Game 129

First off: I've joined a second game, and am currently unaligned. 132 135.

There's too much here for me to address point by point, but I'll give it a go:

I acquired a Great Artist. Great and useless. But I cannot complete the picture puzzle (did not see that there was a swap limit).
Great and useFUL. All great people add a +5% bonus to their category: Great Artists provide a harvest bonus to culture, Great Scientists add 5% to beakers, Great Builders add to Production [hammers], Great Prophets add to Food, and Merchants to gold.

This bonus is additive: 5 Great Scientists will net you a +25% bonus on all your research. This can be an extremely powerful leveraging tool when coupled with specialization and civics.

Also, it's wise to accumulate multiple Great People, not just for the harvest bonuses [I really hate the pseudo-word boni!!] but also for the ability to crank out wonders at opportune times. I have yet to see this for myself, but there's a lot of discussion about how the mini-wonders are not at all balanced.


Let me get this straight: I am at Size 2 and I need 320 food to grow to size 3. When I 'harvest' I get 2 food, and it doesn't appear to matter if my minions are in the corn field or the vegetable garden. I am at 237 food. I need over 40 harvests to grow to size 3? Really? And I'll gain one more harvest in about 3 hours to bring my total available harvests to 35.
I could be wrong on this so be forewarned. Food, Production, Science, Gold, and Culture accumulates at the rate of [x] per Harvest, whether you're online or not. [x] is the sum of all the citizens' output +GP bonuses + civics modifiers:
Your farmer lives far from his field, which is far from the Palace, and there's no granary. He's gathering 4 food per harvest: 4fph. Harvests accumulate at around 1 per hour, whether you're online or not. I *think* that when you're offline, the food gets dumped into the pot, and your Harvest Counter increases by one. But while you're online, I don't think the food gets dumped into the pot. You can cash out a slew of Harvests all at once while you're playing. I could be VERY wrong about the online / offline thing, so don't give it much stock.

The important thing is to see is not that you will take 40 harvest to grow, but that you're going about it wrong:
YOU DON'T NEED TO EARN FOOD EVERY HARVEST!
This is a fundamental concept, and will be very difficult for experienced civ players to overcome - it's almost ingrained in us to only go into a food deficit when absolutely necessary for short-term tactical reasons. That is not the case here.

It costs nothing to move a house, so if your farmer will earn more food in a different location (close to the field or orchard, close to granary or palace, next to water forest) then do that before cashing out Harvests. So if I were interested in growing my city to the next size, I'd set all my citizens to be farmers, move their houses to maximize their take, and then cash out my harvests, sign off, and go to bed.


I hope we get to play another one together. The whole point of these types of games is to band together with friends and play as a team. This is my first try at CivWorld and I'm stuck on a team with loads of people I don't know.
:wavey: Hi Donsig! Great to see you again!
Fallacy: You are not stuck anywhere. Any player is able to leave any team (civ) at any time. You will become an Independent Nation. You won't have all the techs you currently have (see Pepere's notes somewhere else around here), and you can't build Wonders. But you are then free to join any other civ you like, as long as it's not closed or at the player maximum. So if you wanted, you could join Spain, Russia, Japan, Aztecs, Mongols, British, etc.

If you want to play with people you know, well, I'm on the Aztecs. In 132 135 I'm unaffiliated, but I'm not planning on staying that way forever (I just started it on a whim earlier today).


I just figured out today that we can make units with hammers. I thought we could only buy them.
Not only that, but you can sell one resource category for gold, then either buy units or hammers! We were going into a battle with the British, and they were fielding a lot more units than we had. I sold off culture (in 100c blocs) for ~300g, purchased hammers (it's all in blocs of 100) for ~600, and built Natives (each Native requires 50:hammers:). The price in gold at the time for a Native was around 600. So I was getting 2x as many Natives by buying :hammers: and building than I could have if I paid gold outright. But this was a unique case - one of the best parts of CivWorld is the Marketplace. It's important to check it at least a couple of times every time you connect.


You also have some control over what the harvest brings in. Pepere posted some tactics for this.
Ok, here's how I've been playing. But again, I'm not at all sure if this is smart. I only started playing this game about 3 or 4 days ago.

Before logging out of the game, I decide where I need to focus my resources - how do I want my citizens to spend the night: Do I need Gold? Do I need to Grow? Is the price of Culture high? Are the civics and great people giving me a boost to something, that's where I'm going to look first!

Then I check the marketplace. If, for instance, Culture is selling really high, and there's a commodity that's low-to-middling, then I might sell a bunch of culture (paced out, to keep the price high) and invest in the commodity. But if I'm close to earning a GP, then I'd probably sit on it. But maybe I'm in the mood to do a mini-game: The points you've accumulated towards the threshold (next GP or next Tech) allow you more moves in the mini-games - in which case I won't sell that resource.

So I've done my day-trading, now I go back to the citizens. Will they be Fooding, Hammering, Golding, Sciencing, or Culturing? Let's say I choose Science. I make sure my Library or University is Ginormous. I might even trade in gold, food, or culture for hammers in order to do this depending on the numbers. Then I move all my citizen housing in order to maximize the Science output. Happiness will increase this, proximity will increase this. It might take me 10 minutes or more to work it all out. I want to obtain every last available unit because these little guys are going to be going like this until I connect the next day!

Then I click through all my accumulated Harvests until there are no more. I'm sure some people then go back to the marketplace to see if there are any other trades to make before leaving the game, but for me that would be how I wind up never leaving. Once my Harvests are gone, I'm out.

This is how I control the Harvest.

I don't set a couple guys to collecting food, a couple on hammers, and a single guy on science. This is wildly inefficient. In the beginning of the game, those farmers might only bring in 5 each (10), workers 4 each (8) and 4 science (4) for a total Harvest of 22. But if all 5 citizens were living in close quarters, working on the same job, close to their dropoff (palace or building) then you might see 30 total. In fact, my numbers might even be too low! As I mentioned - I'm extremely new to this game still.


Regarding the closed borders thing, I have a feeling that I would not like to be on a team that's willing to implement it. It kind of goes against my own gaming spirit. There might be more people out there who feel the same way. If it comes up, we simply have to speak up and let everyone know that we're not willing to continue contributing to a Civilization that's unwilling to accept new people. I might change my mind in the future, but I just can't imagine a scenario where winning the game is more important to me than having a good time while playing it.
 
Talk about unbalanced:
I just checked in, and we're in the Early Atomic Age. But my civ has yet to discover Monarchy, Engineering, Fuedalism, blah blah blah blah
 
AndreasB from the American Territories in game 129. What's also a bit difficult is the lack of support for organisation. It's almost impossible to organise a civ wide strategy at least at this time. This might change when people start to join games together, but as of now it's a Massively Single player game.
 
I think that's due to three reasons:

1) There is no good intra-team communication network. The chat system is not good enough for this. I tried Travian once and it has a system (in addition to chat) where an email type message can be sent (in game) to the entire team. Not everyone can do this. The founder of the team can and he/she can also give that power to others on the team. Kingdom's of Camelot (another fb game also allows team-wide messages. It would be helpful for organization if the ministers could send out messages to the team.

I agree that as players go into games as a group the mutual efforts will increase. After this first learning game for me I want to find some CivFanatics members to join a game with. I think a thread hear for a team would be a much better communication device than the CivWorld chat. Of course it wouldn't be private here.

2) Many of us are still learning. It took me several days to realize I could make units with hammers. I thought they could only be purchased in the market. I mentioned this in the team chat and another player had missed that, too. So as we learn and continue to play we'll get better.

3) The individual goals of medals and fame points will distract players from the team goals to some extent. Not sure this is bad.
 
I gotta admit, we are doing quite well in Russia atm. Japan can't decide on invading us, and even if they do, they have little hope of winning against us because we are a core of active people, who doesn't field 1 unit armies.

LasseH from Russia with love.
 
How do we tell which game we're in? I started this morning (CatherineB) and am currently unalligned.
There are 2 ways:
1. when the game is loading it will say 'connecting to game xxx
2. once you're ingame, mouse over your face in the upper left. You'll see a throne icon appear. Click on that, bringing you to your throne room. Once there, click on the chess-pawns icon. This brings you to your game screen, showing you your completed games, active games, and any available games.
 
Game 129 here, FerdinandW from Russia :)

Kinda sad that I had to miss the fight because of work, really felt like we would win against the Japanese. Good fight tough, learned a lot for a future game ;)

My biggest gripe is the fact that only 1 person gets credited for building a wonder. I've so far lost my kingship 4 times by building a wonder together with one of the princes and only him getting the credit. Felt especially bad when it was built for a cultural victory.

After that is the general pointlessness of artists/merchants vs farmers/builders. It's always better to just sell prod/food and buy culture if desired.
 
Hi FerdinandW :wavey:
PeterG (Aztecs) here.

I've heard your comment about the poor value of artists/merchants/scientists before, but I'm not sure I agree. This is, however, my first game.

It seems to me that in some circumstances the specialists can outperform the workers and farmers. Not long-term, but for day or two. Besides, it was my understanding that purchasing culture is not counted towards puzzle swaps, purchased science doesn't add maze moves.

Only one person getting credit for a multiple GP wonder is a problem they'll have to address.

I also wish the community chat was archived, so I could have read more about the Battle. I only saw some of the last comments about it. But it seemed to showcase some of the gameplay issues this closed beta should be highlighting for the developers.
 
Scientists can produce upward of 57 pr harvest, with the right bonuses, well worth it.

Gold is never worth more than science, production or food, but can only be accumulated at around the same rate using citizens. Culture peaks at about 300 pr 100, which is more or less the lowest that production go.

Having artists also seems like a waste, considering how much passive culture income I have from my palace, and people in the civ doing double-swaps. So much in fact, that I don't notice a difference if I put all my citizens as artists.

And yes, I know I was mistaken about the battle. Blame the world map for only showing defensive strength.
 
unless i'm going for a wonder, i usually sell off all of my culture so i can buy other stuff with the money, so i'm obviously not running any artists, either.
 
ChrisH here, originally in india but switched to russia last friday.

Artists and merchants are worthless. Before harvest I would switch to whatever was "hot" in the market - so production early, then food. I also built lots of scientists cause maze moves really helped us (russia) get those wins even though we were a small civ.

Had a lot of fun with the market aspect.. buying and selling things. At times (during war especially) you could build units and sell them and even buy production with the money and come out ahead.

Still... not as engaging to me as a real game of civ 4 or 5.
 
Played 129 as JavierR - Mongols. I´m about to join 140. It´s a pity I found the thread too late...
 
I wake up today and go to CivWorld and now I'm in game 140 and 129 is gone. Had no warning the end was near.
 
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