Sid Meier's Civilization V announced. (OMG!)

[Lucavi]

I swear the soundtrack gets better every time. Brazil has the most beautiful song song, and their war theme is something straight out of a 70's crime show.

[deshende]

On the topic of multiplayer, the group I try to play with has trouble with random people jumping into our games. On the initial setup we can mark them as private, but on loading a save to resume our game from a previous setting it seems like there's no way to mark that as private.

Anyone else have this problem or know of a solution?

(We played with vpn clients a while back and that did eliminate the random people issue but we then had issues with people getting out of sync and dropping every few turns so that wasn't workable. Have not tried vpn since latest update though).

[Julian]

I want to play multiplayer or at least try it out. How painful do tou think it would be to join a random game?

[deshende]

I just don't see how a normal game would complete in one sitting for most people (on normal game speed). I think i'd be hard to try and get everyone that you played with to agree on a time to finish a game later if you didn't know them. I've not tried it with random people though. Usually just trying to coordinate getting the game to work with friends is complicated enough

[Lurking Badger]

It seems there is a window as you are loading the game and the first few rounds when random people can join. Keep kicking them and they start joining after a while it seems. Or restarting the client seemed to help sometime. Yea it is really annoying as it pauses the game as they keep trying to connect.

[Kanriel]

So what do you guys play with? Base game? Mods/what mods? Single player or multiplayer?

I play with a few mods, mostly a mod that gives a massive number of promotion options and the most important mod being the one that slows down science by 300%. I think research is stupid fast in this game.

However I come with a major issue when using that mod: My happiness/gold can't keep up if I expand. Until I get Currency I have crap for income and with the slow science mod it takes a long ass time to get to Currency. And same thing with getting to calender and the sort to build up luxuries to expand, though this is a lesser issue compared to money. My usual games involve me researching it up, going for all world wonders as I always try, expanding where I can and by the time I'm at a slow and steady 4 cities I'm out of gold to the point I'm losing my science and thus falling behind everything, and this is with completely skipping an army, not even a garrison unit, just a couple units to explore for natural wonders/city-states. I usually play on King difficulty, but I still have similar issues on Prince.

Does anyone know maybe a better mod for time-rebalancing? Science is the only thing that needs slowing, IMO, so I'd rather not go for marathon play or anything, as I like getting a bunch of social policies so I don't like the culture hit on those plays.

I assume they have civilizations going on fairly different research paths to make it extremely difficult to get all WW's, as I can be 4ish techs ahead (I like Korea) and have just finished researching the tech for Parthenon when another civ finished building it, but any tips to maybe getting most/all of the WW's would be nice.

[BaneTheBrawler]

AI starts with pottery, so they get a head start on that side of the tech tree.

[Purrrfect]

So what do you guys play with? Base game? Mods/what mods? Single player or multiplayer?

I play with a few mods, mostly a mod that gives a massive number of promotion options and the most important mod being the one that slows down science by 300%. I think research is stupid fast in this game.

However I come with a major issue when using that mod: My happiness/gold can't keep up if I expand. Until I get Currency I have crap for income and with the slow science mod it takes a long ass time to get to Currency. And same thing with getting to calender and the sort to build up luxuries to expand, though this is a lesser issue compared to money. My usual games involve me researching it up, going for all world wonders as I always try, expanding where I can and by the time I'm at a slow and steady 4 cities I'm out of gold to the point I'm losing my science and thus falling behind everything, and this is with completely skipping an army, not even a garrison unit, just a couple units to explore for natural wonders/city-states. I usually play on King difficulty, but I still have similar issues on Prince.

Does anyone know maybe a better mod for time-rebalancing? Science is the only thing that needs slowing, IMO, so I'd rather not go for marathon play or anything, as I like getting a bunch of social policies so I don't like the culture hit on those plays.

I assume they have civilizations going on fairly different research paths to make it extremely difficult to get all WW's, as I can be 4ish techs ahead (I like Korea) and have just finished researching the tech for Parthenon when another civ finished building it, but any tips to maybe getting most/all of the WW's would be nice.

Sounds like you are expanding too fast. I assume you're doing the liberty track in the beginning from the sounds of it, but you don't need to go that fast. It also kills you on the policy cost. I've been recently trying to work up to a consistent win rate on emperor and one of the suggestions I read this weekend was to focus on one city for the early game and make use of the tradition tree. You can also build the worker first before the monument to get your tile improvements going quickly (this usually seems to involve getting mining or animal husbandry first so he can chop down forests and build pastures). Tradition also gives your border growth a huge boost. This seems to have been working really well financially as I usually have 1-2k gold piled up around the end of the medieval era, I think (some time after currency I believe). ~40gpt is really nice when not in a golden age. I've also been skipping the bottom military techs mostly, rushing to national library and the oracle for a free policy. Oh, also a religion with initiation rites plays a big part.

[synistar]

On deity, AI starts with a second settler on start. AI usually hax (F U Hiawatha!) and build wonders way faster than a human player can build. There are certain timings certain wonders are built, especially on deity and you'll never be able to build one without crippling yourself. You will eventually learn which ones you can shoot for with experience.

Popular build to go is a 4 city Tradition National College by turn 100. Bunch of science so techs come fast. I think on Emperor I went Babylon for science victory with the 4 Tradition City NC build. I kinda had to lulz when I got satellites tech at turn 300ish before I researched combustion while stockpiling great scientists. Also, tech costs rise with additional cities.

BNW does fix the gold deficiencies with trade routes. I used to be in the red consistently before the xpac, but now running positive while exploiting AI with luxuries for GPT deals. You'll be able to get 6-8 gold per turn for a luxury, which helps a ton.

I think for liberty build, you have to specialize your cities so you aren't building all buildings in each of your cities. Capital will obviously be the most homogenous, but you'll build other cities for production or science or gold. I think I had a trade route city with harbor + all money buildings + east india company + colossus while another was pure hammers and whatever food I could get.

Also there's a few LPs that have given me ideas of how to play. May want to check a few out.

[Kanriel]

So don't grow too early, eh? Interesting as I've always thought my greatest weakness was getting caught up building wonders and never expanding until it's too late (where I need to wage war to get any land). I actually wasn't aware that tech costs went up with more cities like culture does, that's a good thing to know. Expanding is a really bad idea if you don't have the happiness to get population to give you science, then.

I'll give a few more shots to waiting to expand a bit and see how that goes.

[BaneTheBrawler]

me too. ive been trying to whittle down the wonders i try to get. temple of artemis, mausoleum of halicarnassus (especially if there's stone or marble nearby), the colossus, and lately i've been trying for mosque of djenne, sometimes successfully, but after that i start to flounder. i try to go for sistine chapel, but then the AI beats me by a long shot. i end up restarting, but i really like the colossus so i think i just need to give up on sistine and mosque. probably focus more on the lower half of the tree.

also, if you play it right you can sometimes beat the AIs to some of their favorite wonders, especially if you get an engineer fast enough. Not very reliably, though.

[Kanriel]

Well the point of the mod I use that slows down research is that it allows more chances at getting wonders as you don't fly through eras too quickly, which is what I dislike about the games pacing.

I'm a tech-based player so with the normal pacing I always wait on building much of an army because I'm like "10 turns and I'll have my next tier unit" and then it's the endgame and I have no army still, lol.

[synistar]

For pre-industrial units (ie. before gattling gun, artillery, rifleman) A healthy amount of composite bows (or if babylon, skip composites and stay on your UU bowmen) with a few spearmen or pikemen will suffice. A pair of catapults/trebuchets will do for city conquests with bows/xbows covering. I'm currently working on a domination with war against all but 1 civ in late industrial/early modern. I should raze a few cities that is killing my happiness but meh I want a challenge. What pisses me off right now is I have no tourism and my ideology is continually hated due to it. I even switched once, went from -8 > +20 happiness, then about 20 turns later, fell back down to -15. I guess this is what I get for being a warmonger in everyone's eyes lol.

[Prothescar]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile...377&searchtext


This is a really good mod for era length balance. It makes eras last a lot, lot longer and rebalances gold and growth so that it isn't lopsided.

[Julian]

I really wish you could still get achievements while using basic mods.

[Kanriel]

I really wish you could still get achievements while using basic mods.

Same. I had to use mods to get better at Mount and Blade(mostly just ease of use mods though). And now that I have it down pretty solid part of me wants to go through and get the achievements, but I'm a bit "done" with the game now, so not going to get them.

[Mazmaz]

I've been watching this guy do commentary on his playthroughs obsessively and I really wanna buy this game now. He just started one for Brave New World. Thought I'd share cause I think he's kinda funny:

[Tyrath]

Played this game for the first time yesterday..

Where the hell did 4 hours of my life go? >_<

[Kuishen]

How do you deal with Cultural Pressure from other civs when it comes to differing ideologies? I can't even find a clear answer as to how it's calculated. Cause I've got -45 Happiness from that crap and there's really not too many other sources of happiness I can get at this point because I have every single luxury resource, am friends with mercantile city states, have almost all the happiness related social policies and all my cities have all of the happiness buildings, plus various wonders.

I'm going for a science win on an marathon game (King difficulty) and I'm almost a full era ahead of everybody else but my happiness was pretty low before this started and now that I've compensated as much as I can at the moment I'm still at -2 Happiness. I guess if it gets super bad I can switch ideologies but I'd rather not because Order has some good science related policies.

[synistar]

It has to do with tourism. The more other civs produce in relation to you, the higher the pressure. Ugh makes me miss punishment spheres from alpha centuari.