Hello everyone! I'm new here, and sort-of new to Civ. I had played Civ III as a kid (damn that game was good) and Civ IV as a teenager (didn't like it that much, probably because of that @*##@ Montezuma).
Now I decided to give V a shot, and, after a 10-hour session with a friend, I do have a few questions about the game.
I did some reading up, and apparently the AI cheats significantly only after Prince, which is the difficulty we played on. Other than that, I read that the AI plays by a different ruleset because of Happiness and Gold changes. I know that's kind of vague, but that's because the info I found was vague >.<
Speaking of the AI, my aforementioned game was a "coop vs AI" with a friend. We were on team 1, while the other 4 AIs were separate (I messed up there, I actually wanted everyone to be separate and then team up with my friend).
I decided to go with it anyway to test the game. As we could share tech and even gold from turn 1, I assumed that we would have an immense advantage over everyone else, but, weirdly enough, most individual players kept up in points against both of us, and two even surpassed us.
Individually we had less than half of everyone else, so we ended up being at a disadvantage as we couldn't actually help each other if war broke out (we were VERY far away from each other).
If we ever tried to win with military Bismarck would just flood his territory with units (he had enough to actually fill every single tile), and Montezuma was invincible for me.
And let's not even start with the research..while we didn't even have electricity and flight, they were researching The Manhattan Project and had scores of bombers and tanks.
Now, did the AI get some kind of bonus because of the messed-up teams or did we screw up majorly during the early game? Or both? As he had Athens he decided to play as a city-state during the early game (focusing on growth of the capital only) to do a bit of historical roleplay, which is what this game is about, in the end.
I realize that this was probably a mistake, but can't you afford to have a bit of fun in Normal, or do you always have to follow the same set-in-stone pattern of tech rush to be able to achieve any kind of victory? Every single piece of advice I found could be boiled down to "dedicate your first cities to tech, spam great architects and tech wonders, and try to get free techs".
If that's the only viable way to have any chance at winning, what is the point of having so many options if you end up doing the same thing in every game?
Other than that, are there any mods that could improve the game? I have Civ V gold (I'll get BNW if I see that this game is going to last for me), and the ones that appealed to me the most were Really Advanced Setup (no idea why this isn't standard, you had many more starting options in the previous games) and PerfectWorld3 for better maps.
What I'm looking for are mainly quality of life improvements/additions to the UI/gameplay options and better AI.
Sorry if the post was long and sounded a little whiny, I actually really like the game, but I feel that some aspects of it could be improved by just reading the most common criticisms.
Now I decided to give V a shot, and, after a 10-hour session with a friend, I do have a few questions about the game.
I did some reading up, and apparently the AI cheats significantly only after Prince, which is the difficulty we played on. Other than that, I read that the AI plays by a different ruleset because of Happiness and Gold changes. I know that's kind of vague, but that's because the info I found was vague >.<
Speaking of the AI, my aforementioned game was a "coop vs AI" with a friend. We were on team 1, while the other 4 AIs were separate (I messed up there, I actually wanted everyone to be separate and then team up with my friend).
I decided to go with it anyway to test the game. As we could share tech and even gold from turn 1, I assumed that we would have an immense advantage over everyone else, but, weirdly enough, most individual players kept up in points against both of us, and two even surpassed us.
Individually we had less than half of everyone else, so we ended up being at a disadvantage as we couldn't actually help each other if war broke out (we were VERY far away from each other).
If we ever tried to win with military Bismarck would just flood his territory with units (he had enough to actually fill every single tile), and Montezuma was invincible for me.
And let's not even start with the research..while we didn't even have electricity and flight, they were researching The Manhattan Project and had scores of bombers and tanks.
Now, did the AI get some kind of bonus because of the messed-up teams or did we screw up majorly during the early game? Or both? As he had Athens he decided to play as a city-state during the early game (focusing on growth of the capital only) to do a bit of historical roleplay, which is what this game is about, in the end.
I realize that this was probably a mistake, but can't you afford to have a bit of fun in Normal, or do you always have to follow the same set-in-stone pattern of tech rush to be able to achieve any kind of victory? Every single piece of advice I found could be boiled down to "dedicate your first cities to tech, spam great architects and tech wonders, and try to get free techs".
If that's the only viable way to have any chance at winning, what is the point of having so many options if you end up doing the same thing in every game?
Other than that, are there any mods that could improve the game? I have Civ V gold (I'll get BNW if I see that this game is going to last for me), and the ones that appealed to me the most were Really Advanced Setup (no idea why this isn't standard, you had many more starting options in the previous games) and PerfectWorld3 for better maps.
What I'm looking for are mainly quality of life improvements/additions to the UI/gameplay options and better AI.
Sorry if the post was long and sounded a little whiny, I actually really like the game, but I feel that some aspects of it could be improved by just reading the most common criticisms.
