Bradygames Gods & Kings guide is it worth the money?

Many game guides may be worth it due to content such as concept art, development, interviews with the artists, etc. This is more true for Japanese guides than their Western counterparts, unfortunately. There are exceptions, though.

As was mentioned, online guides such as from GameFAQs have some advantages, but they also have huge flaws and lack such content as I mentioned. For flaws, consider how they will often claim that such and such a strategy is best. This happens in some official guides, too, of course, but I am merely pointing out a flaw in online guides that some people feel are superior. Why is it a flaw? Because such a claim only holds if you have a certain specific play style/preference, that's why, and other styles may not work as well (or at all) with such claims.

As was also mentioned, there's also the problem with official versus unofficial. This is a big deal if you are an academic (like me) and need to use academically accepted sources. The most you could do if there are errors or omissions is point them out, but you'd still want to point out the actual game versus the official guide (so that both sources are official). It's worth noting that this type of things can happen because the official guides have to go to print prior to release so that they are available at release, but there can be changes to the release version of the game after the guide material has been sent for printing.

I can't really say much about the G&K guide as I have not seen it. It's probably okay at least as a reference tool.

You could also collect info from here and other sources into documents in a folder and access them with another tool (laptop, tablet, etc) while playing.
 
You need to consider two things if you want to buy a printed game guide:

1) Do you want to waste money?

2) Do you suffer from headaches a lot when reading from computer monitors and is the author/person behind Bradygames guide one of the following persons: vexing, tabarnak, ribannah or madDjinn?
 
Who needs guides when you have forums and wikis?
 
You do not need a Bradygames guide. You can just watch MadDjinn play (his YouTube channel is sbfmaddjinn).

Even if his LPs are good and very educational (and I can recommend them), they also can be very boring to watch (Watching him micromanaging every single aspect of the game even to the extreme sometimes. Every single turn.)

I miss the good ol' nightstand book. Hmm, perhaps Maddjinn should write one :)
 
Even if his LPs are good and very educational (and I can recommend them), they also can be very boring to watch (Watching him micromanaging every single aspect of the game even to the extreme sometimes. Every single turn.)

I miss the good ol' nightstand book. Hmm, perhaps Maddjinn should write one :)

The first 1-2 episodes of a new LP are usually okay, but the rest tend to be boring. That's also true of the other two players that I've watched.

I don't really understand all the guide hate, though. There are some really fantastic guides out there (e.g. Piggyback's FFXIII-2)!
 
I do not hate printed game guides actually. As a general rule of thumb, I prefer printed game guides for Eastern games, but online sources for Western games, especially given that game guides for Eastern games tend to have more exclusive illustrations (including concept art, development illustrations) and details (such as developer interviews), as well as their games being more stable (as in not being patched as often, as they generally do not need to). For Western games, since they update themselves more often, I prefer to use online sources, including YouTube videos.

Even for Eastern games, I do not have much of a budget to have printed game guides for most of them, so I use online sources for them as well.
 
I have the guidebook and am definitely glad I bought it.. (though I'm Not happy I bought the original vanilla one now, which is more or less useless, heh)

As for how useful the info inside is ~ well sure, most of the stuff is already available online and probably in better detail. But the book is still much more convenient for me to just grab for quick reference than alt-tabbing (and potentially making my game unstable).

The guide is well produced with nice glossy colorful pages and is laid out logically with sidetabs to help navigate easily through the sections.

My only real complaint is that this sort of guide was once called a manual and used to ship with the game itself.

Miss those days.. :sad:


-Elgalad
 
Despite most posts been disfavorable to the purchasing of any guide to Civ 5, I've done it anyway. I'll just have to wait a week or so now...
 
I do not hate printed game guides actually. As a general rule of thumb, I prefer printed game guides for Eastern games, but online sources for Western games, especially given that game guides for Eastern games tend to have more exclusive illustrations (including concept art, development illustrations) and details (such as developer interviews), as well as their games being more stable (as in not being patched as often, as they generally do not need to). For Western games, since they update themselves more often, I prefer to use online sources, including YouTube videos.

Even for Eastern games, I do not have much of a budget to have printed game guides for most of them, so I use online sources for them as well.

One of the best guides I ever owned was for StarFox 64. It provided lots of background and info on each tiny little pixelated enemy. It was almost like a novel in that it gave so much background (of course, this is from my 12 year old perspective). No custom artwork that I remember, but it did have interviews.:goodjob: Good stuff.

I didn't realize this was an East/West difference.

Despite most posts been disfavorable to the purchasing of any guide to Civ 5, I've done it anyway. I'll just have to wait a week or so now...

Don't let anyone tell you that you made a bad decisions, especially if the guide turns out to be well-written or interesting. Just enjoy it and ignore the nay-sayers.
 
It finally arrive yesterday, and I can say that my first impressions are quite positive. About 350 pages of information, severall tips and material covering all civilizations, units, buildings, wonders... and fully illustrated. So "is it worth the money?" my answer is most definitely yes, for beginners and intermediate players.
 
I got it recently, I think is very good!

It's MUCH more wide than I imagined, they give strategy for each unit, building, wonder, civ and civ specific UUs, UBs etc. and ofcouse the usual stuff like policies, maintaining economy, diplomacy, city-states etc.

They even give strategies for each faction in the G&K Scenarios and give additional scenario-specific strategies. Nice!

The tips and strategies range from useful and eye-opening to obvious and basic, but they are very well written with nice use of wording and even some humour..
Also everything is rewritten for G&K rules and changes.

A fun read, definately grab it!
 
Often, the guide publisher will release updates to reflect new patches. You might want to check the website.

Anyway, what changes are you talking about? The bug fix for the Ottomans naval upkeep? The pillaging change that affects every civilization? Those are hardly game-breaking changes that obsolete the entire guide.
 
I`ve said this to my friends and i`ll say it again, game guides that you have to buy are the biggest cons on the planet. Someone thought, `Why give them a manual when we can make a gameguide and charge them for it?`


Don`t buy game guides. Ever.
 
I`ve said this to my friends and i`ll say it again, game guides that you have to buy are the biggest cons on the planet. Someone thought, `Why give them a manual when we can make a gameguide and charge them for it?`


Don`t buy game guides. Ever.

Nonsense.

1. Civ V and G&K both came with very detailed manuals, despite the existence of third-party guide books.

2. I don't take orders from random people on the Internet.

I love guide books. They have fantastic art, convenient tables and maps, and often offer strategies that I hadn't thought of. I don't have the Civ V guide, but I have plenty of others and I have no regrets about purchasing them.
 
A strategy guide for an expansion seems like taking it a bit far.
To be fair, the expansion included some major changes to the game. And I don't think they released a separate guide, they just updated the old one.

I`ve said this to my friends and i`ll say it again, game guides that you have to buy are the biggest cons on the planet. Someone thought, `Why give them a manual when we can make a gameguide and charge them for it?`


Don`t buy game guides. Ever.
You can't stand it when people don't agree with you, huh?
 
I've been playing Gods & Kings recently and I feel that at this point I need a way to upgrade my gameplay and to improve my understanding of certain concepts. I consider myself not a starter at G&K but far from being a top player. Yes, it's true that there's a lot of good and helpful information around the forum, but I would like to have a single source of data that I can use whenever I feel the need for it. What can I do, guess I'm one of those helpless romantics that prefers to read on paper...

A past few days I found out about this manual, and like I wasn't able to locate any thread concerning this release, only about the Bradygames guide to vanilla Civ 5. I'm opening this one to learn about your opinion. Is it a good purchase? Or would you recomend other solution?

Well, if you want to learn, learn from the best, as mentioned above. Check out GOTM section, the place where people play the same map and later share their experiences. You can actually 'see' what works better there instead of 'believing' (or not) some guy who compiled a guide.
 
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