Civ 5 We Hardly Knew Ye [Spoilers]

[Ichabod]

I continued the Nobu in the Water SP game, but I haven't had time to report. The idea was to play 10t sessions for some days, but I entered a massive "one more turn" state on saturday and played a whole lot. It was pretty fun.

Considering our MP game:



Here's the start. Notice the ruin to the W of the settler. I moved my warrior to the hill 2NE, but forgot to take a screenshot. It revealed that the water there was a 2 tile lake. I decided to move as follows:



So, we'll have a costal Capital, with bonus of another fish (those aren't bad tiles with a lightouse, at 5/1 and 4/1, without improvements). I favoured settling on a hill and the Coastal bonus, in the form of better TRs and Colossus/TGLh.

Yuri and HAK settled on the first turn, so they probably went for SW of the 3f fish. It's a good Tradition Capital, I think. I'll go for Liberty, with my newly acquired knowledge of how to play a good liberty game. I'm ready to fail again!

Now that I think of it, 1NE of where the settler is might be an even better Liberty Capital. 3 hills, 3 resources on the inner ring. There appears to be tundra above, but the city will just not get those tiles. My fog reading now thinks there might be a river up there too...

I'll debate about it some more... Right now, I'm favouring moving 1NE, even if I lose the 2 hammer plant.

[Rowain]

I'll debate about it some more... Right now, I'm favouring moving 1NE, even if I lose the 2 hammer plant.

Settling now gives you strong production while still giving you a little growth (stone+capital produce scouts/monuments and granary fast).

1 NE gives you faster growth while still giving some hammers (2 2-1 tiles are nice to have without borderexpansion).
Additional it makes a Coastal+riverside city either SW or W-SW (depending on the coastline) of Ruins legit.

Perhapüs the best is to first move the warrior NE+NW onto the hill and see how it looks up there.

[Ichabod]

I agree with the warrior movement to see up there, I'm just hesitant because it means we'll be taking a long time to go to the center of the map, where all the contested ancient ruins lie.

We'll have time to think about it, since next turn will likely arrive only on wednesday.

[Ichabod]

Nobun'água!



This was a common sight during all this game, working unemployed citizens for production. I figured it wasn't worth growing, because my happy situation would always be terrible and I was playing for the small per city bonus, not the concentrated percentages bonuses (since my cities would always suck, anyway).

The shrine was built early, because I figured religion would be key in the game. The best pantheon was the fishing boat one, IMO, since I'd not have much benefit from most of the other ones (which are connected to land based resources/tiles), and I would be always lacking in production. The goal was more on the religion than the Pantheon, though. Pagodas would be key for me, as a very powerful per city bonus, helping with what would likely be a very dire happiness situation.



First settler from Collective Rule SP, due south, to plant on the marble. I figured that filling the rest of the Liberty policies wouldn't help me right now: I don't need workers/worker labor, and the city connections are far away, coming on the form of harbours only. The discounted SP cost wouldn't pay for itself, needing 2 extra policies.

It was obvious that I needed Exploration later, for the +3 prod on coastal cities. But I couldn't get it next, due to needing medieval era, so I decided to go for Piety -> Reformation. More faith sounded very nice for the Pagoda spam plan, and the Reformation belief that lets you build science buildings with faith would also help, I figured. It was better than anything else I could see, so I decided to do it.



That's one ugly screenshot...



Here's what would be my core for a long time in this game.

Research went Pottery -> Sailing -> Mining (for silver happiness) -> Optics. Optics was the main early goal, since lighthouses turn fish into great tiles (adding 2f and 1p, even without fishing boats). You can see me investing the early production into fishing boats, which would only be worth +1f, but perhaps another +1p, if I was lucky to get the needed pantheon (2 civs had already chosen at this point, so I needed 20 faith for the next one). Ah, there was also the +1 culture from japan's UA, which is a nice bonus.

On a future game, getting a trireme early could be a good investment, to help with early exploration and to find more opportunities around the map. I was too busy trying to make my cities not suck so much, so WBs it was.



After some nail biting turns, we got our sought after pantheon. The game was looking very bright at that point!

[Azoth]

I'm enjoying reading about your variant game. Legendary start seems a mixed bag: all you need is a luxury and some Fish for your cities, while the AI can take advantage of all the Deer and Sheep and such. Happiness shouldn't be too much of an issue: there's plenty of room on this map, so you should always plant on luxuries I think (and whatever strategics you need for your victory condition), then there's Pagodas and Colosseums and eventually +3 happy per city from Exploration. Piety is interesting. Do you think you'll have enough faith to make the Reformation belief worthwhile? I might have picked the Honour opener instead (your economy will depend heavily on trade routes, so you want to know about barb camps right away, before they have the chance to spawn pirates), then put points in Patronage-Consulates after Optics before Exploration unlocks in Medieval. If you go Metal Casting before Education, you'll probably have enough production from trade routes (and Engineers) to build Universities at least.

[Ichabod]

Here's where I made the decision to go Piety and focusing on the religious route. Religion works on a per city bonus way, most of the time, and my plan was to spam cities, so it seemed to fit. It's also tied to what I intend to do in the MP game, a Liberty -> religion game, so I think it was worth the test.



When I reached Optincs, every city stopped what they were doing and started on Lighthouses. Lighthouses are the key building for this variant, being more powerful than in Civ 4. I didn't try for the Great Lighthouse (which gives a free lighthouse) becuse it'd take too long, especially considering most of my production would come from the lighthouse bonus.



I had to spend some gold buying the Old Faithful, since that'd likely be the last tile the governor would expand into. With lighthouses, my cities would start growing a lot, and happiness would start becoming a problem. Most luxuries needed new cities (barring water ones, still to be found, unfortunately), due to the variant. I already had marble settled and no Masonry yet, so there was a +4 waiting too, but other than that, happiness was already starting to hurt. Having met no other civs for trade and no City States for quest and alliances, I could only see me getting happiness from Religion or Colosseums. Things were starting to become a bit worrissome.



To make matters worse, my first exploring unit (the initial warrior after embarkation) found a dead end to the West. I was starting to be afraid that we could be stuck without access to anyone else until after Astronomy, which would be a big disaster. I was counting on some trades to keep us going happiness wise, especially considering we'd have 2 repeated luxuries (silver and marble) with our 4 first cities (the red circle being the 4th city), instead of 4 different ones.



At least our Capital was starting to become a decent looking city, after the Lighthouse. A pity we'd only have bare coast tiles to grow into next... How I miss the little commerce you get from coast in Civ 4. Not only gameplay wise for this variant, but also because the map looks very ugly with only those green dots on the water (same for land maps without river gold). Adding back the gold to rivers and coast actually has an aesthetic significance behind it, who would have thought?

[Ichabod]

I'm enjoying reading about your variant game. Legendary start seems a mixed bag: all you need is a luxury and some Fish for your cities, while the AI can take advantage of all the Deer and Sheep and such. Happiness shouldn't be too much of an issue: there's plenty of room on this map, so you should always plant on luxuries I think (and whatever strategics you need for your victory condition), then there's Pagodas and Colosseums and eventually +3 happy per city from Exploration. Piety is interesting. Do you think you'll have enough faith to make the Reformation belief worthwhile? I might have picked the Honour opener instead (your economy will depend heavily on trade routes, so you want to know about barb camps right away, before they have the chance to spawn pirates), then put points in Patronage-Consulates after Optics before Exploration unlocks in Medieval. If you go Metal Casting before Education, you'll probably have enough production from trade routes (and Engineers) to build Universities at least.

The maps I rolled without legendary start all seemed a bit tedious, so it was mostly based on that. I agree it doesn't add that much of a boost to the player. But since the AI is supposed to be very faulty in Archipelago maps, perhaps the bonus was actually welcomed. I thought about going Immortal for difficulty, but decided against it, since the variant is very restrictive.

The thing that get me about happiness in Civ 5 is the timings. In this game, right as we are ready to grow our cities with lighthouses, we reach a point of lacking the needed happiness and our potential is stumped. And there's not many options to solve this particular timing problem: colosseums are the closer option avaiable, but they still need the tech and are expensive to build in such meager cities. And since I lack experience in the game, the timing problems becomes even more evident -> it's pretty clear now that the Pagodas also wouldn't be ready in time for our needed growth after lighthouses (I kind of guessed they could be). Right now, thinking about a next game in the same variant, I think I would have focused harder on exploration early, to have CS and luxury trade options to fill this gap, since I can't really think of any other way...

By the way, I haven't really realized until your post how powerful that happy policy from Exploration will be in this game... Man, I really should have focused on getting to Medieval quicker...

About the religion and reformation, you'll see how it ended. I already have a lot of the turns played (game is not over, though), and things haven't really developed as I thought they would.

[Ichabod]

LAND HO!



After fearing about the future of the game, if I happened to be isolated in my small island, I finally found what I was looking for, what looked like a connection to the other continents.



And my first new luxuries spotted. My liberty plan hinged on the per city bonus, so it was mandatory to find new luxuries to settle into. Here's another thing I don't know about Civ 5: if settling on different continents ignores the minimum distance between cities. In this case, would it be possible to settle both salts?

In quick succession, we met 2 AIs (Rome and Germany) and some City States. Unofrtunately, both of them were too incompetent to have spare luxuries to trade, even if we were already past turn 60. Later, we also met Napoleon, which also lacked luxuries...

Rome and Vilnius were actually to my Northwest, where I sent another trirreme. I was pretty late exploring that way, but Augustus was even slower: notice how I was the first one to meet Vilnius. Augustus was having troubles improving his luxuries and I wondered why he didn't make the smart move of settling on top of the spices. Not sure if it would help him, but it would surely make my job easier, if I decided to conquer him.

Not having extra luxuries from the AI was a big blow, as I was already running out of happiness, even while stagnating two of my three cities. Research wise, I went for Libraries, after spending a few turns on Iron Working, without finishing it. IW was for the Colossus, the extra gold and the extra TR. I figured I had time to finish it even after getting Writing, when looking at this slow AIs.



Kyoto, at the height of its glory. I kept it growing in the neutral ocean tiles because a high pop Capital helps a lot (with TRs, for instance). It was going to be our NC city and we wanted to have high pop for when we open specialists to work.



Overview. There was a settler heading for the Salt city showed above. No settlers being made for now, though, as we lacked the happiness and any close enough places with extra luxuries...

And then, disaster struck!



In quick succession, our religion planned was completely murdered by the AI. The first 2 religions founded got the 3 religious buildings that give happiness AND the Jesuit Education reformation belief... In other words, all our investment in faith and the Piety tree was in danger of not paying off, since the prizes we coveted were not avaiable anymore. And, we took a very hard blow in our happiness plans, losing the religious happiness that our middle game hinged on (I was mad when we lost Pagodas to the first religion founded, and then the second religion was founded and instantly enhanced, taking the other 2 buildings - that was really annoying). I had to rethink where to go from here...

[Ichabod]

Replayed turn 0 with the same movements, but this time, there's an ancient ruin on the tile 1NE of where the settler ended. I wonder what happens if you pop a ruin with your initial settler... What rewards can you get, if any?

[chumchu]

You can get all but pop growth.