Civ5 Managing happiness by SPM

[Aretii]

And if you really want to analogize the current geopolitical situation for Russia and China in Civ game-play terms, both have been historically stymied by a combination of frequent war declarations from other civs, and having half their turns played by someone's idiot kid brother banging away at the keys.

I have never heard the Cultural Revolution described in quite those terms.

[haphazard1]

Three things that are definitely not smaller than in Civ4:

1. Regions of terrain: Sweepingly bigger, more contrasting, more difficult to manage.

I like the new map scripts so far -- they give a more "regional" feel with larger areas of similar terrain. I have not decided which way to settle -- stay in the same region for multiples of that region's luxuries and try to trade for more, or push settlers into a neighboring region with different resources for the variety. Hard to do both, with the limits on number of cities.

2. Civ counts: back up to Civ3 levels, for each map size, but with the City States added in. Bigger diplomatic field, and with much more going on within the diplomatic AI.

More total AIs/city states in the game, yes. But I have to disagree on the "more going on within the diplomatic AI", at least in the current (non-patched) release. City state "diplomacy" is mindless -- hand them gold for goodies, and hope to be lucky and get a request that you can complete for influence without draining your treasury. And diplomacy with the AI civs is also pretty mindless -- they can never be your friends, and most of what you do has little (if any) effect on them. Trade for luxuries and maybe a tech pact now and then -- what else is there? Maybe I am completely missing a deep, rich, complex subsytem here. But it must be buried pretty deep indeed if so.

3. City footprint. The ability to work the third ring out from the city is hardly small or shrinkish. With tiles claimed individually, there is also tactical and strategic variety where none existed before. Used to be you pop one cultural ring and you're done expanding workable territory. Now it is more intricate and less of a no-brainer, how you acquire, improve and manage your cities' tiles. It also takes longer, being something that is not at all small in its duration of relevance.

As others have noted, those third ring hexes mostly might as well not be there. You aren't going to get them for a long time unless you spend lots of gold, since the system will grab all second ring tiles -- even zero yield tiles -- before any third ring tile. And you aren't going to have pop to work more than perhaps half your potential city tiles anyway until very late in the game (if ever) -- by which time you have other options for those citizens anyway. Maybe it lets you get one more resource in range of the city, which is not nothing but isn't that big a deal. Certainly it is far less important than settling for maximum river tiles with production (hills and plains).

I agree with sunrise that the changes in tile yield and worker effects has made the city improvement process pretty mindless. This was a whole subgame in Civ IV, and one of my favorite aspects of developing my empire. Now it is blindingly obvious that you are intended to put your city management and worker actions on automatic and ignore them; all the screens are designed for that, you have to take specific action to get manual control, etc.

So I am supposed to have the AI run my conquered cities as puppets, and the AI run my workers, and the AI run my own cities' management. What is the human actually supposed to be doing? Choosing what to build every 20 turns or so, rarely picking a new tech to research or social policy to adopt, bribing a city state or three, and running the handful of units I can support around the map looking for free city state gold and natural wonder happiness. And oh yes, hitting end turn a lot. A LOT. While waiting for something to actually happen.

Joy.