Armed Zealots

[raider980]

What's wrong with Kameha? And isn't a CV even harder on Continents?

 

[Nizef]

I am fine with all the suggested civs to play. One day, it might be interesting to see what we could do with Austria.

 

[Grendeldef]

• No DOWing CS just for workers

Do we keep this as it's here or the way we had it with Theo or some possible third alternative?

I understand the reasoning behind it being a no-go area but it's also the most limiting factor by the time of 4th/5th/6th city unless we'll have a neighnour(s) with very hostile union attitude so the proletariat is easy to recruit to our side. Out of the available options I'd pick 2 or 3 but I can work with 1 as well.

---busy thread which is always nice

What's wrong with Kameha? And isn't a CV even harder on Continents?

Kameha will meet everyone by ~T60 and our likely violent manners may result a chain of denounces to celebrate the founding of WC which isn't exactly helpful.
Generally Continents makes everything harder than Pangaea so the default answer is yes. On the other hand if we were to properly release our teen-angst from T0 it might be good to keep half of the world in the dark for ~100+ turns.
I just don't play Pangaea on my own so by default I rolled Continents. I can start rolling Pangaea maps if Sweden is the civ of choice and Pangaea is what is wanted. Vada's task of rolling several good maps with different civs seemed like a burden for one man so I thought I'd roll some bad maps off the table.

My second Sweden Continents roll had Lake Victoria, Uluru and Sri Pada all <10 tiles from the capital and I thought I hit the jackpot. Then it turned out to be a tiny continent with 3 luxuries and no AIs.

Had that been Spain I think we would've found a way to faith-buy Astronomy by Civil Service.

 

[vadalaz]

I just don't play Pangaea on my own so by default I rolled Continents. I can start rolling Pangaea maps if Sweden is the civ of choice and Pangaea is what is wanted. Vada's task of rolling several good maps with different civs seemed like a burden for one man so I thought I'd roll some bad maps off the table.

Thanks! If you roll a good Sweden map that'll help a lot. I've got a nice China/Continents start, will roll Brazil maps next. And we should save all three maps we roll for future games.

 

[Grendeldef]

I have now 2 playable (after ~15 turns) Sweden Pangaea maps & start rolling Continents again in hope that after yesterday's violently different views me & the game can agree what a Continents should look like.

Also, how do people feel about cooking the map settings to Huge map, remove 2 civs, add few CSs & high/medium sea lvl? In theory it should keep the land mass available per civ roughly the same as in large/10/20/low but is easier to roll & leaves the world circumnavigeable by default.

 

[vadalaz]

Yeah a custom number of civs and CSs is fine by me. Huge maps have lower per-city penalties so they can be more enjoyable to play as well.

 

[Grendeldef]

You could start a new thread for the next game. I'm done rolling for now & and just play for ~15 whether there's anything worth continuing or immediately discarding. After that I can put up T0 SSs of each for voting with the others. I assume it'll be 2 Pangaeas & 2-3 Continents for Sweden. After these rolling sessions I'm again able & willing to DoW everyone & everything I'll meet - this is not the most fun one can spend time on Civ5.

For those who like Salt starts I can say that try Gustav - half of the maps start with Salt.

 

[raider980]

I don’t have any special interest in playing China, I mentioned them only as part of an East Asian TSL map. So we don’t have to play them outside of that context. That map really benefits from modded civs so if others aren’t interestedly those civs we don’t need to do East Asia either.

Another thing I was thinking of is the scenario Into the Renaissance playing as England and have to win the game by conquering the Roman Empire (or at least that's what gets you points and what I was trying to do). I've never been able to win.

 

[Grendeldef]

Raider mentioned he didn't like Abundant resources. What did everyone else think? Personally I thought the map had fairly good resource spread, and lack of immediately obvious expo spots created a pretty interesting puzzle for city placement (for which I think we all had different solutions ).

I think the map was fine or even good compared to the average crap the game tries to get me hooked on. If I could I'd still limit yield to 6 per resource tile but that's a minor issue and something one can get used to. It feels weird that a single tile can support a massive army and if everything is plentyful pillaging takes some proper effort to cause a resource shortage.
The City locations is another matter. If we alternatively can see 4-8 solid locations, settle the average of those and still miss everyone's top spots something very interesting is going on. Part of this is (I assume) peeps generally playing std sized maps which makes 3C/4C Tradition a solid default for everything while I don't take Tradition unless threatened and expansion is in my DNA. Most likely I'm also more familiar with larger maps and & larger # of cities. This tints the average of these games way more than one player usually would/should.
I can't remember if I've said previously or not and sorry if I did but cities especially on larger maps are like armies - everyone has/everywhere is one and I prefer it to be mine hence I settle tactical cities which from std map 8/16 civs pov might look awful and surely not beneficial to sci VC. There's always the possibility of taking others' cities but they rarely are on the right location and it doesn't much please outsiders and those later settled AI cities tend to be even crappier.
Wonderful subject anyway, the settling, in general.

 

[beetle]

My appologies @raider980 for not being more timely with this reply.

That's not how ideological pressure works though. It works on levels. Whether one civ has 11% or 29% influence makes no difference; but once it hits 30% then the receiver of that pressure gets hit with a bunch of unhappiness all at once. And if an AI has more tourism, then they are going to get to the next level faster than the player and every % bonus they get is going to give them an even bigger advantage over the player. So the player is going to be on the receiving end of that unhappiness before the AI. That's why we want to give OB to AI with the same Ideology; so they're influence on us can get to higher levels which offsets any pressure we have from an AI with a differing ideology.

The ideological pressure being in tiers is exactly why you want AI with different Ideologies to be giving you OB. You state exactly why you give OB to AI with same Ideology, and it is the same mechanic for AIs with different Ideologies giving you OB.

In my experience, it's rare that an AI switches ideology.

I see it the majority of my Deity games.

And in this game it happened because most of the Civs went order, including the cultural/tourism powerhouses. I haven't looked at the game but I'd bet we had very little to do with Pocatello switching, we probably were Exotic over him from our early tourism from sacred sites.

It is a fair point that the player typically is not the tourism leader. But I am sure we helped Pocatello flip. This game might be a good one to experiment with. If we did not have OB with Pocatello, I am sure he would have flipped later than he did. But maybe, might he not flipped at all without our helping?

But if we have Freedom or Autocracy and most of the other Civs have Order (which is usually the case) then we're going to get hit with lots of ideological pressure and we would need to manage that to try and avoid giving those Order civs any bonuses against us.

For me, managing the happy is a big appeal of play. It feels like I am experiencing the game as the developers designed it to work. Which is why I avoid one-way OB, because then I am just cheating myself of the proper challenge.

 

[raider980]

I think we'll just need to disagree on this subject.

The ideological pressure being in tiers is exactly why you want AI with different Ideologies to be giving you OB. You state exactly why you give OB to AI with same Ideology, and it is the same mechanic for AIs with different Ideologies giving you OB.

Oh, I agree with the above. I want the opposing ideology AI to give me OB and I want to give OB to same ideology AI. But I don't want to give OB to the AI with different ideologies because that increases their pressure on me. In my games I buy OB with the AI of differing ideologies, but since we can't do that in this game I would prefer not to trade OB at all. Especially if the opposing AI has more tourism than me because that is a lopsided trade in the AI's favor.

For me, managing the happy is a big appeal of play.

Not me, I hate the happiness mechanic of Civ 5. It is the one thing I would change most about the game.