[GS] GS impressions/random observations thread.

Yeah, I just saw my first barbarian--a barbarian Caravel--in the Information Age in my current game.

Yes. I was unaware of the bug because I usually never sell great works--but I'm currently trying very hard not to win a Culture Victory because I want to win a Science Victory. Honestly, Eleanor of France, Kristina, and Kupe, why are you guys not even trying to compete with me here?

 

It seems that when contests are going on, it stops voting for diplomatic vitory

When Sweden is on the map, there are contests all the time... so I think if you want to do diplo victory, you'll probably want to murder Sweden

 

Super fun having a tornado spawn RIGHT ON TOP OF MY !@#$%%&^& units when I'm trying to siege a city.

 

Certainly adds historical flavour

 

I'm not sure about this. I have won two Nobel Prizes in a row, and just voted for the third at the same time as I voted for Diplomatic victory points.

(I lost because I voted as many as another player possibly could, rather than one more than them).

 

The couple of games I've started with Barbarians on, I was wondering if I had clicked "rampaging barbarians". There were heaps of them.

 

Yeah, you vote on the diplo victory when you vote for the nobel prize, but then once nobel prize passes, the contest goes on for a long number of turns with no voting. I believe it's longer than the period between votes normally

 

I finally got a decent picture of Inca's Ship tunnels. It is a "Bug" that ships can go through tunnels but only from lake/coast to another lake/coast and city centers that are part of the connection. The ship can't go from coast/lake into a city center without an adjacent coast, lake, or canal tile.



I've tried to take an image that displays where the ship can go. Kitu Kara (despite having a connection) can't take the ship but Kashamarka can because of the lake tile.

I rolled flatland as Inca that game which is manageable but production poor. The Inca's terrace farms made the start better, but the land further out still severely lacked hills for production.

 

Well, auto-theming makes Sweden easier to play by stripping out the set collection element, but that's also stripping out the challenge. Not a fan of that.

 

SO, I go buy a tile and find Hong Kong is perhaps considering becoming one of the big boys. Is this old nonsense or new nonsense....?

Spoiler :

 

IIRC, city states get more tiles for each envoy, and now common behavior involves envoy bidding wars on single city states.

 

As expected, I got one of my fastest Cultural Victories ever with Sweden. I didn't even get to try going for a Diplo Victory. I probably didn't need to make Rock Bands, but they were pretty fun.

I cleared 108 barb camps.

Strangely they stopped completely around the Industrial Era.

Addendum: When you activate the Scout Cats, it should not be surprising that the barbarian scouts also have cats. But it is. Also, Mongolia is periwinkle in my new game.

 

They get but there's a limit to how much tiles they can get, IIRC a CS border doesn't go further than two tiles, or at least it's not supposed to. My game have a CS with a border similar to Hong Kong in this screenshot but I liberated it from Macedon, so it grew while it was under Macedon's control.

 

Trying out Canada now, in hopes to win DipV. Since the civ has the tundra start bias, it effectively means that you have one less direction to expand. Well, in my current game I started in the southern hemisphere, with Scythia blocking and running away on the north side, sea immediately on the east side, and a series of mountain chains blocking the entire west side. There are only two one-tile valleys...that lead directly into CS territories. "Okay fine," - I thought. "Guess I'll have to conquer those CS for myself."

I was then reminded that Canada's UA makes proactive CS conquering impossible.

So far Canada's Medieval theme is the ONLY saving grace to this civ...

 

I think rock bands can be OP. In yesterday's game i got a cultural victory faster than an AI got to another planet. And he was using lasers. With a hallyu wildcard you can tune your rock band that they can level up quite easily if they play in right places. And when they level 4 they can produce 16000-26000 tourism each turn with just 4% chance of retiring. So 3-4 such Rock bands can rock the world in culture victory pretty fast. And there is no way to defend. You can block all possible venues, but they just can ride into another civ. To defend againts such tourism production you must have a culture output around 2000, and that even maybe will be not enough.

 

Did you start in the ancient era (like a normal game)? Or did you do one of the 'later era starts'? As border growth on those has been wonky since vanilla.

 

I've completed a first game with Trajan and went for a science victory to see the late game additions. All in all, I am not really impressed with the quality of the addon.

First off, it is quite buggy, especially with the Barbarians not spawning on certain continents, weird city state spawns & roads not aligning. I abandoned one game as the Inca because there were no Barbarians around at all, allowing me to settle like crazy. AI is still pretty bad.

Otherwise, all the new features seem a bit half-baked to me. The World Congress looks fine, but you get the same boring proposals over and over with small effects (+1 trade route for one player, luxuries stack, ...) over and over with no control on what to put on the table. New resource stockpiles are fine in principal, but seem badly balanced with modern resources. I had a large empire with just one Oil resource and no Aluminum. So, +3 Oil = total for 3 tanks and/or airplanes, even without burning an oil for power. And there was not much other oil in the vicinity to go to war for, either. Rock bands are more late game micro-managing, with a large RNG component and more bad balancing.

One you have clean power, you can't decommission your old power plants. Climate change happens too fast, but does not seem to have that large of an impact.

Otherwise, they added a whole new era at the end of the game, but the problem is that the game is decided at that point anymore. Going through the final motions of the science victory was a chore before the addon, and no it takes even longer.

So, seems like Civ IV will remain my favorite for the foreseeable future.

 

Having maybe the greatest war I've had in a Civ VI game at the moment.

Playing as the Ottomans, so you know I'm gonna go conquering. My neighbour is Mali and I thought he actually looked pretty weak. So I start the attack, bring Jannisaries, bombards, some Knights and Pike & Shots. Got the unique governor set up.

Well, turns out that if there's one thing AI Mali can do is put that money to good use. Each turn he just kept buying units, mostly Crossbowmen. So it's been a real meatgrinder, waaaay slower than conquering the AI usually is and with way more casualties. So, finally I make it to the coastline, where he has his few remaining cities. Finally got him on the run a bit.
Well, just on his coast sits a huge navy who just blast my units to smithereens.

He's almost defeated now but yeah, this has been a really epic war.

 

Finished my first game of GS as America last night.

Some observations:

• The American bonus favour from wildcard slots is stupidly strong! Every single World Congress, I could dominate the resolutions.
• Diplomatic Victory takes forever to achieve. I had picked up a few victory points from emergencies and the Statue of Liberty, but I still won a CV when I was at 7 points.
• Map generation is wonky, especially barbarian spawns and volcano placements. I had multiple starts with no barbarians at all on my continent, and I found several volcanoes clustered together on top of eachother (like 4 hexes next to each other, all volcanoes).
• Road generation is completely screwed. Dead ends pointing in all directions.
• Earthquakes are really sorely lacking. The amount of aid emergencies based on volcanic erruptions is really silly, compared to how rare they are in the real world. Adding earthquakes in volcanic regions would maintain the amount of emergencies, and keep it more realistic.

Overall pretty happy with the additions, but climate change is way too easy to ignore (exactly because it happens when the game is wrapping up).

I was by far the world's number 1 polluter, and everyone loved me and lined up to be my ally. Secondly, I got to some of the most severe stages of climate change (using default environmental disaster settings of 2), and almost nothing happened. I lost a couple coastal tiles I really didn't care about, and that was it. Changes need to happen to the inland terrain as well. Snow becoming tundra, tundra becoming grasslands or plains, grasslands becoming plains, and plains becoming deserts.

Secondly, there needs to be a stage of complete environmental destruction. Earth is no longer inhabitable. If nobody won before this, everyone loses. Cue Civ: BE.

 

Surprise Attack - It surely is bugged, because I got it yesterday playing as Canada when I succesfully completed an emergency by capturing a city from America and liberating it to the previous owner (and there were absolutely no tunnels around). And I thought that was the Canadian achievement for succesfully completing an emergency - so it means that that one is bugged, too

It seems that you get Surprise Attack when your unit moves suddenly from one tile to another - which can happen by airlifting or even by being pushed out of somebody's borders. That would explain why so many people have it.