What skill? Creating a few trade routes and making units? The issue is that now hapiness, policies/tenents and science are against wide. There's no point in having a city beyond the 6th or so, as the benefits it gives are practically zip while it takes a lot more effort/gold to develop properly. The whole 'expansion' part of the '4x' is just gone (or at least pointless).
Game worse since BNW ?
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isau
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2007
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- 3,071
I wouldn't say it made it worse. There are a lot of things about GNK I thought were better though. My list of detractions in BNW are below.
- Diplomatic penalties for capturing a city with units are in the worst possible place: extremely punitive but easily gameable by having the AI gift cities. Some people might consider this a "strategy" but it feels like an exploit to me.
- Related to item above. Despite the heightened diplo risks, the game does not actually tell you which AIs are going to be upset by you capturing a city or declaring war. This was mildly important to know in GNK, but critical to know now. My method in BNW is to save the game, take the city, and reload if the results are too extreme. It doesn't help that the AI will sometimes not decide that it is offended until many turns after the fact.
- Defending trade routes is the pits on larger maps or maps with many islands. War is not even the main issue here. It's that a single Barbarian camp spawned on some remote island can shut down an economy based on the sheer fact that so much land goes unclaimed even late into the game. When Barbarian go to the effort of entering your lands and pillage it's fair: you have a reasonable chance of defending against it and the improvement can be repaired relatively quickly. But a single Barbarian trireme spawned on some random island can topple +100 gpt returns of a Modern era civ by sheer luck. Even if you line the seas with counter-units stopping this from happening becomes a huge chore. It's not that defending the routes is impossible, its that in absence of the ability to force a war vessel to travel with the unit, it's extremely boring to monitor it every single turn, and simply comes down to sheer luck whether your economy topples in a handful of turns.
- Based on the above, the need to build caravans and trade vessels with hammers at all results in tons of turns where you just wait. We do not need to build spies, or rebuild them every time they are caught, they just show up at the appropriate time and reappear shortly after being killed. Would be less annoying if trade route vessels weren't being destroyed all the time. If you are given an island start with no other civs or city states this issue becomes illustrated vividly.
- Swapping around great works is a needlessly complex activity. I have stopped playing Culture victories in BNW to avoid what feels like an unrelated soduku puzzle thrown randomly into the game.
- Diplomatic penalties for capturing a city with units are in the worst possible place: extremely punitive but easily gameable by having the AI gift cities. Some people might consider this a "strategy" but it feels like an exploit to me.
- Related to item above. Despite the heightened diplo risks, the game does not actually tell you which AIs are going to be upset by you capturing a city or declaring war. This was mildly important to know in GNK, but critical to know now. My method in BNW is to save the game, take the city, and reload if the results are too extreme. It doesn't help that the AI will sometimes not decide that it is offended until many turns after the fact.
- Defending trade routes is the pits on larger maps or maps with many islands. War is not even the main issue here. It's that a single Barbarian camp spawned on some remote island can shut down an economy based on the sheer fact that so much land goes unclaimed even late into the game. When Barbarian go to the effort of entering your lands and pillage it's fair: you have a reasonable chance of defending against it and the improvement can be repaired relatively quickly. But a single Barbarian trireme spawned on some random island can topple +100 gpt returns of a Modern era civ by sheer luck. Even if you line the seas with counter-units stopping this from happening becomes a huge chore. It's not that defending the routes is impossible, its that in absence of the ability to force a war vessel to travel with the unit, it's extremely boring to monitor it every single turn, and simply comes down to sheer luck whether your economy topples in a handful of turns.
- Based on the above, the need to build caravans and trade vessels with hammers at all results in tons of turns where you just wait. We do not need to build spies, or rebuild them every time they are caught, they just show up at the appropriate time and reappear shortly after being killed. Would be less annoying if trade route vessels weren't being destroyed all the time. If you are given an island start with no other civs or city states this issue becomes illustrated vividly.
- Swapping around great works is a needlessly complex activity. I have stopped playing Culture victories in BNW to avoid what feels like an unrelated soduku puzzle thrown randomly into the game.
InDubioProReo
Warlord
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2012
- Messages
- 231
I think game is much better since BnW. CV is much, much more fun. Trade routes add so much value. AI finally acts more reasonable, instead of attacking you at every opportunity they sort of weigh the pros and cons.
Pythakoreas
Chef Tain
This.
Disgustipated
Deity
I'm not so sure about that. I'm playing Morrocco now and trying to go "tall", but my score lead is very minor (about 300 points). My best game in this expansion has been with America and a wide empire. I do agree it takes a lot more work.
superliminal
Warlord
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2013
- Messages
- 126
I think to some extent the timing of settling has changed a bit. The AI no longer tries to settle every single scrap of land early (sometimes they still do depending on the personality). So there also isn't as much of a rush when going wide. I frequently find myself settling cities in the mid-late game, particularly if they have a scarce resource (coal seems much rarer in BNW), and they grow so quickly now with internal trade routes. So even if I initially start small, I find that I'm usually at 1-3 in terms of total land by the mid-game. I think this simulates, to a certain extent, industrial age colonization. If you pump up new cities with trade routes, they'll earn their keep in no time.
My most common tactic lately is finding closest ai and archer/cbow rushing it, no matter how peaceful I want/plan to be later, even when taking Tradition. You seem to underestimate gains you get from wars. Yes, you have to use hammers to pump units instead of settlers or workers, but those are supplied to you by your target just bit later.
I really don't see problems with Domination at all. Sure, a +3gpt added to capital would be nice, but otherwise, even being at negative doesn't really factor that much if you have money from meeting CSes etc. saved up for it. You don't need any money beside 'just enough' to field army. Buyrush/bribing cs are bonus, not necessity.
People really seem to want to just steamroll enemy cities and automatically get happiness from them. After you take opponent, you need to stabilize for a bit.
Archer/Cb rush -> stabilize -> cb/xbow -> stabilize -> machine/cavalary/cannon -> stabilize -> artillery/airforce -> crush rest of the world. And I bet better players than me could possibly be warring on two fronts during some of tech periods with much bigger armies since I'm ALWAYS distracted by those shiny-shiny wonders later in the game (I built a Broadway in my last pure science game, still have no idea why... maybe I love the art for it far too much).
I also don't see problem with science penalty. As Zulu domination Immortal game, even having 12 cities/puppets still was enough for me to be leading in tech. Puppets still produce science, per city penalty eat it, but you still should get small lead in tech by it, not to mention loads of gold so that you can field bigger army.
As for settling your own cities, I rarely get to see more than 2-3 good places for expansions myself per map till there is no more space left. Of course if you're like AI and like to set them 4 tiles away from each other and on crappy terrain, it will slow you down, but is it really bad that game penalize for making trash cities?
blackcatatonic
Queen of Meme
This is a fantastic suggestion.
I haven't had too many problems with trade routes being pillaged (fortunately) but this is more down to my being very, very careful with where I send my precious little camels and trade cogs than anything else. The most recent occasion when I lost a caravan it was because my trade partner (Napoleon) was so busy attacking all his neighbours that he forgot to leave any units to defend his own territory, resulting in barbarians running amok and pillaging everything in sight. In the end I had to send my knights over there to kill the barbarian camps myself. It's great that barbs are more threatening than before but the AI really should make some sort of effort to stop them.
