Decided that I wanted to play with lots of RExxing and enjoy some mindless violence
so I decided to roll up a game as Napoleon at chieftain (normally I play king, sometimes emperor) - and have a few Civ 5 thoughts. FWIW, I’m currently playing with the 1.0.1.275 patch and Thal’s TBC v 7.0 installed.
(a) Firstly, huge kudos to you (in particular) Thal and the devs for the game's and mod’s stability – I’m currently at 1020 AD and haven’t noticed a single problem / crash.
(b) One small thing I would note about the mod installation / update process: I needed to unzip (in my case using 7-zip) your mod file after downloading it to the MODS folder – perhaps because I have steam on my d: drive – but couldn’t find an instruction to do this in your thread here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=15667
I just wondered therefore if it might be worthwhile adding a third step to your mod installation process.
(c) IMHO, hammers, especially in the early game, still seem rather scarce. The situation’s not too bad once you grow your cities and get to workshops, but early game production still seems to take an age IMHO – and I’m following the great advice I was given elsewhere on this forum re: growing to approx pop 4 and working tiles to maximise production. FWIW, I still think the solution is to add an early hammer back to mines, although I understand the implications of this for the carpet of doom. As a second best solution, does anyone think there’s value in altering the republic social policy to give an additional hammer – even if at the expense of 1 food? That might even provide an opportunity to add back one food to watermills, which I agree are now less attractive. If so, I guess the question becomes how to avoid unduly penalising small empires which go tradition early. Another alternative of course is to move the hammer bonus (which I’d apply to all mines, not just riverside) back to engineering. FWIW, I’ve had some other thoughts on the subject (re: how to improve early hammer availability without producing military unit spam) which I’ll post separately later.
(d) When hovering over the market in the build queue, I get the message “TXT_KEY_BUILDING_MARKET_HELP” rather than the help text outlining the benefits of a market (ie. +25% gold).
(e) Similarly, the mint’s help text doesn’t refer to +3 gold on gems, although it’s mentioned in the civilopedia and occurs in game.
(f) Completely agree re: the inferiority of militaristic CS because of the random nature of the military unit they spawn. Perhaps they’d be more useful if they spawned your latest unit, or at least one from the era that your civ is currently in. (Indeed, I notice that this has already been suggested.) As it stands, military CS seem rather less valuable IMHO than cultural CS.
(g) Personally, I’d leave iron well alone. I haven’t seen it readily available in my last three games (all at king, prior to this chieftain playthrough). The other thing I’d question is whether rationing resource availability is going to compromise the ability of smaller civs to produce defensive units.
(h) IMHO, the additional food from the lighthouse makes non seafood coastal tiles a little overpowered. As it stands, in my post navigation, pre-fertlizer era, I find myself working non-seafood coastal tiles rather than a non riverside farm, for the former’s extra commerce (since both provide three food). Was this really the intention? As an alternative, might I suggest that the lighthouse only adds food to seafood, atoll and The Great Barrier reef hexes, leaving non seafood coastal tiles at two food. To compensate, the lighthouse could perhaps add one extra food (ie. 2F) or some extra gold to seafood tiles. If you really want to add food to non seafood coastal tiles, how about doing so at refrigeration – which then gives the gamer the choice between working a 3F plus gold coastal tile or a fertilizer boosted (4F) non riverside farm?
In all, the game is much improved since launch, so kudos to you Thal for all your continued great work.
IMHO, the only real issue needing to be addressed remains early game production – about which I’ll write up my thoughts in a subsequent post.
EDIT: One last thing I forgot to mention – which may well (perhaps like some of the others above) be a flaw of the base game: I’m noticing huge variations in the willingness of leaders to improve their land. At the current time, I’ve more or less mapped the world and confirmed that a few leaders appear to have done a reasonable job improving their surrounding tiles. By contrast, the Suleiman AI had improved none – repeat none – of the hexes surrounding its three cities when I defeated them in circa 900 AD. I appreciate my game’s being played on chieftain, but this suggests to me that Sully’s propensity to build workers and / or improve land may need tweaking.
and 1
to all cities, it's very useful when expansive empires are lacking production in the early game. I designed warlike empires to get production from combat. Spoils of War provides gold in the early game, and in Civ 5 gold=production. I've also buffed Spoils of War for the next version.
- Unimproved river grass
