I was about to create a thread like this. Will avoid making duplicates by posting the results of my first complete game here. Gonna be thorough.
Played as: Japan
Game settings: Prince difficulty, Continents, Standard everything except for Start Position, which is set to Balanced. All victory conditions enabled.
Result: Won (Score Victory at turn 501)
General impressions:
I enjoyed the game throughout all the eras. Late-game was no longer a tedious chore of mashing next turn like CiV was, but actually interesting with many decisions to make. I loved how they made espionage a very active element, which prompted me to make many decisions compared to the rather brain-dead espionage of CiV. Trade was also implemented much better, with a lot more flexibility compared to the land/sea dichotomy in the previous iteration. The AI was very aggressive early, but they didn't declare wars on me starting from Renaissance. Either I learned to avoid rubbing them the wrong way, or they just weren't aggressive enough at that stage of the game. Maybe both. The gossip system was very well implemented, much better than the notifications in V. I felt very involved in the happenings of the game world, and it felt like I really was running a civilization and taking part in the world politics.
UI comments:
- The UI grew on me pretty quickly. Edge-scrolling nightmares aside, I find everything to be quite intuitive and easy to read. Map is incredibly pretty and perfectly legible even with the stylized fog of war, and turning on all three map options (grids, resource icons, and yield icons) did not clutter the whole screen, unlike in CiV. The colors helped a lot - everything was pleasant to the eyes, and the unexplored area fog of war was not too bright to look at in a dark room.
- The lack of tooltips made it hard to utilize some game features properly. I had to look up the Civilopedia many, many times for explanations on what some units, improvements and wonders do. It doesn't break the game, but it takes me out of my immersion a little bit. I also found that tooltips do not appear unless I had a unit selected.
- Certain texts, such as numbers, could use a little magnification. I had a hard time making out how much gold per turn the AI was offering me, because the text was hardly legible.
- Generally the icons for unit actions and other elements are easy to understand. Although the skull icon for "Delete Unit" is a bit... unsettling.
- There is a hotkey for every lens but Tourism. They need to add this in the next patch, since I don't see any reason why not. It would feel awkward to keep it this way.
- Ultimately, I came to conclude that they replaced the old City View with something better. The ability to move around the map while deciding what my city should do, or just while I view the city's general info, makes it really handy without sacrificing functionality. CiV's City View was good, but it always left something to be desired in terms of how it confined me to one place.
Surprising things I learned:
- Internal trade routes work very differently now. Instead of sending food/production to the target city, you now RECEIVE both food/production from the target city.
- District planning is a VERY long-term decision - I took it too lightly and almost stagnated the entire modern era and beyond.
- Units upgrade to the most up-to-date version instead of the tedious step-by-step method of CiV. It now takes only one turn and much less resource to keep my military in good shape.
- Strategic resource is really all or nothing. You have one copy, you're good for the game. Ideally, with two, you can build some stuff the resource unlocks without having to invest in certain districts. Without the resource however, you see stuff like basic cavalry units in information era. But I liked this implementation just as much, if not better.
- Disbanding units earn me too much money. This needs a nerf so as not to be abused. More on this later.
- Sean Bean cannot pronounce Tokimune's name correctly, but managed to pull off "methylethylamilophenylium".
About the game (5 paragraphs ahead):
The way I won the game is something I'll be proud of for a good while. I came fresh from Civ V and thus, thought that playing with only 4 cities was a good idea. It wasn't. India was my closest neighbor, and since I decided to play peaceful that game, I was quite happy since India was guaranteed to never declare a war. But then Gandhi expanded rather well and ate up to my territory a bit during early game, so I could not settle more outside of my 4 cities.Trajan and Montezuma were to my north, and they attacked me plenty early game, although to no great effect. China was a bit far but on the same continent, and it declared war on me too, although it was never a threat. In the end, none of the AI except for Montezuma sent a decent army to besiege me, and even then he was quite inept at controlling his army. I got the Dead Sea in my territory, so the 100% heal per turn helped a great deal.
Germany was leading in score for the majority of the game because of its tech lead, whereas China was an all-rounder, and excelled in Tourism. I gave up on tourism rather early, since for every wonder I had completed I was denounced and antagonized by China. I missed out on religion (founded one, but never got to enhance it, and it never became dominant in my civ). A lot of faith points were thus wasted. I decided to try for science since I didn't want domination victory for my first game (would take too long).
I failed to read up on how to win science, however, and for the longest time I skipped the Spaceport district. To make matters worse, my main production city, the capital Kyoto, went starving because I misunderstood the internal trade route mechanics. I ended up not having enough population to build the district until well into the mid-400s. By the time I got things going with the district, I only had around 25 turns before turn 500. During the last several tens of turns, I had actively used my spies against Germany, so I patched my tech inferiority and caught up in score. But then India got really ahead with its empire without me knowing, and Gandhi was sitting at 515 points while I was still around 490. Even though none of the AIs were close to winning in other victory methods either, I decided it was my loss then, since I was in the 4th place in score.
I launched the Earth Satellite and Moon Landing regardless, to see if they would bring me up to Gandhi's score. I rose up to the 2nd place, ahead of China and Germany, but it was already turn 495 and Gandhi had 519 points. I was about to just call it quits until I remembered that I built nuclear devices just for fun in my other cities about 50 turns before. I thought that if I couldn't rise in score fast enough, I could try bringing Gandhi's score DOWN. So I looked up how to launch the nuclear devices (again, lack of briefing here), and found out I had to build a nuclear submarine. Not enough time, and I didn't have enough money to buy one. This was where I was ready to give up the second time, until...
...until I found out that I could sell all my existing military for good dough (HA!). Then I bought a nuclear submarine at turn 496, sneaked close to Gandhi in 3 turns, and declared a surprise war at turn 499. The denunciations came pouring in, but i managed to nuke Gandhi's biggest city and brought its score down to 513. By then, I was 517. I clicked next turn and I won the game.
It was epic. And a good learning experience. I cried a little when I heard Sogno di Volare again. Now I'm gonna get my well-earned rest.
