Recent content by bluedevil99

I've been fooling around with small empires on Emperor and Immortal- got the Bollywood achievement the other night and am trying for OCC. The devs' beloved small empires are quite viable now (National College and National Treasury are fantastic). One of the benefits of a small empire, even if...

I'm not sure it is possible to have this discussion at this level of generality. But I would claim that outside of special cases (mostly renaissance era Napolean) I will always prefer to invade a nearby, ideally weaker, AI whose assets I covet than a more distant AI that just happens to be...

I agree about RAs being just about as broken as everything else. I nearly always leave a conquered AI alive now. It is funny, dumb, and a little sad that an AI civ with 1-2 cities and pumping out archers when I'm in the industrial era can be the source of miraculous scientific advancement. As...

This is basically how I got my first diety win the other day. I was going to start a thread on this but it fits into this one well enough. Frankly the way I did it was pretty exploit-y but it was an interesting game and got me thinking of a bunch of issues. Here's the skeleton: 1)...

Couple more points... 1) Score is not that meaningful in Civ 5. I've won several times on Immortal (including one game where I didn't go to war at all) while being behind in score the entire game. Population/tech and gold income are far more important than score. 2) I don't think you...

I'm less a fan of tradition- getting wonders at the higher difficulty levels is an extremely high risk strategy. I would much rather build settlers or military units, adopting honor if I feel I need a military boost (or am playing a civ like Songhai or Germany), Liberty if I plan to have a lot...

This is often an issue in continents games, where you can be happily in control of your own continent only to find later than an AI conquered the other continent and you have a runaway train on your hands. One (partial) solution is to always prioritize Astronomy. As long as you have contact...

I actually, quite unintentionally, have an essentially no trading posts game going right now. I'm playing Arabia on Immortal/Large Archipalego and between using Bazaars and selling the excess luxury resources to the 9 AI players, the extra income from trade routes, and the fact i'm running...

This does not work unfortunately. Both forbidden palace and planned economy reduce 50% from the base number of cities unhappiness, so even with both India just ends up with the same # of cities unhappiness that any other civ would have normally. Mind you, this is still extremely powerful...

Rationalism is often far more important in my conquest heavy games where many of my cities are puppets. Because I can't trust my puppet governors to manage specialists, and I'm often spamming trading posts, rationalism is a powerful tool to maximize the benefits of puppet cities. For science...

I'm winning pretty consistently with horse rushes on Immortal, to the point where I'm actually trying to play a couple archipalego games where I don't allow myself to declare war. milk's build order sounds about right to me. Get yourself 3 horses asap and go take a capital. I typically...

I'm really ambivalent about this. In theory I really like substantive terrain bonuses as they emphasize wartime tactics as well as strategy. In practice, as several others have pointed out, the current CiV AI does not understand these tactics. At all. Ideally we'd see the AI improved...

Just remember, though a lot of the solutions people are proposing here are interesting, it's really only horsemen that are unbalanced IMO, and mostly because they have both the highest base STR of any unit of their era *and* the most movement of any unit until lancers. I'd hate to see rule...

How about, in a game my wife was playing the other night, a Giant Death Robot embarking and being taken out by a barbarian trireme. My personal favorite was losing 2 cavalry on the same turn, one full hp and one 8/10hp, to Rome's war chariots. Yes, my people were 'very unhappy' at the...

From what I've seen the bushido ability is actually very strong for the AI on higher difficulties. The reason is the AI tends to spam units and fight these ridiculous wars of attrition where they throw massive numbers of units at each other with no particular tactics. Between Bushido, and...