So, I found out something interesting. A city with a garrisoned unit or an airport with a plane within 2 tiles of Germany is some sort of trigger for them.
Sounds like they’re simulating history pretty well.
Just finished my first game (I always like to play marathon games). What a really, really crappy end “movie.” It looks like it was animated by elementary school kids playing with basic software. And there’s no animated map of how you spread out. That’s the bestest part!!! 
I’ve got to say that I really like some of the music in this game. In my current game, border tensions motivated me to declare war on Pericles. As my cavalry and Redcoats captured their cities, this song started playing. It felt pretty epic.
That’s disappointing. Is there a Palace Screen? I like the one in Civ3Conquest, but it need a few more options.
I used to love that piece. I was like “YEAH ! Finally this series about world history stopped being so goddamn eurocentric all of the time !”. Then I learned it was just the Lord’s Prayer in swahili and was like “Oh. I have been deceived. Well played, Christopher Lin. Well played.”
I just completed my first full game victory (on Prince) with a culture win, long live Greece! I wasn’t even trying for a culture win, it just pinged up as a victory before I’d even finished my spaceport. There were only two times that civs threatened any sort of victory competition…now that my newb mistakes are past, I’m going up to King where I hope it should be more equitable competition.
Kongo spread cities like rats, and was always close on tech level. When it looked like they were threatening some military unit equivalency, I declared war and took their capital, holding it until they also ceded two more cities to me. It guaranteed they’d never catch up. My formula of 4 artillery plus 2 infantry went effortlessly.
In the later game, Brazil looked like they were on the exponential curve to stealing victory by religion, a non-stop wave of cities converting. I declared war and stomped their 4 largest cities. That took the edge off for the other civs to hold par with their religious units. Their cities were all coastal, so 2 missile cruisers would bring the city down quickly, and a random land unit would march in.
I have confirmed my antipathy for the game. Having finished the game I was running on my Mac, I went back to the game I was running on my PC (it was started first, since the Mac version took two or three extra days to come out). But I didn’t know what I was doing in that game, and within five more turns was being declared on by everyone I had met in the game.
So I tried a re-start with the same civ/leader (Vicky). I got about 50 turns in and got bored and quit.
And promptly fired up Civ IV, and started a game with Gajah Mada on an archipelago world and had to force myself to stop to go to bed. So it isn’t that I’m just bored with Civ in general. :eek:
Civ V. Duh. Started up a Civ IV game as Mongolia earlier in the day. That one, too, still interests me.
I’m working my way to the end of my second marathon game, this time as Victoria of England (I re-started again). I find that, though I am winning easily (I just stomped the crap out of Harald Hardrada, and have previously eliminated four civs), I have little understanding of exactly how to maximize play. I’m just doing it by trying to implement as much as possible the style I used in Civ V. But I have to admit that choosing what a city should be building is pretty-much a crap shoot, since the district thing is so impenetrable, and poorly explained in the Civlopedia. And forget trying to figure out exactly what goes on with combat, because they give you exactly no hint on how combat is calculated, beyond telling you that each unit involved has a strength number, which is modified by several things (you can see the list when you hover over a proposed battle).
One of the things that baffles me is why you would merge units into these new “formations”? I’ve got one such merged unit, made up of three infantry units. Infantry are strength 70; if you merge two of them, they are now strength 80. Mind you, they still have 100 hp, and the combined unit cannot attack more than once in a turn, and you can never split it up afterward. So why would I give up two attacks at 70 strength for one attack at strength 80? That’s only plausible if the difference between 70 and 80 is “might win, might lose” becoming “guaranteed to win”. :dubious:
I hate a game I can win (I’m on the middle level of difficulty, where you play the computer straight-up) without understanding why I’m winning. At that point, it becomes silly. I’ll finish the game, maybe start one more to see if I’ve learned anything, and after that, will put it away for good. Sad.
I played on Emperor and as long as you can withstand the initial rush the game gets really easy after that.
There was a substantial patch released yesterday. Haven’t hade a chance to try it yet with the changes, but it looks promising.
It’s cheaper to maintain a corps than two individual units, and you can only bring so many units to bear in a fight. An extra 10 to unit strength on the five or so units you can actually fight with can be worth a lot more than having a bunch of units in the rear that never actually get into a fight. Especially if you’re fighting Scythia and you really don’t want to lose a unit. It’s definitely a luxury, not a requirement, but it can save a lot of money and tip the scales in a close battle (not that the computer upgrades its military enough to have any close battles by the time you get around to having corps and armies.)
Yes, but the production expenditure to obtain an extra 10 strength points is twice the cost of a single unit. So you’re getting that reduced cost at a significant “cost” in production. Personally, I’d rather have two units of the normal strength, so that each turn I have two attacks, and causing the enemy to have to decide which unit to focus his one attack on; even if I lose a unit in the process I’m more likely to have gained my objective (capture of the city).
I have an army of mechanized infantry sitting around doing nothing now; when they were battering the walls of the Kongo down they didn’t seem that much more proficient than a regular unit. I suppose if I wanted to see just how valuable they are, I’d take on Teddy and his infantry units (of which he has a pretty big stick’s worth!), but I’m too close to sending men to Mars now to care.
Bear in mind that combat damage is based on the absolute difference in the two units’ combat strength. 90 vs 80 is the same as 30 vs 20. I’ve heard that if you get to a 30-point difference, you’re close to one-shotting your opponent. That +10 bonus is nothing to sneeze at; when you add on other bonuses from terrain, promotions, great generals, and/or forts, you should be dealing substantially more damage and taking substantially less.
It’s probably more about maneuvering, though. It’s much faster to surround a city with three units than with six. In that sense you’re running into bottlenecks all the damned time, not just in mountain passes. You’re probably not getting as much bang for your buck in terms of raw production if you somehow manage to contrive a huge line of battle, but it’s a way of focusing your military strength.
Remember, too, that a military academy allows you to train corps and armies more cheaply. An army trained in a city with a military academy costs about twice as much as a normal unit. With a +17 strength bonus, it should have a lot more strength and stamina than a normal unit, so it should be able to rack up promotions fairly quickly (especially because the military academy gives it an XP bonus), making it even more fearsome.
Has anyone else started having trouble opening Civ V? It gets stuck at the “Loading, Please Wait” screen and then just won’t do anything at all.
They want you to upgrade.
The patch is a much more significant improvement than I had thought it would be. Information on cities is way easier to see. Every time you change production you are presented with it automatically, in fact. Amenities possessed versus needed, food usage and production, the works.
Hmm. I checked, and it looks like I already did. Still slow.
I think he’s poking fun at the fact you said “Civ V”, not “Civ VI”.
Or maybe you knew that…?