- Tech quotes are mostly fine, tongue in cheek is ok
Agree...
except...
"Always try to rub up against money, for if you rub against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you" always makes me cringe - to the point that I'm actually glad Capitalism is a leaf civic so I have the option of forgoing the benefits of the civic and finishing the game without ever having to hear Sean Bean's majestic voice be tarnished by the idiocy of what some D-grade writing class student came up with on the spot when he forgot to do his homework.
Right now Specialists are kind of garbage.
Not unpopular at all, I think it just fell to the wayside because we stopped moaning and complaining about it - classic case of "squeeky wheel." Specialists are so bad that when they were buffed by having their yields increase 50% when you complete the 3rd tier building, many of us didn't know about it and those who did know found the increase unnoticeable. I don't know why they fixed what wasn't broken - having them be the source of great person generation as they were in previous games was much better, especially as many of the great people in accumulation are a game changing element, and having methods of increasing their yields so that running them in lieu of a tile was a legitimate option made the game more versatile. Now they're just kind of a "well, the city's using all its good tiles, so do we borrow tiles from other cities or relegate the excess pop to specialists?" To make an extremely bad analogy, I kind of feel like when we found out that the final expansions, patches, and updates were released and no more changes were officially going to be made to the game, we all felt like when Thanos snapped his fingers, only instead of losing half of the people we lost half of the potential, and we are all left talking to Steve Rogers in a therapy session trying to accept that this is just how it is going to be from now on... "But Steve, it's such a great game... but specialists still suck ...And I can't play monopolies mode unless I turn off culture victory ... and how are we supposed to just say 'it's OK' after what they did to Poland..."
Now that that's out of the way, here's my list of unpopular opinions *opening flood gates and donning boxing gloves*
-Secret Societies is the best game mode and should be part of the base game... for the roundabout reason/rationale that none of the optional game modes were patched/tweaked and only the base game elements were fixed, and while it is the best game mode, one of the four options, Hermetic Order, is completely broken in implementation and needs to be fixed, namely the chief component of that option, the ley lines, need to be a placeable improvement (with some sort of heavy placement restrictions) instead of a randomly placed feature that often blocks the ideal placement of that which it's supposed to supplement.
-(more on societies) On a continents or islands map and using the Owls of Minerva SS, the Sukiennice is a strong enough bonus that it makes up for all of the other elements of the Polish kit being completely lackluster. Fight me. EDIT- the converted military slot for the sole purpose of founding a religion is really good too.
-Babylon is an OP civ... because of the Palgum! This thing is just incredible, an extra hammer from the building (which doubles it's production, and in the early game one extra hammer can make such a difference), and an extra housing which is the limiting factor to how big (and powerful) a city can get at that point in the game, and main advantage being that all all tiles with freshwater get +1 food - that's all tiles next to a river or lake or Oasis or some wonders - not just the farms, now the plains/hill/mines make the 2 food necessary to support the citizen to work it and grassland/hill/mines and mills are now food-positive. I'll concede that free tech instead of boosted tech is a very strong advantage, but at least that overpowered bonus has a small counterbalance in that standard researching is halved.
-Mapuche, Canada, and Khmer indeed got much better with the balance patch, but the big winner was Spain, who went from the 2nd or 3rd worst civ in the game to the absolute best. Fight me.
-Ambiorix of Gaul may have some neat and strong benefits in his kit, but the district placement restriction is so annoying that it makes him unplayable. EDIT: not unplayable, just so obnoxious that I'd never opt to play him.
-Kublai Khan is better with Mongolia than China. I feel a lot of people dislike the Mongolia option because the Mongolia kit is completely geared towards Cavalry domination and the Genghis bonus is the strongest aspect of that, but my problem with Genghis is just that - it's completely geared towards cavalry domination with no economic bonus to support the army or science/culture bonus to keep the army relevant. Kublai offers some infrastructure bonuses to support that army, though it's smaller and weaker than Genghis's. The main elements of the China bonus before Kublai came around, were any early wonder you wanted and a permanent extra build charge, both of which are part of Qin Shi Huang's leader ability and you miss out on with Kublai, leaving him with just a garbage unique unit, a situationally... acceptable unique infrastructure, and a bonus to Euerkaspirations that does complement the more limited aspect of his bonus (the extra economic slot is by far stronger and more versatile.)
-I'm not saying they are one of the best civs, or even in the top half... But Georgia really isn't THAT bad, at least not to the point of Meme-level bashing. They can stay in a golden age for the whole game, have a method of generating so many extra envoys that you can always be suzerein of every city state (unless Rough Teddy is in the game maybe), both killing units and 3rd level walls get you extra faith, you want to run monarchy (and monarchic legacy after graduating) for extra housing and diplomatic favor, a tiny bit of extra tourism from walls, and between cheap walls, a +3 Man-at-Arms that gets an additional +7 in hills, and nearby city-state alliances distracting invasions make defending your territory easy. So all in all, they are an impregnable empire (in hills) constantly getting golden age bonuses with small advantages given to several different categories (envoys/suzereinities, faith, and tourism)
-Ever since they added features that give major bonuses to campus adjacency (reefs, fissures, GBR, ley lines (smirk)) without losing any of the preexisting adjacency bonuses, Korea sucks. I'm aware that +4 is a landmark cutoff as it guarantees Korea to get the full value of the second half of the Rationalism card, but +4 or more campuses are pretty commonplace now, and they are restriced to hill placement. The governor boost to science and culture is nice and scales but is too little early game and the bonuses to farms and mines adjacent to Seowons are nice, but that's about it and all-in-all much like the Hwacha, the entire Korea kit is nothing to write home about. I don't think they deserve to retain the constant perma-ban status in MP.
-War carts suck. Fight me. Yes, they are cheap, maintenance free and the strongest thing out there at the very, very beginning of the game, but I still find that you need to make so many of them right away right away right away when you're very limited on production and sacrifice so many other early game investments that the mega-early rush is too much of a gamble.
And finally, some opinions that I'm pretty sure but not certain aren't that unpopular:
-the Prophet system is stupid, where you generate faith and great prophet points (akin to science and great scientist points) and then when you win (or lose) your great prophet, all future great prophet points are discarded is just dumb.
-I've heard there's been some tweaking so that Monopoly tourism has been toned down, but it's still far too much and breaks the game mode.
-I absolutely despise the addition of resource-consuming units. I've pretty much identified the window of opportunity for frigates, line infantry, field cannons, Cuirrassiers, and Cavalry as the last chance to complete a domination victory as your military is constantly increasing in size throughout the game and then near the end, your ability to keep the units relevant is based on map luck of admittedly plentiful but ultimately finite resources.