How I had the most enjoyable Civ 5 experience yet

I recently played on a modded communitas map script with 8 civs, and 10 city states. Epic pace on standard map. I took the Huns and played them more as Hungary (capital was named Budapest and i aimed for a science win). I wound up starting on the western hemisphere with Byzantine, Romans, and the French. Early on I conquered city states with my battering ram and puppetted 2 of them with my eyes on the 3rd.

But before I did that I noticed that Theodora literally had 1 warrior defending her 2 cities. 1 warrior. I had 5 horse archers and a ram. So without even really planning for it I was like.. eff this I took her down. Took Constaninople and razed their 2nd city to ground, ending her civ. I then ended Eastern Orthodoxy, the only other religion on our continent. So.. that`s kind of evil.

While I was building up to take the 3rd city state Rome DOW'd me (reasonable - I was turning into a tyrant) and I really had to scramble to keep Constaninople. It was hairy but I kept the city. Rome offered peace in exhcange for 45 turns of fur. So then out of no where France decides to invade. Thing is though with my horse archers stationed on the frontier I saw it coming a mile away and had a nice army ready for them, including 2 purchased crossbow units. I slaughtered their army then I went just to TOWN on France. I think I pillaged every single improvement they had from Paris to Orleans to their 5th city I cant`remember the name of. With infoaddict even at end game you can see the huge drop in GDP they had from that invasion. So this is maybe 50 turns after the 1st Roman war and while I was taking losses Caeser was building up and had a 2nd go at me. DOW`d on again by Rome, 3rd time in the game. This time I was in a better way to defend my holdings and Rome offered me peace and Antium after a brief war.

So I`ve got a sizeable empire of city states, a 2nd capital, and a huge army. Then a really nice cold war brews up with me France and Rome churning out unit after unit. Massive armies. I noticed that Rome build up only so much though then tailed off to start building infrastructure. So what do I do? I DOW them and in 15 turns I take Rome, their biggest city outside Rome, and literally wipe out their empire soon after. But funny thing was as I DOW'd Rome was like "You're evil may win ...something something". and I was like.. god damn I've turned into Attila here without even trying.

The game progressed well, until Ideoligies. France had a very strong culture and I never could settle between the autocracy of France, and Order of Poland. Poland had very dominant culture in the East. In the end my empire became untennable, the unhappiness and rioting was endless. i build a tradition socity when I needed liberty, and my armies conquered land I coulnd't hold. I've never been so pleased with a loss.

What made this game great?

• Communitas map, modded for more land mass and also to give me 2 giant continents but they're interesting and snakey. Not bland giant blobs.
• I modded the leader flavors a lot so only very religious civs would take piety, and the rest would mostly take liberty and tradition, with a few honour civs being selected by aggressive civs. out of 20 civs 12 would take trad or liberty equally, and the remaining 8 would take piety and honor split up. this is a very nice mix and the way it should be
• i used reform and rule which make social policies much better
• i used a mod that lets you build soldiers and navy on standard speed, but the game itself is on epic. meaning everything is fully balanced but you can have actual wars with each era
• i modded flavors for leaders so that there's more culture flavor for civs that it makes sense on (brazil as example) and science civs are heavy science flavored (babylon and korea). i also turned up the archeology flavor on civs with natural culture tendency.

I cant wait to give the game another go tonight on these settings. What do you do to make the game more difficult and more interesting beyond the non modded specs?

If you are going for domination it's best to sell(or raze) the useless cites you obtain. If you raze them then you'll get an immediate hit to your policy count which is only rectified after you pick a new policy(you must pick that option immediately when receiving a new city). I always sell, or never accept cities in trade deals(opting for gpt).
Autocracy imo is prolly the best ideology to pick and it covers most bases and the happiness bonuses you get from your defensive/offensive buildings is usually more than enough to offset any ideological unhappiness.

Can someone point towards a mod that modifies game speed properly, epic research, but standard production, deal etc. basically standard rules for everything, but era progression, yet decently balanced (no running out of everything to build all the time etc.). Or similar with quick - standard.

So far I've only seen epic speed ones with modified production, which means you play by epic rules.

Resurrection said:

• I modded the leader flavors a lot so only very religious civs would take piety, and the rest would mostly take liberty and tradition, with a few honour civs being selected by aggressive civs. out of 20 civs 12 would take trad or liberty equally, and the remaining 8 would take piety and honor split up. this is a very nice mix and the way it should be
• i modded flavors for leaders so that there's more culture flavor for civs that it makes sense on (brazil as example) and science civs are heavy science flavored (babylon and korea). i also turned up the archeology flavor on civs with natural culture tendency.

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This is something that has been on my to-do list for a while. Can you give more information on what specific entries you changed, and how much?

kaspergm said:

This is something that has been on my to-do list for a while. Can you give more information on what specific entries you changed, and how much?

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so this one requires direct modding of the XML, which I didn't make into a real mod. Step 1 backup your files if you plan on playing MP. Step 2 depends on which leader you mod. BNW leaders are DLC/expansion2/gameinfo/XML/Leaders I believe off the top of my head. You have to reduce the religious flavour of civs you don't want taking Piety to 1. The AI LOVES religion.

For other leaders, go into expansion/ and edit religion flavour there. Korea and Denmark and a few others are in the other DLCs. There's a culture flavour you want to increase as well, that will cause them to build more culture things 1st... but the real trick is to change archaeology in the expansion 2 files. A higher flavour here will def give a boost to civs tourism as they will spam out Indiana Jones' to get some artifacts.

Wow. Cool list of mods. Could you please tell me how you made the units be traindo on standard even though the game was in Epic?

I used another mod as a base then modded it myself , its private but I guess I can go public with it. all it does it change the game speeds so military units train at standard, everything else stays epic. workers, buildings, settlers, etc

Dude, you need to make it public. One of my concerns with the game hás always bem the speed of trainining military units, and all the mods you said in your thread look amazing. Let us have the most enjoyable experience too.

I had a good play the other day on this game. I had a domination victory one turn before the ai achieved a cultural victory. I used bushido and rushed to the final capital with damaged rocket artilleries that were attacking at full strength at the last few turns before the ai got to cultural victory. My units survived two atomic bomb attacks.