English Eleanor

[AntSou]

I think she is a terribly designed leader, as she is significantly weaker than the already existing leaders of both civs. Her ability is 100% worthless in multiplayer

I like Eleanor. She's fun and different with a creative ability.

Couldn't care less about how unreliable she might be in multiplayer.

The focus for multiplayer in my opinion should be on making sure there aren't any exploits available to players and making sure you can actually play without crashes and other shenanigans. NOT Civ balance.

Trying to balance a game like Civ for mp severely reduces design space and would require constant changes to abilities a la other multiplayer games.

 

[Pietato]

I think the new Catherine in the Frontier Pass sounds interesting, and I'm guessing the Chateau gets a buff as well.

Wait, what did I miss? France has the worst abiltities, so any change is good.

 

[AntSou]

Wait, what did I miss? France has the worst abiltities, so any change is good.

People who buy the Frontier Pass are getting a new Teddy and a new Catherine. Essentially two alt leaders with different abilities. It will be released along with the Ethiopia DLC. You still keep the old Teddy and Catherine of course.

Their clothes will be different as well. It's probably cheaper that way, since I assume all of the animations will be the exact same (could be wrong).

 

[Pietato]

People who buy the Frontier Pass are getting a new Teddy and a new Catherine. Essentially two alt leaders with different abilities. It will be released along with the Ethiopia DLC. You still keep the old Teddy and Catherine of course.

Their clothes will be different as well. It's probably cheaper that way, since I assume all of the animations will be the exact same (could be wrong).

Wow...I bought the Frontier Pass and had no idea. Are they available now?

 

[Brutus2]

English Eleanor is one of the last leaders that I have not lit up in my Hall of Fame. You have all inspired me to give it a go after I finish my current game! I think perhaps I have underestimated the usefulness of the ME bonus. I never use them and I probably should make more effort to do so. I guess it never felt useful since only a few cities will need a dam or aqueduct but those damn dams do take a long time to build otherwise!

Also, I always thought the +4 loyalty was just a boost to your own loyalty in that city, does the RND exert +4 loyalty toward other cities?

 

[UWHabs]

English Eleanor is one of the last leaders that I have not lit up in my Hall of Fame. You have all inspired me to give it a go after I finish my current game! I think perhaps I have underestimated the usefulness of the ME bonus. I never use them and I probably should make more effort to do so. I guess it never felt useful since only a few cities will need a dam or aqueduct but those damn dams do take a long time to build otherwise!

Also, I always thought the +4 loyalty was just a boost to your own loyalty in that city, does the RND exert +4 loyalty toward other cities?

I haven't made use of them either, but I really want to. My last game as Maya I had a bunch of aqueducts, and started near a large floodplain area, so ended up building 4 or 5 dams over the course of the game. Thankfully I had the production to hard-build them without too much issue, but it would have certainly been a lot better to just get a ME to rush them. Especially getting an aqueduct up ASAP in a newly founded city and not trying to hard-build it.

 

[AntSou]

Wow...I bought the Frontier Pass and had no idea. Are they available now?

No, they'll be made available along with the Ethiopia DLC iirc.

 

[Drivingrevilo]

get a religion and build up a strong faith income, and at some point get the Cathedrals belief (thankfully AI does not seem to prioritise it)

No offence, but I think going for a religion as Eleanor is really not advisable, especially when playing Engleanor. As several commenters have noted, Engleanor strains to fit all the districts she needs as it is (Royal Navy Dockyard, Campus, Theatre Square, Industrial Zone, maybe Entertainment Complex), let alone when introducing Holy Sites into the equation as well.

This strikes me as the move of someone who plays on the lower difficulties, where going for a religion is a harmless sideshow. But on Deity, unless you have a Civ with powerful religious incentives, it’s really not advisable. Neither Eleanor has those incentives, so it’s a strong pass for religion.

 

[IvoryPavane]

No offence, but I think going for a religion as Eleanor is really not advisable, especially when playing Engleanor. As several commenters have noted, Engleanor strains to fit all the districts she needs as it is (Royal Navy Dockyard, Campus, Theatre Square, Industrial Zone, maybe Entertainment Complex), let alone when introducing Holy Sites into the equation as well.

This strikes me as the move of someone who plays on the lower difficulties, where going for a religion is a harmless sideshow. But on Deity, unless you have a Civ with powerful religious incentives, it’s really not advisable. Neither Eleanor has those incentives, so it’s a strong pass for religion.

Holy sites can be situationally strong for Freleanor in my experience. Housing and amenities on rivers give a good infrastructure and she is going to have the rivers. And if they share your religion, they flip faster. It could be potent, but the situation would need to call for it (juicy Holy site locations, decent production etc)

And any thread with France even tangentially mentioned gets my plea to revamp the Chateau. I’d love to see it have one per city and get +1 culture for each great work in the city, appeal and housing

 

[UWHabs]

Holy sites can be situationally strong for Freleanor in my experience. Housing and amenities on rivers give a good infrastructure and she is going to have the rivers. And if they share your religion, they flip faster. It could be potent, but the situation would need to call for it (juicy Holy site locations, decent production etc)

And any thread with France even tangentially mentioned gets my plea to revamp the Chateau. I’d love to see it have one per city and get +1 culture for each great work in the city, appeal and housing

Yeah, as FrEleanor, I could see how religion might potentially be useful. Since she doesn't get the industrial bonuses, there's not nearly the same number of "required" districts that EngEleanor has, so using religion to generate relics could be a valid strategy for her.

And agreed that the Chateau definitely needs more work. It's a pretty perfect "one per city" improvement.

 

[Pietato]

I found religion to be bad for Eleanor, as it creates too many loyalty issues.

 

[Brutus2]

Just finished my first game as English Eleanor and actually ended up with my second highest score since Hall of Fame was added (my highest score is still Victoria's England).

I played on a standard size seven seas map but actually had bad luck in that I was literally the only civ to start on the coast and started really far from other civs with no way for ships built on one side of the continent to sail around to the other side so my navies were trapped in their own sea where they were built. Every other civ capital and most of their cities were well inland. In fact, only Monty even had a city on the coast for me to invade but it was just a small city without a harbor or theater square when I captured it. I ended up building a theater square, RND, Entertainment District, Sydney Opera House and Hermitage there thanks in part to the natural wonder that gives 50% discount for adjacent wonders and districts.

For the entire game I had the largest, most advanced and highly promoted navy just from all the Great Admirals but never really had anyone to fight with nobody else being on the coast. I also never used a single military engineer. Aqueducts were built before ME are available (needing a later tech and an armory to build them) and I never needed a single canal or dam although that is very map dependent. I have had plenty of other games where dams were needed. Then by the time you can build flood barriers, the cities that need them usually have such high production they build in just a few turns anyway. The increased yields from power was awesome but to be fair I had a huge advantage there being the Suzerain of Cardiff which gives power for each harbor building and of course I had a lot of those. I had full power in all my cities without ever building a single power plant of any kind (until the very late game). Without Cardiff I would have needed to build power plants and in turn caused pollution. The stockpiles of strategic resources was huge. I think I had just over 300 of most resources in the end. I probably should have sold them to buy more Great People & buildings if I was really trying to play the most efficiently.

I did manage to flip Monty's capital and most of his cities as well as half of Cleo's cities. I was just a few turns away from flipping her capital when I won the Culture Victory. I also flipped Lisbon. I definitely could have been more aggressive building more armies and invading faster but I was busy building theater buildings, wonders, harbor building, spies, traders, etc. I could have gone harder into war and bought buildings with gold more often for a faster win I'm sure.

The thing that slowed me down the most (aside from not really going all in on war) was that every city I captured or flipped did not have a theater and was at the max districts for the pop. So I had to spend time growing population with trading routes, chopping, buying granary & sewers, etc. to get pop up to the next level where I could even begin to build (or buy with Reyna) a theater district and then start buying buildings and moving in Great Works. Although I got lucky with a couple Great People that allow a city to have an additional district above their pop limit and I think I may have even gotten extra charges from some of them from the Mausoleum.

I did use Amari, spies and Bread & Circus (after theaters were built) to help reduce loyalty. My Faith income was pretty good considering I didn't build any Holy Sites and took Divine Spark for my pantheon. Faith was very useful for buying some Great People (with Oracle) and Rock Bands. I didn't try for a religion but more faith would always be useful and Jesuit Education probably would have been good. There are just too many other districts and wonders I wanted to be able to fit in Holy Sites too. For example, every city had such great Campus locations from either multiple mountains or reefs I ended up building a campus in nearly every city because they easily had +4 and some +5 adjacency everywhere.

In every game I play I can't get over how rare it is to find AI who have Great Works to steal. Greece had several cities with Theater Districts and Great Writers and Musicians walking around on the map but apparently never used them or only kept their great works in wonders because my spy missions always said "no great works to steal."

Overall a fun game and there were things I could have done better if I was really focused but I found most of England's abilities to be either great or useless based on luck (power from Cardiff, not needing ME, having a great navy but no coastal cities or opponent navies to fight). Eleanor adds a fun twist to conquest. I basically had my armies fighting Monty on one front while my Great Works were "peacefully invading" Egypt and Lisbon on another front.

 

[The Civs 6]

I think France is getting just a little bit underrated here. I think their base Civ is bottom half, I don't disagree with that. But I found their production bonus towards mid-game wonders to be surprisingly powerful for two reasons. You get the bonus for the kinds of wonders that you are likely competing with the AI for. If you look at Classical era wonders, only Coliseum, Machu Picchu (which you never get anyway), and Petra are outstanding. Plus you are still in a race with AI for tech in the midgame. So the bonus is large and quite meaningful.

 

[Pietato]

Base France is bottom 1.

 

[assegai]

No offence, but I think going for a religion as Eleanor is really not advisable, especially when playing Engleanor. As several commenters have noted, Engleanor strains to fit all the districts she needs as it is (Royal Navy Dockyard, Campus, Theatre Square, Industrial Zone, maybe Entertainment Complex), let alone when introducing Holy Sites into the equation as well.

This strikes me as the move of someone who plays on the lower difficulties, where going for a religion is a harmless sideshow. But on Deity, unless you have a Civ with powerful religious incentives, it’s really not advisable. Neither Eleanor has those incentives, so it’s a strong pass for religion.

I went for as religion in both my France and England games, both were on Deity difficulty, and both successful (I even won a religious victory with France but could have gone cultural as well)

in fact as English Eleanor there were just three districts I tried to build in all cities : holy site, theatre square, and harbour. I built I think just one strong campus early, the rest I took from AI (peacefully). And four industrial zones, to power at least double as many cities, plus one encampment for the MEs. Two or three commercial hubs, no entertainment complexes.

ÉDIT: should be noted I also chose the reliquaries belief, which helped a lot with faith income since I planned from the beginning to get many relics

ÉDIT: I have to admit being suzerain of Babylon also helped with the science-without-campuses

 

[Lord Lakely]

Peaceful Eleanor is basically just a whole bunch of Rock Band spam. It's broken and terrifying.

Generally I find that Court of Love is largely insiginificant and somewhat underwhelming, even if the mechanics behind it are unique and creative. It takes so much legwork to get any mileage out of it. I dunno. Perhaps I should stop playing huge/large maps if I really want to give either Eleanor another go.

 

[UWHabs]

Peaceful Eleanor is basically just a whole bunch of Rock Band spam. It's broken and terrifying.

Generally I find that Court of Love is largely insiginificant and somewhat underwhelming, even if the mechanics behind it are unique and creative. It takes so much legwork to get any mileage out of it. I dunno. Perhaps I should stop playing huge/large maps if I really want to give either Eleanor another go.

I think personally I'm waiting for an "unrestricted leaders" game mode to play as Eleanor of Russia or Kongo, or maybe an Eleanor/Relic game as the Khmer.

 

[The Civs 6]

Peaceful Eleanor is basically just a whole bunch of Rock Band spam. It's broken and terrifying.

Generally I find that Court of Love is largely insiginificant and somewhat underwhelming, even if the mechanics behind it are unique and creative. It takes so much legwork to get any mileage out of it. I dunno. Perhaps I should stop playing huge/large maps if I really want to give either Eleanor another go.

It's a mechanic that is more of a "win harder" thing than something that accelerates the snowball. if you have a ton of early game production (which is what she really needs to get theaters and stuff up), you can amass a lot of great works. once you get past a certain threshold it just explodes, often giving you even more great works to use.

 

[Brianstorm]

Still not sure why the Leader gimmick was underutilized. So many possibilities from Constantine leading Rome and Byzantine to William the Conqueror leading England and the French or even Vikings, Various Hapsburgs and Borbouns. More than one Khan and they can both rule China! Hell just multiple leaders for one Civ in general seemed ignored. How cool would a pack with Lincoln and Napoleon and Disraeli and whoever have been?

 

[Zaarin]

William the Conqueror leading England and the French

William the Conqueror was French but he never ruled France. The entire reason he went conquering was because he wasn't in line to rule anything, being illegitimate.