June/July Patch Notes

An undocumented effect of Himeji Castle in patch 1.0.1.332: It provides you a free Castle even if the city in which it has been built has no walls. You can see it in the attached screenshot:

 

If you hover the cursor over Himeji Castle in the Build list the tooltip states that it provides a free Castle. Likewise, the Great Library tooltip will inform you that the GL provides a free Library in the town in which it's built. I usually play offense so the Castle isn't much of an incentive for me. OTOH, if you deduct the hammer cost of a Library from the GL it becomes an even better deal.

 

Diplomacy has improved a lot. Although it might have been handled in an earlier patch because I haven't played for quite a while.

The "you got denounced by your friends" modifier sticks around a long time though.

 

It only took about 5 hours to get compatible with the patch, and another ~20 hours over the next few days to fix some minor bugs and balance issues. It's probably more difficult for a mod that fundamentally alters the game in some way, while what I do is just balancing vanilla.

 

Yes, it does. Considering that you can be denounced for things that are trivial and/or inevitable it seems to me that the player should have some means of blunting or negating the denunciation.

 

I thought I was going crazy the first time I fired up Civ in around a month.

It's not really that much fun to play anymore with the happiness hobbled and the inability to use both freedom and order to fix it.

Sitting at 8 cities around 800 ad and already at 16

What is the point of having a great army if you can't use it?

Change it back. The other patches are fine or whatever I guess. OTOH, the happiness one sucks.

 

Happiness wasn't nerfed; it was changed. You can still expand and stay happy. You need to relearn managing it.

 

With a smaller empire. Coliseum +2 and resources at +4 are killing me.

 

Try honor and building defensive buildings + garrison.

 

Thanks will do.

 

Since you can choose way more policies in the early game, pick policies that will help you mitigate your happiness problem. For example, honor has a policy that that adds one happiness for each defensive building: wall, castle, etc. You can get it early, and it is very useful. Choose that and Oligarchy, and you can fill all of your cities with free happiness and culture producing military. As a side benefit, it adds to your military rating, making it less likely you'll get attacked. There are many other opportunities to improve your happiness position, you just have to think it through and revamp your strategy.

 

An early archer or two makes defending against the initial rush much easier, especially if you pick up Warrior Code or Oligarchy. After defeating the AI's rush they're in a weak position and somewhat undermined for the rest of the game.

 

So go back and do honor instead of liberty. I guess I overlooked the defensive buildings giving happiness. I was thinking I would have to paralyze my army by using them as garrisons.

Good tip.

I have always done that at first anyway. I just used the opportunity to grab iron and happiness resources while fighting a defensive action. After they run out of warriors to kill, I'm usually in a good position to take the first capital.

 

If your city has olichargy and an archer as a garrison, make sure you garrison your archer first, then shoot with your city and only then use your archer. That way, your city shoots a lot harder.

 

I struggle a bit early game if I'm going for REX up to 4 cities for quick free temples but I've found Piety to give me much more happiness early/mid game than before. I think it's free religion, +1 happy for monument, temple and monastery. I think happiness wasn't nerfed. Just have to be careful to avoid growth in outlying cities when REXing. I like this dynamic a lot.

 

The problem is that defensive buildings are completely useless in most (if not all) cities. While they don't cost maintenance, they can be quite expensive to build. It's an expensive way to get happiness and possible not worth it.

 

I'm going to get blammed for saying this (as it is this forum's custom), but this game is actually playable now. Sure it's not as good as Civ VI, but it has offically more playable than it's initial release.

 

This.

The patch changed the way I do things, I can't go down my same old tried and true policy paths, they had to be altered. Different wonders have to be targeted. But, the game didn't change so much that I had to quit playing my favorite two civs (Babylon and Incas), I just have to take them down a different policy path than I used to.

 

I think it's a problem that we now lack a dedicated happiness SP, not to speak of a semi-dedicated happiness tree when you are playing for a large empire.

If you have to start building walls, castles and arsenals in your cities on top of circus, colosseums and theaters in every annexed city to keep happiness afloat, that's a hell of a lot of hammers for what is then essentially happiness buildings with a defensive bonus. Also, every one of those defensive buildings only give 1 happiness. And their defensive bonus are likely to never make a difference in the game anyway.

In my experience you can end up in a catch 22. I had every single luxury and every annexed city had every building available to it to yield happiness. I had even dropped a SP point in Order to get the 1 happiness per city bonus. Notre Dame + Eiffel Tower secured. Still I had negative global happiness because of population size. So, the only option is to annex a puppet, buy the happiness buildings and stay afloat for some turns. Then you are back again because you pop grows/conquests -> annex another puppet etc. I don't have to mention that this essentially kills your chance of getting more SPs, not that there's a happiness SP still available to turn it around.

The SPs lack a decent modifer similar to pre-patch Theocracy. Not as powerful but something in those thoughts, yelding happiness scaling with pop size. The Tradition 1 hap per 10 citizens is not it - it's a joke.

The players going for world domination with a large empire to show for it are in trouble post-patch, especially harder levels/many civs because of happiness issues. At some point you can stall your progress and stop city growth where possible or keep going and just live with single/double digit negative happiness.

PS: AI civs can still display +40 happiness while running huge populations and no wonders and no happiness buildings to speak of of.

 

I'm a programmer too, and I'd rather NOT JUST LOOK at the result.
I mean, AI is NOT that bad, is just bugged.
I think that, in comparison with CIV4 and older, Civ5 has a well made AI, able to look at his whole empire, to plan a victory, to take global and local decisions, and to also make wars with both higher and lower levels of decisions.
On the other side, there are a huge number of bugs, that sort of spoils it off completely!!

It's just like at school, when your math homework is nearly perfect, just an error with the sign, and with a final score of "E": "the result is wrong" the teacher says.

I'm sure that, with some bugs resolved, the game could have a very good AI.