Civilization 5!!!

[bigglesworth]

I've not noticed any performance issues on Civ V since the latest patch (and probably the one before that, but I wasn't playing during that one). And I play on a not-gaming laptop.

[bigglesworth]

Giant Robot! But not of the death kind!

It's a giant multiplayer robot. A service which handles the sending of save-files for hotseat games - allowing asynchronous play between human players. It's entering beta testing now.

[bigglesworth]

I am running a "Let's Play" of Civilisation V with the NiGHTS mod over at the RPG.net forum, for those who like reading about games with pretty pictures. http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?619102-Lets-Play-Civilisation-V-NiGHTS-the-Siamese

[Vaniver]

I am running a "Let's Play" of Civilisation V with the NiGHTS mod over at the RPG.net forum, for those who like reading about games with pretty pictures. http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?619102-Lets-Play-Civilisation-V-NiGHTS-the-Siamese

That mod is interesting, but my initial impression is that it's not balanced all that well. Republic especially seems amazingly good- I only needed to bribe each city state once, and then doublings would take care of any degradation and keep them out of the AI's reach indefinitely. (I suspect a human opponent would have a strategy to counter that that the AI doesn't, but still.)

[bigglesworth]

Well I haven't finished a whole game yet - but from what I've heard the AI Civs in this game can become enormously rich. And if you go for it for your first Cultural Revolution you'll only get a few city-states.

[Vaniver]

The governments only last for 5 (10/15/20, depending on speed) turns. (Which is really aggravating when you're trying to build a wonder that requires that govt. type.) Essentially, only one player can have a government at a time, and when you were the last person to have a government you don't accumulate any cultural revolution points. My culture heavy empire, in a game with 4 players, was getting about every third revolution, which meant I got a government around every 20 turns.

I was Greece and put a few policies into patronage, and was losing ~.5 respect (whatever it was called) a turn. Over twenty turns, that's 10 respect- and so if you start off with ~100, you only need to pick Republic every two hundred turns to never drop below 100. (That was 10 opportunities to pick governments, for me, though it'll be less in larger games or empires with less culture.) Note that games are around 200 turns long, on quick.

Everyone gets enormously rich- one of the things the mod does is really reward tailoring your tech tree and production chain to the resources around you. (Instead of buildings giving you +1 gold for having a particular kind of resource, there are a number of buildings that give +15 gold for each of a particular kind of resource.)

(One thing to note, for the policies: piety/fanaticism for a first pair strikes me as a really good choice, because you start off with so much spare happiness. I haven't done the math to see when it helps and when it hurts, though.)

[bigglesworth]

I think fixing the building of wonders that require a government type is supposed to be in the next version - you're supposed to be able to finish them off after the government ends I think.

[ArgonV]

Ok... Why do my games ALWAYS end in war? I like to build, not fight pointless battles. Here's what I mean:

I've played three games today. All went fine and well, friendly neighbours, I expand, build improvements, build up my cities, garrison them, keep some military units sprinkled throughout my lands, when all of a sudden, usually somewhere around 1000-1500 AD, a neighbour decides to attack me, without any obvious reason behind it. I'm dug in well, as long as I keep building military units, I'll survive. But I don't want that! I want to build up my cities and my lands. Do some diplomatic/cultural things, not fight pointless, endless battles. The AI, when contacted, says things along lines of: let's make this fighting stop. I propose a generous truce, they reject it and continue sending troops suiciding on my defences. And their enemy, you know, the one they've declared 3x already upon won't even jump in when I politely ask. THIS IS YOUR CHANCE, THEY'RE FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS!
If you need to ruin a game by artificial stupidity in both counts, then that's just sad. Even peaceloving AIs like Gandhi attacked me today, and our borders weren't even touching

Well, guess it's back to Galactic Civilizations 2 for me then, at least that has decent, logical and understandable AI...

[Coin]

Ok... Why do my games ALWAYS end in war? I like to build, not fight pointless battles. Here's what I mean:

I've played three games today. All went fine and well, friendly neighbours, I expand, build improvements, build up my cities, garrison them, keep some military units sprinkled throughout my lands, when all of a sudden, usually somewhere around 1000-1500 AD, a neighbour decides to attack me, without any obvious reason behind it. I'm dug in well, as long as I keep building military units, I'll survive. But I don't want that! I want to build up my cities and my lands. Do some diplomatic/cultural things, not fight pointless, endless battles. The AI, when contacted, says things along lines of: let's make this fighting stop. I propose a generous truce, they reject it and continue sending troops suiciding on my defences. And their enemy, you know, the one they've declared 3x already upon won't even jump in when I politely ask. THIS IS YOUR CHANCE, THEY'RE FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS!
If you need to ruin a game by artificial stupidity in both counts, then that's just sad. Even peaceloving AIs like Gandhi attacked me today, and our borders weren't even touching

Well, guess it's back to Galactic Civilizations 2 for me then, at least that has decent, logical and understandable AI...

There is always Civ IV... I'm playing a variant right now where I'm only allowed to attack if someone attacks me and thus far I've had one war in ancient times and peace well into the renaissance. Mmmm, sweet sensible AI...

[ElWanderer]

Ok... Why do my games ALWAYS end in war? I like to build, not fight pointless battles. Here's what I mean:

I've played three games today. All went fine and well, friendly neighbours, I expand, build improvements, build up my cities, garrison them, keep some military units sprinkled throughout my lands, when all of a sudden, usually somewhere around 1000-1500 AD, a neighbour decides to attack me, without any obvious reason behind it. I'm dug in well, as long as I keep building military units, I'll survive. But I don't want that! I want to build up my cities and my lands. Do some diplomatic/cultural things, not fight pointless, endless battles. The AI, when contacted, says things along lines of: let's make this fighting stop. I propose a generous truce, they reject it and continue sending troops suiciding on my defences. And their enemy, you know, the one they've declared 3x already upon won't even jump in when I politely ask. THIS IS YOUR CHANCE, THEY'RE FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS!
If you need to ruin a game by artificial stupidity in both counts, then that's just sad. Even peaceloving AIs like Gandhi attacked me today, and our borders weren't even touching

Well, guess it's back to Galactic Civilizations 2 for me then, at least that has decent, logical and understandable AI...

In all* Civ games, the threat of the AI going to war is meant to keep you honest (balancing expenditure on guns and butter), and actual wars can be seen as a challenge / brake on the progress of a player who'd otherwise win easily. But each one does it differently. Some players complained that Civ 4's AI was too docile when a human player had the advantage, whereas Civ 5's AI comes across as insane, quite frankly.

Once in a war, the Civ 5 AI bases what it'll accept/give for peace on relative strengths rather than casualties - at high difficulty levels they will churn out units as quickly as you can kill them, meaning they always have more units than you and so think they are "winning". You can have a 100-1 kill ratio, but they still demand cities, resources and gold for peace - in Civ 4 they'd be getting a lot of war weariness from losing units and so would be prepared to make peace. This can make fighting defensive wars in Civ 5 an neverending nightmare. If you go on the offensive, start seizing cities and threaten their capital, then you'll see them change quickly to "total surrender" mode (in my highest scoring game, Catherine gave me about 25 cities for peace, leaving herself with just her capital, just because I was threatening Moscow). But not everyone wants to do that.

There's also the thought that Civ 5 is a wargame with a few empire-managing elements tacked on. That's unfair, but the game design emphasis is tilted much more towards wargame elements than Civ 4 was.

* - (disclaimer I haven't played Civ 1 or Civ 3) I got my father interested in Civ 4 a few years ago. I still get regular emails where he complains about games that went well up until the point where AIs declared war on him for "no apparent reason" and marched in with big, unstoppable (I think there's a clue there) armies. I can't say I've never suffered odd, annoying or ill-timed war declarations in Civ 4, but it hasn't happened to me nearly as much.

[ArgonV]

Ok... Why do my games ALWAYS end in war? I like to build, not fight pointless battles. Here's what I mean:

I've played three games today. All went fine and well, friendly neighbours, I expand, build improvements, build up my cities, garrison them, keep some military units sprinkled throughout my lands, when all of a sudden, usually somewhere around 1000-1500 AD, a neighbour decides to attack me, without any obvious reason behind it. I'm dug in well, as long as I keep building military units, I'll survive. But I don't want that! I want to build up my cities and my lands. Do some diplomatic/cultural things, not fight pointless, endless battles. The AI, when contacted, says things along lines of: let's make this fighting stop. I propose a generous truce, they reject it and continue sending troops suiciding on my defences. And their enemy, you know, the one they've declared 3x already upon won't even jump in when I politely ask. THIS IS YOUR CHANCE, THEY'RE FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS!
If you need to ruin a game by artificial stupidity in both counts, then that's just sad. Even peaceloving AIs like Gandhi attacked me today, and our borders weren't even touching

Well, guess it's back to Galactic Civilizations 2 for me then, at least that has decent, logical and understandable AI...

In all* Civ games, the threat of the AI going to war is meant to keep you honest (balancing expenditure on guns and butter), and actual wars can be seen as a challenge / brake on the progress of a player who'd otherwise win easily. But each one does it differently. Some players complained that Civ 4's AI was too docile when a human player had the advantage, whereas Civ 5's AI comes across as insane, quite frankly.

Once in a war, the Civ 5 AI bases what it'll accept/give for peace on relative strengths rather than casualties - at high difficulty levels they will churn out units as quickly as you can kill them, meaning they always have more units than you and so think they are "winning". You can have a 100-1 kill ratio, but they still demand cities, resources and gold for peace - in Civ 4 they'd be getting a lot of war weariness from losing units and so would be prepared to make peace. This can make fighting defensive wars in Civ 5 an neverending nightmare. If you go on the offensive, start seizing cities and threaten their capital, then you'll see them change quickly to "total surrender" mode (in my highest scoring game, Catherine gave me about 25 cities for peace, leaving herself with just her capital, just because I was threatening Moscow). But not everyone wants to do that.

There's also the thought that Civ 5 is a wargame with a few empire-managing elements tacked on. That's unfair, but the game design emphasis is tilted much more towards wargame elements than Civ 4 was.

* - (disclaimer I haven't played Civ 1 or Civ 3) I got my father interested in Civ 4 a few years ago. I still get regular emails where he complains about games that went well up until the point where AIs declared war on him for "no apparent reason" and marched in with big, unstoppable (I think there's a clue there) armies. I can't say I've never suffered odd, annoying or ill-timed war declarations in Civ 4, but it hasn't happened to me nearly as much.

Yeah, but in Civ IV, there was always some logic behind it. Either you had accepted open borders and a warlike neighbour discovered you had little in the way of defense, or you just thoroughly pissed them off by settling next to them, or having the wrong civics/religion. But you'd always have a heads up, it's almost never like in Civ V, where it actually went like this: Trade + research agreement + declaration of friendship, 2 turns later WAR! And I can hold my own, I've got Himeji Castle, the Great Wall, I've got fortified melee units in front and ranged units in the back on hills and all my frontier cities now have walls + castle + garrisoned unit damage bonus, so for every unit Liz manages to kill, I kill at least five of hers. But she's churning them out too fast for me to strike back and take her frontier cities, she's got 2-3x the cities I have, since I was going cultural. And most of them are bigger, due to the stupid modifiers the AI gets. Even if I could take them, I'd have no way of holding on to them.

[ElWanderer]

Yeah, but in Civ IV, there was always some logic behind it.

Ah, but was it always a logical decision by the AI or are there occasions where you as the player can supply your own reasoning to what was effectively a random choice? I was under the impression the Civ 4 code has been gone through and there's still the potential for a completely "out of the blue" declaration.

On the whole, the war declarations (and other diplomacy) by the Civ 4 AI make far, far, far more sense than the behaviour of the Civ 5 AI - the latter seems to have been modelled on the most annoying, ADD, multiplayer humans. So much of the diplomacy in 5 is still a black box that if it is doing anything sensible, we can't actually see it. We can only compare the actions of the AI, which are often crazy in Civ 5. But Civ 4 could still be crazy on occasions.

in Civ V, where it actually went like this: Trade + research agreement + declaration of friendship, 2 turns later WAR!

Someone, somewhere has a fantastic screenshot of Ramkhamhaeng declaring war on the player using the "haha, fooled you!" text. They've moused over so that it shows the diplomatic modifiers and all the positive, green ones you can imagine are shown (declaration of friendship, trading, war against a common enemy, returned a captured worker etc.) The only red, negative modifier is the "we are at war" one. I'm now aware that the AI hides the negative modifiers until the turn after breaking a friendship, but it's an indictment of the game's diplomacy that someone who you've built up a strong alliance with over the course of a game will casually renege and go to war with you under the pretense they were planning to do it all along.

I've had an AI denounce me despite the two of us having a declaration of friendship. The next turn, the only red, negative diplo modifier other than "we have denounced you" was "a friend found reason to denounce you"... but that friend was them! So why did they denounce me? Who knows...

The "I signed a research agreement then 2-5 turns later they declared war on me" story occurs so often I wonder if it's actually scripted in as a "ruse" to waste the player's gold.

I can hold my own, I've got Himeji Castle, the Great Wall, I've got fortified melee units in front and ranged units in the back on hills and all my frontier cities now have walls + castle + garrisoned unit damage bonus, so for every unit Liz manages to kill, I kill at least five of hers. But she's churning them out too fast for me to strike back and take her frontier cities, she's got 2-3x the cities I have, since I was going cultural. And most of them are bigger, due to the stupid modifiers the AI gets. Even if I could take them, I'd have no way of holding on to them.

Yup, been there, done that, got fed up

One solution if you can retaliate successfully (which can take what feels like forever) is to puppet any cities you capture then sell them off to a third AI. The AI will sometimes pay crazy amounts of gold for cities, and it denies them to your enemy whilst avoiding any happiness hits on your own civ.

[Diadem]

Yeah, but in Civ IV, there was always some logic behind it.

Ah, but was it always a logical decision by the AI or are there occasions where you as the player can supply your own reasoning to what was effectively a random choice? I was under the impression the Civ 4 code has been gone through and there's still the potential for a completely "out of the blue" declaration.

This is actually a leader trait in Civ4. Every leader has individual traits (beyond the official ones that give game bonuses). Some are more pacifist, others very religious (looking at you, Isabella!), and some were much more likely to declare war. And then a few were just batshit insane. Especially Montezuma is infamous for declaring war out of the utter blue.

Personally I think this added a lot to the game. Starting next to Montezuma was very different from starting next to Gandhi. And Isabella was always very interesting too. Personally I always hated starting next to Tokugawa most. Quite a strong leader, and almost impossible to befriend.


I still haven't played a lot of civ5. So can't comment much on that.

[ElWanderer]

The Civ 5 leaders aren't as different from eachother as they are in 4. This was done deliberately so you couldn't e.g. ignore Gandhi because he'll never declare war. But it does mean there is less flavour and it can be like playing against 7 montezumas. The main visible effect of the different trait scores is how quickly the leaders decide you are a warmongering menace to the world if you are declaring war and/or wiping out Civs.

[Yakk]

The Civ5 AIs where built to roleplay less, and try to win more.

This means that if you are approaching diplomatic or cultural victory, they will want to stomp you flat to prevent you from winning.

[Jessica]

So, I saw this, and wanted to share it.

Steampunk scenario for Civ 5: gods and kings

[bigglesworth]

Giant Robot! But not of the death kind!

It's a giant multiplayer robot. A service which handles the sending of save-files for hotseat games - allowing asynchronous play between human players. It's entering beta testing now.

Dredging this thread back up with a quote of my own post! What gives!?

Well, I've actually played a bit of a game with this service, and it actually works really well. So if you're on Steam and want to play a slow multiplayer game, let me know, it could be great.

[Vaniver]

I just realized I haven't written anything about the expansion. So here goes!

So, I saw this, and wanted to share it.

Steampunk scenario for Civ 5: gods and kings

The steampunk scenario is actually a lot of fun. (Maybe not $30 fun, but hey.) The primary reason is that the victory condition is entirely different: there are now 5 things you get judged on, and if you're the coolest player on 3 out of those 5 for 5 turns in a row, you win. (Only one- "has the most highest tech units"- is unlocked at the start, and the rest are unlocked by techs. You don't get "has the most wonders," for example, until you've had a chance to build a few.)

What's awesome about that is that as soon as you become dominant, you win. Like gentlemen, the AIs take off their hats and salute your superior play- rather than insisting that you play for 150 more turns to convince them that, no, really, you got this. What's also awesome is that it rewards building a varied empire, rather than the specialization of base Civ V (a second city? But that'll increase my culture costs!), and can lead to furious arms races. As soon as you hit another tech level of units, you can make everyone's old armies irrelevant for the victory conditions as soon as your first spiffy new tank is finished. Everyone else only has 5 turns to catch up- but if they snatch any of your titles away from you, your victory clock goes back to 0.


What about the rest of the game? Espionage is eh- I like that they're off-screen agents that you just send to cities where they perform missions, but I don't like that the number of agents is so limited, and that they included a way to get techs directly from other players, but it's theft. Religion is interesting- especially that the benefits are first-come-first-served (so if my pantheon is based on building Wonders, yours can't be)- but doesn't add all that much to the game. What's troubling is that religion isn't a new way to win- and so it's hard to tell if efforts spent on religious growth are wasted or not. The different possible benefits are varied and interesting but are often determined by geography- if you've got lots of gold and silver near you, pick idolatry for your pantheon, and if you don't, don't. It is nice that faith can turn your policies into great people, and overall the sense I get from religion is extra customization which can't be min/maxed too hard.

The new civs are interesting but it's hard to guess their balance. No one seems really dominant, and a few are swingy- the Dutch get a really nice improvement (it's a super-farm, which gives extra food, production, and gold) but it can only be built on marsh or flood plains. It's like the Aztecs and lakes- but at least with the Aztecs you could get +15% food from a river. Similarly, the Spanish get massively higher benefits from landmarks- and so if you happen to find one and plan a city by it, awesome, but if you don't, well, oops.

[Yakk]

I'd be amused by a GG&S based Civ5 mod.

Technology flows rapidly (especially obsolete tech!), but is more useful than base Civ5. Upgrading units is cheap. And technological edges are short-lived.

A civilization with better research ends up advancing faster, but barring a ridiculous gradient can only manage a tech or two above even a backward other empire. But, being a tech or two above means that your units are going to be significantly tougher, faster, longer ranged, etc.

A good chunk of technological progress is implementing the infrastructure, whose cost scales with the size of your empire.

Trade (which you cannot completely stop, even in wartime! Borders leak.), Espionage, and Conflict all result in technological interchange.

[Vaniver]

But, being a tech or two above means that your units are going to be significantly tougher, faster, longer ranged, etc.

They've done some of this with the new unit strengths, slightly longer tech tree, increased number of ages (with each age starting at Renaissance giving you a new spy), and so on. I definitely got the sense that being a tech level or two above meant that I could have way less units and win, where beforehand it felt like you needed a tech edge and the same number of units to have a chance.

A good chunk of technological progress is implementing the infrastructure, whose cost scales with the size of your empire.

As in, much of the benefits come from new improvements (which you need workers to upgrade), new buildings (which you need hammers to build), and so on? It seems like that could be interesting- but runs the risk of requiring too much micromanagement.

How are you thinking costs will scale with the size of the empire- that is, what's the tradeoff? Right now, in vanilla Civ V, there are tradeoffs between (policies and happiness) and (science and hammers and gold and territory), whereas in Civ IV the tradeoff was between (science and happiness) and (hammers and territory), but even that's a bit of an oversimplification (because hammers required happiness).

What it sounds like you're suggesting is that it's easier for a smaller empire to all be using the latest stuff they have access to- but it also seems like infrastructure is something that's easier to support (game-wise) with a large empire, especially if you only have one production queue per city.

It seems like it should be possible to have a script give you progress on a tech you're not researching, which would be a good way to do border leakage- each turn you get X beakers into every tech that other players know that you don't, where X is determined by your economic integration.

In general, a mod that formalized economic interaction in a more sophisticated way seems like it could be awesome, and you could have spillover into a lot of other parts of the game.

[edit]One other thing that's worth thinking about- and done in other games, notably Paradox Interactive ones like Crusader Kings II- is to have tech levels by region. One way to do this in Civ V is to have a lot of the 'techs' be buildings- iron working is done in the Smithy building, not because you have the iron working tech. The Smithy building is massively expensive in terms of hammers- but each one you build reduces the cost for future ones in cities that are economically integrated with that city, and the building is pretty awesome (a percentage bonus to hammers, plus one hammer for every hill, whatever necessary to make it worthwhile). This make specialization useful- you have three pioneering cities along the three tracks, and then they make subsequent investments in the other cities cheaper- but still makes it so built up cities have a huge edge over new cities, and once you have the smithy in place you have a brief period of building faster than anyone else (until they catch up to you).

It seems like multiple production tracks are really useful for anything like this, though, and I have no clue how difficult that is to mod into Civ V.

[edit2] Actually, with the faith mechanic that's in there now, it's easy to set it up so you can buy buildings with some gold-like resource that you accumulate. It might be possible to make it so particular buildings cost beakers.

[Yakk]

So, a Gun Germs and Steel version of Civ5.

I'm using Science for abstract ideas.

1) Science and knowledge spreads, if it is implemented. It is infeasible to stop this from happening over more than a short period of time (a few decades). Science effort does not scale with the size of your civilization.
2) Deploying Science into Technology takes effort. Doing so gives you Infrastructure and the ability to exploit that Science. Infrastructure and Technology effort scales with the amount you want to use it.
3) Developing Technology can give you Sciences nearby, as playing with the Tech generates ideas among your population.

So a Civilization gets a Science breakthrough. They can develop it into a Technology, or leave it fallow (it can also self-develop). Developing it into a Technology happens in a particular city (or maybe province? -- cluster of cities, the max size of which grows as you develop better social technologies). The Science, over time, leaks to neighbors -- it leaks faster if you have developed it into a Technology, slower if you put efforts into keeping is Secret. Once the Technology has been developed once, further development is cheaper. Other provinces/cities can start developing it, with the development cost continuing to drop.

The advantage of being high-science is that you get to start this race early. And exploit the technology for a window. On the other hand, if you are lazy, you get the benefits a few turns later, and you aren't wasting resources on developing high-cost science and technology.

This, in effect, leads to a trap: where putting effort into developing S&T basically means you are subsidizing your entire continent's development, for temporary technological edges against your neighbors. On the other hand, if you manage to find a far away civilization, against whom your S&T spread is weaker, being able to raid it with better tech will be quite beneficial. On the other hand, your unit "ranges" should be similar to your ability to trade, so once you are able to raid a new civilization, you will also start leaking S&T faster to them.

Provinces would be another thing I'd like to see in a GG&S version: provinces being upgraded versions of the vassal states concept. The core of your empire would be limited in size, and after that even cities you found would have to be put in provinces. The Provinces AI gets to build units, build infrastructure, and pick priorities on you, and in theory could rebel and leave your empire. You can even choose to shed provinces into independent states if you want to (and maybe conquor them later). That would allow you to conquer a far away nation, and take over their provinces for a time, but eventually they'll develop the infrastructure and technology to break free (at which point, they might not be all that pissed at you, because in the meantime you'd changed their culture).

[Vaniver]

This has got me very curious about how deep the Civ V improvements system is. If you can turn each city into multiple hexes, that can give you a lot more control over how particular cities develop, which can be along the lines of the infrastructure development.

Actually, heck: why even have workers like they are now, as terraformers that process one region and then move on to the next? Why not have them be more like workboats, where you send out a group of frontiersmen who settle in a fertile river valley and turn it into a farm? That might make it way easier to have infrastructure costs vary with city size, at least, and possibly empire-wide as well, especially if you buy those improvement-makers from a empire-wide supply (like with faith points).

As well, I think I haven't been thinking deeply enough about the espionage screen. That may be a good interface for focusing empire growth / interaction- having, say, the ability to send "ambassadors" to increase economic interconnection with empires much sooner than you get the ability to send spies.

Provinces would be another thing I'd like to see in a GG&S version: provinces being upgraded versions of the vassal states concept. The core of your empire would be limited in size, and after that even cities you found would have to be put in provinces. The Provinces AI gets to build units, build infrastructure, and pick priorities on you, and in theory could rebel and leave your empire. You can even choose to shed provinces into independent states if you want to (and maybe conquor them later). That would allow you to conquer a far away nation, and take over their provinces for a time, but eventually they'll develop the infrastructure and technology to break free (at which point, they might not be all that pissed at you, because in the meantime you'd changed their culture).

I agree that this can be a fun game, but if the game is going to be about medieval middle management then it should probably be about that explicitly (like CK2). Civ seems like the sort of thing where having direct control over any part of your empire is what makes the game work- compensating people for not having control is difficult to balance well and make fun.

[cphite]

The Civ5 AIs where built to roleplay less, and try to win more.

This means that if you are approaching diplomatic or cultural victory, they will want to stomp you flat to prevent you from winning.

This.

In the context of what the game is about - being the leader of an empire, building a civilization, etc - the AI is acting batshit crazy at times. But in the context of winning the game, they're being logical. If you're on a path to winning the game peacefully - be it by launching a spacecraft, forming a utopia, or even just being the guy with the biggest nation and most wonders - you're a threat to them. Their only logical option is to try and bring you down.

It might be interesting to play a mod where the AI's were only interested in making their respective empires the best that they could be; in which case sending wave after wave of units to die to prevent you from launching a spacecraft would be out of the question. But I suspect that game would end up being very easy and not much different than playing something like SimCity.

[bigglesworth]

Well, the AI do adjust for which victory conditions are selected, if you restrict the victory conditions to just Score, they should do just that: try to make the best Empire as is determined by the scoring system.

[ElWanderer]

It might be interesting to play a mod where the AI's were only interested in making their respective empires the best that they could be; in which case sending wave after wave of units to die to prevent you from launching a spacecraft would be out of the question. But I suspect that game would end up being very easy and not much different than playing something like SimCity.

That sounds a bit like Civ IV, where there the AI behaviour didn't seem to change much towards the endgame. I'm aware the Civ V behaviour is possibly an over-reaction to complaints that the Civ IV AI was too compliant.

In comparison, Civ II always seemed very fond of the "all the AIs band together against the nasty human" endgame, which I found very frustrating.

I don't mind the prevent-X-from-winning gaming so much if the player/AI doing it is trying to (and able to) win themselves. I have once (in Civ IV), nuked a rival shortly before the last turn just to lower their score below mine so that I would win on points. It did feel a bit dirty, but the map-maker had screwed up the number of turns so the game ended in 1910 and no one had been able to get near any other victory conditions. I'm much less enamoured if someone (or indeed everyone) with no chance of winning starts attacking the human player just to (try to) prevent them from winning, so that some third party might win instead. When that happens in single-player, it feels like all the AIs versus the player. For me, that isn't the point of the game unless you set the game up with teams from the outset...

[Yakk]

I think I'd rather have a "band together" based system. Where multiple civilizations can merge to a great extent to confront a threat.

And it should happen to the player as well (where AIs band together with you), with a corresponding score penalty.

So rather than every AI going to war with you, what you'd see is more and more AIs banding together and forming merged empires as rival civilizations grow in scale.

You could have lots of fun with this, by starting the game off on a really small scale (a small corner of the world), and as the game progresses the local civilizations, once bloody rivals, would conquer each other or merge to deal with further-away, more-massive threats. Your score along the way would be scaled down by how big a "percentage" you where at each "merger". There would also be a chance of "fragmentation", where lacking a sufficient rival your empire would could apart into its old segments, or a colony would leave the core. When that happened after sufficient merging, the Player might be given a choice which of the fragments to continue on with, with a higher score multiplier the smaller the fragment the Player took.

[bigglesworth]

As much as that might be a fun game, I don't think it fits in very well with the core Civilisation gameplay ideas. The series is essentially long-term chess with thousands of pieces and funny rules, and I like it that way.

[Radical_Initiator]

Who here has Gods & Kings? I really want to get it, even though my comp runs Civ V on the lowest settings, but I'm really tight on cash right now, so I'm wondering if it's worth possibly mortgaging my future.

[Xanthir]

It shouldn't cause any graphics problems, I wouldn't think, so you won't need a new computer.

Anyway, it's very good. The religion system is a nice benefit, spies are okay, and I really like that units were finally pushed back into a 100HP system instead of the 10HP system. The additional rebalancing they've done since the last vanilla patch was *very* good, imo.

[jules.LT]

It shouldn't cause any graphics problems, I wouldn't think, so you won't need a new computer.

Anyway, it's very good. The religion system is a nice benefit, spies are okay, and I really like that units were finally pushed back into a 100HP system instead of the 10HP system. The additional rebalancing they've done since the last vanilla patch was *very* good, imo.

I just got Civ V for 10€ as my release from Diablo-patch-wait frustration, so I was wondering about spending 30 on the extension...
The 100HP system sounds really sweet. The spearman taking 10% off the HP of a tank kinda annoyed me. I'll look into the other new things it brings.

[Xanthir]

Yes, get the expansion. In addition to the new additions, it's a big balance reworking of the existing stuff, which works *very* well.

[You, sir, name?]

Started Civ5 up yesterday for the first time in ages. Apparently I got Gods & Kings a while back. Probably at the steam sale or something.

Man there was a lot of barbarians in the beginning. And no other civilizations. At about 900 BC, I had explored the entire continent. I was alone, save two city states.

Hate when that happens. Now I have to build a bunch of cities on my own, rather than stealing them from the AI D:

[mosc]

I bought this game recently. Haven't played civ in a long long long time. It does feel more like a combat love fest than what I remember from before. I finally got my first diplomatic victory the other day. It took me so long to get the UN that I'd already reduced the world to one other nation and a whole array of city states. I ended up not attacking just to ensure the diplomatic victory. I could have take my single opponents capital (triggering domination victory) in a turn or two for any of the last 50 or so turns while I waited for the UN to do it's thing.

I tried playing on higher difficulties but the AI cheats too damn much. You end up having to play amazingly defensive if you share a border with an opponent early on. Also, settling towns to claim area in the early game royally pisses off your neighbors to an unbelievable degree.

On the military side, the the gallion, friggate, battleship unit is absurdly powerful. Coupled with a single other navy unit to take the zero HP town, anything on the coast becomes easy pickings. You can defeat your opponents navy outside of the range of their army and towns, then pick of the towns with a full navy outside of the range of their army. You have to pick a map purposely with very little water to make the combat particularly strategic. Also, battleships just chew through wooden sailing ships (maybe realistic but unbalancing) and coupled with their mobility and 3 range (outside of towns), they're pretty much I WIN on a water map with even a dozen turns of tech advantage.

Another note, I have decided the British are the best for military (which in turn is the best strategy making them the best overall) the naval range is huge unless you are playing on a single continent but more than that, the longbowmen works in unexpected ways. First off a 3 range unit early is good, behaving like a 2 range unit in bad terrain is still better than a 2 range that behaves like a 1 range. Second, when you upgrade longbowmen into Gatling guns, they keep their extra range! And in turns as machine gun men. Gatling guns no longer suck with 2 range and become very powerful, more than anything in that era on land by a wide margin. Machine gunners with 2 range are nice but not as dominant in comparison to tanks. Late game, mobility is so high that range of land units doesn't matter much. After all that, the ship of the line is a nice little throw in for a non-useless upgrade over the frigate. I usually do most of my attacking with crossbowmen+horsemen, frigates, battleships, or bombers so getting crossbowmen and frigates upgraded are both nice. The german panzer by contrast is less revolutionary when it finally arrives in comparison. Longbowmen due to their added range in the era and equally awesome upgrade into double range gatling gunners just seem like easily the single best faction unit in the game.

[philsov]

I found similar with the Aztecs. The forest/jungle mobility and life draining effects of their starter warrior units will carry over well into past mobile infantry. I can assume similar with the Chinese and their double-attacking crossbowmen, but I haven't played with them heavily yet.