Whatever your happiness can support, unless you want a non-cheese’d diplomatic victory then about five.
I think the reason why units lose all their movement points when they move into a city is because the unit is automatically garrisoned.
What exactly are the benefits and costs of making conquered cities into puppets?
You can’t choose their production and they won’t do wonders or military units. Ok.
They also won’t increase the cost of social policies for your empire, correct? Are there other benefits similar to this, like perhaps they don’t carry an unhappiness penalty for the number of cities?
Do you get all the science and gold they generate? Do you have to pay for the upkeep of their buildings? Do you get the resources in their territory?
No, their population contributes to your happiness total which is definitely a factor to consider when choosing to keep them as a puppet. They will, of course, eventually build happiness boosting buildings so that helps, but they also build structures that they’re never going to use like military stuff (which are obviously useless as they won’t be building any units). The “puppets build crap” issue is something that works against keeping those cities.
Yes, yes, yes and yes. So you need to consider whether what the city is going to offer in terms of resources and buildings is going to be worth the hassle of their upkeep and potential unhappiness drain, particularly when you can’t directly control their building queue or allocation of workers.
Has anyone used a strategy of puppeting cities initially, letting them build themselves up for a while and then annexing them later on when they’re more stable and recovered i.e. more useful?
Do puppet states you culture, or are they culture neutral?
I was thinking of trying to a cultural victory, but damn it seems pretty hard. Seems like you have to specialized very early and not expand beyond 2? 3? cities, and then suck up to the cultural city states. I’m in the 1870s and I probably only have half the social policies I need, which I guess means I won’t be winning that way.
It should still be more than capable of running a Turn-Based Strategy game with graphics that aren’t significantly better than those of it’s now five-year-old predecessor.
FWIW, my Dual Core system is running the game just fine speed-wise, but I’m getting a lot of crashes and graphical glitches on both DX9 and DX10 modes so I’m just going to sit on it until some more patches come out.
Does anyone know if the unhappiness penalty from annexed cities ever decreases or goes away? I mean, I can understand the locals being unhappy for maybe a century or so, but it would be very silly to have unhappiness penalties for a city conquered three or four hundred or even a thousand plus years ago, after all.
I must say I really am starting to wonder if many of the reviewers giving the game perfect or 90+ scores actually played the game for any length of time. I really want to like it, but right now it’s a buggy mess that’s not (IMHO) significantly better than Civ IV, and how it’s getting such high scores does somewhat baffle me…
Seems good to me. I haven’t had any of the problems described in this thread - it runs smoothly and it’s never crashed and I’ve yet to notice any bugs.
I like what they’ve done with pretty much everything. Like how happiness is simplified so you aren’t micromanaging entertainings in each of your cities, and how surplus happiness leads to golden ages. I like the culture/civic thing. Hexes are good. The combat is much better. The interface is good.
I haven’t played enough to identify subtle issues, but so far it seems pretty good to me and deserving of it’s (not exceedingly high) 91ish meta rating.
Well, I’m still just tinkering around instead of trying to start a full game I intead to play…at least until the weekend where I’ll have time. But in my tinkering I’ve run into three or four city states early in the game along with other civs. It’ll take getting used to. In Civ 4 I usually picked large maps so I could start in relative solitude.
In two seperate instances though I’ve gotten the message that a city state is under the protection of another civ. I don’t know how to do that. It doesn’t seem to be an option for me and I don’t have the gold to gift them. How are the AI civs able to do this so early on?
I agree - I haven’t experienced a single lock up or crash and I’m running it on a rig that is definitely not cutting edge (bought it a year and a half ago and the processor only just meets the minimum requirements for the game - time for an upgrade I think!).
The core elements of the game I think are fine, a lot of the complaining are about things that are going to be easy to tweak in patchs. Complaints about the AI are there for every version of Civ, and I’m sure it’s something that can be improved via patch too.
If you are friendly with a city-state and click on the city you have an option to put them under your protection. If another civ attacks them you go to war with that civ.
If a city-state is “claimed” by someone else you need to buy them out to undo that. You can do that via gold (expensive and the other civ may put gold in to maintain relations), unit transfer (which frankly does not seem to net much good will) or do a “mission” the civ occasionally say they want done (e.g. kill a nearby barbarian camp).
You can also drive a Great Merchant up to the city (not in but next to the city in the city-state) and do a Trade Mission. I just did this but it was unclear how much they liked me for it (city-state was neutral to me) as I had to leave the game to go to work.
I agree, for me the entire joy is building a vast empire. The size of your civ is directly tied to your happiness which is closely tied with the amount luxury resources you can get your hands on which kinda sucks. The Mongolian Empire wasn’t built on shinny objects.
Does anyone have a strategy for an early rush on minor civs who hold the only iron resource in you area? Archers and spearmen do not get it done and my ego wont allow me to beg a toady for iron.
I’ve noticed building roads early cripples your economy. Your tech level isn’t high enough to take advantage of the trade and 10 or 15 bucks spent every turn destroys your early surplus.
Wait for 'em to beg you for help with the local barbarians.
Is there any advantage to a large empire? So far I am not seeing it.
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I am not progressing scientifically very fast for it (despite a strong focus on tech and double great scientist production plopping academies all over the place I am behind one of the other civs in my current game and seemingly by a fair bit).
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It costs me a fortune to maintain my buildings.
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Keeping them all happy is a serious challenge (forcing me to build expensive “happy” producing buildings).
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You get seriously nerfed on the social policy side.
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Roads connecting it all are expensive to maintain.
On the whole seems the game really wants to screw you for a large empire. About the only advantage is being able to produce more military units in a given time than a smaller civ but even that is dicey since you have to spend a lot of time building markets and banks and theaters and so on just to keep the empire afloat leaving little room to build a big honking army.
I am going to be pissed if there is a “best build” in this game and it amounts to having three cities.
Wow this game is too easy. I just won (Normal size map, King difficulty, Quick speed) with a total of 11 non-civilian units. They were all Companion Cavalry-> Knights -> Cavalry with the exception of 2 scouts and 2 early warriors. (I did have 25 or so other scouts but their sole purpose was to garrison cities for the +1 happiness bonus from Civics) I lost a total of one knight the whole game. I attacked very early and encountered little resistance (Well a lot of resistance, but from units that were obsolete compared to mine) as I took city after city and puppeted them all. I only had 2 real cities that I built up.
Alexander is my new favorite leader now. I had a ton of allied city states, and all of them by 75% of the game. The extra culture mitigated the # of cities I had so I had a lot of Civics. My science was crazy from puppets and City-States (civics bonus). I was able to ignore farms and made everything trading posts instead for cash due to my maritime city-states. I had a boatload of money from the puppets and trade routes as well. I was in an almost perpetual golden age a little after mid game due to the amount of great people I got from puppets and gifted by city-states. Happiness was the only problem but I managed to keep it under control using Civics bonuses and having almost every luxury through trade, puppets and city-states. Mid-game it was an issue and I had to take a break from taking new cities. But then I was flush with cash and I was able to raise my happiness by annexing small cities and then buying colloseums and theaters immediately.
I had before complained about once when every country declared war on me in a single turn. I now realize that this was because I did not have a lot of units so they saw me an easy target. More importantly, when people asked me if I was about to attack them, I said no and then did it anyway. Don’t do this, it doesn’t just piss them off, it pisses the world off. This game everyone stayed my buddy until they were dead.
My game before that was a little more difficult. I tried a one-city challenge on Prince difficulty but I can’t say that it was that hard. I was Alexander as well and almost all of my units were gifted by militaristic City-States which was enough to defend myself before my cultural victory. I do admit to some cheese tactics on that one though by exploiting the rubbish AI. The comp tried to take down my city-states several times but I blocked the city using my units. Since we were not at war they just surrounded the City-state doing nothing for 30 or so turns.
I am one of the not so lucky folks with tech problems I guess.
The DX9 version is a bit more stable, but I still have to have all graphics settings at minimum in order to play. By the industrial age, time between turns stretches out to minutes, and the odds of a crash during this time are pretty good.
My machine isn’t top end, but it runs other recent games without this kind of problems. Starcraft 2 has no problems on mostly medium settings, for example.
This is a Macbook Pro 15" running bootcamped Windows 7.(Core i5, 4G RAM, GeForce 330M only 256MB)
I’m going to get myself a desktop rig soon. Maybe it’s all about the video ram and GPU.
That video RAM seems terribly limiting these days for most any gaming.
I am amazed at the minutes between turns thing people are reporting. Granted my PC is very good (home built) and it takes about 15 seconds between turns (give or take). That is on a large map with all the graphics maxed and 8 Civs and such.
While I would expect most other PCs to be slower minutes seems a colossal difference.
Something weird is happening. Just can’t figure what.
Do the tiles of the land scape shift around constantly on your box, or do the roads take a long time to refresh on your system, Whack-a-Mole. Also, if you click on the mini-map to move to another part of the world, are the tiles sort of gray initially, and slowly fill in the tile detail? That’s what I’m getting, even running the DirectX 9 version.
My video card has 2GB of RAM on it btw, though it’s an older NVidia card (and 9800XL)
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Interesting multiplayer experience today.
Playing on a Small continent map my buddy and I, on opposite continents, quickly dispatched the computer opponents, building continent-sized empires… and that was it.
There simply was not any practical way to take the war to the other continent. Buddy even managed to take 4 cities from the hapless Siamese on my continent before I conquered them myself but it was no use; he could not successfully maintain a military effort on my side of the world.
Using nukes and bombers wasn’t even practical because there were no islands or archipelagoes to island-hop.
So we just called it off.
Looks like I have some reading to do over the weekend.
I have a very nice ATI 5870 video card (overclocked) that likewise has 2GB of RAM.
It is very rare for me to see any pop-in at all. Game scrolls smoothly with everything maxed for me.
Like I said though I realize my PC is pretty bleeding edge so I am not surprised others experience slower gameplay. I am just surprised it takes minutes for the game to calculate a turn on anything that meets even just the minimum requirements.