How do YOU play Civ different from anyone else?

[gunnergoz]

Want to start a dialog. I'm looking for ideas, inspiration, imagination. Different ways to play to freshen the experience. For example, reducing numbers of civs on a given map to make more space. Rule sets you might impose upon your play to make you feel different about the game, limit or expand your choices, whatever. Mods that do specific changes to make it more rewarding for you. Play styles that others may not have thought of. Role playing, for instance. How do you make it work for you? Looking for ways people have found to spice up the Civ playing experience. But no, not going to wear a costume to play, that's out.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I rarely pay much attention to the Victory Conditions as given, since I care less for how the game ends than for how the game proceeds. So, I set 'in game' victory conditions for myself.
Examples:
Play Xenophobic China: not only build Great Wall across the border with, say, a Tundra full of barbarians, but Never allow Open Borders with any other Civ in the game and massacre any Missionaries crossing the border. Result: the original Hermit Kingdom concentrating on all internal resources rather than Trade - it's surprisingly difficult to get a decent Empire going that way for any length of time.

Play Cornucopia of Excellent Goods At Reasonable Prices: try to maximize the trade routes and trade route income, regardless of anything else in the game. My previous record was with Scythia, of all people, but I'm preparing to start a game with Dido and see how much I can beat it with the new emphasis on Sea trade routes.

Transcontinental Railroad. My latest. Playing on a Pangaea Map with Roosevelt, my sole purpose is to build a railroad from one side of the continent to the other, coast to coast. So far this has required that I seize a Canadian city that was in the way, kill Georgia completely (their capital blocked the only direct pass through a mountain range: so sorry for Tammy) but otherwise have largely managed it peacefully. Also had to rename a couple of cities so that San Francisco was available for the city on the far western coast. . .

I play most of my games with the Mods Faster Starting Settlers and Expanded Initial Vision and so frequently start my games as a Nomad - moving my settler for a turn or two before settling down. This is not always strictly necessary from a gameplay standpoint, but for almost all the given Civs in the game, it's more historically realistic. I can't wait for the Mod Community to modify the Maori start to land-based Civs like the Huns or Commanche or Goths, so that I can do some Real nomadic starts. . .

I name cities according to where they belong - can't stand the idea of, say, London being land-locked or Saint Louis being on the sea coast. And I name units constantly, either to give them historical flavor or whimsicalyl. I have a couple of times recreated the WWI British 'I' class Battlecruisers by naming Victoria's Battleships, but instead of the Indomitable, Invincible, etc. I use HMS Insipid, Inconceivable and Incontinent.

And, being a writer of military history of the Soviet Union's forces in World War Two, I've been known to rename cities in the game, so Peter's Sankt Petersburg becomes Leningrad, and the Soviet cities Kalinin, Gorkyi, Kuibyshev and Ordzhonikidze appear on the map.
- Oh, and Vladivostok is always the farthest Russian city on any of my maps from the Capital, just for grins.

None of which has the slightest thing to do with any 'traditional' way of playing the game, but it keeps me interested.

 

[Weraptor]

I use this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1673627346
It's surprisingly good and the concept is well thought-out overall. It also nerfs Korea (but don't play it as Australia)

 

[Jaybe]

Currently in my 1st GS game (Rome, huge continents, epic speed, prince). 70 hours @turn 559: yes I am a slow, micromanaging player. Role playing with the goal of seeing how close to 750 turns I can get before winning, which is how I always play. To me, scoring under 2500 points is a loss, though I currently am at 3300 with some 50 cities. My largest cities are in the mid 20’s in pop. I have taken 6 foreign capitals, 1 or 2 by loyalty after taking over nearby cities.

I have been selling or giving my artwork etc. to other civs to avoid a culture victory due to the humoungous success of my 3-promo, 1st rock band (I recently deleted it). 6 diplo points and I am letting others reduce it, because I just launched the inter-system ship. I’ll not be getting any GDRs unless someone else does first (those GDR promotions seem INSANE), and intend to delete them from future games.

 

[Sostratus]

I know the 'meta' is early war + science/culture spam.
You know what I like? Production spam.
The goal of the game is to amass as much production in your cities as possible. Why? To create infrastructure to enable further increases in production, of course.
Mines on almost every hill. IZs universally. Every city gets an internal trade route to boost - you guessed it- production. And sometimes food, so we can have more workers to increase production. (Sub for alliance trade routes later since they give even more production!)
See that tile not doing anything? put an encampment on it. Those buildings give production. Our pious people believe in Work Ethic.
Craftsmen is the most important card in the game. Naval infrastructure is key too. Because it boosts our shipyard for more production.

"Less" is not a word in our vocabulary. There is only More.

Germany is ideal for this. I am a ruthless Hansa maximizer (see signature.) Get apprenticeship and just explode. You can do it with lesser civs too, but the Fatherland is choice for this.
You can win, too, at emperor+. You just end up producing so many wonders, projects, etc, that the computer simply cannot keep up. Multiqueue is a godsend here.

 

[Bosque]

I generally strive to become suzerain of every City State on the map, and am usually successful. Number one priority is the Apadana, and then I Wonder spam the capital. I follow that up by making every effort to satisfy the City State requests. Having every CS on your side makes the game much easier, and does so without major wars (unless I need to liberate a CS).

 

[gunnergoz]

Wow! Love the ideas! Thanks for sharing your various game kinks & kicks. Hope more folk do so too, this is great stuff.

 

[Zerazar]

In addition to several dozen mods from the workshop, I make lots of dirty xml edits. https://imgur.com/a/YiAjrvd

I also tend to give up on games in the late game. I find it enormously tedious to go through the motions of the last 50-75 turns or so.

 

[BTSeven7]

I second the production game. Before I learned to min/max and spam only what I need for victory I used to love growing super cities and getting massive amounts of production in my capital.

I got the capital of Poland to 500+ production per turn once in R&F using Magnus multiple IZ effects and a lot of intn’l trade routes. I was building space projects in 3 turns.

Play with the civs that have unique routes to regular victories and actually use those methods.

-Turn off victory conditions and flip your way to a domination victory with Elenor.

-Use Khmer and really go for the suicide missionary relics. It’s a fun culture victory.

-Try Georgia with max city states on a normal map and have fun rolling envoys. It’s a unique strategy and kind of cool.

Also...

-Play on the lowest difficulty and see if you can build every wonder. I tried this once and think I missed two. It’s hard.

-See if you can put an improvemt on every tile of the map or maybe just your continent by conquering the whole thing.

 

[Casworon]

I play multiplayer local games where i am the only human player.

I do this because in the multliplayer game setup you can change the difficulty of each AI civ.

My set up currently is standard speed huge continents with
2 king AI
3 emperor AI
3 immortal AI
3 Diety AI

This often leads to an interesting game with civs being wiped off the map, lots of emerencies and occasionally a snowballing AI.

It also means that the weaker civs that are getting beaten up can be good targets for colonial wars Celsius Beli which i rarely see on normal set up games

Also starting the game you have no idea what AI you will start next too. Might be a diety or two. Might just be the kings.

Its great fun!.

 

[dagriggstar]

I haven't played for almost a year, been travelling, so some of this stuff is kind of out of date I guess. I haven't played either of the expansions yet.

I went through a phase where I recorded my own games. I would look up the history of a country, then say stuff like "After the military conquests of Julius Caesar, his adopted son Augustus becomes the new head of state under an autocratic government" (In game conditions, I've been conquering as Rome, then changed my gov). I'd use map pins to remember where battles where, so you could have like 5 battles of teutoburg forest. I never released any though.

The other thing I did was play with a lot of mods, including some of my own. I nerfed science yields a lot, then gave every civ in the game Peters boosted grand embassy ability (Each trade route gets you +1 science per tech behind you are compared to the destination civ). Had a fun game where as England, I sent all my trade routes to Gilgabro (Netting me like 10x the amount of science I had), caught all the way up, started a colonial empire, had Gilgabro war me but my total naval dominance kept me safe.

I always played continents, checked the map first to make sure they were separated by oceans. With my mod above, I managed to sort of get science clustered around a civ (Brazil, Sumeria due to science bonuses usually). So one continent would sometimes get ahead of the others.

The final mod (unreleased) I was experimenting with removing policy cards from the game. I did it in the functional sense, but the AI couldn't really play with how I had redesigned culture (I made it basically so you researched civics to get settlers, workers, envoys etc). When I get back to modding I'll probably mod so it so the amount of culture you have determines your age (getting rid of era points and policy cards in one go).

I guess short version I like to play pretty differently

 

[kb27787]

I befriend the whole world by giving free gifts of luxes to the AI... Really missed this feature from BNW where your friends can ask you for extra lux copies (also miss the AI having loyalty and diplobalance traits). I do this for almost all except for a few proven jerks (say they eat up my CS or settle a horrible city which due to loyalty they cannot keep anyway but do so just to block my settler)

To me, you haven't won a cultural victory until your nation becomes the darling of the world where everyone loves your country and wants to be identified with it.

I also love getting cultural alliances and then settling all around the borders of my friend... Then if it so happens that they go into a dark age, I shall have no qualms about deploying Amani in my own city if no CS is nearby to take their cities via loyalty flip. (hey, your people want to join us because we're so awesome right? No hard feelings!)

 

[Victoria]

But no, not going to wear a costume to play, that's out.

Oh cmon, that jacket looks great.

I do lots of things.
When playing Victoria I will often play until I have a city on every continent or to win just with seaside resorts.
Play until I can capture a sub with sea dogs ( I tend to out Brazil and Germany into the game for this)
Quite a few times I have played until I can Raze Boston
One I have found particularly challenging is getting every civ to declare war on you amd never declare on anyone else... sort of a bait city game.
1k GPT is another one
Have a city next to each natural wonder

 

[Dimplz]

I prefer peaceful games.

I loved the feature in Civs 4 & 5 to disable war and was highly disappointed this feature wasn't included in 6. Thank goodness I found a mod that does this called Forever Peace for Civ 6. I am love with Civ 6 again as a result!

 

[agonistes]

It really varies from game to game, but the variant I most frequently use is:

1) no victory conditions
2) no turn limit
3) play a 'cold war' game where the idea is to project power without actually fighting world wars
4) speed much much slower than marathon... like 250-500 turns to astrology on turn 1.

But sometimes I'll play to make a sea trade empire, or religious capital, or crusades... whatever theme I'm in the mood for.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I know better than to think I'm special.

If anything would stand out, it would be that I play turns faster than most people.

 

[gunnergoz]

Almost as many variations in play styles as there are Civ players, it seems. If anything, I tend to quit games early. Not sure why but it is one reason I'm looking for ways to help me focus better and less likely to walk away from a game that is otherwise fine. I think the lack of goals going in is part of it. So thank you all.

 

[FenrisWolf456]

I find Role Playing isn't too hard (even if you don't dress up), but it does require perhaps a more casual mind-set. At least for me, I try to perceive everything as 'real', and not looking into the gameplay mechanics (i.e. oh I should beeline to Knights so I can have the strongest unit of the era as soon as possible ... I tend to go with "well, I have a lot of horse, I should put them to use and look to developing my civilization backed by cavalry units). This would also go with not using various 'exploits' that have cropped up in the game. I had never used Magnus' overflow exploit before (at least not knowingly or intentionally) or the 'sell a new work of art first turn for everything the civ has' one. I won't use the current 'sell 1 resource unit to the same civ over and over'. This did lead to about a half-hour of restarts for my Mali game, as I really wanted to play my first game with them as a desert-based trading empire ... which is hard to do if you don't spawn near an actual desert. Finally got a map with an equatorial desert zone and had a blast playing and getting my gold-plated space vessel to Alpha Centauri.

I also like to play again type. My first victory with the Mongols was via a cultural victory (all the more driven to do so from the achievement for that). I plan on trying a Canada domination game after I have played all the new civs. I find it interesting to use a civ's bonuses as a support tool rather than a focus. Such as my plans for Canada; their high tundra resource gathering should let me build up quickly. And no surprise wars will mean I can better focus on the attacks I want to launch and when. Finally, the hockey rinks should provide a good source of culture so that I can devote more resources to the war effort while keeping up with civics and not having to rush to prevent a possible AI cultural victory.

 

[Tyroq]

So my friends and I have a really fun way to play. Basically we'll do a sort of "dynasty game" where we take turns playing for an age. So like, one of us will choose a nation and set up the map and start the game, playing through the Ancient age. Then they'll send the save file to the next person (who is picked by dice roll), and that person gets to play through the Classical Age. And so on. Sometimes we'll all get to decide the nation we play as, but sometimes player 1 gets to pick. What makes this so fun is that you are basically imitating getting elected to leadership of a nation that's already established. You never know what kind of a mess you might inherit from your predecessor. Could get lucky and find yourself with a golden age, or you might inherit a dark age and a bloody war. You can't get any information about the game before you start playing the save, except maybe for knowledge of who you're playing as if you decided on that as a group. And of course there are some friends you'd rather follow than others!

Since there's a variety of skill levels in our group we usually play on King as a standard setting. And because it's a single player game shared among several people, it can take a while to get through one game. We actually just finished our first GS game. It was a Maori play on an island plates map, New world age, which made for lots of mountainous islands! And epic game speed. We won a diplomatic victory, so that was fun. I got the pleasure (or pain) of playing in the Industrial age and having to rush computers to try to get flood barriers up so we wouldn't lose any wonders/districts on our already tiny islands to sea level rise. My predecessor in his infinite wisdom had decided to upgrade our fleet to Ironclads, and overnight we were the world's #1 producer of CO2. At least we had Cardiff as suzerain, so no need for power plants.

 

[Sagax]

Large map with Standard number of players.

Shuffle map. Always Shuffle.

Try to last long enough to build a GDR. I am now collecting all their color variations.

Espionage game on. Promote ASAP, then steal works from those pesky CV contenders.

I love gold.

Form alliances whenever possible. Not because of Favor, but because it’s a chance for grievance-free conquest when Defensive Pact is triggered (is this a bug?)

Save every lake-heavy map for future fun with Polders.