So just finished my first play through and must say I found it way too easy.
Played the game as Byzantium as I wanted to try a powerful religion. At the deity level I figured the AI's would get their religions insanely fast so I went directly for the Stonehenge foregoing any other techs just to be sure, the result was I founded the 2nd or 3rd religion. To be fair I think it was mostly due to a fast friends status with a nearby religious CS, you can waste a lot of faith on getting a pantheon up if you aren't amongst the firsts as the price increases dramatically for each pantheon already founded.
The plan was to get the World Church (+1
for each 5 follower in foreign cities), the Cathedrals and the enhancers for faster spread (+34% spread rate and +33% spread distance), the last part is only possible for Byzantium as they can take an extra enhancer belief as their bonus, but I also think this would work with other civs.
Once the religion was founded and enhanced I just had to sit back and watch it spread netting me insane amounts of culture. I only manually spread it to a few nearby city states at the start to speed it up in the beginning. By turn 100 it was 20 culture per turn extra, which isn't that great I will admit, but from there on the spread just increases exponentially. As more cities convert to a religion, other cities will convert faster, that and growth in already converted cities resulted in 1-3 extra culture for every turn. By turn 200 it was +300 every single turn. Worth noting is that Golden Ages also increases the culture gained from the religion.
Cultural victory hasn't gotten harder to achieve in anyway, so the normal culture buildup is the same, though Cultural city states might be a bit harder to hold, the AI's seem to really like to plant spies in them. Add in extra culture from religion and you can just watch the Social Policies trickle in one by one.
Just to show how incredible the natural spread of your religion can be, Boduccia, who naturally had her own religion, used missionaries and great prophets a lot, but she barely managed to stem the tide, leaving her in a little bubble of her own religion with my own spread to everyone around her, she even took a Great Prophet down to my capitol, so for ~20 turns my Capitol was Christian (The religion she had founded). Worth noting is that you still get the culture from your own religion even though your cities aren't of that religion.
In hindsight, if I had gotten the extra happiness from followers in foreign cities as well, I could have netted an extra 300 happiness, or 150 culture and lots of extra golden ages making it even easier.
As everyone (or at least everyone around you) follows your religion it is very easy to stay friends with most (or all) of your neighbors, so with some careful diplomacy you can sit safely and just focus on getting more culture.
Overall I find the new features in G&K to be very good, making for a more entertaining game. I noticed some things that I found interesting/annoying.
1) The AI is extremely slow, even though I just sat and more or less clicked next turn, the game still took over 9 hours in total with a win on turn ~235 that's about 2 minutes per turn, in which you play ~10-20 seconds in average.
2) The extra culture and gold from Holy Sites with full Piety isn't doubled with full Freedom. Worth knowing when you plan ahead for what to do with your Great Prophets, and later for getting either a prophet or an artist from your faith.
3) AI still chain denounce. No where near as aggressively as before, but the slightest misstep and you have denunciations piling up. For example, once people started entering the later eras and religion mattered less in the diplomacy, I got denounced by a long time friend, simply because I asked him to stop spying on me, that one friendly request apparently out weighted our entire long standing friendship, and once you get 1 denunciation the ball starts rolling. All his friends then denounced me, and then all their friends and so on. Another case was I made a DoF with civ1, and civ2 (who also had a DoF with civ1), civ3 who had denounced civ1 then also denounces me, and a turn later civ2 denounces me as well breaking our DoF, because, as it turned out, civ2 had a DoF with civ3. The AI apparently values other AI friends a lot more than a human player.
4) It isn't good to be a city state. The AI seems to have a lot less grievances with taking neighboring CS, a large number of them was either conquered or annexed by Austria leaving very few if one was in the mood for a diplomatic victory.
5) According to the intelligence I gained from my friends and their spies, a whole lot of people both friends and, well, not-so-friends, was plotting against me, or sending armies and fleets towards me, but not once did any of said plots in result in an actual action. As I see it right now this whole mechanic is just a way to make people like you more, there is no negative effect from telling the victim of a plot that they are being plotted against.
6) Diplomatic effect of getting caught spying. If you as the human player get caught spying, it is the same as if you are settling too near them, do it again and all hell breaks loose, or take the loss of not being able to spy on that civ for a while. However the AI seem to expect there to be no repercussions for them spying on you. If you ask an AI to stop spying on you after you have caught them doing so, they will grovel and beg for forgiveness and then give you a negative diplomatic modifier for asking them to stop spying on you. "Hold on there a moment, is it my fault your spies got caught? I even told you I forgave this one transgression", but no the AI will get pissed at you. So the lesson is head the AI's warnings but don't you ever dare to warn an AI who is doing the same to you!
7) The Great Admiral, what the do you do with these guys? The first couple of them are of course somewhat usable for the extra naval combat bonus, but beyond that? Their ability to instant heal your ships can be useful I presume, though I have never used it as of yet, but is the extra micromanaging, not to mention the gold upkeep for them, really worth it?
8) Faith, it is gained sort of like culture, but the cost for anything you buy with faith doesn't go up with number of cities, meaning a very wide empire can net huge chunks of faith, and remember 10 faith is approximately 1 GPP in the late game, in one game I had a faith gain of 200 per turn (Again Byzantium with all the faith buildings you can get), once I could start buying Great Scientist I surged way beyond all the AI's.
9) Religious imbalance, especially the Pantheon beliefs have a vast gap in strength. For example take the situational extra faith beliefs, I'm thinking on Dance of the Aurora (+1 faith from tundra tiles without forests) compared to the Desert Folklore (+1 faith from all desert tiles, including flooded plains), they are both the same situational type of beliefs, which is all good, but why should the 1st be from only tiles with no forests on them? Yes I get tundra is better than desert in it self, but seriously no one would work a tundra or a desert without some feature or resource on it, making the Desert Folklore much more powerful.
Also a question here as I haven't tested it out by myself yet, the Pantheon Belief, Faith Healers I think, that gives +30 healed when adjacent to a friendly city, the way it is worded makes it sound like you would now heal 50 HP per turn, but that sounds insanely overpowered, so I suspect it is 30 instead of the normal 20. Can anyone comment on that?
Played the game as Byzantium as I wanted to try a powerful religion. At the deity level I figured the AI's would get their religions insanely fast so I went directly for the Stonehenge foregoing any other techs just to be sure, the result was I founded the 2nd or 3rd religion. To be fair I think it was mostly due to a fast friends status with a nearby religious CS, you can waste a lot of faith on getting a pantheon up if you aren't amongst the firsts as the price increases dramatically for each pantheon already founded.
The plan was to get the World Church (+1
for each 5 follower in foreign cities), the Cathedrals and the enhancers for faster spread (+34% spread rate and +33% spread distance), the last part is only possible for Byzantium as they can take an extra enhancer belief as their bonus, but I also think this would work with other civs.Once the religion was founded and enhanced I just had to sit back and watch it spread netting me insane amounts of culture. I only manually spread it to a few nearby city states at the start to speed it up in the beginning. By turn 100 it was 20 culture per turn extra, which isn't that great I will admit, but from there on the spread just increases exponentially. As more cities convert to a religion, other cities will convert faster, that and growth in already converted cities resulted in 1-3 extra culture for every turn. By turn 200 it was +300
every single turn. Worth noting is that Golden Ages also increases the culture gained from the religion.Cultural victory hasn't gotten harder to achieve in anyway, so the normal culture buildup is the same, though Cultural city states might be a bit harder to hold, the AI's seem to really like to plant spies in them. Add in extra culture from religion and you can just watch the Social Policies trickle in one by one.
Just to show how incredible the natural spread of your religion can be, Boduccia, who naturally had her own religion, used missionaries and great prophets a lot, but she barely managed to stem the tide, leaving her in a little bubble of her own religion with my own spread to everyone around her, she even took a Great Prophet down to my capitol, so for ~20 turns my Capitol was Christian (The religion she had founded). Worth noting is that you still get the culture from your own religion even though your cities aren't of that religion.
In hindsight, if I had gotten the extra happiness from followers in foreign cities as well, I could have netted an extra 300 happiness, or 150 culture and lots of extra golden ages making it even easier.
As everyone (or at least everyone around you) follows your religion it is very easy to stay friends with most (or all) of your neighbors, so with some careful diplomacy you can sit safely and just focus on getting more culture.
Overall I find the new features in G&K to be very good, making for a more entertaining game. I noticed some things that I found interesting/annoying.
1) The AI is extremely slow, even though I just sat and more or less clicked next turn, the game still took over 9 hours in total with a win on turn ~235 that's about 2 minutes per turn, in which you play ~10-20 seconds in average.
2) The extra culture and gold from Holy Sites with full Piety isn't doubled with full Freedom. Worth knowing when you plan ahead for what to do with your Great Prophets, and later for getting either a prophet or an artist from your faith.
3) AI still chain denounce. No where near as aggressively as before, but the slightest misstep and you have denunciations piling up. For example, once people started entering the later eras and religion mattered less in the diplomacy, I got denounced by a long time friend, simply because I asked him to stop spying on me, that one friendly request apparently out weighted our entire long standing friendship, and once you get 1 denunciation the ball starts rolling. All his friends then denounced me, and then all their friends and so on. Another case was I made a DoF with civ1, and civ2 (who also had a DoF with civ1), civ3 who had denounced civ1 then also denounces me, and a turn later civ2 denounces me as well breaking our DoF, because, as it turned out, civ2 had a DoF with civ3. The AI apparently values other AI friends a lot more than a human player.
4) It isn't good to be a city state. The AI seems to have a lot less grievances with taking neighboring CS, a large number of them was either conquered or annexed by Austria leaving very few if one was in the mood for a diplomatic victory.
5) According to the intelligence I gained from my friends and their spies, a whole lot of people both friends and, well, not-so-friends, was plotting against me, or sending armies and fleets towards me, but not once did any of said plots in result in an actual action. As I see it right now this whole mechanic is just a way to make people like you more, there is no negative effect from telling the victim of a plot that they are being plotted against.
6) Diplomatic effect of getting caught spying. If you as the human player get caught spying, it is the same as if you are settling too near them, do it again and all hell breaks loose, or take the loss of not being able to spy on that civ for a while. However the AI seem to expect there to be no repercussions for them spying on you. If you ask an AI to stop spying on you after you have caught them doing so, they will grovel and beg for forgiveness and then give you a negative diplomatic modifier for asking them to stop spying on you. "Hold on there a moment, is it my fault your spies got caught? I even told you I forgave this one transgression", but no the AI will get pissed at you. So the lesson is head the AI's warnings but don't you ever dare to warn an AI who is doing the same to you!
7) The Great Admiral, what the do you do with these guys? The first couple of them are of course somewhat usable for the extra naval combat bonus, but beyond that? Their ability to instant heal your ships can be useful I presume, though I have never used it as of yet, but is the extra micromanaging, not to mention the gold upkeep for them, really worth it?
8) Faith, it is gained sort of like culture, but the cost for anything you buy with faith doesn't go up with number of cities, meaning a very wide empire can net huge chunks of faith, and remember 10 faith is approximately 1 GPP in the late game, in one game I had a faith gain of 200 per turn (Again Byzantium with all the faith buildings you can get), once I could start buying Great Scientist I surged way beyond all the AI's.
9) Religious imbalance, especially the Pantheon beliefs have a vast gap in strength. For example take the situational extra faith beliefs, I'm thinking on Dance of the Aurora (+1 faith from tundra tiles without forests) compared to the Desert Folklore (+1 faith from all desert tiles, including flooded plains), they are both the same situational type of beliefs, which is all good, but why should the 1st be from only tiles with no forests on them? Yes I get tundra is better than desert in it self, but seriously no one would work a tundra or a desert without some feature or resource on it, making the Desert Folklore much more powerful.
Also a question here as I haven't tested it out by myself yet, the Pantheon Belief, Faith Healers I think, that gives +30 healed when adjacent to a friendly city, the way it is worded makes it sound like you would now heal 50 HP per turn, but that sounds insanely overpowered, so I suspect it is 30 instead of the normal 20. Can anyone comment on that?
