Civilization V

So, I've never played a Civilization game before. Is there a smart way to expand outward? Alexander the Great is kicking my ass.

Wish I could help, but I couldn't get to grips with V at all.

only decent tip I can give is if you conquer a city make it a puppet until you can afford to buy a courthouse. theyre more or less useless without one and it takes forever to build with so many people hating you.

they seemed to have gone overboard wrt nerfing big empires. back at Civ2 the easy route to victory was to spam cities, and it seems to me like they are still responding to that with the straight-jacketing they keep adding to expansive empires. for Civ5 i definitely have found 3 cities to be optimal for the most part, and as a general rule i wouldn't add any more past that unless it gave me access to some luxuries, or if i already had a big surplus of smiley faces. i did get one late-era domination victory but capturing new cities was killing me and the whole thing became a chore so i took advantage of the convenient-but-not-nearly-as-satisfying rule that you only have to hold the enemy capitals.

How the hell do you get natural resources without building a city next to it? If there's some oil on a desert island I'm building a city there but it stuffs up my happiness no end.

What does "nerfing" mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerf_(computer_gaming)

"Is there a smart way to expand outward?"

I civ v I can beat the game w/ about five cities. a good way to expand it to build a city, BUY TILES and then put a city outside those borders -- kinda like the settler/great artist combo from Civ IV. I know Jon willamsong bragged that be had a cultural victory w/ 1 city but I am not interested in trying to do that.

In terms of capturing cities, you must have siege weapons. It's, like, not really worth trying to conquer w/o catapults imo.

"only decent tip I can give is if you conquer a city make it a puppet until you can afford to buy a courthouse. "

This is a pretty legit strategy.

"they seemed to have gone overboard wrt nerfing big empires."

I've noticed (esp @ the higher levels) that if you decide you want to be a destroyer of worlds, it kind of negates any sort of cultural advancements or golden ages by way of happiness. Like, the most you can conquer is 2 civs, then you sort of have to go for the straight kill victory because you spend your time bulding courthouses and markets/banks to pay for your big civ.

"How the hell do you get natural resources without building a city next to it? "

buy tiles. buy them early while they're cheap.

also, allying yourself w/ city states will get you stuff like oil. obviously, the bigger your initial territory the more likely it is you discover oil/aluminum etc. later on.

is allying with city states really worth it? it costs so much to keep them onside there's hardly any cash left over for a military.

haha short answer: sometimes. long answer: is too long. it really depends on difficulty level, overall strategy, and your own situation

as to the above i feel like 4 cities is sort of the acknowledged optimum at most difficulties but tbh ive kidna tired too quickly of this game to really have a good feel for the mechanics of it

unless i have decided to go for a diplomatic victory, i will only buddy up to a city state if they have a resource i need (inc culture production if i am going for a culture victory). diplo victory is recommended for cash/trade biased civs, eg arabia

i'm going for a culture victory in this game i've had going for the past week. it's a race with the devil as Egypt is powering though it's space program pretty fast.

Sometimes it helps to be on good terms with a militaristic city state because they will give you a shitload of free military units if youre not keen on making your own..

you have to pay the maintenance on them tho, right? i had that happening when my finances were tight and i told the city-state mo-fo to knock it off!

I think this will be an amazing amazing game when it's finished (2/3 years from now) but I'm not sure I'll ever love it as much as IV; it's a too little too facebook in a way I can't quite put my finger on - I really & honestly like almost every design decision they took and the 100% unifying thread of them seems to have been 'remove the things that aren't fun' - I'm just not certain I like fun as much as the game's target audience?

yeah its a trade off: theres less you have to pay attention to but theres fewer things in your control

http://www.empireonline.com/images/image_index/hw800/51373.jpg

having played this version a bunch now it really isnt v good

its also way too easy imo

i do think they made some great changes but they did oversimplify it and i would love them to build on the positive changes and put back in some of the less streamlined junk.

Apparently Civilization NiGHTS is the version that works and is fun and challenging? I haven't played it at all.

rs what difficulty do you play on? do you play conquest or do you try other strats? like i dont know if its too much that game is too easy as that the most optimal strategy is so much easier to play than any other. i always feel boxed into playing early conquest on immortal or deity.

i think the biggest problem is that the devs tended towards coding the AI so that they will use the most optimal/powerful strategy from the previous iteration of the series but w/V so much about the game changed that they AI has no real concept of how to win, or even how to fight. w/o unit stacking the AI is incredibly bad at warfare, and w/ the new constraints they dont spam units as much/as effectively which was one of the things that made III so challenging.

they also went too far in making diplomacy viable imo, the AI will give you way too much to make peace even on deity. its a nice change from III (which is still the gold standard imo) but it makes early game conquest rush/puppet a too easy/boring strat.

i like the idea that even the civilization AIs are always fighting the last war

have played a bunch of deity games lately, feel like this is 'what the game should be' although its still more limiting/abstracted than i would like it to be.

p excited for the new expansion tbqh

wtf, no victory movies?! This is bullshit. You win a game, you get a static bit of game art and go bugger off. I want my animation of dudes making it to Alpha Centauri, it's been in there since the first effing game, thank you very much.

highly disappointing

The exp adds some critically missing stuff, but I still hold Civ 4 has my personal fave in terms of presentation and how much fun I had with the game.

That version had far more humor and Leonard Nimoy doing Sputnik and Lou Reed and Elvis and I could play as FDR and this one pretty much has mechs and a better wargame feel and that's about it.

yeah gods + kings is p unexciting it turns out, i like a bunch of the civs but its still not that great a game. i def hold III in highest esteem tho, for some reason i was thinking about how often i would get wrecked by volcanic eruptions in that game on the higher difficulty settings, shit was p real

The spoken dialogue in civ-specific languages is a cool touch, tho.

preview for new expansion this summer: trade route spreadsheets, culture victory redesign involving "great works", archaeological digs constructed on sites of early-game battles, late-game cold-war-style cultural-influence stuff including a u.n. redesign that makes it look more like alpha centauri

enact resolutions to ban specific luxury goods

GLOBAL ARTS FUNDING / GLOBAL SCIENCE FUNDING

i mean these are just lategame gimmicks i guess but diplomacy was my favorite part of 4 and i miss the intricacies.

all sounds potentially pretty cool. i have been content to wait for them to do whatever tinkering with it before i go back to it.

the expansion's out. posting about homage to catalonia reminded me: i got into a small and distant war near the very end of the first full game i played w the new mechanics, because i was running the "freedom" policy tree and a combination of ideological friction and yknow, old hatreds, had started a war way out east on a different continent between korea/ethiopia ("order") and spain/carthage ("autocracy"), mostly for control of spain, that kept messing up all my carefully designed trade routes, and along with fellow freedom-lovers germany and austria (here the coincidental resonance collapses) i ended up sending a few aircraft carriers and battleships and using them to bomb and occupy madrid, during which battle i fought alongside a bunch of korean communist ships even tho every time i talked to sejong he glared at me and complained about my cultural influence and told my units to stay away from his borders. so this expansion has the popular front, is what i'm saying, which is good enough for me.

a lot of the new mechanics are just new numbers tho. those big ugly numbers that add to themselves endlessly. i read a negative review of the original civ5 that said "huge numbers perch at the top of the screen like crows" and i can never forget that image when i play. it's not a very elegant game in some ways. the new diplomatic stuff tho is way fun: being able to spend the ~20 turns before a congress sending diplomats to capitals and bargaining for delegates and counting votes. it's more robust than SMAC actually. more of those kinds of numbers please, less "you have 3765 culture out of 4221."

oh also: when you sack people's cities, you can take the great works of art from the museums and ship them to the museums in your home cities. YES.

whatever, fuck this, played 4 today for the first time in a while and it was balm. ultimately you do nothing in 5 but wait for numbers to accrue, and you can't even give firaxis $5 to make them accrue faster.

in retrospect the high point of my relationship with 5 was when a friend was visiting and immediately recognized king kamehameha's diplomatic-screen voice as his thesis advisor's. "they get him for everything," he said.

Downloaded this two nights ago and it's fucking up my sleep schedule. It's hard to pull away mid-game and then I look up and it's 3AM.

This, me. I've never played Civ in my life and I still have no real idea what I'm doing, but I... cant...stop... playing.