Recent content by Gus_Smedstad

I talked about going Shipbuilding because you need that to embark units. Rushing frigates to take cities didn't even cross my mind. At least in part because frigates are mid-game units in my mind. How practical is it in general to try and run these mid-game rushes if your archer rush proves...

I'm puttering around on Emperor now, and gave up on a Rome game after about turn 140 (Epic speed) because I was so clearly far behind. I couldn't manage a rush of any of my neighbors, because they were all too darned far away. Brazil and Japan were both about 25 hexes from my starting area...

Kongo is weird. All that emphasis on religion and you can't do much useful with it. No holy sites, no holy buildings. Religions that have purchased things like Meeting Houses are useless to Kongo since you can't own any Holy Sites. Only the ones with passive benefits (i.e. Work Ethic or Zen...

No, no map generation mods. I'm playing with Better Trade Screens and Unit Report, but that's it. This particular map was: 1. Very large continent, Egypt and myself (as Arabia). Many, many suitable sites. 2. One fair-sized continent with Rome and Kongo. 3. One medium island with a city state...

I do agree that as the game progresses, scouts get more useful simply because they're the cheapest unit available. Scouting the oceans if I haven't managed to do the galleys -> caravel upgrade for Exploration, and sometimes just to keep an area under observation to prevent barbarian camp spawns...

This was Standard Size / Continents. Which is pretty much all I ever play, actually. I'm not fond of the oddball map types, and there's a lot less variety in the "not weird" map generators than in Civ 4 or 5. I'd say there were plenty of viable city sites. The continent I shared with Egypt was...

I find that I never build scouts in the early game. They're not cheap enough to justify giving up a slot that could be a slinger. Warriors and slingers do the early game scouting well enough, and are far, far more combat capable. Scouts gain experience from discovering natural wonders, but it's...

I was going to title this thread "look Ma, no city states." Because I was on a large continent with no one but Egypt. I mean no one, not a single city state. The other civs were shoehorned into a couple of near-islands, and there was one (1) city state on the entire map. I carefully looked over...

I'm finding the "playing it the same way" problem to be largely true. I haven't yet tried all the leaders, but it's gotten repetitive enough that I'm thinking I'll shelve it when I've gone through all of them. It's not perfectly true, of course. There are small details that change for most...

I can attest that allies can and will break the "won't spy on you" promise. I was allied with Kongo, they spied on me, I told 'em cut it out, they agreed to stop, 10 turns later they did it again and I got a "they broke their promise" message. The problem here is that there's no way to hold...

It's not housing, it's that many of the costs escalate with time. Builders and districts in particular. It's not so visible with the early cities because your production there is so high compared to a starting city. For the most part, I don't expect colonial cities to do much. I found them to...

Even if I'm not going for a neighbor immediately (which I always do if there's a neighbor), I'm having trouble seeing slinger-settler being viable because of barbarians. I almost always seem to have at least one camp within serious threat range by the time I could finish the settler, and maybe...

I didn't take note, really. About turn 70 on Epic speed, I think, but I could be wrong.

Pfeh. I'm still playing on King, and I had an archer rush failure against Gorgo. "Failure" in the sense that I took 2 cities, but the rush completely fell apart when I hit her capital. Not because she had walls, because she had Archery, had a garrisoned archer, and was popping out fresh archers...

It seems like the Great Library rarely gets built by the AI, and I can see why - by the time I'm in a position to think about building it, I'm completely done with the Classical age. All those Eureka boost have no value (and aren't that hard to get normally anyway), so I'm left with a grossly...