Piqued
Chieftain
- Joined
- Feb 17, 2020
- Messages
- 4
Pre-script: I looked around for somewhere this kind of thing was supposed to go, read the FAQ, the basics; didn't really see anything. This is actually my first Civ-Fan-Center post, pardon in advance for any faux pas or other breach of etiquette. This is a very long post. Pardon any little typographic or grammatical errors, I would like to go to bed, I promise to do a typographical pass later.
First of all I'd just like to gush a little, my goodness, this mod is very cool - it's not perfect, of course, but it's very cool. I've been playing... about a week now? Week and half, two weeks, something like that. I'm playing a giant world (not bigger, because my computer's a bit of a geezer these days), holy crud it's big and frankly I'm floored that C2C runs as well as it does on a turn to turn basis. Whoever's responsible for the optimization in this thing deserves a trophy, or a medal, or something. I'm playing Marathon speed, I started out in Snail and decided the first time I got to the end of the Ancient era that I was going to restart at a slightly faster speed - not because I didn't like the speed, but because I wanted to see more of the mod, sooner, and made a better educated assessment of whether or not this was something I wanted to sink weeks, months even, into (as seemed increasingly likely the nearer I got to a proper civilization). It was (something I wanted to sink weeks into), I have, and I'm loving it. I'm invested now, I have every intention of finishing this game through to the end, If I have the strength.
We founded Uruk on the south bank of a great lake, and set about the business of making a living as early humans. Our lake, we're calling her Abzu's Basin these days, was blessed with a wide range of resources and conditions that facilitated early moves towards prosperous settlement and the underpinnings of a sedentary lifestyle; fresh water, staple grains, ample wildlife of all sizes - mostly the harmless and variously vulnerable variety - and plenty of gatherables. So we hunted and gathered, invented language, found wonder and introspection in the great landmarks, and generally rose meteorically to early tribalism and a cultural identity. Sumerians spread out from Uruk all along the banks of Abzu's Basin; we met our neighbors to the Northeast, the vile Carthaginians, and the savage Ethiopians to the Southeast, who bred with Neanderthal stock. We were the first in the land to perfect the art of sedentary living, and with it Agriculture, which is when things got dicey for a bit.
The Carthaginians, a jealous and violent people, wanted to ride the grain-train to civilization station too, but they didn't want to do the work. Just after we entered the Ancient era they came over the hills in a great horde with many atalatlists, and other primitive warriors that easily overwhelmed our slightly more advanced garrisons of slingers and obsidian axemen. They had us on a back foot as we scrambled to protect our tribesmen, and quickly conquered another settlement. When they approached Uruk, though, we had a response prepared in the newly discovered art of horse-riding.
We mastered the Ancient way of the Horse, used superior mobility and defensive terrain to stall and eventually turn the Carthaginian army; we chased them back through our lands, retook our settlements, and eventually made peace after some punitive raiding. However, our role as the world's decisive leader in innovation was well and surely lost. The Carthaginian invasion has colored the rest of the game - what might have been a tall, peaceful game defined by efficiency and micromanagement has turned into a monstrous exercise in delegation and focused inattention. Rather than turn our efforts back to industrious innovation, we doubled down on military strength, eventually we returned to Carthage to sack their cities and subjugate their people, and we've kind of been doing the same thing ever since. First Ethiopia near the end of the Ancient Era - at the time they were my largest and most powerful rival, absorbing them not-quite doubled the area and population of the empire, and now we call ourselves Greater Mesopotamia, where Mesopotamia is the traditional holdings of our people around Abzu's Basin, and our imperial holdings across the continent are the reach of Greater Mesopotamia.
To fuel our military need for hammers, we adopted slavery and took many captives from the Carthaginian and Ethiopian campaigns. My main recruitment centers in Mesopotamia: Eridug (the holy city of Mesopotamism and our primary naval manufactory), Kis, Urim, and Uruk; churn our 1 of a horse crossbowman, a light cavalry, a mounted infantry, or a sentry; every turn, each. We stopped really playing the Wonders game after the Ancient Era; we get a few, but most went to Ethiopa or other foreign powers. Ethiopia's wonders are ours now, though, so I reckon it doesn't matter.
It's about 550 BCE now, midway through the Classical era, we've regained a position of glory at the forefront of civilization, largely riding on the horse of conquest. This is not usually my style, but I guess I'm Gilgamesh and it kind of is his style, and I'm having a good time anyway. There's a huge amount of variety that I'm really enjoying in the military side of things, it's a good bit more complicated than Rock/Paper/Scissors, because there's multiple answers to every question, more than one unit can fill any given role. I'm running 3 armies in the field right now; one is largely a cavalry horde that has split into two separate front in the South, comprised mostly of Horse Archers and Mounted Infantry and a weird smattering of siege units from various eras. My navy is mostly tied up in the invasion of Israel, an island nation to the Northeast, where I'm fielding a new army of classical era siege weapons and foot troops; and I have a very small expedition to the Southeast tramping around Iroquois lands, mostly to keep them distracted.
So a couple of notes from my game so far.
Wow there's a lot of money. I know this is a known "issue", I assert the dubiousness of its status as an "issue", but I still wanted to mention it. I actually had money issues that first time the Carthaginians invaded, I had to start rolling our huge numbers of units as quickly as possible; it broke the bank, burned right through my 2500 gold warchest, we bottomed out our research in the struggle to pay for the horsemen to fight the Carthaginians. It still wasn't enough, eventually we had to downsize the military in less strategically important areas. It was a good fight - a third of our population got pealed out from under us, I figure we *should* have been having economy issues right about then. We muscled through it. That was the last time we were strapped for cash, though. Lately, even producing between 3 and 6 units - mostly military, some naval - every turn, our expenses didn't even outstrip the rate of our income growth. Before this most recent war, we were making about 2500 gold a turn, with over 250,000 gold in the treasury (amusingly, we finally made it back on the "Wealthiest Civilizations" roster at this point, second from the bottom).
This most recent war has taught us where the limit of our economic logistical strength lies. We're losing money now - like a lot, over 1,000 a turn; it's mostly city maintenance. A few decades after the Ethiopian conquest, our armies were chomping at the bits to get out and get a little of what's best in life, so after a bit of preparation, I declared war on the next-largest empire neighboring us, the Japanese. (Meanwhile, I was preparing my navy for the amphibious assault of Hebron on the Isle of Israel). The very next turn, the Iroquois threw in with the Japanese, turning my invasion of the Southeast into a multi-fronted conflict across half the border of the Empire in the South-west and the South-east. Numerically, the game evaluated the military strength of the Japanese at this time as being about .3 of mine, and the Iroquois as .2; my main concern was that the bulk of my forces were stuck in the exact wrong place to respond to any expeditionary force from the Iroquois - but I decided to carry on with the invasion of both Japan and Israel as planned, and try to adapt as necessary.
We're a couple decades into the campaign now, Israel is down two of its cities out of 4, and Japan is very, very on the back foot - we swept through their western heartland with little opposition, several cities were garrisoned by only a few units or didn't even have enough defenses to require siege. When we reached the Southern coast - the farthest South any Mesopotamian has been, save Topal the Navigator (my naval scout, who mapped the coast of the continent several decades ago in preparation for our invasion). We split the army, we sent the bulk east to sweep along the coast to the mountains splitting Japan in two, then north to reconnect with Ethiopia. Resistance has been increasing as we go, but is still insufficient to stop our advance. The smaller force went west to take Nagasaki, which was separated from the main Japanese empire by a protrusion of Egyptian culture, a consequence of one of Egypt's many wars. We tried to talk the Egyptians into open borders, but they hate us about as much as everyone else, and refused so hard we knew we had one of two choices - violate their sovereignty through a declaration of war, or bring the navy down to travel over-sea. We opted for the former as the navy is busy and it would have been quite a long wait for the boats to arrive. So we're now fighting a 4-way war against every one of our neighbors, with 4 armies consisting of upwards of a hundred units between them. (We also have 2 groups of bandit horsemen in the field, t he main one a group of Steppe Raiders that had been terrorizing the Japanese quite effectively for a good long while, they were so successful they'd actually captured several siege engines and a fort to operate out of.)
I finally started losing money after taking my 7th or 8th city from the Japanese, we're paying about 6500 gold in City maintenance every turn right now. I'm not worried about it because of our tremendous treasury, it took hundreds of turns with 1-2.5k income to get here, it'll take hundreds of turns to burn through, in the meantime I'll be able to get out some maintenance reducers and stabilize the situation a good deal.
The AI seems to have a rough time, militarily. I'm not a wizard at Civ by any means, but I usually play on Emperor - I started this game on Monarch (I think? The one below Emperor) because I had no idea what I was doing. I've bumped the difficulty up to Immortal now through the BUG interface, though, hoping to give the AI a bit more a boost. I was really expecting some more opposition during this war, but they seem to be being totally defensive - I haven't seen anything like that stack of atalatlists that sacked Kis and Urim since the dawn of the Ancient era. Every now and again a few units move out, I killed them, with horses, and that's the limit of the enemy's maneuvering. Their armies seem to be totally tied up in their garrisons, and not fond of the idea of moving. That's not to say I don't lose units defensively now and again - the AI is decently opportunistic and is definitely taking easy fights when it can get the odds, it just doesn't seem to be able to logistically figure out fielding armies. I know they have the money, because apparently I'm poor by comparison; and they're definitely getting an offensive army out there from time to time in their own internecine conflicts because I've seen them shuffle around on the scoreboard trading cities.
I read around the forum a little bit about other people who'd seen similar things, especially the "AIs and the Art of War" thread, I'm not sure what to make of my experience in the larger context of the mod, just thought I'd share it, the AI seems like it's generally kind of a pushover right now.
Speaking of taking things from the AI, fixed borders. I actually really like the notion of fixed borders, they make a little more sense to me than traditional Civ borders, although C2Cs merger of the two ideas is... a bit odd in some respects. Mostly I'm happy with the way the mechanic works, but having fought two empires using a Fixed Border civic now, I definitely think a modification of the way conquered cities are handled would be a good idea. When I conquered the Ethiopians, I conquered their whole empire in one go. Not because I'm greedy (I am), but because I didn't want the cities I was taking from them to starve, and taking the nearby cities was the only way I knew to fix it. Every time I took a city, the Ethiopian culture would clear out, leaving the surrounding land unclaimed, but the next turn it would sink right back in, leaving my new cities completely surrounded without tiles to farm, causing them to quickly starve. I discovered the mechanic where units can claim tiles shortly thereafter, and used it to claim a few strategic food-bearing tiles per city I conquered as a temporary solution, but I didn't want to fan out 9-20 units per city to maintain a production radius for each one, so I really had one option I figured: eliminate the Ethiopian state. We did, worked like a charm, so it's now my modus operandi. I would like to just take a bite out of the Japanese and sign a truce (they'd like a truce as well, believe me), rather than engaging in a decades/centuries-long total conquest of their 20+ cities, but I don't want to have to individually garrison each of the tiles around their former cities. Maybe a modification of the Fixed border mechanic where the 20-tile cross around a city gets an ownership change after the city is conquered would be appropriate. Or maybe I'm missing something important but obvious about Fixed Borders.
Overall I'm very satisfied so far. This is the game I wanted Spore to be, and maybe it's honestly the game I wanted Civilization to be, too. I do think maybe there's too many buildings. I refuse to micromange any but my core 6 or 7 cities just because there's so much in each one - I don't really want to interact with them every turn to tell them to build the outhouses and the hair salons - but that's fine, I enjoy managing delegation as much as micromanagement. The interaction between the base game's broader abstractions and C2Cs more specific ones are a bit odd, as well. I get the distinction between "Disease" and "Health", but it feels kind of wonky to manage both when the "Health" abstraction was originally envisioned as implicitly including things like disease and disease treatment/prevention; the same goes for education, the overlap between things that provide research and education kind of a nebulous line because original Civ4 rolled a lot of what C2C calls education into that broader abstraction. I enjoy the more specific and detailed systems, but I worry I'm missing out on enjoying the details because I'm delegating so much to handle the unwieldiness that comes with their trappings.
I'm also kind of wearing thin on the hunting mechanic. It was novel during the Prehistoric, and even Ancient age (especially I had a long euphoric period after I didn't have to manually walk all my animals home), but I've got 3 or 5 hunters now that are just set to wander around autonomously sending home a steady supply of animals, and it stopped being fun and started being tedious about 600 turns ago. I suppose I could just fire them all into the culture refineries, but... there's a part of me that can't do that - free buildings. I'm thinking a tweak of this system somewhere would be good. Maybe if the animals could automate their jobs? Like workers, click a button and have them autonomously walk to the nearest city where they can build a building and do their job? Or maybe tweak their custom buildings to be like their myths? You have one "Snake Pit" building built by a snake at some point, and then every other building gets a "Snake Pit effect" building. I'm not sure. It's just definitely become less of a gameplay mechanic and more of a chore at this point. I want to stop doing it, but there's unique buildings that can only come out of hunting, deer herds and poultry flocks, etc. Something to put this less and less in focus in later eras would help differentiate the Prehistoric/Ancient eras and move the game mechanically as it progresses chronologically.
Maybe those basic buildings "we have Chickens!" should be built automatically (similar to the vicinity autobuilds system) when a city is connected to your trade network after the Classical era starts. Since, you know, obviously one of the settlers brought some domestic poultry.
Speaking of Snake Pits, you can't seem to delete Conceptual Buildings, I'd like to be able to remove the Snake Pit from my capital because it's giving all my units built there -15% Capture Chance, but it's not a real building.
---
Post-script: I'm sure I have more commentary to offer from my experience so far, and I'm sure I'll have more as I continue to play, but I'm drawing a blank at this moment and I've gone on long enough. If you read all that you're a superhero (shoot, I wanted to say something about Cultures and Heroes); if you happen to be involved in this MOD's development in any way, thanks a tremendous amount, this is an enormous mod and I'm enjoying it a commensurate amount, you're fabulous, thanks again, thanks a thousand times.
End-script.
First of all I'd just like to gush a little, my goodness, this mod is very cool - it's not perfect, of course, but it's very cool. I've been playing... about a week now? Week and half, two weeks, something like that. I'm playing a giant world (not bigger, because my computer's a bit of a geezer these days), holy crud it's big and frankly I'm floored that C2C runs as well as it does on a turn to turn basis. Whoever's responsible for the optimization in this thing deserves a trophy, or a medal, or something. I'm playing Marathon speed, I started out in Snail and decided the first time I got to the end of the Ancient era that I was going to restart at a slightly faster speed - not because I didn't like the speed, but because I wanted to see more of the mod, sooner, and made a better educated assessment of whether or not this was something I wanted to sink weeks, months even, into (as seemed increasingly likely the nearer I got to a proper civilization). It was (something I wanted to sink weeks into), I have, and I'm loving it. I'm invested now, I have every intention of finishing this game through to the end, If I have the strength.
We founded Uruk on the south bank of a great lake, and set about the business of making a living as early humans. Our lake, we're calling her Abzu's Basin these days, was blessed with a wide range of resources and conditions that facilitated early moves towards prosperous settlement and the underpinnings of a sedentary lifestyle; fresh water, staple grains, ample wildlife of all sizes - mostly the harmless and variously vulnerable variety - and plenty of gatherables. So we hunted and gathered, invented language, found wonder and introspection in the great landmarks, and generally rose meteorically to early tribalism and a cultural identity. Sumerians spread out from Uruk all along the banks of Abzu's Basin; we met our neighbors to the Northeast, the vile Carthaginians, and the savage Ethiopians to the Southeast, who bred with Neanderthal stock. We were the first in the land to perfect the art of sedentary living, and with it Agriculture, which is when things got dicey for a bit.
The Carthaginians, a jealous and violent people, wanted to ride the grain-train to civilization station too, but they didn't want to do the work. Just after we entered the Ancient era they came over the hills in a great horde with many atalatlists, and other primitive warriors that easily overwhelmed our slightly more advanced garrisons of slingers and obsidian axemen. They had us on a back foot as we scrambled to protect our tribesmen, and quickly conquered another settlement. When they approached Uruk, though, we had a response prepared in the newly discovered art of horse-riding.
We mastered the Ancient way of the Horse, used superior mobility and defensive terrain to stall and eventually turn the Carthaginian army; we chased them back through our lands, retook our settlements, and eventually made peace after some punitive raiding. However, our role as the world's decisive leader in innovation was well and surely lost. The Carthaginian invasion has colored the rest of the game - what might have been a tall, peaceful game defined by efficiency and micromanagement has turned into a monstrous exercise in delegation and focused inattention. Rather than turn our efforts back to industrious innovation, we doubled down on military strength, eventually we returned to Carthage to sack their cities and subjugate their people, and we've kind of been doing the same thing ever since. First Ethiopia near the end of the Ancient Era - at the time they were my largest and most powerful rival, absorbing them not-quite doubled the area and population of the empire, and now we call ourselves Greater Mesopotamia, where Mesopotamia is the traditional holdings of our people around Abzu's Basin, and our imperial holdings across the continent are the reach of Greater Mesopotamia.
To fuel our military need for hammers, we adopted slavery and took many captives from the Carthaginian and Ethiopian campaigns. My main recruitment centers in Mesopotamia: Eridug (the holy city of Mesopotamism and our primary naval manufactory), Kis, Urim, and Uruk; churn our 1 of a horse crossbowman, a light cavalry, a mounted infantry, or a sentry; every turn, each. We stopped really playing the Wonders game after the Ancient Era; we get a few, but most went to Ethiopa or other foreign powers. Ethiopia's wonders are ours now, though, so I reckon it doesn't matter.
It's about 550 BCE now, midway through the Classical era, we've regained a position of glory at the forefront of civilization, largely riding on the horse of conquest. This is not usually my style, but I guess I'm Gilgamesh and it kind of is his style, and I'm having a good time anyway. There's a huge amount of variety that I'm really enjoying in the military side of things, it's a good bit more complicated than Rock/Paper/Scissors, because there's multiple answers to every question, more than one unit can fill any given role. I'm running 3 armies in the field right now; one is largely a cavalry horde that has split into two separate front in the South, comprised mostly of Horse Archers and Mounted Infantry and a weird smattering of siege units from various eras. My navy is mostly tied up in the invasion of Israel, an island nation to the Northeast, where I'm fielding a new army of classical era siege weapons and foot troops; and I have a very small expedition to the Southeast tramping around Iroquois lands, mostly to keep them distracted.
So a couple of notes from my game so far.
Wow there's a lot of money. I know this is a known "issue", I assert the dubiousness of its status as an "issue", but I still wanted to mention it. I actually had money issues that first time the Carthaginians invaded, I had to start rolling our huge numbers of units as quickly as possible; it broke the bank, burned right through my 2500 gold warchest, we bottomed out our research in the struggle to pay for the horsemen to fight the Carthaginians. It still wasn't enough, eventually we had to downsize the military in less strategically important areas. It was a good fight - a third of our population got pealed out from under us, I figure we *should* have been having economy issues right about then. We muscled through it. That was the last time we were strapped for cash, though. Lately, even producing between 3 and 6 units - mostly military, some naval - every turn, our expenses didn't even outstrip the rate of our income growth. Before this most recent war, we were making about 2500 gold a turn, with over 250,000 gold in the treasury (amusingly, we finally made it back on the "Wealthiest Civilizations" roster at this point, second from the bottom).
This most recent war has taught us where the limit of our economic logistical strength lies. We're losing money now - like a lot, over 1,000 a turn; it's mostly city maintenance. A few decades after the Ethiopian conquest, our armies were chomping at the bits to get out and get a little of what's best in life, so after a bit of preparation, I declared war on the next-largest empire neighboring us, the Japanese. (Meanwhile, I was preparing my navy for the amphibious assault of Hebron on the Isle of Israel). The very next turn, the Iroquois threw in with the Japanese, turning my invasion of the Southeast into a multi-fronted conflict across half the border of the Empire in the South-west and the South-east. Numerically, the game evaluated the military strength of the Japanese at this time as being about .3 of mine, and the Iroquois as .2; my main concern was that the bulk of my forces were stuck in the exact wrong place to respond to any expeditionary force from the Iroquois - but I decided to carry on with the invasion of both Japan and Israel as planned, and try to adapt as necessary.
We're a couple decades into the campaign now, Israel is down two of its cities out of 4, and Japan is very, very on the back foot - we swept through their western heartland with little opposition, several cities were garrisoned by only a few units or didn't even have enough defenses to require siege. When we reached the Southern coast - the farthest South any Mesopotamian has been, save Topal the Navigator (my naval scout, who mapped the coast of the continent several decades ago in preparation for our invasion). We split the army, we sent the bulk east to sweep along the coast to the mountains splitting Japan in two, then north to reconnect with Ethiopia. Resistance has been increasing as we go, but is still insufficient to stop our advance. The smaller force went west to take Nagasaki, which was separated from the main Japanese empire by a protrusion of Egyptian culture, a consequence of one of Egypt's many wars. We tried to talk the Egyptians into open borders, but they hate us about as much as everyone else, and refused so hard we knew we had one of two choices - violate their sovereignty through a declaration of war, or bring the navy down to travel over-sea. We opted for the former as the navy is busy and it would have been quite a long wait for the boats to arrive. So we're now fighting a 4-way war against every one of our neighbors, with 4 armies consisting of upwards of a hundred units between them. (We also have 2 groups of bandit horsemen in the field, t he main one a group of Steppe Raiders that had been terrorizing the Japanese quite effectively for a good long while, they were so successful they'd actually captured several siege engines and a fort to operate out of.)
I finally started losing money after taking my 7th or 8th city from the Japanese, we're paying about 6500 gold in City maintenance every turn right now. I'm not worried about it because of our tremendous treasury, it took hundreds of turns with 1-2.5k income to get here, it'll take hundreds of turns to burn through, in the meantime I'll be able to get out some maintenance reducers and stabilize the situation a good deal.
The AI seems to have a rough time, militarily. I'm not a wizard at Civ by any means, but I usually play on Emperor - I started this game on Monarch (I think? The one below Emperor) because I had no idea what I was doing. I've bumped the difficulty up to Immortal now through the BUG interface, though, hoping to give the AI a bit more a boost. I was really expecting some more opposition during this war, but they seem to be being totally defensive - I haven't seen anything like that stack of atalatlists that sacked Kis and Urim since the dawn of the Ancient era. Every now and again a few units move out, I killed them, with horses, and that's the limit of the enemy's maneuvering. Their armies seem to be totally tied up in their garrisons, and not fond of the idea of moving. That's not to say I don't lose units defensively now and again - the AI is decently opportunistic and is definitely taking easy fights when it can get the odds, it just doesn't seem to be able to logistically figure out fielding armies. I know they have the money, because apparently I'm poor by comparison; and they're definitely getting an offensive army out there from time to time in their own internecine conflicts because I've seen them shuffle around on the scoreboard trading cities.
I read around the forum a little bit about other people who'd seen similar things, especially the "AIs and the Art of War" thread, I'm not sure what to make of my experience in the larger context of the mod, just thought I'd share it, the AI seems like it's generally kind of a pushover right now.
Speaking of taking things from the AI, fixed borders. I actually really like the notion of fixed borders, they make a little more sense to me than traditional Civ borders, although C2Cs merger of the two ideas is... a bit odd in some respects. Mostly I'm happy with the way the mechanic works, but having fought two empires using a Fixed Border civic now, I definitely think a modification of the way conquered cities are handled would be a good idea. When I conquered the Ethiopians, I conquered their whole empire in one go. Not because I'm greedy (I am), but because I didn't want the cities I was taking from them to starve, and taking the nearby cities was the only way I knew to fix it. Every time I took a city, the Ethiopian culture would clear out, leaving the surrounding land unclaimed, but the next turn it would sink right back in, leaving my new cities completely surrounded without tiles to farm, causing them to quickly starve. I discovered the mechanic where units can claim tiles shortly thereafter, and used it to claim a few strategic food-bearing tiles per city I conquered as a temporary solution, but I didn't want to fan out 9-20 units per city to maintain a production radius for each one, so I really had one option I figured: eliminate the Ethiopian state. We did, worked like a charm, so it's now my modus operandi. I would like to just take a bite out of the Japanese and sign a truce (they'd like a truce as well, believe me), rather than engaging in a decades/centuries-long total conquest of their 20+ cities, but I don't want to have to individually garrison each of the tiles around their former cities. Maybe a modification of the Fixed border mechanic where the 20-tile cross around a city gets an ownership change after the city is conquered would be appropriate. Or maybe I'm missing something important but obvious about Fixed Borders.
Overall I'm very satisfied so far. This is the game I wanted Spore to be, and maybe it's honestly the game I wanted Civilization to be, too. I do think maybe there's too many buildings. I refuse to micromange any but my core 6 or 7 cities just because there's so much in each one - I don't really want to interact with them every turn to tell them to build the outhouses and the hair salons - but that's fine, I enjoy managing delegation as much as micromanagement. The interaction between the base game's broader abstractions and C2Cs more specific ones are a bit odd, as well. I get the distinction between "Disease" and "Health", but it feels kind of wonky to manage both when the "Health" abstraction was originally envisioned as implicitly including things like disease and disease treatment/prevention; the same goes for education, the overlap between things that provide research and education kind of a nebulous line because original Civ4 rolled a lot of what C2C calls education into that broader abstraction. I enjoy the more specific and detailed systems, but I worry I'm missing out on enjoying the details because I'm delegating so much to handle the unwieldiness that comes with their trappings.
I'm also kind of wearing thin on the hunting mechanic. It was novel during the Prehistoric, and even Ancient age (especially I had a long euphoric period after I didn't have to manually walk all my animals home), but I've got 3 or 5 hunters now that are just set to wander around autonomously sending home a steady supply of animals, and it stopped being fun and started being tedious about 600 turns ago. I suppose I could just fire them all into the culture refineries, but... there's a part of me that can't do that - free buildings. I'm thinking a tweak of this system somewhere would be good. Maybe if the animals could automate their jobs? Like workers, click a button and have them autonomously walk to the nearest city where they can build a building and do their job? Or maybe tweak their custom buildings to be like their myths? You have one "Snake Pit" building built by a snake at some point, and then every other building gets a "Snake Pit effect" building. I'm not sure. It's just definitely become less of a gameplay mechanic and more of a chore at this point. I want to stop doing it, but there's unique buildings that can only come out of hunting, deer herds and poultry flocks, etc. Something to put this less and less in focus in later eras would help differentiate the Prehistoric/Ancient eras and move the game mechanically as it progresses chronologically.
Maybe those basic buildings "we have Chickens!" should be built automatically (similar to the vicinity autobuilds system) when a city is connected to your trade network after the Classical era starts. Since, you know, obviously one of the settlers brought some domestic poultry.
Speaking of Snake Pits, you can't seem to delete Conceptual Buildings, I'd like to be able to remove the Snake Pit from my capital because it's giving all my units built there -15% Capture Chance, but it's not a real building.
---
Post-script: I'm sure I have more commentary to offer from my experience so far, and I'm sure I'll have more as I continue to play, but I'm drawing a blank at this moment and I've gone on long enough. If you read all that you're a superhero (shoot, I wanted to say something about Cultures and Heroes); if you happen to be involved in this MOD's development in any way, thanks a tremendous amount, this is an enormous mod and I'm enjoying it a commensurate amount, you're fabulous, thanks again, thanks a thousand times.
End-script.
Last edited:
, I had some Python which would make maintaining and adding the animals easier. I need to see if I can find a back up.
