GeneralZift
Professional
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2019
- Messages
- 1,081
It would be nice to select a particular unit and press 'Levy', that gives it a sort of personal touch, as if you're picking a particular battalion to be your mercenary force
City States in Civ7 - the good, the bad
- Thread starter m_mus
- Start date
I was playing as Ashoka with Maurya -> Ming -> Nepal. Standard Pangaea map on Deity difficulty. Normal settings (e.g. speed and age length). 11 players; myself + 10 AI.
You're right, the other leaders in general weren't happy, lol, and kept declaring war to take my city states. The massive combat bonus from all the city states made it easy to keep the AI at bay though...
As for war support, I managed to build the Gate of all nations fairly early on, so didn't have to invest much influence into war support.
Our old pal Tecumseh was also in the mixer, and of course outraged throughout the game
Agendas and trade routes were enough to keep my closest neighbours fairly happy though, in fact I even had an alliance with Charlemagne at one point! Very useful as he had the largest military by far.
Scouting is of course key to find as many independent powers as possible. My first build order is always 2 scouts, 3 if the military situation allows it.
I just loaded up a save from the game, turn 66 in Exploration, and I had 15 city states at that point!
The Xunleichong has a boost even bigger than I recall, and I can't remember why... Check it out:
I definitely agree with you that there should be a cap on aggregated / multiplied combat strength!
Nic@Melbourne
Warlord
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2020
- Messages
- 161
I like the progression from barb camp to city states. I like the. Ariety of names and cultures across the 3 eras. Like the tile improvements and economic resource.the stacking bonuses get broken.
Otherwise Civ 6 did it better.
Should stay competitive and influence from competition between should grow them.
Agree with most of what was said here. I miss liberating them and using them as a buffer zone.
Otherwise Civ 6 did it better.
Should stay competitive and influence from competition between should grow them.
Agree with most of what was said here. I miss liberating them and using them as a buffer zone.
shaglio
The Prince of Dorkness
I second this. I recently had a game in which I wanted to build a town on a tile where one of my suzerain-ed City States had a unit parked (right side of picture). I thought I could Levy the unit and then move my settler onto the tile and build the city. But, alas, while I could choose the *type* of unit I could levy, I couldn't choose *that specific* unitIt would be nice to select a particular unit and press 'Levy', that gives it a sort of personal touch, as if you're picking a particular battalion to be your mercenary force
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stealth_nsk
Deity
Never ask AI for precise information. In this case it clearly messes up Civ7 info with some previous games, because there are no huge maps for Civ7 yet and we don't know what default values will be there.
Haha, I know! To be fair, I did specify that it was from Google's AI, expecting people to know they should take that kind of info with a bit of salt - to say the least!
Anyway, it was the only info I could find, and at least on a Standard map it seems the info is somewhat accurate.
Dotsworthy
Warlord
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2019
- Messages
- 143
Just to add to the discussion:
It really bugs me that in the second and third ages city states wait a turn before respawning in their original positions. This should be something a player should take into account when planning how to tackle an age from the very start.
Secondly, I don't mind the move away from envoys and the competition to remain suzerain given that it resets at the end of an age. I do have an issue with the fact players can choose from any of the relative bonuses from a city state. VI's system allowed for emergent strategies and gave the player something to think about. I've found the city state of Auckland, do I have enough coast to utilise this? Is the city state defensible? Will someone keep trying to snipe this from me?
VII hasn't replaced this level of complexity in its current form. Instead you will probably pick the meta option 9 times out of 10.
It really bugs me that in the second and third ages city states wait a turn before respawning in their original positions. This should be something a player should take into account when planning how to tackle an age from the very start.
Secondly, I don't mind the move away from envoys and the competition to remain suzerain given that it resets at the end of an age. I do have an issue with the fact players can choose from any of the relative bonuses from a city state. VI's system allowed for emergent strategies and gave the player something to think about. I've found the city state of Auckland, do I have enough coast to utilise this? Is the city state defensible? Will someone keep trying to snipe this from me?
VII hasn't replaced this level of complexity in its current form. Instead you will probably pick the meta option 9 times out of 10.
Canadian Bluebeer
King
Currently taking a look at the new patch. Huge map. Not 1 science CS on the starting continent.
Got a couple for Exploration age.
Distant lands: 1 count'em ONE miserable CS.
Got a couple for Exploration age.
Distant lands: 1 count'em ONE miserable CS.
How many total CSs? (not just science)
Canadian Bluebeer
King
11.
Just started the modern era and that's it. 10 on original, 1 on distant.
Civ 6 would start with twice that on a huge map.
(ok. it would get stupid with that many. (free tech each time become suze? heh. silly enough right now)
This makes no sense!
I'm playing my first game on the new patch, focusing solely on suzeraining as many IPs as possible - you can read more about my game setup in this thread.
I'm currently 78% into the Antiquity era, and I've got 15 city states under my belt, and befriending 1 more. My opponents have 5 between them (could be more in the fog of war, there's still some unexplored tiles), and there's another 2 IPs that haven't been suzerained yet. Could be more of those in the fog of war as well - not to mention the distant lands!
So that's at least 23 on my continent alone...
I'm playing Deity on a large Pangaea map with 10 players (me + 9 AI). What map type are you playing on, and how many players? And what difficulty?
Initially I wanted to play with 11 players (me + 10 AI), but in the patch release notes they said that map generation could throw up unintended weirdness with more than 10 players. Could this be the case in your game?
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Canadian Bluebeer
King
Continents, default difficulty, default player amt.
no crisis, long ages, marathon.
I don't think the AI kilt any on the starting continent,
(using the cheat panel mod. hee-hee) So I get all the CS.
Distant lands, no clue how many got wiped out.
Playing in Linux btw. NO denuvo here.
on that.
Edit: new game. Huge, Continents Plus. 10 civs. 11 CS on my continent.
Not at exploration yet.
Pangea would put them all on the same continent. (there is only one after all)
no crisis, long ages, marathon.
I don't think the AI kilt any on the starting continent,
(using the cheat panel mod. hee-hee) So I get all the CS.
Distant lands, no clue how many got wiped out.
Playing in Linux btw. NO denuvo here.
on that.Edit: new game. Huge, Continents Plus. 10 civs. 11 CS on my continent.
Not at exploration yet.
Pangea would put them all on the same continent. (there is only one after all)
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I don't know what they were thinking with the independent powers in VII. They're such a downgrade over what we had in VI. Everyone already knows how poorly independent powers (henceforth IP) compares to city-states (CS), but it should be pointed out that IPs are also a replacement for barbarians. A terrible one, that is.
Say what you will about barbarians - I've certainly cursed their existence plenty of times - but they did represent a recurring and unpredictable military challenge that took skill and preparation to deal with. You didn't know when and where a barbarian camp would turn up, or what kind. They played a very important role in making sure that you had at least some military gameplay even in games where you never went to war with anybody. They ensured that unoccupied mini-continents weren't just trivial to claim halfway through the game. They made it dangerous to leave terrain unattended near your borders later in the game. They made it dangerous to send a lone civilian out into the wilds, necessitating the maintenance of spare military units. They ensured that even isolated civs couldn't just blindly sim-city from the beginning of the game with no regard at all for their own safety. As annoying and RNG-driven as they were, barbarians were crucial to the core gameplay, and as anyone who has tried to turn them off in VI can probably attest to, the game felt super empty and dull without them.
In VII, barbarians were removed altogether and the effect is pretty much the same as turning them off in VI. IPs are not a replacement for them. An IP is just a CS that you might start out at war with, same as if you randomly declared war on a CS in VI. They don't emerge unexpectedly anywhere, they're always in fixed locations and cannot be a meaningful threat to anyone who isn't settled right next to them. They can, by definition, not surprise you (except maybe in the first 10ish turns of the game). They do not represent a recurring, unpredictable military threat that has to be accounted for throughout the game. It's also trivial to kill them - barely harder than a barbarian camp - or to claim suzerainship of, so by the time it's no longer the very early stages of the game, you've done one or the other and never have to think about them again. There's only a handful of them, with at most two or three that are close enough to your lands to be relevant even if they are aggressive. Compared to barbarians, they're so insignificant and easy to handle that they don't serve the intended purpose at all, and the end result is that for all intents and purposes, VII is like playing VI with barbarians turned off, and all the bland emptiness and earlygame inactivity that comes with it. And you have no choice in the matter.
And when we then dig into the ways IPs pale in comparison to VI's interesting and unique city-states, and the methods of interaction being so barebones, it's kind of an insult for the newest iteration of this series to deliver such a massive downgrade to one of the most fundamental aspects of core gameplay. Why remove the uniqueness and make all IPs of a given type identical? Why remove quests? Why remove the dynamic, interactive nature of envoys? Why make it so that once someone is suzerainship, nothing whatsoever can be done about it? The only way in which IPs aren't vastly inferior to what they replaced is in the theoretical gameplay venue of building them up and supplying them with upgrades; but in reality, this turns out to be largely pointless and not worth doing, because you get less out of it than you put in and there's really no reason to ever do it.
There's a lot of ways in which it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what the problem with VII is, but in this particular case, it's extremely obvious how severely they failed to make this part of the game good, and how easily it could have been far better, because they already had the right ideas in the past and then simply abandoned them for no apparent reason. It's just dumbed-down, seemingly for the sake of making the game less complex. In a series that is all about complexity, decisionmaking and intractivity, this is inexcusable. For an established developer with so much experience in the genre to deliver something this much worse than what they've already proven capable of in the past is just not acceptable. And it's worse in such an obvious, undeniable way that one must conclude that they knowingly, intentionally made it worse, presumably to cater to f***ing mobile phones and other such platforms that require primitive game design.
Say what you will about barbarians - I've certainly cursed their existence plenty of times - but they did represent a recurring and unpredictable military challenge that took skill and preparation to deal with. You didn't know when and where a barbarian camp would turn up, or what kind. They played a very important role in making sure that you had at least some military gameplay even in games where you never went to war with anybody. They ensured that unoccupied mini-continents weren't just trivial to claim halfway through the game. They made it dangerous to leave terrain unattended near your borders later in the game. They made it dangerous to send a lone civilian out into the wilds, necessitating the maintenance of spare military units. They ensured that even isolated civs couldn't just blindly sim-city from the beginning of the game with no regard at all for their own safety. As annoying and RNG-driven as they were, barbarians were crucial to the core gameplay, and as anyone who has tried to turn them off in VI can probably attest to, the game felt super empty and dull without them.
In VII, barbarians were removed altogether and the effect is pretty much the same as turning them off in VI. IPs are not a replacement for them. An IP is just a CS that you might start out at war with, same as if you randomly declared war on a CS in VI. They don't emerge unexpectedly anywhere, they're always in fixed locations and cannot be a meaningful threat to anyone who isn't settled right next to them. They can, by definition, not surprise you (except maybe in the first 10ish turns of the game). They do not represent a recurring, unpredictable military threat that has to be accounted for throughout the game. It's also trivial to kill them - barely harder than a barbarian camp - or to claim suzerainship of, so by the time it's no longer the very early stages of the game, you've done one or the other and never have to think about them again. There's only a handful of them, with at most two or three that are close enough to your lands to be relevant even if they are aggressive. Compared to barbarians, they're so insignificant and easy to handle that they don't serve the intended purpose at all, and the end result is that for all intents and purposes, VII is like playing VI with barbarians turned off, and all the bland emptiness and earlygame inactivity that comes with it. And you have no choice in the matter.
And when we then dig into the ways IPs pale in comparison to VI's interesting and unique city-states, and the methods of interaction being so barebones, it's kind of an insult for the newest iteration of this series to deliver such a massive downgrade to one of the most fundamental aspects of core gameplay. Why remove the uniqueness and make all IPs of a given type identical? Why remove quests? Why remove the dynamic, interactive nature of envoys? Why make it so that once someone is suzerainship, nothing whatsoever can be done about it? The only way in which IPs aren't vastly inferior to what they replaced is in the theoretical gameplay venue of building them up and supplying them with upgrades; but in reality, this turns out to be largely pointless and not worth doing, because you get less out of it than you put in and there's really no reason to ever do it.
There's a lot of ways in which it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what the problem with VII is, but in this particular case, it's extremely obvious how severely they failed to make this part of the game good, and how easily it could have been far better, because they already had the right ideas in the past and then simply abandoned them for no apparent reason. It's just dumbed-down, seemingly for the sake of making the game less complex. In a series that is all about complexity, decisionmaking and intractivity, this is inexcusable. For an established developer with so much experience in the genre to deliver something this much worse than what they've already proven capable of in the past is just not acceptable. And it's worse in such an obvious, undeniable way that one must conclude that they knowingly, intentionally made it worse, presumably to cater to f***ing mobile phones and other such platforms that require primitive game design.
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Maybe barbarians were meant to do those things, but they rarely did. In my experience, barbarians mostly didn't matter at all to the player in V and VI unless you got very unlucky. They made the game much harder for the AI, though, which made the AI less competitive against players.
I think that to fix this
1. IPs must be much better at war (strong defense and strong raiding parties that don’t just get picked off)
2. IPs need to alter their targets based on difficulty level (ie they tend to leave AIs alone on Deity and target them on Settler)
Sostratus
Deity
I can see a lot of promise for IP/CS system in the future.
What I ultimately would like to see is successful city states becoming persistent between eras; at least exploration to modern, and under various conditions can actually achieve “minor power” status - actual civs that simply don’t try to win the game. The alliance aspect would be much more meaningful if an independent people had the potential for more than 1 settlement. Imagine how differently you’d look at a city state called Brussels versus a minor power called “Belgium” with 3 settlements. Depending on geography that could have huge implications. (And you can fill in all sorts of flavor and varieties between coastal traders, raiding pillagers, and everything in between.)
Yes, ways to actually compete for their favor, and so on is important too. But I feel like they could be so much more than just city states too.
What I ultimately would like to see is successful city states becoming persistent between eras; at least exploration to modern, and under various conditions can actually achieve “minor power” status - actual civs that simply don’t try to win the game. The alliance aspect would be much more meaningful if an independent people had the potential for more than 1 settlement. Imagine how differently you’d look at a city state called Brussels versus a minor power called “Belgium” with 3 settlements. Depending on geography that could have huge implications. (And you can fill in all sorts of flavor and varieties between coastal traders, raiding pillagers, and everything in between.)
Yes, ways to actually compete for their favor, and so on is important too. But I feel like they could be so much more than just city states too.
Canadian Bluebeer
King
Huge Pangea Map: 20 IP/CS on the main continent.
I left it at 8 players.
This is just to see the numbers. (using cheat panel to send out a buncha scouts)
Btw, getting a science IP then cultural as 1 and 2 so free tech/civic.... then 18 more CS.
Ran out of options for the military IP (always a LOT of them about)
Made it future civic by turn 100 on marathon. lol. (ok, I always take the culture from goodie huts)
so 11 on continents+ and 20 on pangea. hrmmm...
I left it at 8 players.
This is just to see the numbers. (using cheat panel to send out a buncha scouts)
Btw, getting a science IP then cultural as 1 and 2 so free tech/civic.... then 18 more CS.
Ran out of options for the military IP (always a LOT of them about)
Made it future civic by turn 100 on marathon. lol. (ok, I always take the culture from goodie huts)
so 11 on continents+ and 20 on pangea. hrmmm...
I hope that those bonuses are altered or removed in a future patch. They're just too powerful.
Yeah, I think switching from a free tech, to a free tech boost, would still be very powerful, but would be much more in-line with the other bonuses available. I mean, even just getting a free tech once, not every time you suze a CS, wouldn't even be a terrible bonus.
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