Hi !
A started a new game a while ago and decided to post how it went here to provide feedback and ask for some advice.
Mod used : CP and CPB (2-27, keep in mind it's not the most recent version and there have been changes since then)
Here's the album if you want to have a look : http://imgur.com/a/LXp5c#0
I didn't finish the game (sorry if it leaves you a taste of uncompleteness) but it still went fairly late.
Don't forget that there are comments in addition to the screenshots. It's the first time I do this and I probably forgot to report a lot of things but I tried to keep it short.
I also wanted to share my impressions about the mod and discuss a few points, since I haven't played a lot of games with this mod so far :
About happiness :
I like the happiness system but had issues at two points of the game :
- Early expansion (see turn 80) : I took the Might policy tree to quickly grab the good city locations thanks to the free settler but I had to stop fow a while because my newly founded cities were unhappiness-capped until I had built a few crucial happiness buildings in them (library, granary, colosseum, etc ...). Do you also encounter this problem ? How do you deal with it ?
- Late game (see the last happiness screens) : I'm the richest nation in the world by far but all my cities are poor and poverty is by far my biggest source of unhappiness. From what I read on the forums I'm not the only one having issues with poverty with a wide empire.
- Puppet cities : At the end of my game, all of my puppet cities were at max unhappiness (10-15 per city). I kept them as puppets out of habit (it works well in the modless game) but I guess it isn't as good here due to the difficulty to avoid unhappiness in them. Now that I think about it, I probably should have annexed them. How to you manage conquered cities ? Do you leave them as puppets or annex them ? Do you think puppet cities are worth considering compared to annexed cities ?
Also, does the negative yield multiplier due to unhappiness affect the yields for the unhappiness calculation ? If that's the case, I'm worried that it may create a snowball effect that makes it more difficult to recover from unhappiness than it should (bad yields -> unhappy -> yield penalty -> worse yields -> even more unhappiness).
Some random thought that I had : unhappiness "priorities" seem to follow a Maslow pyramid (citizens want to be fed before they want to be entertained, etc …
but when a city is capped on unhappiness (happens frequently with newly founded/conquered cities) it makes more sense to treat the boredom first and the poverty last (because poverty is likely to be replaced by something else), which seems a bit paradoxal.
About trade routes and villages :
I really like the new villages and towns. In the base game (modless) I always built the same improvements (specific improvements on ressources, mines on hills, lumber mill on forests, trading posts in jungles and pupetted cities, and farms everywhere else). Now I have to plan the placement on my villages/roads/trade routes and I really enjoy it. It also balances and diversifies land/sea trade routes in an interesting way (sea have a higher range and a higher modifier, land trade routes boost villages and are sometimes easier to defend).
I also like the fact that the caravan boost on villages helps paying for roads between you and your neighbors. Is it possible to make it so that the road connections between you and your neighbors count for the village gold boost ? (in my game they only got a bonus if a caravan was crossing them since it isn't a city connection between two owned cities) It would make it financially desirable to build roads between you and your (friendly) neighbors, which seems realistic and aesthetically pleasing.
About specialists and governor :
Specialists seem to be a "big" source of unhappiness (especially since I had a lot of them in my game). When a city is poor the logical reaction would be to employ citizens as merchant specialists, but you generally end up losing as much happiness for the specialists as you gain by reducing poverty. Also if you don't know that specialists generate unhappiness you don't really know what happens because you see on the city tooltip that the local unhappiness has been reduced (it doesn't display unhappiness due to specialists) but you don't see an increase in global happiness. Perhaps the tooltip could mention the specialist unhappiness to avoid confusion.
Also, the governor (the system that allocates citizens automatically) seems to heavily favor specialists compared to the modless game. I usually let the game manage my citizens because I felt it did a decent job (I sometimes choose a food or prod focus, but that's it) but here it doesn't seem to be a very wise decision. At turn 220 I realized that I had more specialists than regular citizens (which felt a bit weird, because it doesn't happen in the modless game). I moved all my focus to food and doubled my entire population in less than 30 turns because I produced so much food. Do you let the game manage your citizens ? How do you find a good balance between specialists and tiles ?
Thanks for taking the time to read this long post !
A started a new game a while ago and decided to post how it went here to provide feedback and ask for some advice.
Mod used : CP and CPB (2-27, keep in mind it's not the most recent version and there have been changes since then)
Here's the album if you want to have a look : http://imgur.com/a/LXp5c#0
I didn't finish the game (sorry if it leaves you a taste of uncompleteness) but it still went fairly late.
Don't forget that there are comments in addition to the screenshots. It's the first time I do this and I probably forgot to report a lot of things but I tried to keep it short.
I also wanted to share my impressions about the mod and discuss a few points, since I haven't played a lot of games with this mod so far :
About happiness :
I like the happiness system but had issues at two points of the game :
- Early expansion (see turn 80) : I took the Might policy tree to quickly grab the good city locations thanks to the free settler but I had to stop fow a while because my newly founded cities were unhappiness-capped until I had built a few crucial happiness buildings in them (library, granary, colosseum, etc ...). Do you also encounter this problem ? How do you deal with it ?
- Late game (see the last happiness screens) : I'm the richest nation in the world by far but all my cities are poor and poverty is by far my biggest source of unhappiness. From what I read on the forums I'm not the only one having issues with poverty with a wide empire.
- Puppet cities : At the end of my game, all of my puppet cities were at max unhappiness (10-15 per city). I kept them as puppets out of habit (it works well in the modless game) but I guess it isn't as good here due to the difficulty to avoid unhappiness in them. Now that I think about it, I probably should have annexed them. How to you manage conquered cities ? Do you leave them as puppets or annex them ? Do you think puppet cities are worth considering compared to annexed cities ?
Also, does the negative yield multiplier due to unhappiness affect the yields for the unhappiness calculation ? If that's the case, I'm worried that it may create a snowball effect that makes it more difficult to recover from unhappiness than it should (bad yields -> unhappy -> yield penalty -> worse yields -> even more unhappiness).
Some random thought that I had : unhappiness "priorities" seem to follow a Maslow pyramid (citizens want to be fed before they want to be entertained, etc …
but when a city is capped on unhappiness (happens frequently with newly founded/conquered cities) it makes more sense to treat the boredom first and the poverty last (because poverty is likely to be replaced by something else), which seems a bit paradoxal.About trade routes and villages :
I really like the new villages and towns. In the base game (modless) I always built the same improvements (specific improvements on ressources, mines on hills, lumber mill on forests, trading posts in jungles and pupetted cities, and farms everywhere else). Now I have to plan the placement on my villages/roads/trade routes and I really enjoy it. It also balances and diversifies land/sea trade routes in an interesting way (sea have a higher range and a higher modifier, land trade routes boost villages and are sometimes easier to defend).
I also like the fact that the caravan boost on villages helps paying for roads between you and your neighbors. Is it possible to make it so that the road connections between you and your neighbors count for the village gold boost ? (in my game they only got a bonus if a caravan was crossing them since it isn't a city connection between two owned cities) It would make it financially desirable to build roads between you and your (friendly) neighbors, which seems realistic and aesthetically pleasing.
About specialists and governor :
Specialists seem to be a "big" source of unhappiness (especially since I had a lot of them in my game). When a city is poor the logical reaction would be to employ citizens as merchant specialists, but you generally end up losing as much happiness for the specialists as you gain by reducing poverty. Also if you don't know that specialists generate unhappiness you don't really know what happens because you see on the city tooltip that the local unhappiness has been reduced (it doesn't display unhappiness due to specialists) but you don't see an increase in global happiness. Perhaps the tooltip could mention the specialist unhappiness to avoid confusion.
Also, the governor (the system that allocates citizens automatically) seems to heavily favor specialists compared to the modless game. I usually let the game manage my citizens because I felt it did a decent job (I sometimes choose a food or prod focus, but that's it) but here it doesn't seem to be a very wise decision. At turn 220 I realized that I had more specialists than regular citizens (which felt a bit weird, because it doesn't happen in the modless game). I moved all my focus to food and doubled my entire population in less than 30 turns because I produced so much food. Do you let the game manage your citizens ? How do you find a good balance between specialists and tiles ?
Thanks for taking the time to read this long post !
