Civilization

Asek said:
In terms or good civs the Faith and Science based civs are as a rule of thumb the best in the game. Civs that can get up an early religon (ethipoa, celt) can tailor a religion to a win condition based on their spawn, making them quite suited to every area, while Science based civs can get an early tech lead and then have the lions share of wonders, steamroll with a more advanced military or just go for a straight science victory. Both these types of civs aren't dependant on certain spawns either, making them excellent to all situations. Militaristic civlizations range from very good to very bad (many are spawn dependant), and economic based civs are usually middle of the road. Special shoutout to Denmark for having a uu that has a bonus on a territory nobody cares about. Best civ in the game is widely considered Poland, but I think on a land based map China is the best civ (crazy warmongering).

Personal favorite civs are the Aztec, Egypt and Arabia, but if I'm looking for free wins I'll default back to Babylon or Korea. Really liked the Aztecs even when I only had vanilla, the culture gain from kills can keep you from major unhappiness in the era of idealogies when theres some loser shoving his culture down your throat and trying to force you into unrest. The floating gardens also help keep your cities with a high pop, and subsequently working harder. Egypt can get that early game wonder you want even on Deity, which goes a long way towards a victory condition. Arabia just makes rediculous amounts of money with the amount of luxuries and oil you can trade off, and if you manage to grab a religon you can quickly suppress surrounding civs by forcing them to adopt your religon with your crazy pressure

Also if your looking for a really fun mod download the real world mod in which every civ spawns where they would be located in real life. Forgot what the name of it is now on steam but heres a link of someone playing it as japan, lots of fun to be had in replicating stuff like the mongolian horde.

Also guys dont buy that new space civ its hella bad and i blew $80 on a reskinned civ v
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Lol that true start map must be brilliant for spain, as they start off with rock of gibraltar, and can just head south to all the african wonders
 
I've been running a game on a giant earth map with all 43 civs sans Venice (since I have to be someone) with true start locations and all victory types turned off except domination. Basically I wanna see the CPUs fuck each other up. Spain doesn't do nearly as well as you might think in Africa because Carthage and Songhai exist (Morocco is garbage lol)
 
Hello friends.

Would anybody like to organize some multiplayer Civ 5 BNW games? I have a group of friends I play occasionally with but we sometimes struggle to get six people online at the same time. We usually play on weekends and games last between 5-8 hours. All skill levels are welcome but I will Chariot rush you if you forward settle me.

Maybe we could organize something through the Smogon steam group that is dead at the moment. It seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity there, someone should revive it.
 
Cherub Agent said:
what is the smogon steam group?
i'd certainly be up for playing on weekends
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All I know about it is that it's been around for years and has 266 members. A lot of the names are recognizable but nobody has posted in it for nearly a year now. Looks like it was mainly used for TF2.

I'm IamKinneas on steam if anybody wants to add me. We will probably try and get something going this saturday or sunday, UK evening time around 5 or 6ish. I'll try and hop on irc at some point too.
 
Walrein said:
I've been running a game on a giant earth map with all 43 civs sans Venice (since I have to be someone) with true start locations and all victory types turned off except domination. Basically I wanna see the CPUs fuck each other up. Spain doesn't do nearly as well as you might think in Africa because Carthage and Songhai exist (Morocco is garbage lol)
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iirc shoshone dominate that scenario because they can spread throughout north america so much. but really anything too isolated will have serious advantages, which means China, mongolia, zulus, etc. dominate that.

best civ is poland bar none, then babylon korea. everything else is a step down except MAYBE mayans.

poland gets tradition/liberty + patronage opener + commerce + rationalism or something else for a crazy late game stack of bonuses. honor + liberty + commerce is crazy w/ autocracy for super purchaisng power and lots of military bonuses.

long count + new deal is nuts if you go for merchants and spamming cities for pagodas and pyramids is pretty effective, and allows you to actually use workers faculties which will make catching up in science easy. also if you have to war once you have workshops + factories you can produce a lot.

babylon is turtle science. really fucking boring imo...

korea is specialist spam -> freedom --> universal suffrage/the t1 tent/SoL
 
Yeah, Poland is amazing, getting an entire extra Social Policy tree and then some is crazy good. Their unique unit and building are pretty marginal but it doesn't even matter (then again, Korea and Babylon are pretty similar that way, though a couple of the just slightly lower than top tier civs like Arabia and Mayans are more balanced).

I recently played a game on a Frontier map as Inca and they were pretty fun, I slightly regret not being a bigger warmonger since treating hills like normal terrain + cheap/free roads is great for conquest and bringing your Workers with you to war.

Kinda want to play Byzantines with a mod that maintains their focus but makes them less crappy (there are several) since in most of my games religion has been something I either ignore or make very light use of and I've never once gone Piety, though I'm not sure that part will change.
 
piety is arguably the worst tree to open at the start of the game, so yeah don't bother with it unless you get a mod that improves it

in all honesty, i would not say mayans are lower-tier than babylon or korea, pyramid is probably the strongest unique building in the game and the long count, while not quite as good as babylon's free scientist, is still incredibly strong; atlalists aren't amazing, but they do free up your tech progression a bit in the early game so that you don't have to grab archery almost right away to deal with barbarians/early invasions
 
I'm a Civ newb (play on like King lol) but I cannot get enough of Venice and their amazing revenue powers. IDK how but somehow I often manage to get a Cultural Victory by just buying shit to increase production so I can wonderwhore. Diplomatic is also easy with them and really fun to achieve, my only nemesis being Greece when they try to steal City-State delegates from me which leads to tension and stuff.
 
Outlaw said:
If you guys aren't using the CBP mod, you're doing it wrong.
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it looks pretty crazy, I put something crazy like 145 hours in a month into Civ 5 but I feel like I could play a lot longer still with mods.

speaking of Civ 5 mods, I feel really conflicted after watching some videos of Beyond Earth's expansion (which is admittedly still in development). Parts of it look really cool but at the same time it looks really rough in areas, even simple stuff like how easy it is to tell terrain features apart. Hopefully it'll end up good, whether by patches or mods.
 
I'm playing the new Beyond Earth DLC right now as it came out yesterday (I prefer BE to civ 5, shoot me) and its a huge improvement to the base game and much more enjoyable to play. There are bugs in this expansion that will probably soon be ironed out and most are just minor annoyances. There's a bug where you can't bring allies into wars instantly like you are supposed to while the AI does it every time, and sometimes it turns into large scale wars for a long ass time thanks to the new diplomacy systems, but I play somewhat peacefully early on (only on my first full game) so I personally haven't run into it. The AI does not like doing peace deals anymore so you are forced to steamroll them; so good luck taking a city purely to curb their power, and other things like contradicting decisions happening every now and then - but both of these are more than likely bugs. The DLC does add life and replayability to the game but be cautious and make sure you see things for yourself before buying this as its somewhat pricey - i enjoyed the base game so an expansion like this will always be welcomed. BE will probably end up like Civ 5 where its hated until a couple big expansions are out and then people will prefer it, but I like it already.

It sucks that the game's launch gave it such a bad rep (r/civ doesn't even wanna acknowledge its existence last time I looked at the place) but I can answer any questions people might have on BE / its new DLC.
 
I, too, love the new DLC for BE. It makes my usual playstyle (hybrid) much better, now, and not as hard to be a true hybrid. The new units... I haven't seen them all, but this breathed a new level of customization to the game, which ... is actually its selling point to me.
 
They still can't fix explorer running animation while idle or affinity quests that ask you to do something you literally cannot do. (Like build an alien preserve in your aquatic capital.)
 
yeah, Civ BE looks like it has a good amount of potential but I'll probably wait awhile for patches/cheaper price/mods/future expansions.

still so many Civ 5 mods I want to play though. CBP, Enlightenment Era, Events and Decisions, a bunch of random mod civs, etc

Steam Controller works pretty well with Civ 5, though you need some rebinding for stuff like siege setup and I've just been using my keyboard whenever I need to specify a trade amount. Kinda wish Firaxis had gone with slightly more universal hotkeys instead of requiring different stuff for ranged attack/melee attack/aerial attack but oh well.
 
I played a shit ton of Revolution when I was like 12 and have fond memories of it. Had no idea what I was doing back then but I really should get back into it.
 
Outlaw said:
If you guys aren't using the CBP mod, you're doing it wrong.
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bumping this after playing two games with it to say that the Community Balance Patch is pretty great. It changes a massive amount of stuff but I'll list some of the changes I found the most interesting:

-Unit trees are a bit more balanced, the Archer > Composite Bowman > etc tree actually stays ranged and there are proper units in between Crossbow and Gatling Gun and Frigate and Battleship now. Aluminum is slightly less all-encompassing late game as well (mid-late game siege units including Rocket Artillery use Iron now, and Modern Armor uses Oil).

-Tech tree is completely redone, you don't get Infantry right after GW Infantry with a no-brainer tech, and several lategame units like Mechanized Infantry and Stealth Bombers are now in positions where they're a lot more likely to be used.

-There's one semi-new unit line which is ranged mounted units and ends in the Helicopter Gunship (which now doesn't suck); the catch is that they only have one range by default so they're not completely broken like Camel Archers and Keshiks. Spear/Pikemen now promote to the same tree as Long/Swordsmen as well.

-Happiness is now based on "needs" of a city rather than just straight population; a city will want certain amounts of gold, culture, defense, etc based on population (and probably era) and if those needs aren't met, it generates unhappiness. The net effect is that happiness is less of a problem generally (unless you're going really wide/warmongering), it's next to impossible to eliminate unhappiness completely but dealing with unhappiness is now a lot more interactive than just building happiness buildings and buying luxuries.

-A certain number of policies is now needed for World Wonders, so Culture is harder to skimp on if you plan to get some. Also, the policy-based wonders now require you to have the full policy tree which is a welcome change.

-There's an "Optimize" button on the Great Work/Culture screen, and a "Swap and Optimize" one as well.

-Flat Coast/Ocean tiles are suboptimal, but not complete garbage now once you have the right buildings.

-Combat AI is improved and enemies will pull back damaged units instead of suiciding into you and move and attack with ranged units on the same turn. Newly founded cities and ones without defensive buildings will fall very quickly so you can punish weird forward settles more easily and city bombardment is generally a lot weaker. Also, melee units won't move off forts/citadels when attacking so they're much better for holding a position now.

-Most unique abilities/unit/buildings are either changed slightly (Assyria gets a one-time science boost if he can't steal tech on city capture) or completely redone (India gets an instant pantheon and then bonus growth/religious pressure for each follower, but can't create Missionaries) and generally stronger and more fun.

-Instead of bribing City-states for Influence, you now send them Diplomatic units that you have to build. This adds a geographical element to City-State diplomacy which is kind of nice, and Diplomatic units use a new strategic resource (Paper) that you get from specific diplomatic buildings, and which you can sell for some good money if you don't need it. The downside is that AI players on harder difficulties will use their increased production to spam diplomatic units like crazy (instead of with gold, where they seem to have a cap on how much they'll spend at once) and you'll see AIs with hundreds of influence regularly later on, so maintaining alliances with more than a handful of City-States is a lot more difficult.

-As a result of being better balanced, the game tends to actually be a fair amount harder, I played one Emperor and one Immortal game and they felt like Immortal and Deity respectively.


There are also a couple of things I'm iffy on (Artillery are kind of overpowered and not having Iron for them screws you over somewhat, trade value of resources is based on era and how much given AI needs them which is realistic and more balanced but makes trading kind of tedious especially since AIs will lowball you when you ask them how much something is worth, pretty significant amount of bugs) but overall I've really enjoyed it so far, would definitely recommend it if you're looking for something to inject new life into the game.

If you're looking to see more of what it's like without installing it, the series of videos I watched that got me really interested in it is
 
I'd recommend Quill18s videos myself. I love Marb, but he doesn't do well with change (and not always going domination.)
 
damn i thought beyond earth woulda been really good with another dlc + more attention but the hate got the better of it... rip

civ launches usually mean an unplayable game for 2 weeks, i wouldn't be surprised to see it again. this game could also end up like civ 5 where the game is garbage until a bunch of patches + dlc so my hopes are actually pretty low.

style looks rather shitty (screenshots on steam show it) compared to usual if thats in-game footage, and i don't think i'll be preordering it unless im sitting on money. endless legend + stellaris is fine for me.
 
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