By the way
@Milae, since you've now finished three games using 4UC (Netherlands, China and Celts), what is your opinion on the UCs you've seen ? Anything you've found too exploitable (I saw you keep the Scythed Chariot for quite a long time) or too weak ?
Also, good luck (to the AI) for your Egypt OCC playthrough !
Thanks I guess lol.
I would say it's all been good tbh. I guess the scythed chariots are sort of exploitable in that if you have 2 or more of them in your own land and some roads you can kill units of any tech by swapping them back and forth 5 times. Also I found a funny strat where you have them embarked and use them to kill boats lol. But they do have the downside that you lose the splash dmg if you upgrade them so I actually would have just not bothered with them if I could go back since they aren't very useful for offense once they are outdated imo.
I think Celts are already very powerful Authority Civ without UC but I'm a big fan of the Oppidums (especially the art!) and they make Tradition Science victory pretty good for Celts as well.
China was improved quite a lot by UC. Being able to get Logistics on ranged boats is a complete gamechanger (I sometimes just have full fleets of melee boats now for civs without unique boats) and it's also very nice to have an actual good use for food/pop in the examination halls so definitely allowed me to play differently which was fun. Imo China without UC is quite a boring and maybe underpowered Civ so big improvements there.
Just some things I found in my game is that the way examination halls work, with the fact that it's normal to work science specialists in many cities, means you can end up getting loads of cities attempting to make Great Scientists in late game so Science Tradition seems like best strategy. Also the influence from boats in cities was fairly useless tbh but like I said the boats were good anyways.
Netherlands I also think is already a pretty strong civ without UC. I also would already recommend playing Netherlands as Authority Civ in VP and UC just makes that even more the case. Probably the Goedendags were the most useful since it covers the one weakness Netherlands Authority has which is no Unique land unit. Waags are okay but once they become good it probably means you are already winning but it is fun to have more incentive to get all the monopolies.
So the Civs I played were probably closer together in terms of balance than they are without UC which is good. I did take a look through them all though and choose the ones I thought would be interesting but not too good. just from looking I think some of the military ones (zulus, aztecs, mongolia) might be a bit too good for humans since there are so many stacking bonuses to warring with them. For non war the Babylon building seems like it would be very good and India getting a UU early on also seems like it could make for a fast start as tradition which is always dangerous. Hard to say for sure without playing them though.
In general though, giving people more tools to use as their Civ definitely makes the game more fun but also is always gonna make it easier, so I'm looking forward to trying out the other Civs but I also wanna make the game harder than it is now so that you wish me luck in the future to go smash the AIs
