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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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Civilization 5 Announced
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Speaker Wrote:And me! And me.
"You have been struck down!" - Tales of Dwarf Fortress
--- "moby_harmless seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" darrelljs Wrote:ItThat strategy is really funny, but I notice that no one seemed actually win with it on immortal/deity. It really is a BC rifleMAN, not rifleMEN. 1 unit can only do so much, even if it's more advanced (and really, 25 strength vs. 18 strength longswordsmen isn't that great). If you're going to abuse rationalism, just go all out and wait for the GDR. You can get there surprisingly fast. The slingshots you can pull of in this game are ridiculous, thanks to all the "free technology" methods.
Yes, I did build the Forbidden Palace (eventually). While I agree that Order is a better choice than Rationalism, the latter works pretty well with the mass filler city strategy. The idea is to spam libraries, feed each city through maritime food, and then run mass Scientist specialists. You get 5 beakers per specialist, so add with 4 population + library = 16 total beakers in every dinky little village. Adds up really fast once you get up to about 5-10 of those suckers, each of which is completely self-sustaining on food, happiness, and gold.
 But overall I concur with you: science comes in ridiculously fast as-is in this game. Going for Production is better. darrell, the problem with your example is that no one is ever getting size 20 cities in this game under normal conditions. (Unless you build hospital + medical lab, but then, that adds extra gpt and such.) If you want to compare 150 total population, the more likely comparison is between 5 size 10 cities and 25 size 4 cities. That's how I would do it, at least. Obviously the latter would take much less food, especially with maritime freebies kicking in. Speaker Wrote:And me! And me! The OP of the thread Sullla linked to: Celevin Wrote:Puppets are the lamest part of Civ5, and also the strongest. And half of CFC is arguing in FAVOR of puppet states.  I know I'm not the only person who thought that puppet states were an awful, awful, awful mechanic the moment I heard about them. Was it really that hard to predict that the first player who figured out how to manage his own AIs would do well?You know what would work for a penalty for annexing cities? If the rest of the game was balanced? A happiness penalty that fades over time. -5 unhappy for the first 10t. -4 unhappy for the next. etc. etc. Scale the amount and decay rate to suit your fancy. It's a simple mechanic, it's a temporary penalty, and it would work, if only the deeply negative unhappiness values actually hurt a player...once you're at -10 unhappiness, it doesn't matter whether you're at -11 or -9874. Civ4 made most of its game mechanics linear or quadratic. Population growth and unhappiness come to mind. Really only number of city maintenance was a mess, and that was more because of the large number of interlocking effects of having more cities and more pop on unit costs, distance maintenance, civic upkeep, and inflation, than the innate complications of # of city costs. Civ5 is making more of them exponential or step functions. Population costs become laughably absurd late-game: Should it really be 15f to grow to size 2, and over 20 times that to grow from 19 to 20? This makes balance a disaster, and it's even worse for happiness which has abrupt changes, but an infinite bottom.
Puppet states seem a rather dumb mechanic in the current form. Player is forced to accept that their worth is revolved around seemingly random choice of AI script on what to build, OR work around that by a) inhibit puppet state from building anything at all (TP spam) or b) avoid entire half of tech tree so puppets make only useful stuff. Just dumb as it is. IMO puppet should not:
1) Build any buildings which are unit-oriented - barracks, armory, etc - puppet never builds any units, this should be excluded by default. Absolutely NO reason for puppet to build these things, and IMO points to that this mechanic was not really thought through. I assume devs just apply the same build AI to puppet states as computer civs. Maybe wrong. 2) Build anything that requires resource. Or should ask first. They are my puppet state, that means I own them. If they want some nice coal/uranium/whatever, they got to ask, right? Had some size-2 puppet states ruin my fun "nuke everything" strategy by building nuclear plants. But really, no reason to have puppet states in the first place. Should have been more focus on making annexation and management of many cities (of decent size, not this ICS stuff) more of a balanced deal. Way I see it, puppet states were probably an addition to cater to players who don't care for micromanagement, but it's rather stupid that the PS offers some outrageous benefit in one regard (free culture) while having massive penalty in another (dumb indescretion at buildings, player is forced to alter tech or stunt growth/production of PS to stop it). Could be argued this is balance to encourage "strategy" but I feel it's just an oversight in all regards. I can't believe some people argue in favor of PS being good addition or fun, really they are just a pain. Either you got to spam TPs or tech half the tree, or you got to accept that the PS is a big cash sink. Not fond of mechanics that force player to completely ignore other game concepts to make it valuable. Quote:The slingshots you can pull of in this game are ridiculous, thanks to all the "free technology" methods. No kidding, 2 GS saved up and lower branch focus in my last game got me 2 free techs up to dynamite and mass artillery while still in medieval era GG, Catherine.
Yeah I was wondering why city growth was so slow in the high teens, I guess this explains the position of the 50% food saving buildings higher up on the tech tree, your growth rate is supposed to hit diminishing returns without them.
played an Immortal game as egypt on pangaea, not following a rigid plan but trying to REX with small cities. the AI took a dim view of this expansion, and I got 2-on-1 declared on when I only had about 4 cities. Fortunately it appeared to be the sort of deal where one of the supposed war allies joined in for diplomatic reasons but had better things to do than actually invade, so I was able to take a city from him and force peace. I took a city from the other guy as well, but couldn't press on because a different pair of AI declared on me. At this point it turned into an enjoyable military game. Went for Patronage because city-states were clearly the only reliable allies I was going to get in this game, and several of them were acting as buffers between myself and the other civs (two were conquered by the AI and liberated by me at various points) They actually ended providing about 1/3 of my research at this time as well as being useful in fights; I actually lost one of my captured cities to a city-state when the AI bribed it. I was able to get a couple of policies in Rationalism later. Order wasn't relevant. as when I got artillery I'd already taken the capitals of all but one civ. on a related note I really hate courthouses, way too costly in hammers and gold upkeep. Combined with the bad behaviour of puppet cities they're what encourages raze-and-replace in civ5. The way puppets SHOULD work is that you get whatever resources they're sitting on, take a small global happiness penalty and that's all. You don't get any gold/culture, but you don't pay upkeep or incur raised SP costs either.
Reading all the posts here, besides all the broken mechanisms we encounter, there is one thing that is clear to me.
This game can be played in so many different ways successfully. Who would have thought that's possible? I find that positive, though the new ICS methods sounds like I won't try it. Uberfish, you are not in the mood for SG's these days? Or wait for a proper patch? |
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