General Snowball

Recently got my first Great General in Gods and Kings and was disappointed to see that starting a Golden Age was not an option. Is this part of the expansion/update? In my first Domination Victory in the vanilla version I was able to steam-roll over all the Civilizations one at a time (which did take a bit of diplomatic finesse) because after winning so many battles against one I would use my new Great General to start a Golden Age and then use the profit to upgrade/rush units with which to decimate my next target.

It reminded me a lot of the cards used in a game of Risk, which I thought was a nice touch to speed up the game, which even so took months because I don't play a lot but when I do I play on huge/marathon. But now I guess the developers decided it made the Great General over-powered?

yes, GnK redefined each of the great people's abilities. im not going to list them all but everyone of them changed a little in that only great artists can now create golden ages but it doesnt reduce the length per pop. GGs can settle a citadel, which is a very good defense tile and it will take territory in each tile around it. but you have to be in or next to your borders. ive taken up to 6 tiles of land before. they are nice.

Hammer Rabbi said:

yes, GnK redefined each of the great people's abilities. im not going to list them all but everyone of them changed a little in that only great artists can now create golden ages but it doesnt reduce the length per pop. GGs can settle a citadel, which is a very good defense tile and it will take territory in each tile around it. but you have to be in or next to your borders. ive taken up to 6 tiles of land before. they are nice.

Click to expand...

They make things too easy.

nokmirt said:

They make things too easy.

Click to expand...

yeah, the ai rarely seems to understand that pillaging is an option, though i have seen them pillage on occasion. more often than not they just move a unit into the citadel tile, suffer damage, next turn move back (but still beside the citadel) and die (after being hit by a ranged attack or two). having a citadel beside a lake can really mess with the ai. some civs like washington and alexander and genghis will use citadels offensively though, stealing territory, which is nice to see, if only civs like china were programmed to do the same. half the time i see civs like china or germany with about 8 great generals, but they never just drill citadel holes into my territory as they should if they really wanted an advantage.

The Great Artist is the only guy you can burn for a Golden Age now, as far as I've discovered. And the Great General does the "culture bomb" thing with his citadel heh heh!

As others have said already the new GG use is arguably more "overpowered" than before. But with Fall patch that AI will actually pillage now, that kind of mitigate the ability. Still, culture bomb is good even for a peace game (I've bombed CS/other civs to get luxury for CS quests, lol) and it's still godly during offensive combat.