maurcus
Warlord
- Joined
- May 24, 2012
- Messages
- 245
All of which is true of Greece. The difference isn't that Siam is better for diplo victory, it's that it rewards you for playing diplomatically, and simply by giving you extra bonuses for having CS allies, it improves your game position for any victory condition.
No, it isn't close. Greece's benefit is only of value when you're close to losing friendship/allied status, which very rarely happens if you're completing quests. Losing influence half as fast is not equivalent to being friends/allies for twice as long. Even if Greece does get an early game advantage somehow, as soon as Patronage hits and Siam stops losing influence that would take it below friendship status, any minor advantage the Greeks have would vanish.
It is inaccurate - I'd thought the same in vanilla, but it was just an omission from the entry. And the G&K Civilopedia restores the reference to +2 science from jungles. Which, incidentally, Siam is much more likely to start close to.
Only assuming you aren't completing any other quests or making any effort to gain influence - and what would be the point of that if going Patronage? As I noted, it's very rare to lose alliances with city-states through natural decay in G&K. Even if you don't incidentally fulfill quest objectives, you'll lose an alliance to another civ that's increasing its own influence long before yours drops close to 60. So if you don't make active efforts to keep your city-states, you're not going to keep them as Greece any more than you are as Siam.
Wasn't your claim that it should have been in the top 10? Certainly fun plays a part in whether a civ makes it that far - however there was no suggestion even by its detractors that Denmark is not a fun civ to play. It still got eliminated very early. Though personally I just can't see what would make Greece fun since it doesn't do anything distinctive. For the sort of game you'd want to play with them I can have fun with Siam (decisions to make about which CSes to ally with to maximise my UA benefits) or Sweden (full diplo experience maximising both DoFs and CS alliances, and selecting which CSes to target so that my GPs don't go to waste). Greece seems to have one of the game's most boring UAs, in fact - not only does it not do a lot, but even though it takes a small amount of work to use, it works equally on any CS without giving you any incentive to make strategic decisions regarding your choice of friends/allies that you wouldn't make anyway, and its effects are entirely passive once they come into play.
just jumping into this discussion i would also like to note that if you take patronage and spread your religion to a city state you lose no influence per turn at all. as greece that is.