Death of Conventional Strategies? [11/18 Patch Notes]

As some of the better players on this forum have already argued, i'm not really certain that this patch does anything other than make playing on immortal or deity much more micro-intensive if you want a ton of choice in strategy.

Why are you playing on immortal or deity in the first place if you want a ton of choice? :rolleyes:

I'm also wondering why people think that forcing SP adoption has anything to do with stopping ICS? It probably has more to do with saving up for the Rationalism slingshot, in much the same way that it looks like they're trying to slow down other early slingshots.

Pi-R8: As soon as you build a building or unit, you start paying maintenance on it -- you can't "Save up" until you're actually using the building and then pay the maintenance. You can't build a unit and only pay maintenance on the turns they're in combat.

Hopefully you can see the parallel.

With the change, you get a social policy as soon as you've generated enough culture. At worst, you may have to pick one policy in the early game.

As has already been noted, you can still get the later policies in the game. Nothing's preventing you from getting the later policies in the game except your own personal choice.

Alpaca said:
It does not impact the outcome, just makes the way to get there more tedious.

I can see not liking tedium.
 
What about instead of mandating the purchase of SPs, the game simply enforced a ten-turn delay between getting them? (Like the delay in using Great Artists) If you saved up culture for Rationalism or Order, it would still take you another 30 turns to plow through the chain, which is pretty reasonable.

Hmm, that would also mean a minimum of 300 turns before you can even begin the Utopia Project (5 brances x 6 picks x 10 turns); assuming you get one the first turn (possible with a ruin) and always reach the next level before the 10 turn minimum period is over. Possibly closer to 400 turns unless you're doing a OCC.
 
I'm also wondering why people think that forcing SP adoption has anything to do with stopping ICS? It probably has more to do with saving up for the Rationalism slingshot, in much the same way that it looks like they're trying to slow down other early slingshots.

Why are you thinking that forcing SP adoption is the right fix for stopping the rationalism slingshot? There's a grand total of ONE broken SP in rationalism - the one that get's you two free techs. Change that to one free tech, or change it two the two lowest priced techs, or nerf it in some other way and the slingshot is dead.

Making a choice-reducing change to the game when they could have instead fixed one broken policy definitely hurts the games strategic complexity.
 
Important point to note. If hover over the Adopt Policy bar then the tooltip menu tell yous to rightclick to ignore, therefore it is obvoius that the dev intent was to allow you to choose at a later date. I firmly believe changing this aspect is a knee jerk reaction which a: panders to the nosiy casual gamer usually found in the general Civ5 forum b: has not been thought through in a logical manner - by someone who has actually played the game properly rather than play testing a small aspect of it.

I really think that no one on the Firaxis payroll plays Civ5 at high level in a serious manner and thats the core issue facing this game. Lets not forget how Blake got picked up by Firaxis to work on Civ4 after it was released.

These patches are all very well, but they do not prevent me settling a few cities, building a barracks then 6 warriors, quick MC beeline then bulb steel, i'll be forced down the Honour path due to lack of decent alternative, so i'll be upgrading those warriors to Longswords with 50% off. Promotions or not I'll still be finished by turn 230 - 250 just before crappy programing causes so much slowdown that the bordom kills me.

Just been looking at Starcraft 2 down the shops, someone was saying it was a bit like Dune, i'm getting increasing tempted to demand a refund from Amazon and ask for SC2 instead.
 
Pi-R8: As soon as you build a building or unit, you start paying maintenance on it -- you can't "Save up" until you're actually using the building and then pay the maintenance. You can't build a unit and only pay maintenance on the turns they're in combat.
Actually you can do that. You can build a unit 99% done, and then let it sit in the queue until you're ready to use it. Unlike civ 4, there's no penalty to doing that.

A better analogy might be to say that you can't prebuild units before they're unlocked by the tech. Except that you still sort of can, by stockpiling gold to purchase things as soon as they're available. So I don't really know where you're going with this analogy.

It's not like this was particularly imbalanced anyway. Saving up policies for the later branches was often worse than just taking early policies. You had to make a tough choice between taking weaker policies early on, or waiting for a while to take stronger policies. Now they've just taken that choice away, unless you feel like doing some tedious micromanagement to circumvent the rule.

With the change, you get a social policy as soon as you've generated enough culture. At worst, you may have to pick one policy in the early game.

As has already been noted, you can still get the later policies in the game. Nothing's preventing you from getting the later policies in the game except your own personal choice.

The cost of policies increases dramatically with each policy you take, though. With a large empire, getting a 5th policy might take 50 turns. You can it's "your own personal choice" to just wait an extra 50 turns, but it's a pretty bad strategy to do that. It's already kind of questionable whether Order and Autocracy have a useful place in civ V; this change will just remove them completely for anything except sandbox games.
 
I had well over 100 hours in before I knew you could save up policies. I think the game was intended to be that way from the beginning and don't see it as a big deal. I've done cultural victory quite a few times this way, granted only on king level.
 
The policy change leaves me thinking I'm going to be trying to blitz my way through the tech tree just to get to whatever era the policy I want is in. Not that I didn't do that a bit before but now I kinda have to do it ASAP or risk spending a SP on something I just don't care about.
 
Why not make it only 1 allowed per turn?
Because if you do a late era start, the game starts you with a wad of culture points (and up to three settlers/workers/military). This is enough to allow you to immediately open a tree and get three policies from it (or more on lower difficulties).
 
I have some suggestions for what the patch after this should do:

1)Players must construct new buildings as soon as they are available. No units can be built in a city until all buildings are finished. This will prevent the cheesy "grow your economy quickly" strategies by forcing players to make even the useless buildings that do nothing but hurt them.

2)Some players might attempt to circumvent change 1 by avoiding techs that unlock buildings. To prevent this, all players will be forced to follow a single tech path, which goes down evenly through all eras. Just like the AI!

3)Citizens cannot be reassigned, but must work the tile they are automatically assigned to.

4)To prevent the "flanking" exploit during warfare, all units now automatically march straight towards the nearest hostile city as soon as they're built.

With these changes, the AI will finally be competitive, and players will be doing things the way the designers intended.

If forced to choose, I would follow your guidelines rather than not building a monument until atheism, and selling your cities to win by culture. The only difference is that you were just being sarcastic, while I'm referring to the perverse truth.
 
Why are you playing on immortal or deity in the first place if you want a ton of choice? :rolleyes:


I play on immortal deity, because i've been playing Civ since I was about 12 and lower levels arn't really that challenging for me...I do occanionally roll a settler level OCC tho. Regardless, I feel like previous Civ games (IV especially) offered a lot of choice in how you beat the game, even on the harder difficulty levels. I'm not trying to say that changes to prevent abusive tactics shouldn't be changed; I just wish that they'd make changes that don't pigeonhole us into playing a certain strategy (with a ton more micro as well). I certainly don't know everything, but I think there have been a ton of great alternative options mentioned in this thread alone that would go a long way to accomplishing what we all want: a better game.
 
Why are you playing on immortal or deity in the first place if you want a ton of choice? :rolleyes:

A perfect strategy game should offer multiple viable strategies even at the highest levels of play. Nothing strange about that, even if few games really manage it.
 
If forced to choose, I would follow your guidelines rather than not building a monument until atheism, and selling your cities to win by culture. The only difference is that you were just being sarcastic, while I'm referring to the perverse truth.

I'd agree that selling/razing cities to win by culture is an exploit that should be patched. But there are much better ways of doing so. They could make it so that your culture costs don't go down when you lose cities, for example. Or change the AI so it's not dumb enough to accept all your cities as a gift.
 
pi-r8,

Yes, if they can have some AI pay for cities but others not based on personality, you'd think they could keep them from being gifted. There could be pop-based price mechanic that a civ has to pay in order to acquire a city.
 
(Sigh) Is that why when you hover over the SP icon it tells you how to not take the SP? Or perhaps the tooltip was "unintentionally" put in there?

What this really says is that it was the "intention" of the designers that players not pay attention to the game features.

I like saving up SPs and then dumping them into a branch in connection with an overall strategy. Its FUN!


I had well over 100 hours in before I knew you could save up policies. I think the game was intended to be that way from the beginning and don't see it as a big deal. I've done cultural victory quite a few times this way, granted only on king level.
 
I love the tactical feel of the new combat system! As an old US Army "Redleg" myself, I especially enjoy ranged artillery! Yes, I know the scale of the map makes it unrealistic, but it feels right. Speaking of unrealistic, I'm glad they got away from the massive "kill stacks" of yore. Only a computer can keep track of it. Back in the days of cardboard war games stacks like that would keep falling over. (Which, BTW, is where the term originated.)
 
I really like these changes except for the SP change. It's a lazy nerf that nobody asked for that limits diversity in the game. I mean it's not like it wasn't difficult enough trying to do Autocracy in a game either.

I'd even welcome having reduced culture if you chose to save for a policy. 50% culture reduction each turn that you save up culture for a policy. You lose culture but at least you get your policy.
 
All the people hating the SP change just got too used to use the saving SP exploit. The idea behind the SP is, that a civilization gradely and steadily improves it self. Not having a rich culture and out of a sudden be immensly overpowered because of that. If you never had the chance to save up culture, you would not complain about the way it will be. You have to think how to go through the tech tree to make your SP choices reasonnable. I really like that change. There are more good points to it:

1. You can actually detect that a player is going for culture. If he saves up culture, its impossible to notice that someone comes close to the utopia project until its almost too late.

2. The AI probably can handle immidate choices better than with the saving opportunity. I think its tromendously difficoult if not impossible to make an AI that can handel that option. Therefore, the human player doesnt get a sort of unfair advantage to the AI.

3. You get social policies from the several aereas of human history. That is also just quite reasonnable.

Abusing the SP as it is now is not fun. Its boring because there is no counter. If the AI would pull something like it off, human would suspect it to be cheating. Anyway, lets see how it goes in the actual game.
 
I'd agree that selling/razing cities to win by culture is an exploit that should be patched. But there are much better ways of doing so. They could make it so that your culture costs don't go down when you lose cities, for example. Or change the AI so it's not dumb enough to accept all your cities as a gift.

I did a little experimenting near the end of a game, trying to sell cities. I already knew that not all AI will buy a city, although all will accept one. But Japan, who was in a buying mode, would only pay a "fair price" for a city - meaning that he wouldn't pay for the size-20 capital, but would pay through the nose for a size-15 city. Persia, on the other hand, had less and offered to pay less for some other ones. If the AI could only pay for cities, and only pay what they consider to be fair, that problem might be solved. And the mechanics seem to be within reach.
 
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