New Beta Version - October 8th (10-8)

Care to look at my guide on happiness? It's in the strategy section.

Anyways, the issue you're having with happiness, AI is suffering it too. It doesn't matter if you settle slowly as long as you settle faster than AI.

A sound combination of successful exploration, revealed resources, a couple of workers for connecting luxuries you can trade and some help from the pantheon. Then, a tight control over the city growth if you value more the number of cities than your population.

 

I’ll add in, be aggressive with purchasing luxuries if your going that many cities. Ideally you are using several of your cities to take your monopoly resource, so you can trade these resources for others to keep you happy.

Second, build a lot of workers so you can connect cities quickly, that makes a big difference on happiness. This is an area I slip on still, it takes a lot of workers to build the infrastructure for 6 cities, so keep making them.

Tu mentioned controlling growth. With that many cities you are focusing on terrain control, so it’s ok to sacrifice city size in the early game. Focus on hammers over food to build your infrastructure. Then once your empire and your local cities become happy, get them a WLTKD and switch to food for a bit to catch up.

 

The hammer argument doesn’t work because the policies get the hammers at different times. For example, tradition will often get the policy third, progress gets its second (or third if your money focused and need that extra worker), and authority starts it with the first policy. It also would change the early game speeds.

Now supply is a different story, because by the time players were actually using the new supply, it would have balanced out anyway. Not saying this is the right approach, but it is a reasonable one

 

That all makes sense. Whenever I go Progress, I focus workers and rush markets so I can afford connecting cities, I just can't get it to work. I'll take alook at that strategy section on happiness.

 

Settling on lux definitely helps with early rapid expansion, it also cuts on the immediate worker needs.
But its a call you have to make, is the strategic location, on the lux or the short/long term yields most important.

 

It took me several tries as well. In my last game I got a 6 settle (this was with tradition). Happiness was a struggle for a while, I kept it between 36-46% for a while...and finally have been able to stabilize to 60% after really focusing on infrastructure for a time.

So 6 cities is doable...the bigger question is...is it beneficial? Ultimately I would say yes but it definitely slows you down internally for a while, so I don't think its an automatic "more cities = more better".

 

Great, well now I have a new challenge to try for this weekend, with making a early 6 cities expansion work. My current challenge of getting as many great generals as possible and dropping citadels everywhere will have to wait.

 

I wanted to make a showcase for you and started in a really nice location with only Harald as neighbors. I forward settle him and ended up settling 8 cities in turn 100, but I made a big mistake setting roads up before I could afford them. Ultimately I couldn't raise my defense against Denmark in time and lost one city. I kept pushing happiness near 40%.

I'll try to do it better next time.

EDIT. Well, it didn't go much better. I removed 2 civs so I have enough room for expanding, so only happiness is slowing me down. Ethiopia Emperor. I managed 8 cities before unrest. Now I need some time to recover.

Spoiler image :

 

I don't know what's going on here, but Askia's units have Altitude Training promo even though Kilimanjaro is in the hands of Bismark...

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

 

IIRC in order to get Altitude Training you only need to place your unit next to the Kilimanjaro. You may be confusing it with another Natural Wonder, the Fountain of Youth. In order to benefit from the latter you need it to be within your borders.

 

If I recall correctly that's no longer the case in VP, where having a promotion-giving natural wonder in your borders automatically gives all your units that promotion.

 

Last time I played VP with access to Kilimanjaro in 2018 it was working the way I described. You only need to place your unit next to Kili and it will retain the promotion until it gets killed. The owner of the Kili tile is irrelevant.
No idea whether it was changed after that.

 

I recently played a game where I had the fountain of youth, and only units built in my Capital got the bonus, even though the NW was near my 3rd city.

 

I just played a game on this patch with Kilimajaro in my territory, and that is what gave my troops the bonus. Moving next to it did nothing. I had fountain of youth in a previous game and it seemed to work identically. Not all unit types get the bonuses though, so I think that is why some may have it and others don't.

As for units belonging to someone else having Altitude Training, there are a couple of possibilities I can think of. Firstly, are you playing with Events and Decisions? That sometimes grants units promotions which very depending on the civ. I don't know what Askia's are. Secondly, is it possible that Kilimajaro used to belong to Askia and it was stolen by Great General or something? I don't know if units keep the promotion after you loose the wonder in the current version, I haven't had that happen to me recently.

 

Has anyone else experienced the AI very rarely proposing projects as World congress resolutions, with the exception of United Nations?

 

Its rare but does happen. Just had an AI propose treasure fleet as one of the first proposals. They seem to still love ban luxuries and world religion.

 

Yes, banning luxuries seems to be their favourite proposal, together with open doors and spheres of influence. I don't think I've seen them propose Arts/Science resolutions in the last few months.

 

I've made a modmod for my proposed changes to the power plants system. It can be downloaded here. I made this mod specifically to address the lack of total yield coverage in the existing power plants (no boosts for lakes, desert, tundra, snow, or water tiles). The idea being that there should be viable options for tundra starts and archipelago maps besides the nuclear and solar plants.

I would ultimately like to add a 33% boost to processes in a city with any of the 5 power plants. That would increase => X yield conversion from 25% to 33% in the city. Perhaps the light of G will shine on this modmod, and it will be incorporated into base VP. For now, it's a very lightweight addition to your existing modlist.

 

I've had kilimanjaro in two games with most recent patch and it provides the altiture training to all land units no matter where created without a need to go near, I've also tested that going near does NOT provide the upgrade.
It's been like this for awhile in VP and fountain of youth function the same (I control it in current game).
Maybe a mod conflict? the civ you are playing does not look like a standard one.

 

Just going to throw this out there after seeing a few comments, but I've been using the mod "Remove Ban Luxury" (it's been so long that I can't even find the link online anymore, but I can just upload it later for anyone that wants it) from day 1 of playing VP, and I don't know how any of you play without it. These are silly wastes of proposals during a game, and even more so after just reading how the AI apparently likes to spam it. I suggest this just become incorporated into base VP for everyone's sake, and if not, I advise anyone reading to download the aforementioned mod and enjoy never having to deal with that nonsense in your games ever again. I'm all for people playing the game how they want, but I really think this "feature" (I'm aware this is a Vanilla thing) should just flat out be removed from VP.

As for my bugged Kilimanjaro, it's functioned properly for me in the past along with FoY; all units under my control received the promotion, as intended. No, I'm not playing with events, and you can see that Bismark has had possession the entire time, as Askia has no adjacent border or citadel. I'm going to assume weirdness happened somewhere along the lines between using a custom civ (Inuit), a custom map (Communitu) and 3/4UC mod. Or maybe you can in fact get the promotion onto your units by bringing them adjacent to the wonder even if it's not under your direct control. If this was the case, I guess it's plausible Askia technically could have done this, seeing as Kili is bordering his empire fairly closely. I'm almost positive though that the owner should be the only beneficiary of these natural wonder giving perks -- I'm leaning towards a bug.