Civilization V

[Art Blade]

nice post :)

I had realised the correlative conjunction "either/or" which was exactly the reason for my surprised comment. It is as if saying, "Alexander is either a girl or a boy, either good or bad, either decisive or indecisive." Well, yes. He either wins or loses.

[fragger]

Thanks for the link to that Wiki, JRD. There is indeed a bunch of useful info on all the leaders there :-X The Civilopedia doesn't go into that depth of detail regarding the leaders' traits.

Man, the Brave New World EXP adds loads to the Social Policies part of the game. In addition to the policies, there is another new section to it called Ideologies. Actually, the Freedom, Order and Autocracy branches have been removed from the Social Policies screen and have now become the three overarching Ideologies (they have been replaced with a couple of new SP branches, Exploration and Aesthetics). Researching Ideologies is done a bit differently to the standard Policy branches. Each Ideology (you can only choose one) has Tenets that you can adopt the same way you do Policies, i.e. with Culture points, so when you have enough Culture points, you can either adopt a new Policy for one of the standard branches or a new Tenet for your chosen Ideology. There are way more Tenet slots per Ideology than there are Policies in the standard branches (16 per Ideology vs. 5 per Policy branch) and they are arranged in three tiers - seven in Tier 1, six in Tier 2 and three in Tier 3. They w@&k in tree format, roughly similar to the Policy branches - a Tier 2 Tenet will require two prerequisite Tier 1 Tenets. However, you can choose the Tenets anyway you like, i.e you can choose any of the Tier 1 Tenets to put in any Tier 1 slot. Once you have two Tier 1 Tenets and are ready to acquire another Tenet, you can adopt another Tier 1 Tenet or you can choose a Tier 2 Tenet. I'll post a screenie next time which will make this a bit clearer.

The catch with Ideologies is that you can't start one until you either reach the Industrial Era or build your first three Factories, whichever comes first.

An Ideology can actually be used like a kind of weapon, or rather as a means to undermine another culture's Happiness. If enough people in another culture prefer your Ideology over their own, they may actually abandon their host culture and start joining yours! Your own people might do the same to you, so you have to be careful. How an Ideology becomes attractive to other cultures is a bit too involved to go into here, but it can seriously hamstring an opposing culture's status. If it happens to you, you can try switching Ideologies, but this involves a nasty period of Revolution, which is a drastic, last-resort measure and you might end up even worse off. The idea of staging a Revolution is a kind of throwback to Civ III, where you could switch to a different government style but had to have a revolution first, which meant a period of unrest and unproductiveness. There was a funny gag there in Civ III - if you chose to start a revolution, a confirmation window would pop up which said "You say you want a revolution?" and instead of the "Yes" or "No" response, the choices were: "Yes. You know it's gonna be alright" or "No, you can count me out" :-()

Here's a rundown on Ideology (from another part of the same Wiki). It adds a whole new dimension to the game and increases the strategic depth of Civ tremendously - as if it wasn't a deep strategy game already :-()

The method of winning a Cultural Victory has likewise had a major overhaul. It's now considerably trickier, but it's far more logical than the old Utopia Project. Here's a description of Cultural Victory in BNW (scroll down to about halfway through the article to the heading, "Cultural Victory in Brave New World".

The new additions brought in by the Gods and Kings and Brave New World EXPs are collectively like having a whole new game added to an already entire game. I could play this game for years to come - on top of the years I've already spent playing it :-X

[JRD]

The Cultural Victory is the oly one missing for me. I started another game after pulling off my first Domination to learn better how to w@&k with military units. I am now with the Babylonians lead by Nebuchadnezzar II  8)

That wiki says it prefers a Scientific Victory over the other but still, I'm playing warmonger again  >:D

I am curious to see the Utopia project though. The Policies part is fun and truly changes how the game unfolds and knowing it will open yet another game aspect makes me want to go for that as well.  :)

[fragger]

 8) :-X

Here is the Ideology window. Here, I've chosen Freedom as my Ideology:
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Next time I earn enough Culture points, I can expend them to either adopt a new Policy for one of the standard Social Policy branches, or I can come here and adopt a new Tenet. In this example I can either adopt a new Tier (Level) 1 Tenet, or I can adopt a Tier 2 one. As you can see by the way it's structured, if I adopt a Tier 2 Tenet now, next time I will be able to adopt a Tier 3 Tenet or another Tier 1 Tenet, but not another Tier 2 - until I have two prerequisite Tier 1 ones. There are actually six Tier 2 Tenets available but for some reason you can only have four of them for whichever Ideology you choose. The other Tiers allow all Tenets to be acquired for those Tiers, but you can choose them in any order you like. It's highly unlikely that you'll earn enough Culture points to fill an entire Ideology tree anyway since you can't start adopting Ideologies until you reach the Industrial Era, so you need to choose them carefully - to suit the world situation, your playing style or the victory type you're aiming for.

Naturally the Tenet sets are different depending on which Ideology you choose - Freedom, Order or Autocracy. Generally speaking, Freedom is good for Scientific or Cultural victory, Order for Diplomatic victory and Autocracy for Domination victory.

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The Cultural Victory is a more elaborate affair to pull off now. Essentially, if you can generate more Tourism points than the total of Culture points generated by each the other civs, you win a Cultural victory. It works like this:

The Great Artists have been removed from the pool of other Great People (there are still Generals, Scientists and Engineers, who continue to function as they always have, and the Gods and Kings EXP adds Great Admirals, Great Prophets, Missionaries and Inquisitors to the mix). The Great Artists have been split into three types: Great Artists, Great Writers and Great Musicians. Whenever you generate one of these, you can expend it to install a Great w@&k in a building or Wonder that will accommodate it, such as an Amphitheatre or the Great Library for a Writer's w@&k, A Museum or the Louvre for an Artist's w@&k, or an Opera House or Broadway for a Musician's w@&k. When you install a Great w@&k, it starts generating Tourism points, so the more Great Works you can install, the greater your Tourism value. Tourism can also be enhanced through establishing carefully selected Trade Routes, via Diplomatic choices, later-era Buildings such as Airports and Hotels, certain combinations of Wonders, and Ideological Tenet choices.

Most Buildings which can accommodate a Great w@&k will only have one slot for it, but typically the Great w@&k-enabled Wonders may have two or three slots - for example, the Louvre can house three Great Artist Works. If you don't have an available slot for a Great w@&k from a particular Great Artist/Writer/Musician, you'll either have to build Buildings or a Wonder to provide more slots, or if you have to develop a Tech before you can build a particular type of Building to house more Works, you might have to keep your Great People safe somewhere until you can. However, each of these three Great People types have one other unique ability, e.g. you can send Great Musicians into another culture's territory and expend them to do a concert tour there for a one-off Tourism boost, so you don't necessarily get stuck with excess, useless Great People.

The Great People are all named for historical personages (just as they always have been in Civ) and what I like about the Great Works is that you get to see what they are when you install them. If it was an Artist's w@&k you'll see the painting, if it was a Writer's w@&k there'll be a quote from his/her book, or you'll hear a snippet of the music from a Musician:

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With the Gods & Kings and Brave New World EXPs, Civ V has evolved into a profoundly deep strategy game. I haven't even touched on the World Congress, assigning Delegates and proposing Resolutions, creating and maintaining Trade Routes, discovering Antiquity Sites and carrying out Archeological Digs, pursuing all kinds of new quests for many new City-States, new Techs, new Units, new Buildings and Wonders, new Cultures, new Diplomatic choices - it goes on and on. This is strategy gaming on a grand scale :-X

[fragger]

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Oh, get over it.

[JRD]

   :-X

[Stiku]

Those are annoying, always when you want to expand the bothering starts.

[fragger]

So far I have pulled off a Domination Victory and a Cultural Victory in Brave New World. Cultural Victory is quite tough now - I squeaked home with only eight turns to spare (out of 500). You have to generate enough Tourism points to exert 100% cultural influence over all other opponents. Whenever you achieve this with a culture, you get the pic that I showed earlier with their leader bitching about your pop music and blue jeans corrupting their people :-() You can check anytime under "Victory Progress" to see how you're doing.

Here's one of the many new units, a Trade Caravan (there is also a sea-going equivalent, a Cargo Ship).
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Building one of these allows you to establish a trade route with a city of another culture, or a City-State. Once you select the destination city, movement of these units becomes automatic as they travel back and forth between the city of origin and the trading partner's. Each trade route lasts for a set number of return trips, I think twenty, after which you have to re-establish the trade route or you can establish a new one. You can build a Trade unit in one city, then expend one turn reassigning it to a new city of origin, if you have something more pressing to build in the new city of origin that you don't want to interrupt. Like any other unit, Trade units can be purchased with Gold. You have to be careful of Barbarians as they will capture and destroy a Caravan or Cargo Ship if they catch it. Later in the game (Modern Era) the caravan camels are replaced with freight trucks, and the sail-powered Cargo Ships are replaced with modern container ships.

Trade Routes will bring extra money to both trading partners, but of course the player who owns the route gets the most dough. You can also use Trade units to carry Food between your own cities, thus helping to boost Cities that aren't doing too well in the Food department. Setting up a Trade Route with another culture's Cities will bring in more money than trading with City-States, however a City-State may request a Trade Route in the form of a quest, which will generate Influence points with them if you set one up.

Trade Routes also carry Religion and Tourism influence to other cultures, which can help you w@&k towards a Cultural Victory. When you are ready to choose a destination for a Trade Route, a list appears which shows you what the Trade Route will be worth to you for each possible destination city. There is a limit to how many Trade Routes you can have at any one time, but this base limit can be expanded upon by constructing certain Buildings and Wonders.

Trade units are non-combatant, but they can stack with any other unit type, even another non-combat unit. Which is good because it means that they don't get in the way or interfere with anything. Land Trade units will travel two spaces over any terrain except Mountain, but they don't enjoy a road-movement bonus - they still move spaces per turn regardless. Cargo Ships move four spaces per turn. All Trade units have a maximum range and thus can only trade with Cities that are within their trading range. This is another instance where switching a Trade unit's City of origin to a different one can come in handy.

Trade units are a nice addition to the game - or should I say, a re-addition. You could build Trade units in Civ II, but they were dropped for subsequent Civ games, for some dumb reason. They're very useful units, and a great way to bring in extra Gold :-X

[JRD]

Trade routes seems a good addition indeed, fragger.

I was thinking if that sort of unit could be introduced somehow since trade routes with your cities do exist but you can only trade with City-Estates using your Great Merchant or becoming allies with them or with other civs via the trade menu once you click on another civilization's city banner.

I am beginning to master the art of trading as I get more experience in the game. You can benefit a lot from City Estates once you build up some gold. It seems that everytime you start a game you will have some resource in abundance and one very scarce or completely lacking which brings balance to the game and kind of force you to look for trading options with other players since both you and the AI will be needing something and willing to trade the excess ammount of what you have near you.

Becoming allied with one City -Estate helped me wipping the Persians off the map. That particular City-Estate (can't remember which one now) not only helped me by giving me some military units but they also created another war front against Darius with their own troops. They actually took a city by themselves and kept feeding me more troops and resources while forcing Darius to split his army on both fronts.   :)

There are many ways in which you can benefit from trading. You can get some extra gold by trading something with another player and that's the most straightforward outcome, of course. It can directly boost your production or make you enter the "City loves the King", also improving city growth and production. All of it can help you finish contructing specific buildings faster, which will also improve production and gold and food generation so there is a lot of feedback from a simple trading operation.   :-X

There are so many details and they are all very well balanced. It's not like you can just get lucky and spawn on an island with endless resources. Something will always be lacking and something will be there right from start. The game gives you fair ammounts of resources, terrain obstacles and possibilities of expansion to enable infinite outcomes everytime you start a new game.  8)

[fragger]

I thought Art might get a kick out of this.

There's a new unit in the tech tree in BNW that is enabled once "Nanotechnology" is researched - an XCOM squad!
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Here's what a couple of squads look like in-game (click on the image for a sharper picture):
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I haven't tried them out in combat yet since I'm not at war with anybody, and I'm so close to winning a Science Victory that I don't want to stuff it up by going to war. But once I've finished this game, I'll go back in for a post-game muck-around and pick a fight with someone. I want to see what these bad boys can do. With a whopping combat strength of 100, they should be able to biff the snot out of any enemy ground unit >:D

[Art Blade]

nice reference  :-X :-()

[fragger]

I won the game (science victory, yay team) then went in and picked on a hapless City-State post-game with my XCOM guys.

They lasered the opposition into glowing green slime >:D

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[PZ]

 :-X nice!

[Art Blade]

:-X :)

[JRD]

Not much free time time as I'm in the middle of a busy, life changing process but I'm finding some time to squeeze in a couple hours of game play here and there.  ^-^

I finally won a cultural victory, which means I now made it through all possible types of victory on the easiest difficulty level (settler). I immediately started a new game but this time I increased the difficulty level one notch (chieftain). It doesn't seem too hard so far so I went after information regarding what changes when you up one level. I found this table here. For whoever plays this game, you can see this is not too different, which explains why it feels like the same challenge as before although a little less rewarding. Mostly I can see my happiness level is not as high as before (I initially thought it was due to my choices of which wonders and buildings I am producing but it seems like both the difficulty level and my choices add up to this outcome) and the gold I get from clearing barbarian camps have decreased (this one is a direct consequence of the difficulty level alone).

Apart from that, no other civilization seems to be threatening my dominance nor does anyone seems to be prone to invading my territory so I am quite comfortable on that level so far. I am going for a scientific victory and keeping my army to aminimum and it seems like I am in for another victory.  :)

[Art Blade]

go on, JRD, show them  :-D

[fragger]

Reach for those stars, JRD :-D :-X

Here's one of the new EXP Civ leaders, Pacal of the Maya. He's quite the party dude, judging by his intro spiel (click on the image to read it clearly). Apparently he also has quite a flair for "hat couture"):
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Over four and a half years I've been playing this game, and I've never seen this happen before:
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It popped up at the start of my turn and when I looked, sure enough, the City-State of Genoa was now in Austria's colours and had joined their empire without a fight. I don't know how the Austrian player pulled this off - I've never seen it before and I couldn't find any way of doing it myself. No option of this nature ever appears in the City-State diplomacy dialogs, which is the only interface for dealing with them. Interesting...

[Art Blade]

nice pic, that Pacal chap surely has to carry a lot of weight on his shoulders. :-D

That marriage, if he can pull it off, you should be able to do it, too. Maybe a little research on the net will help you find a way.

[fragger]

I found it out. Acquiring a City-State via marriage is a "special ability" of the Austrian Civ (every Civ in the game has one or two of its own special abilities, and a unique unit and/or building or two, that the other players cannot construct). Austria is one of the new Civs introduced with the Brave New World EXP, which is why I've never come across this marriage thing before. That should have occurred to me... d'oh.

I'll have to play as Austria some time to see how this ability works and what's involved.

[Art Blade]

Hehe, travel around and collect brides, not bribes. Which reminds me, I reckon that the Austrians have "Harem" as their, erm, special building?  :-()

[fragger]

 :-D :-D

[fragger]

I'm trying "One City Challenge" again. It's kind of interesting, being allowed to have only one city. It's pretty much impossible to win in any way, which is why it's called a challenge, I guess. The main challenge is to see if you can hang on until the end of the game without getting clobbered, which means playing a defensive game. What I like to do is take a quick look around with my Warrior and Settler before I found my city to see what kind of start location I've gotten. If I don't like it, I'll bring up the menu and hit "Restart". If you do this before you found your first city, the game will immediately generate a new map with the same starting conditions you've specified. I do this until I get a start location which looks well defensible, such as having mountains at my back, and shows a good variation in potential resource yields from the surrounding terrain.

In my last game I tried switching off "Time" in the allowable Victories list to see what would happen. I've never tried that before. What it does is remove the time (turn) limit so that the game will just go on and on until somebody pulls off whichever of the four main Victory types you've enabled for that game (you can enable/disable them independently - enable one, some, or all). This will theoretically give you enough time to research all of the techs in the tech tree before the game ends in a victory for someone, something that I've very rarely been able to pull off. I say "theoretically" because you'll just have to prevent anyone else from winning before you've completed the tree. Simple :-() There's always the "Just... one... more... turn..." option which appears after someone does win, which allows the game to go on indefinitely and thus allow you to research the whole tree, but of course you can't win a particular game for a second time.

I'd like to play a game where I can win by conquest using XCOM squads and Giant Death Robots >:D For that, I need to research the whole tech tree as the tech required for GDRs is Fusion, one of the very last ones in the tree.

[Art Blade]

I'm already looking forward to reading your first impressions on XCOM  :-D

[PZ]

Same

[fragger]

So am I :-()