Civ V Beta 1

Started playing last night, still haven't finished, but will post the result ofc. After following this thread I thought Free Speech and Christo Redentor would be quite important for my win date (supposing that I would win of course).

So, following the discussion between 12agnar0k and bhavv, I think for the moment we should interpret the effects of both items, as expressly defined in the manual/game:

Cristo Redentor: Culture cost of adopting new Policies reduced by 33%
Free Speech: -25% of Policy Culture costs

There is no mention in either of the definitions that the reduced cost is meant to be used only when spending future culture. If it was like this:

Cristo Redentor: Future culture cost of adopting new Policies reduced by 33%
Free Speech: -25% of Policy Culture costs for culture obtained after taking this Policy

then I would accept it is presently an exploit. Sadly for my understanding, the game was designed with allowed usage of these effects for past culture, even though you are supposed to receive the discount because you have spent time researching a tech, reaching a certain level of public freedom and hammers for building a wonder. It seems as if up to the moment of time when you have these two, you have been somewhat uncultured.

I still agree with 12agnar0k though, and would like to try winning as early as possible without using them.

Meh, the notifications aren't as in depth as I thought. Anyway, pics of my initial location, and of Istanbul are attached. I decided I liked Istanbul much better, so went and took it. My tech pace was very slow all game, and my economy wasn't great either, particularly thanks to Mecca being without a river. Also thanks to Istanbul building literally every building it could, it actually ran out of builds a few times. I was paying 70+ gpt in building maintenance by the end. Ended at roughly 270 cpt, I was balancing things very finely to try and hit the exact number without going bankrupt for my final policy, gifting away units to drop my maintenance and keep Florence just above allied. Had it down to 1 turns to go, and France, who was marauding on the other continent after all the city-states ganged up on him, captured Lhasa, costing me 20 cpt. Oops. Couldn't make that up with specialists, so had to wait one more turn.

I built Oracle, GLib which gave me Civil Service, and various other mid-late game wonders. I was late starting Oracle, when I popped archery from a goody hut I decided to build two archers and try for Istanbul with them and my initial warrior. I was lucky that Mecca had Iron, so when India & China allied against me mid-game I was able to get a few longswords out and repel them. Eventually sent a Caravel out to find the other continent, and made friends with the city-states over there. Did mean that two great engineers had to sail back to my lands late in the game. Also found two unpopped huts, one of them upgraded my camel archer to a cavalry.

Going to try again with a more warlike game this time.

Siberic said:

There is no mention in either of the definitions that the reduced cost is meant to be used only when spending future culture.

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"Future Culture" however is not needed in the explanation, "Future Social Policies" Implies that. The fact that "Past Culture Earnt can be spent on "Future" Policies because of the ability to simply not spend it, is what causes the bug.

Obviously the developers did not make the distinction, it was an oversight on thier part, just like the starter of this thread said 8 opponents originally when he meant 8 total.

However, just like the OP was changed after the acnowledgement that 8 Opponents was wrong, so might Past Culture being able to be used to generate more social policies after "Future" costs are decreased. But thats down to the developers. They might decide to leave it as it is, just like the OP might have decided to leave 8 Opponents as the rule.

Siberic said:

I still agree with 12agnar0k though, and would like to try winning as early as possible without using them.

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Winning without saving up policies for them is easier and faster anyway if you use Patronage and Piety properly.

Does checking OCC eliminate the prereq for national wonders? One of the saves here had hermitage but no museum. Also it didn't look like the commerce branch was giving 3 hpt as listed.

12agnar0k said:

"Future Culture" however is not needed in the explanation, "Future Social Policies" Implies that. The fact that "Past Culture Earnt can be spent on "Future" Policies because of the ability to simply not spend it, is what causes the bug.

Obviously the developers did not make the distinction, it was an oversight on thier part, just like the starter of this thread said 8 opponents originally when he meant 8 total.

However, just like the OP was changed after the acnowledgement that 8 Opponents was wrong, so might Past Culture being able to be used to generate more social policies after "Future" costs are decreased. But thats down to the developers. They might decide to leave it as it is, just like the OP might have decided to leave 8 Opponents as the rule.

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If the intention was for the player to spend his culture as soon as he had enough to adopt a policy, they wouldn't have made it possible to dismiss the "Adopt Policy" notification. The tooltip even says you can dismiss it by right-clicking, which suggests that it was an intentional design decision.

It's not as if saving all of your culture for Cristo/Free Speech is a no-brainer anyway. It's pretty much only wise if you are going for a culture win, and even then it's usually wise to take a few policies before getting to Cristo (33% faster Wonders, happiness gives culture, and perhaps some patronage if a cultured city state offers a good mission).

It isn't unlike the decisions one must make when given a great scientist. You can pop him early for the immediate benefit of getting an expensive tech early and a good tech lead, or you can save him for the end to speed through the modern techs and get Globalization for a diplo, for instance.

MasterDinadan said:

If the intention was for the player to spend his culture as soon as he had enough to adopt a policy, they wouldn't have made it possible to dismiss the "Adopt Policy" notification. The tooltip even says you can dismiss it by right-clicking, which suggests that it was an intentional design decision.

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I never said that it wasn't, however it causes the bug where by Past Culture saved up can get you more policies after a social policy decrease. Their are a couple solutions to this, my favourite one thats been come up with is Policy Points, where by instead of maintaining say 600/400 culture if your saving culture and not spending it, you have the culture converted to a "Point" each time it hits the limit, this way increases/decreases in Social Policy Cost say by building or razing cities, has no effect on unspent Policy Points, only on culture currently earning and that to be earnt.

It would also be a much better system to manage, assume you have spent no culture so far (or no policy points as it may be), and have earned 14 Social Policy Points, then you know you need 26 more points, this is only easy to see if you spend the culture on Policies in the current system, but now no matter whether you spend it or save it, you know exactly how many policies you can buy, and how many you still need to win the game. This is something not apparent in the current system, as you can tell when someone here posted they accidentally completed 6 policy trees because they didnt know how many they had aquired.

So I tried this for the first time and won in 1947.

I think I had nice luck with my starting position: marble and nice ressources.


My second city had 4 gold resources in its radius to produce lots of money.


Several Cultural and Maritime City states nearby - all more or less friendly.
Made some major mistakes though, like going through patronage before getting the nice stuff from Freedom and Piety.

Quick question: are settings like abundant resources OK?

From the front post:

Resources: Standard

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Tried my first playthrough today and abandoned it after I realized it wasn't going to fly. Here's a few thoughts.

1) If you're not near any cultural City States you might as well just restart the game. I don't think you can get a cultural victory with any haste if you don't have those city states pounding out culture for you.

2) If you don't get a city on a coast that leads to other continents, you might as well restart the game. I built my second city on a coast thinking I'd be able to find trading partners later on, but realized later that it was a huge inland lake. Not being able to find more city states and other civs to trade with was a huge setback.

3) You should always try to get a great engineer and then save him for the Cristo Redentor (Or however that's spelled). In my game, it was going to take 50 turns to build it. That's a massive investment and a great engineer would've let me build it like nothing.

4) Great scientists are awesome and you should get as many as you can. I'm a little tempted to say that you shouldn't bother trying to get great artists as the free fast teching is just so overwhelmingly good.

5) I'm a bit torn on whether or not you should build more then two cities for this victory. If it gets 30% more difficult for each city, it's still worth it to have a second city, as you'll be producing twice as much culture that way, so it still comes out ok for you. But with a third it becomes much more difficult. I certainly wouldn't get any more then three though.

Anyway, I hope to try this again tomorrow, with a much better start then what I got today.

Mercantilism - Purchasing items in cities requires 25% less Gold

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As pertaining to the debate on saving culture being an exploit then this policy makes saving up gold an exploit. Why would I pay a premium for an old outdated monument today when it's cheaper tommorow? It's the same for SPs, waiting until an SP is old isn't worth it and certainly would not be worth paying top dollar for it. Put it on clearance.

Looking at some of the final policy costs from some of the submitted games, it looks like the final cost of the last policy is about the same price with all discounts applied. Since only a small handful of policies are needed at the start its not worth waiting. In other words, waiting to spend culture at maximum efficiency only saves ~500 to 1k of culture. After that a person can wait for some time for the rest. If it weren't for the discounts the game would take forever.

For my third and final submission to the Gauntlet Beta, I give you my masterpiece.

Cultural Victory, 1705 AD (Turn 251).

I won't try again. I don't think I could ever top this. Not only did I have the most amazing starting spot, I got some very good ruins pops (pop, culture, and scout upgrade).

Some more information on my win:

I wasn't gonna do a third game, even though I had some ideas for how to improve my game. I just fired up Civ5 to play around, when I saw an absolutely amazing starting location. If I knew how to convert .tga to jpg, and how to post them I'd show you, but if you want you can check out the start save.

I was on the coast, and running alongside the coast was a nice long river, and I was nestled perfectly between them. To my north and south both were wheat fields,on the river, and all the land surrounding the river was plains. There were a few hills scattered around, several hexes of forest, and 2 hexes north of me was a beautiful patch of marble. The ONLY downside was that the only other luxury was whales. Not too crazy about coastal bonuses, take so long to hook up.

Settled, started the 5 turn scout, and sent the warrior in search of ruins. Found one with population inside (yay, even faster start!) and another with culture. My scout was ready so I sent him south along the coast. All in all I got seven ruins, I think I got one of each (upgrade, pop, gold, culture, tech, map, barb locs). Found Rome REALLY close by, but I had a warrior and an archer on turn 12, so I decided to grab my first puppet city. A few turns (and burning an upgrade on an instant heal) later, Rome fell to the Arabian Empire!

Found I was on a rather large continent with India and Japan as well. I did the GL-Civil Service slingshot, then grabbed animal husbandry, hoping for some horses, ended up having two sources for 6 horse within range.

Build Order: Scout, Monument, Worker, Stonehenge, Great Library, Oracle, Horseman Horseman Horseman!
Tech Order: Pottery, Calender, Writing (popped from a ruins while researching Calender), Philosophy, Animal Husbandry, Trapping, (Civil Service), Wheel, Horseback Riding.

My strategy from the get-go was going to try and conquer the surrounding civs while they were still developing, before turn 100. My problem last game was I waited too long to puppetize them, so their populations were high enough to kill my happiness.

First up was Japan. My archer had been hanging around his area and saw he was about to drop his third city. Yay, more puppets for me! I rushed in with archers and horseman, and took his capital and two little ones very quickly. I was going to wait a while before taking out Ghandi, but then the little shizniz dropped a city on the other side of the world from him, right between my capital and Rome! Oh well, at least that puppet will be close by!

I didn't want them bankrupting me with their buildings, so I just forced them to settle the way I wanted. If it wasn't a resource, it was a Trading Post. Ghandi had been nice enough to build a road between his two cities in unclaimed land running just north of rome, so once I finished him off, I was able to connect them up fairly easily.

Once all the cities were hooked up, the gold was rolling in. Had 3 culture CSs and 4 Maritime around me, no military at all. I took the first three socials in patronage before I got Free Speech, doing the math shows that the loss is maybe 300 culture overall, and getting to those culture City States and holding them longer was worth it.

Everything else was normal, except I was earning 80-100 gpt at times. I treated it like another form of production. I used my normal hammers on various wonders, and any buildings I need, I just bought. I beelined for Astronomy, made a clipper, and sent him round the world to find the other 4 civs.

After that, it was just your standard nursing of culture for another 150 years. Not the most exciting game ever, but it gets the job done.

I just did my 2nd attempt, much nicer start, much less peaceful, much better result. Economy was great all game despite the huge building maintenance (500+ on building maintenance, I think it was when I checked), I had 4 AIs on my continent and made them all puppets, and then from the middle of the game on was more stuffups/learning experiences. Took too much stuff in piety before patronage, I reached telegraph with ~10 policies still to grab, but could have saved ~10 turns if I saved 5 or so earlier policy upgrades for after it was built. Was no need to research telegraph as soon as I did, either. Only noticed Radio and the broadcast tower building after researching other things. I also made bad choices with the policies I did grab. The bottom left of the Piety tree, that gives less unhappiness for unoccupied population, it applies to puppet cities. I took it very very late, and picked up 20+ happiness instantly.

Hydro Plants are awesome, I built Utopia in 8 turns, compared to 18 for my first game with the coastal, non-river start.

My puppet cities were obviously using plenty of specialists, as they produced quite a few great people, even with the +50% to great people policy being one of my later ones as well. Ended the game with 1100+ beakers per turn, 5 spare great scientists, and 2 generals and an engineer from Brandenburg + city-state gifts. So lightbulbed my way into the future era with 3 turns to go, and threw up a couple of citadels, just to see what they looked like.

I'll be very happy when the bug that stops surplus research carrying over is fixed. Micromanaging to not waste beakers is something I can do without.

Discovered a weird thing with upgrades too, they only upgrade one step at a time, and if you have a musket, and you can build infantry, but don't have rifling, you can't upgrade. Even though once you get rifling, you can upgrade musket-->infantry in two turns. Slightly better tech tree prereqs would solve that, anyway. It's amazing how many wonders can be built without the knowledge of masonry.

I might have a third attempt, or I might try some different stuff. I had a UN victory wrapped up in this game too, with 14 votes and only needing 10. Didn't actually build the UN just in case the vote wasn't optional.

Finished in 1850, turn 295. Don't know if I can get 44 turns quicker to match Neuro's time, but think I can certainly get ~20 turns quicker just by not doing silly things, and a little luck with things like goody huts (I only popped 3?) would help too.

so, puppet cities do not increase the culture cost of policies? Nifty.

Hi,

Here's my submission. Although I don't think you will accept it because I unintentionally found an exploit.

When trading horses, I would get a notification the next turn that the deal was canceled, but the deal is still in effect. What happens is that I get a duplicate of the horses I traded, in addition to the horses already used in the deal (which I get back later!). I didn't spend too much time investigating this bug, but I did exploit it to the point where at the end of the game I had over 10000 horses!!!!!!!

Anyways, here are my saves:

I decided to give this a try. I have never won a culture victory before so I figured this would force me to try . I got an ok start, sheep, 2 cottons, and fish. Later revealed iron right beside my city. I got Stonehenge and The Great Library pretty quickly, and started expanding like mad. My plan was to take over the continent and just stay peacefull from there. I don't think its going very well though. I lead in score and in tech, but a leaderboard thing came up and told me I was last in social policies (but that was before I even built stonehenge so....) I found Germany, Iroquois, and Songhai on my lands, and Germany declared on me before I was really ready. Its all good though, because 2 of my swordsmen took out 4 of his warriors and 2 of his archers (due mostly to stupid AI trying to heal up while still getting smoked by my city)

Anyways, I don't know how to do screenshots but i will post my start save (on turn 4 cause Im an idiot and forgot) and my win save, if I win...

@Neuro
Nice win! Looks like capitol and CSs account for 347 CPT and puppets a bare smidgen. But the beakers from puppet's pop is sweet!

10000 horses?? Damn, I wish I could do that with Uranium