Civ 5
Game 1
Wanted to test out multiplayer, so - after entirely too much futzing with hamachi and steam - got a game running with my brother-in-law.
Random leader (Darius of Persia), multiplayer, pangaea, difficulty 3, 6 total players.
The multiplayer "team" system is rather unbalancing if the AI players are not also teamed. You get full tech sharing with your teammate (diplomatic tech sharing between non-teammates was conspicuously removed for Civ 5), so we basically carved through the tech tree twice as fast as the rest of the world, quickly longsworded our way though my closest AI opponent, and nothing was really terribly challenging. Resolved to reconsider team options if we try multiplayer again. Adjourned after 200 turns figuring that there was really no way we could lose.
Game 2
Random leader (Washington), single player, continents, difficulty 4, 8 total players.
Washington's passive ability (+1 unit sight range) is very sweet for the early game. One scout was really plenty for our continent, discovering that it was vaguely plant-shaped. Arabia shared a leaf with me, Rome had a different leaf to himself, and Gandhi and Japan shared the "stem" of land in between. Japan ended up being born on a peninsula of land about two spaces wide and managed to cram about 4 cities onto it by the time my scout navigated the traffic jam to discover what was going on. (Sort of like real life Japan, I suppose.)
Our leaf was mostly desert and tundra. Gandhi and Rome had the best positions, so learning from the last game that Swords Are Awesome, proceeded to skewer my leafmate Arabia with swordsmen without breaking a sweat. Marched across the desert to Gandhi around turn 150, plopped down a city to upgrade their swords into longer ones, parked on Gandhi's border and.... *CRASH* to desktop on turn 159.
Crud. Well, good thing the game keeps autosaves every 10 turns. Let's make it every 5 to be safe.
Reload from 150, maneuver units in the same direction, but slightly differently this time, crash again on 159.
Reload from 155, don't move units at all, just sit around, and crash again on turn 158. WTF.
Game 3
Random leader (Catherine), single player, continents, difficulty 5, 8 total players.
The players-continent breakdown was quite different this time. Three continents, with (1, 3, 4) players on them. I got the 1, which was connected via shallow water and a couple islands, to the 3-continent.
Two city-states shared my continent, but there was only room for about 3 cities, so I ended up attacking the two city-states with archers and warriors because they owned the only iron on the continent. My 6-strength archers did about 2 damage per turn to their 16-strength city walls. Tedious, but successful. Iron acquired. But it's only 2 pieces. Russia's passive ability doubles this to 4, but that still limits my army potential. Even so, I'm stuck on this island and need to do *something*. So I grab 4 longswords, a couple crossbows, and off we go.
After attacking the second city-state, a city on an outlying island (Stockholm) spontaneously declared war on me. A tooltip reads "City-states have grown fearful of your warmongering and have began to band together. If you attack more city-states, others may join the alliance." Interesting data point. Stockholm is now set to "permanent war", but happens to be stuck on an island without boats, so no harm done. Stockholm proceeds to die, with no new war declarations.
As I slowly plod my way to the 3-continent through shallow water, I find a horrible mishmash of cities belonging to England, Germany, and the Ottomans. War seems to have been rampant here, with the Ottomans getting the better end of things. England loses their capitol to the Ottomans just as I arrive. While exploring the new continent, I get a diplomatic message from Ottoman: "Don't think I don't notice you parking units along my borders. If you're going to do something, get on with it already."
So I do. I manage to snag one of Ottoman's cities on the first turn of war, but he promptly gold-conjures longswords from each neighboring city, ganks my crossbows quickly, and outnumbers the rest of my longswords. Two of my longswords die and the other two run like hell towards the relative safety of Stockholm as the Ottoman takes his city back. After healing up, I manage to ninja the city back before swiftly signing a peace treaty, giving me a foothold on the new continent for future planning.
Around 50 turns later, with a lot more tech, a lot more money, and a lot more planning, I upgrade all my longswords to rifles, conjure a few more rifles in my newly captured city, and have another try at conquering the second continent. This time goes a lot better, since no one has rifle tech yet. They slightly outnumber me, but most of my units can escape to heal, and I steamroll about 8 Ottoman cities, including their capitol.
At about this point it occurs to me that my happiness is -11. Only three of the 12 cities I currently own were created by me, and even the ones that are still puppets are draining the hell out of my civ happiness. When your happiness dips below -10, you get -33% combat strength and -50% production *everywhere*, which really really sucks. So I stop my warmongering and try to build up happiness where I can. Of course, half these new cities now have a population of 2-4 and can't build anything with any semblance of speed.
Feeling very ineffectual with my 12 cities, I waste a bit of time getting happiness back to the break-even point, get the tech for ocean-going sailboats, and check out the third continent. Alarmingly, I find Siam there, who has conquered the *entire* 4-continent, has literally 300 gold income per turn (and using most of it for city-state bribery), and is trying to figure out what to do next.
Naturally, that ends up being me. On about turn 250, Siam, Ottoman, and roughly eight city-states all declare war on me at the same time. Siam's units weren't poised to strike, but two of the city-states were; they march in with infantry (a tech I was still a ways away from). City-states can't capture new cities, but they can set fire to existing ones if they get pissed enough. I proceed to lose most of my recent acquisitions. They weren't producing much, but it sort of screws my hopes for the future. I figure there's no way I can catch up to Siam, so I quit. In retrospect, I might have been able to ninja a domination victory if I could sneak some units into Siam's capitol, I might (very briefly) become the only player still in ownership of their own capitol. Stealth ocean-going riflemen are hard to pull off, though.
Lesson 1: Attacking city-states is generally a bad idea. You're not wounding any player in doing so, other than yourself earning AI hate for being a warmonger. You still get the same disadvantages in conquering other cities (unhappiness, puppet, etc). Plus they don't give you any gifts once conquered. Being in their good graces instead gains you the same amount of resources, PLUS free food/culture for your other cities.
Lesson 2: Happiness is important. Colosseums and Theatres, even more so. There's a reason that AI players charge an arm and a leg for their luxuries.
Game 4
Specific leader (Egypt), single player, continents, difficulty 4, 6 total players.
In the interest of having a change of pace, and after glancing at the social policy charts in the past few games, I try for the ONE CITY CHALLENGE. No settlers, no annexing, no puppets. Razing is okay (but I didn't).
The "tradition" branch of social policy makes your capitol amazing: 33% wonder build speed, extra food, extra happiness. Add in the 20% wonder speed from picking Egypt, and no one was close to competing with me for the early-game wonders. By the end of the game I ended up with about 20 wonders, no other player had more than 2. Research progress, to my surprise, didn't really bog down until the late Renaissance; I was ahead of the curve for most of the game before that point. I was late to the party with respect to rifles and infantry, but managed to completely avoid war for the entire game.
Happiness, somewhat unsurprisingly, was really easy to come by. Lots of wonders give happy points, Tradition keeps my capitol population happy, and even with only 3 luxuries in my possession, end-game happiness was +58. Which makes for TONS of golden ages.
And a damn good thing it did, because once I had most of the stuff built in my capitol, my maintenance grew high, with no trade routes to mitigate it. After about turn 200, I could only turn a profit during a golden age, and had to hope that the profits were enough to coast me though until I could start another golden age. I found that running out of money will eventually cause military units to suicide to boost the budget (even if you don't have enough military units on the board to have a fee for them).
If it's not clear by now, I did eventually win the game by culture victory, though the process of doing so was pretty boring. Not much micromanagement necessary with only one city.
Various end-game stats:
- Population in capitol: 24
- Combat strength of capitol: 91 (this may have been why no one declared war on me)
- Turns to win: 409
- Policy branches completed: Tradition, Piety, Freedom, Patronage, Commerce.
- Turns to build Utopia project: 10 (with golden age)
- Final Culture gain per turn: 289 (drops to 254 if I wanted to "money focus" my citizens)
- Culture cost of final policy: about 2700
- Highest tech acquired: Plastics
Patronage *would* have been a cool policy as a one-city civ, since city-states can be quite helpful, but in practice I didn't have the bribery money to take full advantage of it. Commerce looked good on paper, but was also sort of junky - other than the initial 25% cash from capitol, it wasn't worth much to me. Fortunately, the other policy branches were amazingly good.
Lesson 1: Tradition may very well be worth picking even not in a one-city game
Lesson 2: Although you are limited to a 3 hex radius for distributing citizens, having obscene amounts of culture can give you free territory tiles WAY outside of your city radius - say 5 or 6 tiles away.
Lesson 3: Great Artist "culture bombs" are hilarious. You get to convert a radius-1 cluster of tiles to your city, just arbitrarily grabbing whatever resources they produce. "This may have diplomatic consequences!" Works best on city-states, who never hold a grudge for long.
Overall, good to be playing Civ again. Most of the changes are awesome.
Things from Civ 4 that I wish still existed:
- That table of your-cities-at-a-glance, and other minor statistics
- The end-of-game movie of how territory changed hands during the game
- Map trading
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