ground in which "smart expansion" is the best play.

Just over two more weeks until this game releases.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I definitely agree that over-penalizing expansion would be even worse. More QUALITY cities should always be superior to fewer cities.

I just cannot imagine Civ working well without the necessity of at least 10-12 quality cities in the end game. If the happiness/maintenance penalties put the optimum at 5-6 cities, Civ would cease to be Civ.

On the other hand, I do like the idea that a solid 10-city Civ could potentially compete with a warmongering Civ that went out and took land for 18-25 cities, but didn't develop it properly.

It sounds to me like the makers of Civ V wanted people to war more over resources than to war over land.

[SevenSpirits]

I just cannot imagine Civ working well without the necessity of at least 10-12 quality cities in the end game. If the happiness/maintenance penalties put the optimum at 5-6 cities, Civ would cease to be Civ.

Er, you've played Civ IV right? You can easily win with that number of cities at least on Immortal (I won't make any claims about Deity). Hell, you can win just fine playing OCC.

Are you just thinking of bigger-than-normal maps or something?

[Speaker]

Has anyone read even a single thing about multiplayer? Will it even ship with the game?

[SevenSpirits]

They've stated that LAN and internet MP will ship with it and promised that PBEM (and maybe other mode(s), I don't remember) will be added soon after.

Especially given that the AIs are supposed to act more like MP opponents, I don't think they've been neglecting MP in general. Though, I've been wondering how much the 1-unit-per-tile combat tactics will be changed by simultaneous turns. It seems like a bigger effect than in Civ IV where stack attack at least removed some of the tactical differences.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Er, you've played Civ IV right? You can easily win with that number of cities at least on Immortal (I won't make any claims about Deity). Hell, you can win just fine playing OCC.

It isn't a question of can, it is a question of optimal. The name Civilization alone implies something large, something sprawling. A bit of an empire so to speak.

If they designed the game where optimally you build 5-6 cities, and anything more than that becomes a drain, I think much of what makes Civ great would be nerfed.

Now if you have a write-up of a game that you won on Immortal running a OCC against AIs allowed to expand to their fullest extent, I would love to read about how that was accomplished. I would learn a lot.