First Impressions

First impressions, reaching Industrial Era after spending most of the day playing Celts/Continents/Huge/Epic/Emperor with all the new civs included:

I am beginning to hate Maria Theresa and her numerous marriages.
Ethiopia seems to have a VERY strong religion flavor. They started a religion extremely quickly leaving my tree-worshipers in the dust.
William is a massive economic powerhouse. There is more to this guy than meets the eye.
Gustavus got swallowed up so quickly I never got a chance to meet him.
Pacal and Theodora, both doing average at best, are in a non-stop espionage knife-fight over Florence. Go figure.
Atilla is VERY pushy diplomatically. If he wants an embassy, he WON"T take no for an answer.
Dido is both a sweet, undemanding neighbor and quite able to hold off a frisky Napoleon.
On religion: I absolutely love it; but not as much of a force diplomatically as I thought it would be.
On espionage: I thought I had a little more say over when the tech theft or election-rigging occurs, but apparently the game decides when it's time. Rather than the AI over-doing it like some experience, the espionage in my game is so far rather sleepy (see exception above.).
On wars: the game stuck me on my own little continent so I never met any body until after Astronomy and no DOWs with anybody yet. No runaway powers, though Monty and Gustavus are apparently dead.
On the tech-tree: a reworking long overdue.
On diplomacy: I see real hope for lasting friendships. Could it be too easy???
On mercantile city-states: happiness galore.
Overall: a massive improvement to vanilla.

Randall_Flagg said:

I am not liking the sound of Austria's UA at all. I always release city states that have been conquered, do we get that option on the ones she takes control of?

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Very important question, haven't seen it asked before. A screenshot could give a good indication. I can't check for myself, but I would bet the answer is unfortunately NO, CS's anexed via Austria's UA become regular Austrian cities and cease to be CS's in the first place. On the other hand she can puppet them as well, so in this case, hopefuly is still possible.

There's one thing in diplomacy that I don't get and that I've seen at someone's screen that caught an Austrian spy: they get angry if you tell them to stop spying on you. That just sounds ridiculous.

GlobularFoody said:

If I want to take a CS and use it as a beachhead on new continent, I just conquer it. CS are extremely easy to take over since they don't boot you out of their territory once you declare war.

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They are also a massive diplomacy hit to invade, alienating just about everyone in the game - competing Civilizations, other City States, and even your DoF buddies. Meanwhile you get a useless pile of rebels for your trouble - waste of time.

And why would you take it over with the UA only? Are you planning to build your entire army from that one city?

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If you were planning on merely employing it as a beach head you don't even have to conquer it. You ally it, land there freely, stage up, and declare war on your first target, taking the CS with you and still benefiting from it being friendly territory.

You only conquer the City State if it's an ally of your target enemy. If its friendly or allied you don't need to do anything to it. The only reason to seize a non-hostile City State for an invasion is if you need the production center. Diplomatic Marriage gives you an optimal production center - no destroyed buildings, no 9 turns of rebellion, no losing half its population and all its fortifications. From there on you have a fully functional city with population and infrastructure that's been built up from Turn 1 to back-fill your invasion forces.

Explain to me how mounted units are awesome? They are even worse against cities now and they still require resources.

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It doesn't matter that they got worse against cities. They didn't take cities before. Now Swordsmen and Archers don't take cities either. So now they are just more mobile than infantry without being significantly worse at taking cities. They are excellent at wiping out enemy Archery, Siege, and Infantry other than Spears / Pikes.

You don't get horses every game, they need to be better.

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Yes, you don't get horses every game. You don't get iron either. Sometimes you need to conquer or engage in some (ahem) horse-trading for strategic resources. Mounted units don't need to get any better. They do their job just fine. Their job just happens to be something other than "jump over that wall and sack the city" - which is historically accurate.

- Marty Lund

DavidCAD said:

Policies look much better balanced (Rationalism is no longer OP), I noticed Great Scientists now give beakers (too bad it doesn't say how many, I think I got +1000 from one)

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Can't remember where I read this (probably the steam manual while the download was going on) but the Great Scientist now gives you 6 times your per-turn output of beakers instantly.

alter_echoe said:

I always knew she fit the bill, but backstabbing someone from behind is just cold...

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Backstabbing someone from in front requires extremely long arms.

I like the epsionage system a lot, but the only annoying thing is AI's keep rigging election and you lose Ally status with the city state and had to spend gold to get back in the blue. >_> Make diplomatic victory hard.

My first game is going well into the late Renaissance as Attila. I have taken Ramky and Dido's capital, and my religion controls 13 cities. Harold is the runaway on the other continent and has conquered Boudicca. William and Pacal are in a huge fight over Florence, and I was able to kill my first spy, a Swedish one that was stealing my techs. Looking like it's going to be a large battle between me, Harold, and Pacal. Pacal has already eliminated two city states.

bcaiko said:

Arabia seemed to be having some trouble. As I passed by them, I noticed a Settler who seemed to be running from a Brute.

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By far the funniest thing I've read on this forum ever!

Seriously? I'm loving the expansion but I just realised when William of the Netherlands denounces you, he wags your finger at you like you've been a bad child. That's both hilarious and wtf to me.

EDIT: Also, for the record, you DO NOT get the Attila achievement for researching satellites if you bulb it with the Oxford. Just FYI.

THIS is what I was expecting when I first decided to get Civ5! I <Snipping> love it!

Gali said:

Pacal then conducts 8 coups in 20 turns and succeds in 6 undoing all that careful planning. I can handle a 66% enemy tech steal rate in a capital with constabulary, counterspy, spy national wonder and police station. I can handle firends and close allies stealing techs I cant match because I'm ahead. However, I'm going to look for a mod to get rid of coups becuase this is ridiculous. There is a coup EVERY 5 turns and last turn before I wrote this Pacal launched 2 coups. How he has a 80% success rate on coups when my coup odds are 52% is beyond me but save scumming counter coup is the only counter it seems.

Another 2 turns another 2 succesful Mayan coups. Can I use quests, no there are none, money please don't have 10k to waste. Just launch counter coups and its done.

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From what I've read so far, coups can only be attempted if he's within 50 points of your current influence with the CS. So the counter (besides save scumming counter coup) is to stay more than 50 influence points ahead. Even if you can't get 50 ahead, the further ahead you are the less chance he has of succeeding.

Further observations:

The 'Fortify in City' button seems to be missing. Of course, you can still fortify in the city, it just isn't as convenient. Also, I can't be sure, but it seems like DOF leaders don't ask for as much money for a donation. However, the thing I absolutely love is how my scout doesn't insta-die in later eras. He actually has a good chance of getting away.

Ekmek said:

some impact but not as bad as civ4

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Quick question-can you adopt a State Religion like you could in Civ4? One of the reasons I ask is because the biggest problem with Civ4 is that this is *all* you had to do to guarantee excellent relations with another civ-a bonus which grew over time. I think it would be much better if adopting another Civs Religion as your State religion gave you a large, *temporary* boost to relations, but have that decay quickly-but then have spreading the religion and/or removing "enemy" religions helping to slow down that rate of decay!

Just a thought

Aussie.

Has anyone else noticed that there seems to be alot of jungles on the map?

Aussie_Lurker said:

Quick question-can you adopt a State Religion like you could in Civ4? One of the reasons I ask is because the biggest problem with Civ4 is that this is *all* you had to do to guarantee excellent relations with another civ-a bonus which grew over time. I think it would be much better if adopting another Civs Religion as your State religion gave you a large, *temporary* boost to relations, but have that decay quickly-but then have spreading the religion and/or removing "enemy" religions helping to slow down that rate of decay!

Just a thought

Aussie.

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Hey Aussie,

Since in G&K each civ can only found one religion, what I've found so far is that if you or another civ found a religion that automatically becomes your "main religion." Civs which did not found a religion (including those that have pantheons) will just treat the one followed by a majority of their cities as their main religion. Example in my game, Sweden has three cities, with Stockholm the capital having more population than the other two combined. But after flipping the other two to Buddhist from Confucian, he now treats Buddhism as his main religion even though there are more Confucians.

But there's no Civ IV-esque button to switch to a religion AFAIK.

I was Ethiopia, Prince, Continents, Diplo Victory.

Things I like:
-AI much better at building navies, diplomacy
-Espionage adds depth to diplo victory
-New City-State System (more emphasis on quests, not money)

Things I didn't like
-No burning Great People for Golden Ages (nothing to do with multiple GGs at least in my case)
-New units + their strengths seem somewhat cluttered (could just be something to learn/get used to)

That's all off the top of my head. Overall I'm loving Gods + Kings, really improved upon a Civ V experience that IMO was already pretty good. Managed to bring me back to this game (and forum )

Moderator Action: Merged with a similar thread.

Cicero63 said:

Has anyone else noticed that there seems to be alot of jungles on the map?

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I've only played two games about half way through, but yeah, on those two maps I've seen more jungle tiles. I've also seen more fish tiles as well. On my second map, I had a nice coastal city with SIX workable fishing tiles. I've never seen anything like that before unless I checked the box for abundant resources, which I didn't for that game.

I just finished my first game. I won as Gandhi on Prince on a small map. I dominated from start to finish. It was fun though. I wanted to play an easier game to learn the new concepts. I like religion, but I don't quite understand it. I'm not sure what pressure the people are applying or how that works, but it's all good. I wish you could have someone other than inquisitors do your religious bidding. Seems a bit harsh to send them out.

One good thing... maybe... I noticed that I was doing was not following one policy tree just to follow it. I was picking and choosing policies to help with my situation. It was kind of fun. No auto pilot.

espionage seems to strongly discourage building a super-science capital. better to spread it out.

the celts are pretty fun with the religion, somehow Ethiopia was faster though...so I killed them and brought the inquisition to their holy city...good times.

generally I like it so far.