Huge map and marathon play

[Sir Betti]

I have just played about two hours of this game on huge and marathon. Then the electricity went off...So I want to start over.
I am playing on warlord to try to get a hang on the play and have 12 civs. I am on America. I have played Civ 3 and 4 mostly on Noble and prince. My playstyle is turtleing until prodded by enemies, which I believe is very American .

Are there any hardcore Huge and marathon players who have a kind of handle on what one should build/produce for the first, say, 100 moves? I know its pretty early. The game is certainly different in many areas. What I do notice most is that there is so little to do at marathon. What I want to do is to repeat my playstyle with this new format but dont know if thats wise.

I have made 1 military, 1 worker, 1 settler, and bought 4 tiles before my game crashed. I went Tradition,with the 33%military improvement. I had made two farms. nothing else seemed important enough yet to focus on. Learned archery, and mining, and was on trapping. My only close resource was an elephant. I battled two barbarians. Nothing diplomatic except for the secret whatever it was.

 

[Malkaviel]

If you don't know the game much yet, marathon/huge will be more tedious than informative or enlightening.

I recommend try 2 games with different leaders on normal speed/small map. It's plenty big for a 5-7 hour gaming session while you're learning buildings/units/policies.

 

[Jimbo30]

Drop to epic speed, I have and I can't see me going back to marathon until a few things are ironed out.

Huge maps are also incredibly...huge. Try large. Large + Epic is still slower than Civ4's Huge + Marathon.

 

[slowjames]

My playstyle is turtleing until prodded by enemies, which I believe is very American .

As an American, I have to tell you that historically our style has always been more of the "murder/relocate them then say it was OK because they were savages/communists/terrorists anyway," variety. So you need to be doing a little more killing. How else are you going to get those logistics+range archers if you don't?

 

[tpg0007]

Unless you're playing on a supercomputer I can't even imagine how long it'll take to resolve a turn late in the game on such a map. I'm not talking about how long you take, but how long the AI take to make their moves.

 

[EdCase]

Huge, Marathon, King,Archipelago, English. I have found pushing forward that maintaining happiness and culture are key in my game. Golden Ages combined with Liberty "tree" have enabled me to spread out reasonably fast to establish my powerbase. Never let happiness fall below zero.

Key techs : Archery-Barbs fall to them easily..good cash boost.
Sailing- for embark and first naval power projection/defense.

Other techs as needed to develop luxuries (happy, happy, happy)

When commerce became available it was developed next.

At 1350 AD I am spread across 3 islands (8 cities)with 2 culture city states allied and am trading (mainly luxuries) my way to dominance.

One war with Monty (go figure) ended badly for him as I am playing England in character as a Naval power.

May/may not help but it's all I got

 

[Malkaviel]

Archipelago maps, like vanilla civ4, is going to be completely one-sided for the player. AI doesn't know how to fight amphibiously properly. You're pretty much assured of losing 0 or maybe 1 city if you leave it completely unguarded. Not fun.

 

[Fin]

Archipelago maps, like vanilla civ4, is going to be completely one-sided for the player. AI doesn't know how to fight amphibiously properly. You're pretty much assured of losing 0 or maybe 1 city if you leave it completely unguarded. Not fun.

I've seen the Civ 5 AI use ships and Embarkation rather well in one of the games I played. Maybe I just got lucky though.

 

[EdCase]

Archipelago maps, like vanilla civ4, is going to be completely one-sided for the player. AI doesn't know how to fight amphibiously properly. You're pretty much assured of losing 0 or maybe 1 city if you leave it completely unguarded. Not fun.

key phrase here "is going to be". Until you try you won't know.
Embarkation does change the equation.
Plus no city is truly unguarded anymore. Hello bombardment........
Incidentally with the way units are handled now...taking cities on other landmasses is no longer a cakewalk either.
The game has, as far as I can tell, changed in subtle but significant ways.

 

[DanPMN]

As an American, I have to tell you that historically our style has always been more of the "murder/relocate them then say it was OK because they were savages/communists/terrorists anyway," variety. So you need to be doing a little more killing. How else are you going to get those logistics+range archers if you don't?

This isn't fair.

I'm American too, and while you might be right about the US during the past 60 or 70 years, for the vast majority of its life as a country the US was strictly isolationist and wouldn't get involved internationally at all.

The first major US war outside of North America didn't happen until 1898.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-interventionism

 

[Zechnophobe]

This isn't fair.

I'm American too, and while you might be right about the US during the past 60 or 70 years, for the vast majority of its life as a country the US was strictly isolationist and wouldn't get involved internationally at all.

The first major US war outside of North America didn't happen until 1898.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-interventionism

Well, to be fair, America was almost completely separated from the 'rest of the world' for a lot of that early time. Oddly enough America seems to have gone back and forth between Isolationist, and Idealogical imperialism for most of its existence.

One of our biggest exports are still christian, or Democratic missionaries.

 

[slowjames]

This isn't fair.

I'm American too, and while you might be right about the US during the past 60 or 70 years, for the vast majority of its life as a country the US was strictly isolationist and wouldn't get involved internationally at all.

The first major US war outside of North America didn't happen until 1898.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-interventionism

Heh, I don't want to start too much of a political argument. If I were more prudent, I'd have said nothing at all. But let's not forget about the native Americans here. Them Iroquois aren't mad at Washington for nothing.

 

[meteora 888]

I really like playing on huge maps and marathon. It let time for fight or diplomacy and it is always fun to build a very large empire. I play on Prince, usually on a map with continent or small continents, so I can build a large empire on my starting continents and widespread small colonies for ressources. The AIs usually dislike my gaming style: they betray me and call me a "warmongering menace to the world". Once I got a DoWed by all the 11 other leaders while in late industrial age... At least, the AI is crap at launching across-sea invasions (I saw Napoleon loose about 8 tanks to a single barb!), so I've been able to save my main country, but loosed all my colonies. After a second wolrd war, I've been totally destroyed by Bismark's Giant Death Robots (how ironic...). These games are full of surprises and it would be nice to make a game with 5 to 7 other players on these settings!

 

[PimpmyCiv]

the idea of a huge marathon map sounds fun in theory.... but in practice it gets extremely tedious. Especially as the game progresses. The time between turns is ridiculous, and if you aren't constantly at war (and a non-one sided war at that) you'll spend more time clicking NEXT TURN and waiting for that next turn to actually happen then doing anything else.

If you have a top of the line com, you might be ok. If not, you'll still get a good long game experience at epic speed and large.

But if you are committed to playing a huge marathon map... I'd recommend a civ with a good UU (Mongols are almost overpowered in that respect, Rome.... with iron ofcourse... is another one). It takes the same amount of time to kill a unit on any speed, slow games take longer for the units to go obselete.

And assuming you aren't playing an islands map... start with a scout. The bigger the map the more they have to scout and the more use you'll get out of them.

 

[Sir Betti]

Well its now over a year later. I have found marathon is way to tedious to enjoy. Epic seems to be the right speed. That said, I dont feel this game to be drawing me to play one more time like past Civ games. I thirst for some epic deep empire building and wonder if I am too shallow of a player or the game is just not up my alley or a combo of both

Anyway, after a long break I am going to fiddle with England with small continents. I love the exploring angle and am warming up to naval play. Alas, I read that naval action is hohum.
Editing that I am on King settings and this is where i find a challenge. read the forums and played just enough to get past that bewildered noob stage. Dont care much for the vassalage part of the game either. It is way subpar compared to EU111. Has anyone set the slider on city states to zero and found out interestingj stuff?

One of my biggest gripes is that there is no Map scripting available on par with the legendary Surt v91 map script. I think the default map generator is poor. (opinion)

 

[Aspon]

you said your playing on warlord difficulty whats the point?

I am pretty sure I could win a domination victory with this difficulty and settings before reached AD

 

[Mesix]

If you don't like the default maps, try some of the options in the Advanced game setup. I find that Oval creates a Pangaea style map with a lot of strategic bottlenecks and makes for a good game if you don't want to mess around with naval action much.

 

[apocalypse105]

I Had a topic about this here tips how to play marathon:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=424923

The main big tip was gold is now even more important buying a setler in the early game can be really strong because it takes a lot of time to build things the AI will olso give you more gold for luxury resources like 700 or maybe 800


Olso be prepared for a early rush if you know a AI is close to you tech archery those rushes can hurd you if you aren't prepared.


You have to plan really well on marathon because everything takes a lot of time when to chop forest for extra production, when to build wonder,worker. Its even more important then fast space games

Example:

I was playing china and I was spawned near a lot of forest and some gems close by(border pup) and 2 incencs.
FIrst technology mining to chop then archery because ghenghis kang was close(good choise when i had 2 warriors and 1 archers he dowd me) Second technology pottery and writing I knew callender would be better but i wanted to get great library( and i did got it)

So here you see I planned a head

 

[Sir Betti]

you said your playing on warlord difficulty whats the point?

I am pretty sure I could win a domination victory with this difficulty and settings before reached AD

No sir, I am now at King as per my last post.

I must admit, I used a popular mod that tweaks gameplay and fixes bugs( its one of the most downloaded ones,..forget the name). It seems the game has a little more oomph now.

Tried marathon/huge one more time with America at King and was planted smack dab in the middle of a large continent. Good green earth and a fair amount of resources. Discovered Japan to the immediate north and Germany somewhere off to the N.E. Also was set up for raging barbarians.

The cold molasses paced research and development was offset by the sheer number of barbs who came calling. It was a good time! Soon I noted at least 14 German troops descending from wherever they originated and was a little amazed at how Quickly they cleaned out the multiple Barb stations!

200 turns in Japan decided I was expendable and sent a rush. With the xp gained from bushwhacking, I held him off until he called for peace. I have 3 cities now and am rather enjoying it so far.

Thank you for the feedback. I am using the advanced setup option. I may just hang in there now as the game appears to be fun again, at least for me.Also thanks for the link
! reading it now! http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=424923

 

[Bugfatty300]

I'm playing a huge/marathon game right now and I have to say I'm a little disappointed. 9 Turns to build a road on flat terrain, ~25 turns to build a pikeman in my most well developed city and dopting all the faster worker/production policies hasn't made a dent. Honestly it does bother me a bit that the time scale simply slows EVERYTHING down. It's a little boring just hitting the turn button over and over waiting for something to get done. I was hoping for a huge empire and world war with early-mid game units by the time I reached the Renaissance but no go.

At least there is the purchase feature in the cities.

This isn't fair.

I'm American too, and while you might be right about the US during the past 60 or 70 years, for the vast majority of its life as a country the US was strictly isolationist and wouldn't get involved internationally at all.

The first major US war outside of North America didn't happen until 1898.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-interventionism

Well there was the whole Mexican-American War thing and a serious drive into Canada in the War of 1812.