Civ Discussion - Egypt

[Lord Lakely]

Clarification - you don’t need strictly bridges. An early Fishing Quay or Bath will suffice, it’s the same basic urban spreading rule at play.

I thought the notion of constrained development was weird in your earlier comment, now I think I know why.

I forgot about the fishing quay, that does indeed work. However, navigable rivers are not the best spot for the quay itself. You ideally want that to be built on a sea tile to have a better spawn point for your cogs in Exploration. It also doesn't help you if you spawn between two different navigable rivers.

It's one of those little things that adds to the general "Feels Bad"-ness of the Civ for me.

 

[uppi]

Clarification - you don’t need strictly bridges. An early Fishing Quay or Bath will suffice, it’s the same basic urban spreading rule at play.

I thought the notion of constrained development was weird in your earlier comment, now I think I know why.

Yes, but there are only two of those buildings and you might have other places for them. Add in awkwardly placed mountains or resources and you can feel quite boxed in. But in my opinion, the problem is not so much that you can't get to spots, but that the spots are not that good and you cannot really make them good. Navigable rivers don't have resources themselves and there are no wonders you can place on them. So when you have snaked your way to a +2 spot, you often can't make it a +4 spot by placing wonders next to it, because the adjacent tiles are navigable rivers.

Also, if you have many navigable river tiles, you kinda have to work them, because there are only so many buildings you can place on them. But they are mostly food tiles, so you don't really want to work them in cities where you want to work production tiles.

To improve navigable rivers, I would like to have resources on them (Papyrus? Or maybe just plain fish?). Also, one or two wonders which need to be placed on navigable rivers would be great and would really help Egypt (although I am not sure what those could be).

I also want to throw in Prussia as potential followup in Modern. If you have placed your districts along navigable rivers, that +1 production adjacency for every building (multiplied by specialists!) from the Ruhr civic can amount to quite a lot.

 

[Sagax]

I forgot about the fishing quay, that does indeed work. However, navigable rivers are not the best spot for the quay itself. You ideally want that to be built on a sea tile to have a better spawn point for your cogs in Exploration. It also doesn't help you if you spawn between two different navigable rivers.

It's one of those little things that adds to the general "Feels Bad"-ness of the Civ for me.

Yes, but there are only two of those buildings and you might have other places for them. Add in awkwardly placed mountains or resources and you can feel quite boxed in. But in my opinion, the problem is not so much that you can't get to spots, but that the spots are not that good and you cannot really make them good. Navigable rivers don't have resources themselves and there are no wonders you can place on them. So when you have snaked your way to a +2 spot, you often can't make it a +4 spot by placing wonders next to it, because the adjacent tiles are navigable rivers.

Also, if you have many navigable river tiles, you kinda have to work them, because there are only so many buildings you can place on them. But they are mostly food tiles, so you don't really want to work them in cities where you want to work production tiles.

To improve navigable rivers, I would like to have resources on them (Papyrus? Or maybe just plain fish?). Also, one or two wonders which need to be placed on navigable rivers would be great and would really help Egypt (although I am not sure what those could be).

I also want to throw in Prussia as potential followup in Modern. If you have placed your districts along navigable rivers, that +1 production adjacency for every building (multiplied by specialists!) from the Ruhr civic can amount to quite a lot.

I’ll concede that being sandwiched between two navigable rivers and/or mountains is rough. On its own, though, I haven’t run into significant development issues caused by just one navigable river. Fishing Quay is not that strategically important - you’re either close enough to the coast that building it on a river is not a big deal (and you should save a good coast spot for Wharf+Shipyard anyway), or you’re so deep into the land that you probably should have another coastal settlement to handle ships anyway.

I wouldn’t mind more buildings/Wonders on rivers, though - water-based buildings in general are all sorts of clunky right now.

 

[Sostratus]

I feel like Egypt just has 1 objectively badly designed element (the necropolis) and 2 undertuned ones - navigable rivers & Tjaty.

All of the unique “great people” are a bit clunky. There are 10 of them for every civ that gets them, they’re all unique, they have escalating costs… it’s a cool idea, but it’s messy. This is for all of them - Tjaty, Shi Dafu, Ulim, etc. Many of the individual units have good abilities, but this is just a nightmarishly complex little Rube Goldberg machine to give out little boosts. I’m not sure what to do with them generally.

The necropolis is just inherently flawed. There are so many interesting effects you could give it - say, it grants yields to all wonders in the city. Or maybe it gets yields for every wonder within X tiles (like cov6’s temple of Artemis and camps.) 100 gold for each wonder built is mathematically terrible and anyone could have foreseen that without playing the game. Suppose you have a real banger of an ancient age and knock out 7 wonders. That’s potentially 700 gold if you even built the necropolis first in each city - probably more like 500. That’s just a few gold per turn at the empire level. Does no one remember the burial tomb from civ5? Now that slaps.

I think the problem with boosting navigable rivers is it misses the obvious- the land adjacent to navigable rivers. If we could boost that instead, well, yeah, then you’d change your tune about Egypt. If I got +1 on improvements next to a river, oh, we’d be cooking with gas. Slap on +25% towards quarters next to navigable rivers and Kemet just sails, baby.

Egypt was known for the stuff they built on the Nile’s banks, not what they did in the river itself.

 

[Lord Lakely]

+1 Production adjacency from Navigable rivers is a tweak I would accept and welcome.

I don't mind Great People as a concept, at all. Greece's Logoi, Abbasid's Alim and Spain's Conquistadores are all very good. The Tjaty have too much variance between them. They're either the best Great Person you can think of, or an utter waste of resources.

 

[Krikkit1]

+1 Production adjacency from Navigable rivers is a tweak I would accept and welcome.

I don't mind Great People as a concept, at all. Greece's Logoi, Abbasid's Alim and Spain's Conquistadores are all very good. The Tjaty have too much variance between them. They're either the best Great Person you can think of, or an utter waste of resources.

Do those GP bonuses last past the Age?

 

[MutilationWave]

Do those GP bonuses last past the Age?

No, but you can build wonders with some of them so kinda yeah I suppose

 

[Lord Lakely]

Christopher Columbus's bonus carries over. He reveals the entire map if you pop him on an owned ocean tile.