Dawn of Civilization General Discussion

[Enyavar]

Oh yeah, you are right. I was thinking of the cases when you never settle a core city.

And how do those cases go? If you settle a core city straight, your capital counts ALSO not as a core city. One of the sure ways to lose as Egypt within 50 turns, is settling a non-core capital and failing to settle a core city asap. That you get that much time at all, is simply thanks to the rise mechanic that keeps you stable and afloat for all those turns.

 

[Sinsyne]

Yeah it used to work previously(1.12 for example), but nowadays you collapse on the I believe second or third stability check if you settle outside your Core.

I'm kind of an expert in this

 

[JHLee]

Oh ok. I never tried no-core strategies myself and was thinking of some pictures somebody posted on this forum, about a Greek playthrough in which the uploader settled his cities in India.

 

[bluepotato]

It's not too easy but you can still manage with enough domestic stability. In the current version stability doesn't really matter if you have at least -10, and you can get +14 domestic stability (to counter the -24 expansion penalty) even in the industrial era (the only problem there is foreign stability, but you can always use isolationism). The classical era is a bit trickier, but if you get Hinduism (that's what I did with my Greek India) or enough economic stability you can still survive until tributaries. All the other eras have pretty decent combinations that even allow you to be constantly shaky.
This doesn't really work well for civs other than Greece or Rome though, even the Phoenicians don't start with enough techs and they can't even build the colossus + great cothon combo because Greece will inevitably build one of them. Other civs simply don't have good places to move to or can't reach tributaries in time (like Phoenicia). Okay, you can do it with Babylon if you start building up your economy somewhere else and then let your core flip to the Arabians but that's kind of a different strategy. (I was actually able to build a nice Jewish Australian kingdom with Babylon by razing Jerusalem and founding Judaism in Sydney. My economy was slowly dying though and after getting to a point where researching any tech would require at least 40 turns, I quit.)

 

[trevor]

I got a new-to-me event/quest for settling/conquering a city by a selected horse resource with a reward of 5 lancers but can't seem to find it in CIV4EventInfos or the git log. Did I make this up in my head?

 

[JHLee]

I got a new-to-me event/quest for settling/conquering a city by a selected horse resource with a reward of 5 lancers but can't seem to find it in CIV4EventInfos or the git log. Did I make this up in my head?

That's the Quest of Greed, a vanilla event. Don't worry, the game hasn't got into your head... yet.

Spoiler :

Quest10:
Greed
Prereq: BRONZE_WORKING AND lacking either of the following revealed resources: Oil OR Copper OR Iron OR Horse
Obsolete: if GrowthPercent for the current Game Speed number of turns have ellapsed (100 for normal)
Active/Weight: 40/300
Aim:
Declare War on the owner of the resource triggered, stay in war until you conquer the resource
Result:
1.get 0.5*default number of players for this world size+1 units (4 for standard) with the conquered resource as prerequisite

 

[1SDANi]

I've been thinking about Republic and Democracy's usefulness recently and decided to post some of my rambling musings here.

Republic, while a lot more useful in early game with the new minimum slots, still has an issue with being more useful for long term games rather than short term games that dominates the early republics. While very useful for Italy and Holland, it runs into a different problem with them where it's often better to take the stability hit from Republic rather than switch to Democracy. While an interesting gameplay interaction, I'm not sure it's intended or fits the game's philosophy.

Weirdly enough, Democracy's effect would be amazing for Greece and Rome- to the point that Greece more or less already has it as their UP. Were Democracy to be given +1 Food per Specialist and Republic to lose the -Food on Farms, Cottage Lines, and Plantations and be given +100% Great Person Birth Rate we would run into a few balance issues:

1. Democracy would have too much food and we can't apply Republic's food effect for obvious reasons. The first thing to spring to mind is to add -X% Food in all cities, though that would make it harder to grow new cities.
   
2. Greece. Greece would need a new UP. This is outside the scope of exploring the possible effects Republic and Democracy could have, especially since there's such a wealth of info about Greece that choosing a new UP would be rather trivial.

There is also the existence of a particular effect that I've seen lying around the XML: +X Specialist in Core Cities. This would work amazingly in place of Republic's food based effects for Greece and Rome, but runs into issue with every single other Republic, whose cores are either small, or they're named Carthage and their situation is designed to disincentivise settling Core Cities.

Altogether, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to improve Republic's effect. While it is ahistorically useful for many Civs, the addition of minimum slots makes it amazing for historical Civs as well and I fear that trying to restrict it's usefulness for ahistorical Civs would only break its intended usefulness. If the main issues are its appeal to ahistorical nations and superiority to Democracy for nations that find it useful, it seems the best option to fix that would be to fix it in a way that doesn't change Republic.

 

[JHLee]

I never thought Republic to be OP, especially for large empires. Happiness has been a big issue ever since the resource patch, and it is very hard to maintain high population without Monarchy if you don't control tons and tons of happy resources. Once religions start popping up from the late classical age and on, Republic has a hard time controlling angry faces.

 

[1SDANi]

I never thought Republic to be OP, especially for large empires. Happiness has been a big issue ever since the resource patch, and it is very hard to maintain high population without Monarchy if you don't control tons and tons of happy resources. Once religions start popping up from the late classical age and on, Republic has a hard time controlling angry faces.

That hasn't really been my experience. While difficult, with the proper use of Cathedrals, Happiness Buildings, Great Artists and Culture Happiness Republican nations can keep their Happiness neutral or positive while maintaining their growth. I can see the same strategy being much harder on higher difficulties though.

 

[Sinsyne]

I'll just leave this here.

 

[Leoreth]

Shut. up.

 

[Sinsyne]

Shut. up.

It honestly is one of the most enjoyable experiences in DoC when you play in a region with lots of jungle and rainforest and then finally are able to chop down that pesky nature blocking your prime real estate.

 

[Leoreth]

I diagnose you with Jair Bolsonaro

 

[1SDANi]

I diagnose you with Jair Bolsonaro

It's the best option. The only real use of Rainforests is to be chopped down once you get Microbiology and build a farm or cottage where they once stood. They don't grant health like forests do, reduce yields rather than improve them, and don't have any advantage over forests when a nature preserve is built on them. Jungles are even worse.

Perhaps Nature Reserves should be buffed or given special yields for Rainforests and Jungles?

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Perhaps Nature Reserves should be buffed or given special yields for Rainforests and Jungles?

Easy Fix: Nature Preserves grant -1 Production but +3 Commerce. That way they are worse on forests than on jungles and rainforests at least.

 

[Leoreth]

Interesting.

 

[KeeperOT7Keys]

What do you think about capital changing UU of Turks? I think building palaces is very annoying process since most cities have very low production unless you are lucky with your conquests, and building plaaces seem counter intuitive as a player imo.

I suggest adding/changing power of Divan, it would be a very unique building if it allowed an easier transition between palaces/capitals. What about reducing the cost of palace or making it free if there's already a divan in the city? I think this would make it a very interesting UB, which makes you change your capital often to minimize maintanence instead of kinda generic building which directly reduces the miantenance. but tbh I don't think I've ever seen an AI building a palace so it might be hard for them to manage.

 

[Leoreth]

Why is building palaces couterintuitive?

 

[KeeperOT7Keys]

Because you normally wouldn't build them if it wasn't required in the UHV.

 

[Leoreth]

Yeah that's why it's a UHV goal.