First Impressions

Am I wrong in thinking that rivers are wider now? In Vanilla I sometimes had to hover my mouse over a tile to see if it was beside a river - the river was so thin it could disappear especially if a border was on that edge of the tile. Now the rivers are easy to see even at the maximum zoom out, you can easily see the water flowing animation now too where before the river just seemed to shimmer.

IIRC, there was something in the patch notes about making rivers more visible.

It would be cosmic if they were also navigable. It can be done because there was a scenario (I think it was in Civ 4) where they were navigable.
 
How long is Smoky Skies? How big is the map?

I'm about to finish my first game on it. You start with 2 extra settlers but then you really can't have more cities than three (settlers cost like 50 turns/2000 gold or something ridiculous like that). So the map's pretty small, there's 5 civs, and they'll have 3 cities unless they heavily invest into another settler (I saw an AI do this in my game but it seems like a terrible plan). Of course, you can capture other civs though.

The buildings that you end up creating are all very powerful. There's a lot of buildings that boost two things at once, like +science/gold, culture/happiness, etc. There are also "national wonder prerequisite" buildings and when you build those, you can build a national wonder building (for example there's a building that's basically Ironworks but under a different name). This all makes your cities pretty powerful if you get a decent start.

You're generally using landships as your melee units, there's artillery, there's flyers which are like fighters, and there's airships. Landships start at 60 strength but have 2 upgrades that turn them into 85 strength monsters called Land Leviathans that are essentially modern armors. You need a resource for them but I found that city-states often have them. When I captured my neighbor I had a line of the modern armor units with artillery behind with some flyers intercepting enemy flyers. I didn't use airships much but they're pretty fast and are decent anti-personnel, especially against landships (100% bonus and that can be upgraded)

You have 5 social policy trees. A lot of them are very similar to base game SPs. There's one that's essentially Honor/Autocracy, one that's Commerce, one that's Piety, one that's Order, and one that's sorta a mix of Tradition/Freedom (with the +2 science on specialists policy too)

Anyway I'm just passing turn 100 and will probably have the game won before 120. I'm sure better players can pull off wins around the ~80 mark.

There's a lot of espionage here. The tech tree kinda branches toward your intended playstyle but if you're trying to play culture you can also steal some military techs that you probably wouldn't have otherwise. The enemy will do that too. Even with police stations built and spies running surveillance in my cities I still got my techs stolen more often than not.

And of course there's 5 titles and the game ends when you get 3 of them. One's having the most social policies, one's for having the most gold generated through the game, one's for having the most landships/airships built, one's for building the most world/national wonders (there aren't new world wonders for the scenario, they're base wonders), and then there's the most productive city. You have to unlock the titles through the tech tree. Once they're unlocked, every 5 turns, there will be a briefing on who holds the lead on each title. Once you have 3 titles on each of these 5 turn intervals, you win the scenario.

It's an interesting scenario and it's fun to play with new units and buildings, but I personally feel this scenario is not too replayable. You can change the map to any map type which is nice for what it's worth. But it's essentially a modern war scenario where you can only have a few cities and the units just look different and have different names.

Edit- Won at turn 108. Definitely could've easily won before 100; probably before 90 frankly if I focused on my victory better.
 
No offense mate, but I've been hearing about this for more than a decade. Consoles, handhelds, mobile phones, they were all supposed to have already replaced PCs, yet here I am, sitting on a PC.

You see, it's already happened! Now we're relegated to using PCs as chairs...
 
You see, it's already happened! Now we're relegated to using PCs as chairs...
And it ain't that comfy.. Sigh, my mother tongue got the hang of me, the way we say sitting in front of something can also be literally translated as sitting "on" it. Go figure :)
 
Andulias, good points. I'm just a little sensitive in that I build custom PCs for fun and always have been anti-consoles. What I don't know, though, is who is going to making/selling PCs 4-5 years from now, particularly since both HP and Dell have been thinking about dropping out of this unprofitable segment.
 
I'm so old that I can remember when there were numerous voices insisting that the PC would die quickly, replaced by terminals connected via token ring networks to a mainframe.

I know I am not quite as old as you but I did play my first computer game (Adventure) on a timeshare terminal in 1978.
 
Well I was really loving it until I ran into some strange bug which meant I couldn't take another turn. Playing king btw.

I started as Will and had a great start with lots of rivers and cotton. I had Sweden to my east not too far away, they were my closest neighbour. I was raking in the gold but kinda struggling with happiness a little bit which is the opposite to what most people have been reporting in here.

What happens when you steal someones elses missionary? I stole the Incan's missionary, who were buddhist. I thought I'd just gain one for my religion which was christianity, but I think it was still buddhist. Is that right? I ended up using it, and it spread buddhism, at least I think it did. Also bizarelly, I couldn't delete the missionary. At least that's the way it seemed.

Civs do seem to be expanding much less, it was quite noticable compared to vanilla.
 
What happens when you steal someones elses missionary? I stole the Incan's missionary, who were buddhist. I thought I'd just gain one for my religion which was christianity, but I think it was still buddhist. Is that right? I ended up using it, and it spread buddhism, at least I think it did. Also bizarelly, I couldn't delete the missionary. At least that's the way it seemed.

You can't delete them on the turn you capture them, that's for sure. Did you try on subsequent turns?
 
Well I think it was the turn after I'd captured it that I attempted to delete the dirty infadel. Yh I'm pretty sure it was, because I captured him just on the outside of my cultural borders, and then moved him to near one of my cities which involded going over a river. It must have been at least 2 turns after I captured him, I definitely couldn't delete him.
 
Erm, oh god my brain hurts. Let me think... I'm half asleep so don't take it as 100% but I'm pretty sure I moved him across the river then took a turn. In the next turn, I moved him from the tile which was adjacent to the river and put him next to Utrecht (about 3 movement points I think). Then I hovered over the city to see what the effect would be, and it said it would give more followers to Buddhism, or something to that effect. It was then that I attempted to deliver him to the underworld, but I saw no option to delete him.
 
Just to double check in case - the delete button is accessed by clicking on the bottom (IIRC) button in the list and then selecting to delete; it's not one of the buttons that's displayed there as a default.
 
I don't know whether to cry or throw my faeces at the monitor. I know how to delete a unit tyvm. ;)
 
You go back far enough to suit me.

Ah, the good old days. Remember how we had to make our own packets with files and sandpaper, in the snow? :D

I'm 56 going on 14...:) Gamer from the beginning :)

BTW, I think GK is a "massive" improvement. I'd say more but this is cutting into my game time....:lol:
 
Enjoying it so far.

Disappointed that turn times are still bad (if not a little worse).
 
So apparently I don't have a religion. I missed the chance to make one. I'm pretty pissed off. And religion looks crappy anyways. BUT I WON'T GET TO FIND OUT. FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

I went with the Aztecs my first game. Should've done celts. I'm playing on immortal on a large map with 18 opponents and 6 city states. I chose Ice Age so I'm playing on an epic tundra map. I molested the dutch who started under me. I took their capital and leeched culture of them, just killed them off. Now I'm waging war against the Incans, Swedish, and Babylonians. And that poly something civ.

I declared all the wars. I have 5 cities atm. All coastal. I almost finished my honor policy branch and it's still 590 B.C.

I managed to grab the great lighthouse. I wanted it because I wanted a huge navy.

Only my capital is really developed atm.

I'm getting a terrible cash flow. Decent happiness.

So far I've been a militeristic conqueror. So I'm only gonna start growing my civ economically now.

Apparently generals culture bomb now, I can't wait to use them. I have 5 generals XD.

Ohhhh Inca, you stupid s, you have no idea what's about to happen to you ><
 
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