Play With Me: Rome - infinite style

r_rolo1 said:
I played a lot of ICS games in civ IV :p And yes i already MMed more than 40 cities .... I know it is not that easy as that, I'm just pointing that this game is MM intensive :D
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I know, it's in fact worse than in Civ4 because in Civ4 your cities didn't need so much baby-sitting because the city governor didn't re-arrange tiles so aggressively and once you set it up it was sufficient to check every now and then if he didn't do crap. In Civ5 you need to check for crap far more often and I find I sometimes have to tell the governor all of the tiles he has to work - and again when the city grew. Since there's no growth notification after size 5, that means you basically have to go through all of your cities every few turns if you really want to get the best out of it.

Another reason is that you re-arrange specialists far more often in Civ5 to avoid beaker overflow and such, which is a royal pain in the ass.
 
That would be an excellent mod idea: growth notifications even over pop5.

I've found you can limit the ******ed governor quite a bit if you lock tiles and then click the focus for food/prod/whatever. By locking your actual good tiles, you'll ensure they'll always be worked, even if your governor disagrees :p
I only manually MM the specialists for my production cities, I'll let the AI handle the million minor cities which are built solely for gold/science anyway so if he wants to assign scientists/merchants, why the hell not.
 
Ulti_mecia said:
That would be an excellent mod idea: growth notifications even over pop5.

I've found you can limit the ******ed governor quite a bit if you lock tiles and then click the focus for food/prod/whatever. By locking your actual good tiles, you'll ensure they'll always be worked, even if your governor disagrees :p
I only manually MM the specialists for my production cities, I'll let the AI handle the million minor cities which are built solely for gold/science anyway so if he wants to assign scientists/merchants, why the hell not.
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I agree but I haven't found where it actually sets the limit to 5. No XML setting so far (notifications.xml only defines the notification but not behaviour) and no LuA file I can see except something in InGame.lua that looks like its called from an event at the C++ side.

I have no idea why they capped the notifications anyways. Apart from the first few turns I care a lot more about my large cities growing than my small cities growing, and it's not that it would be so many more notifications given the fairly low growth speed later on.
 
alpaca said:
By the way: Seeing that this is my first public game I would be interested to know how you like it and if I should make an effort to maybe post some more in the future.
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Actually, I'd be interested. Your writing style is great and you offer a great description of what you do.

I do have a question regarding the primary and secondary cities. As the cities are closely together, you mentioned the primary cities' grow onto the hexes of the secondary cities and at that point, you hire specialists in the secondary cities.

How does the computer know that, for example, Rome which you have as a primary city, will grow and work a hex in the secondary city, and not the other way around?

Does this question make any sense? :) Will Rome, because it was founded first, grow and assumed one of the secondary city's hexes, and force the secondary city to reallocate its work force0?

BTW, what level was this played at?

EDIT: Never mind my question concerning the hexes. I know the answer and in fact it was a stupid question. Wasn't thinking.
 
Haha yeah, you have to click on them with citizen allocation focus on.

As for your other question, Immortal difficulty. It works on Deity, too, but it's too much of a grindfest and I still sometimes make substantial mistakes so I didn't want to do that for a public game to avoid making a fool of myself (and possibly harm the point I was trying to make) ;)
 
Let me try this again. :)

How much room do you usually wait to have before you start ICS. Does it really matter since you are putting cities very close together? Is it a question of having the happyness increasing options available (luxuries, coloseum, etc...).


Is war only an option if say, the AI stops you from laying down 6 or 7 cities?

In my current game, I spawned on a continent with France, England, China and the Aztecs. With 5 on the landmass, it was going to get tight quickly. England settled in my face with 5 cities quickly. This was a no-brainer to wipe them out. In just wondering if I should keep warring until they are all gone.

Just wondering if I should just turtle up, build settlers and workers or keep warring until the entire landmass is mine.
 
yanner39 said:
Let me try this again. :)

How much room do you usually wait to have before you start ICS. Does it really matter since you are putting cities very close together? Is it a question of having the happyness increasing options available (luxuries, coloseum, etc...).


Is war only an option if say, the AI stops you from laying down 6 or 7 cities?

In my current game, I spawned on a continent with France, England, China and the Aztecs. With 5 on the landmass, it was going to get tight quickly. England settled in my face with 5 cities quickly. This was a no-brainer to wipe them out. In just wondering if I should keep warring until they are all gone.

Just wondering if I should just turtle up, build settlers and workers or keep warring until the entire landmass is mine.
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Since the AI can't mount an effective defense, war is always stronger. I typically only go to war if my opponents are really close to me or they attack me, but that's just my personal thing. The strongest strategy is probably to wipe out everyone but only keep their capital, then settle the huge amount of space yourself. A sub-version of this is to puppet their other cities but raze them when you want to settle the land they occupy or they started building too much useless junk.
 
What's your usual build order as you are ICSing? What I mean is, will you build (or buy) a coloseum, get happy, and then build a settler? Do you have one city only building settler? Do you build settler if you see a spot with a luxury you don't have? Would you settle 2 new cities even if it meant a -6 or -7 Happyness?

I'm doing ok in my current game, except that I seem to be expanding slower than you did, and less cities means less research. I have a nice cashflow, but I use cash sometimes to buy a library or coloseum but I also need it to appease the 2 maritime CS 1 Cultural CS I have.

Anyways, great strategy in all. In my current game I wiped out the whole continent before I started ICS (I wonder if I should have started ICSing sooner). I probably could have eliminated one Civ and had the same amount of cities I have now based on the room on the landmass. That would atleast have given me one or two trade partners.

You should do a Youtube video of this.:)
 
yanner39 said:
What's your usual build order as you are ICSing? What I mean is, will you build (or buy) a coloseum, get happy, and then build a settler? Do you have one city only building settler? Do you build settler if you see a spot with a luxury you don't have? Would you settle 2 new cities even if it meant a -6 or -7 Happyness?

I'm doing ok in my current game, except that I seem to be expanding slower than you did, and less cities means less research. I have a nice cashflow, but I use cash sometimes to buy a library or coloseum but I also need it to appease the 2 maritime CS 1 Cultural CS I have.

Anyways, great strategy in all. In my current game I wiped out the whole continent before I started ICS (I wonder if I should have started ICSing sooner). I probably could have eliminated one Civ and had the same amount of cities I have now based on the room on the landmass. That would atleast have given me one or two trade partners.

You should do a Youtube video of this.:)
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What I build first depends on cash-flow, I'll also buy colosseums but usually not libraries. I will either build a colosseum or a library first. After that it's typically a market and then I might build a university if it's a high-food city. If it's not, I'll build units and gift them to city states for 2 influence. I typically don't go for culture buildings anymore, you expand way too fast for them to be worthwhile and they cause a significant slow-down.

I've learned a few tricks lately, too, some of them on my own, some from other people (Paeanblack, for example). This thread is an interesting read: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=392678

Don't fret if you're a bit slower. Your expansion speed is highly susceptible to many factors so you can't expect to always pull off the same speed.

A video is out of the question because I have a low-medium-end machine that can barely even handle the game ;)
 
alpaca, thank you for the great write up. I thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot as well. I look forward to more of your game stories as well as strategy talk.
 
I wonder, seeing various posts in this thread, is it possible to have a good ICS game without taking policies from the order or piety trees, for instance?

Also, can we please have more example games? :D I still didn't get the hang of this kind of play, although I might be warring too much too early and I'm definitely not settling new cities fast enough, mostly for happiness reasons.
 
Crow said:
I wonder, seeing various posts in this thread, is it possible to have a good ICS game without taking policies from the order or piety trees, for instance?

Also, can we please have more example games? :D I still didn't get the hang of this kind of play, although I might be warring too much too early and I'm definitely not settling new cities fast enough, mostly for happiness reasons.
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Yes, in fact I never picked up Order and rarely take Piety in my ICS games. You're perfectly fine choosing Meritocracy and then you'll often have too many cities to get more than one additional policy or so. Which I usually spend on Freedom. I've lately decided that ignoring culture except for CS is probably the stronger version of this play anyways.

Edit: As for example games, I would offer you the same as the last poster: We are currently playing a succession game that will soon go into infinite mode.
 
alpaca said:
Rome is by no means a weak faction but I wouldn't say it's top tier, either. I'd put it on a level with factions like Russia but it definitely doesn't reach powerhouses like France or China.


Something I just noticed is that Freedom looks a lot more useful than I realized. I'll pick it up as my next policy: +1 happiness per specialist is approximately 2 happiness per city, which puts it on par with Theocracy but without any prerequisites apart from not running Autocracy. It also makes running artists far more juicy, especially if I also pick up Civil Society to go nuts with a specialist economy.
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I haven't read past page 2, so maybe someone else caught this later on, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned it so far -- Freedom grants 1 happiness per 2 specialists. That cuts the benefit you're talking about in half... I don't recall reading patch notes that said this has changed, so AFAIK it's always been like that. Just wondering if I made a mistake here or if I'm missing something.

**EDITED to include: I love well-writted "strat guides" like this and would love to see more. It's definitely changed the way I play and enabled me to get a Deity win (I'm normally an Emperor/King player)
 
javaja said:
I haven't read past page 2, so maybe someone else caught this later on, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned it so far -- Freedom grants 1 happiness per 2 specialists. That cuts the benefit you're talking about in half... I don't recall reading patch notes that said this has changed, so AFAIK it's always been like that. Just wondering if I made a mistake here or if I'm missing something.

**EDITED to include: I love well-writted "strat guides" like this and would love to see more. It's definitely changed the way I play and enabled me to get a Deity win (I'm normally an Emperor/King player)
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Yes, that was me reading things wrong. You are correct, it only adds +0.5 happiness per specialist, and always has. Still a very strong bonus, though. It is correct in the write-up but not in the discussion ;)
 
I'd love to see you post more games as well. Just please turn on resource bubbles, I haven't gotten used to all the new graphics yet and I'd imagine other people are in the same camp. This might also be necessary if you cut down your image size by about 50% which I strongly recommend. I have to scroll all over to see one pic, and then close the spoiler tag so I'm not scrolling a bunch just to read because the pic stretched the text so much. It won't make everything unreadable as you have said- see any of these threads for reference: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5315318

Pictures in spoilers is acceptable, I don't mind clicking if it means people with slower internet can load the page. Just do something about the image size, I skipped all of the images in the second half because of frustration, and because it's hard to see what the picture is trying to show you when you can only see 60% of it at once. Maybe smaller images would also help the slower internet users?
 
Tyrael said:
I'd love to see you post more games as well. Just please turn on resource bubbles, I haven't gotten used to all the new graphics yet and I'd imagine other people are in the same camp. This might also be necessary if you cut down your image size by about 50% which I strongly recommend. I have to scroll all over to see one pic, and then close the spoiler tag so I'm not scrolling a bunch just to read because the pic stretched the text so much. It won't make everything unreadable as you have said- see any of these threads for reference: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5315318

Pictures in spoilers is acceptable, I don't mind clicking if it means people with slower internet can load the page. Just do something about the image size, I skipped all of the images in the second half because of frustration, and because it's hard to see what the picture is trying to show you when you can only see 60% of it at once. Maybe smaller images would also help the slower internet users?
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I started using quarter-sized (50% scaled down in both dimensions) versions that you can click on to see the full-sized image. That should be fine for everyone. I'll try to keep in mind enabling the bubbles, but I hate it when I hit "r" and some worker, somewhere starts building a road...
 
Great stuff alpaca. Really helped me get into the ICS game. Question: Do you think the +2 Happiness on Egypts UB outweighs the loss of 2 GA specialist slots for Golden Ages dumps? Or do you generally find that your cities can't support that many Specialists.
 
SureYouCan said:
Great stuff alpaca. Really helped me get into the ICS game. Question: Do you think the +2 Happiness on Egypts UB outweighs the loss of 2 GA specialist slots for Golden Ages dumps? Or do you generally find that your cities can't support that many Specialists.
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I typically run a couple of scientists. Lately, I stopped bothering to build culture buildings except sometimes in the very early game when using ICS. Cultural city states are mostly sufficient.

The Burial Tomb isn't bad but Egypt in general is probably not such a great faction for ICS. India, counter-intuitively, is.
 
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