Wait, can you make scenario mods without owning the game? Because I completely want to make a Legend of the Five Rings map.
Do the Pacts of Cooperation/Secrecy (or whatever they’re called) do anything? I’ve started randomly agreeing to them left and right and it doesn’t seem to affect anything at all.
After four games, I think I’m seeing that the scoring mechanic is stressing an early finish quite a bit less than in previous versions. My best score to date is my very first game, where I finished around turn 240. My most recent game was finished at turn 140 and on one difficulty level harder, both Conquest wins, and that recent game actually scored the lowest of all! I’m not complaining…not at all…just surprised.
One thing I thought was fun: a city-state was attacked by Japan; I was neutral with both. However, I had plans to attack Japan soon, and realized that a weakened Japan would be just yummy. So I gifted the city-state with a half-dozen quality units over the next few turns; the units were on the other side of the map anyway, making them close to useless for me in my coming war against Japan. Using those units, the city-state certainly held their own, taking out a number of Japanese units.
I do not know the calculation but winning sooner is worth more points (among other things). From the manual:
Well, here is an answer from a Firaxis producer. Kinda vague in my view but FWIW:
Aside from happiness, is there some sort of punishment to growth rates based on number of cities? I just played a game where I had 3 huge cities going, and they grew like crazy. I’m playing another game as the Aztecs where I’m much more militarily focused, and it seems like my cities take forever to grow, even when I’m keeping happiness above 0.
Maybe it’s just that I have less money to spend on maritine city states or something.
Not to my knowledge. They were probably just getting more food from buildings, terrain and city states.
Or it might just seem that way because you’ll go through turns quickly in a peaceful 3 city game and slowly in a big empire war game.
when i click on mods it says “no mods installed” 
Just a guess but since units require gold for upkeep your cities may be defaulting to tending more gold producing tiles instead of food producing tiles. Since you are not getting “free” food from maritime city-states this compounds the problem.
It’s the age old dilemma of guns or butter.
Clickng on a city will let you fiddle with what tiles and buildings are getting used. Play around with it a bit and you’ll see the tradeoffs.
I’ve definitely been playing around with the tiles farmed and stuff. It’s just that none of my cities have even half of… anything of the other ones. Not food/size, science, gold, or culture output. It’s kinda sad actually since I’ve been so focused on military strength, and yet I’m not very strong in that regard. Between that and the very punishing happiness penalties, and the tendency of the whole world to declare war on you after you conquer some people, it seems like it’s very difficult to play a militaristic civ in this game.
From memory so may not be exact but, click browse mods, it takes you to a screen with 3 tabs at top:
- one for downloaded mods at left
- one to search in middle
- one for downloading, I think, on the right
You automatically start in downloaded and if you haven’t got any then it will say no mods installed.
Click the middle tab and you should see a load of mods there already. Just click and download any you want. I think you have to tick them in the left tab to activate them (so you can switch on and off downloaded mods in whatever combination you want).
There are quite a few already, things like earth map with proper starting locations, fixes for things like the minutemen bug, new civs etc.
Does distance make a trade route worth more?
If not, then is it not worth linking up a faraway city that might be 20 tiles away from your nearest city?
I’m not sure but keep in mind that each piece of road has a 1 gold maintenance cost.
The distance does not matter, the size of the city and your capital determine the amount that you get. I find that trade routes generally make back well more than the cost of the road upkeep. If there is a small lone city 20 tiles away then maybe not, but if your playing conquest or plan to expand, then that road to the 20 tile away city will allow you to link to those and will be well worth it.
Trade routes give 1.25 gold/turn per population of the connected city. Population of your capital doesn’t matter. Distance doesn’t matter.
I prefer not to bother trading with the other civs, unless it is by getting a Great Merchant guy, which is a limited timeframe.
You realize that when you are an ally with one of the little NPC cities, you automatically get luxuries without having to build a road, right? The only advantage to building a road or harbor is within your own cities. You can ignore the little pleas for XXX wants a road as they are not ultimately profitable, unless that city-state is right next to one of yours and you can build and maintain a road for less than 5 gold.
Where possible, hooking a distant city into your trade network with a harbour rather than roads costs a lot less maintenance. Doesn’t provide any military logistical benefits, though.
Really?
I find trading with other civs to be crucial. You need not build roads to them, just having made contact is enough. You then trade your extra luxuries with them. It gets you 5 happy people (IIRC) per luxury which is of great importance. Keeping your citizens happy is a full time job and anything to keep them going and (maybe) not spending the time and upkeep costs on expensive “happy” generating buildings is worthwhile IMO.
So, if you have (say) three cotton, two pearls and and ivory stash laying about that can net you 30 happiness. That is a big deal.
Other civs are pretty easy to trade the things to as well unless they hate you. Generally (not always) they will trade 1:1.
If you have no better use for your worker labour, you can build the road and then bring a military unit in to destroy it after you’ve linked the city state and scored the influence reward.
That’s the big thing for me unless all the “bad” guys are on one side of my empire (and even then Barbarians can pop up anywhere :eek:). (<– That is not my game BTW…just someone posted it with a “WTF?” tag)
Been numerous times I have found my combat units 5 turns from where I want them to be when with roads it’d be 1-2 turns.