I forgot about the whole holiday thing. If this presents problems for people, chime in and we can reschedule.
I played some 1v1 games against Rand McNally. When you have two people who are fast the games go really fast.
So the first game we picked a 1v1 skirmish map. This is the map designed for competitive balance in 1v1… the only options for resources are “balanced” and everything about it is supposed to give both players a fair shot.
He started right next to El Dorado, which gives the first discoverer 500(!) gold. I don’t even know why this natural wonder exists, it only serves to randomly unbalance the game pretty severely, but especially in competitive multiplayer, wtf? At that stage 500 gold is like 60 or 70 turns worth of gold. Then… within his capital borders he had 3 different luxury resources and then a nice city founding spot a little bit over with another 2.
Meanwhile I had… not eldorado, lakes taking up most of my prime space around my capital, and 3 furs, and that was it - like that was gonna do me any good.
He was able to fund a rush with that el dorado money and showed up with like 12 units when I only had 2 cities. Crazy.
We just gave up on that one and we did another one where I was babylon and went science focus. Science! For most of the game my capital alone was producing like 150% of his total science output. At one point I was putting out 1200 beakers to his 200. So it got pretty unbalanced, with giant death robots fighting regular infantry. Babylon can be pretty powerful.
Yeah, I’m actually fairly decent fighting wars, but you had a tech lead that there was no way I could catch.
For any and all that care there is a huge patch being released in a few weeks.
It’s going to change the way I play the game. I’ll definitely have to drop back down to Prince.
The main issue is happiness. They’re increasing the per city cost, decreasing the happiness generated by buildings, and decreasing the happiness from luxuries (from 5 to 4)
Notre Dame is no longer worthless, as it’ll give you 10 happiness.
[QUOTE=Patch Notes]
Fixed aircraft UI issue causing the aircraft selection UI to duplicate itself when rebasing aircraft.
[/quote]
Oh, thank God!
I’m less happy about the nerfing of culture. Most things that give culture and culture multipliers will be reduced.
I’m really curious to see how this plays out, because while its true they dropped happiness from luxuries and the happiness buildings, they added a ton of little +1 happinesses all over the place. With order opener and meritocracy, you get +2 happiness per city, so its only costing you one happiness to found a city, which can be overcome pretty easily. I also like that they added happiness to the honor track, as I used to never even consider it even though I play very military heavy.
I’m also really interested in the changes to dynamite. On the one hand, when I saw “reduced cost of dynamite” I chuckled a bit, but on the other they say they’ve moved it around a bit so we shall see…
One thing that I think is a very good call is the reduction of the culture from the goody hut. Popping a culture goody hut at the beginning of the game is like starting with two settlers, which can be a bit unbalancing.
Final thought: they nerfed longswords… I can’t say I didn’t expect it, but I’m very curious to see how that ends up.
That is a … massive rebalance. Not even sure how I feel about it until I’ve had a chance to play around with it.
The big update is live. Gotta go see what it’s all about.
Yeah, sorry I’ve been busy for three consecutive mondays and we’ve been branching out into new games on wednesdays too so Civ has taken a backburner. We should get a new game going soonish with the new rule changes, might be interesting.
I played my first game since the patch. Settings were: French, Pangaea, Tiny, Quick, Emperor.
Overall, the game played pretty similar to previous ones. Expansion was a bit harder than usual due to happiness, but honestly there are so many new ways to gain happiness that it wasn’t a big deal. I played rapid expansion and that worked pretty well. If anything, the game seemed easier than usual - I think I was able to adapt better than the AI to increased happiness penalty, as they tended not to expand very much. I was able to grab like 3/4 of the map only fighting one of the three AIs. The AI still sucked at fighting.
Some more detailed observations:
I really like the culture changes. I had a lot more social policies than I normally do, especially early on. The changes make things a bit more interesting than before, but that might just be because new is always interesting.
Stone was everywhere. That made most of my cities have much higher production and helped with the happiness.
The AI didn’t seem as interested in wonders this play through. I usually don’t get a lot of wonders, but this time I got probably 90% of them and I wasn’t rushing them or anything.
I have never, ever built a chariot archer before this play through, but I like them a lot now. My early army was like 5 or 6 chariot archers that were cruising around killing everything.
The replay feature is hot. You can graph your score, gpt, whatever, and you can watch a map play through like in the old civs.
I was thinking of getting these going again. Any interest?
I am interested, my issue just seems to be getting on at the same time as everyone else…
If at a convenient time, I would be interested. Would we need all the DLC? I’m missing some of the newer content.
Me too.
No, DLC isn’t necesary - it’s just extra civs. Actually, a while back you couldn’t even use the extra civs unless everyone had them which is stupid, maybe they’ve fixed it since then.
That would be nice because I really like the Inca.
I am definitely interested in a game of Civ V now that I have actually purchased the game. I am not as worried about the time everyone chooses, since I am on Central time.
Reviving this thread, been a while since we’ve done a game. Anyone up for a weekly tuesday game from about 8-11:30pm eastern? That seems to be the best compromise time for everyone. If you want in, make sure you have the game installed and ready to go, and also ventrilo set up.
I’m interested, just so everyone can see how bad I am…
Would if I could sigh