9-15 patch writeup (not technically finished but I'm mired in unhappiness for unknown reasons and probably won't pick it up again):
-To see if I "graduate" from emperor to immortal, I ran a random civ. Rolled Russia, pretty powerful civ with my expansionist loving playstyle. Communitas, standard size, standard speed.
- Events were enabled by default for some reason (I don't usually mess around with advanced settings and they were absent in the last few). Not too unwelcome, I feel like they tend to benefit wider empires than tall, Baths/aqueduct event is still way too good.
- Picked progress, which seems counterintuitive for authority's tile grabbing bonuses but I wanted to maximize expansion and science. I ended up getting god of the expanse anyway so there was still a bonus to expanding, especially when I was able to grab Ankor Wat. So many instant bonuses per turn.
- I settled circles around my southern neighbor Venice and picked up some excellent city spots that would have a lot of mines and lumbermills for the later UB (which gives production/gold on those tiles). He soon attacked me, I took his capital and puppeted one of his city states later and vassalized him.
- Siam, my northern neighbor, became a credible threat while the bulk of my army was dealing with Venice and took one of my core forward settled cities with his UU spam. I think he tried to peace out too early, he really had an edge on me at the time and my capital was right next in his path. The captured city unfortunately went back and forth multiple times so had to rebuild everything from scratch. It would have been nice to have the option to raze your own cities... but that's pretty tyrannical.
- Siam voluntarily vassalized to Poland (his northern neighbor) shortly after. He didn't seem weak to me and the two weren't at war, but it happens sometimes.
- I honestly never had a desire to conquer my neighbors, I had plenty of space thanks to aggressive early forward settling and my empire was stable, extremely productive, and well on it's way to coasting to a science victory. Later on I took Siam's capital and a core city out of boredom.
- Went Progress -> Fealty -> Industry -> Order.
- Progress seemed pretty cut and dry as to what policy order you take (dip into the free worker on the right side then the left side gives you building rate and hammers/gold per city, very powerful in infant cities which you should be popping out at that time, right side on the other hand you'd want to save for last since you usually don't have city connections up yet if you go down it first and the happiness per citizen is obviously better when your empire has grown.) Progress got changed in the next patch (looking for the better) so it will be interesting to check out again.
- Fealty seems much more balanced based on what your empire needs at the time. I beelined straight down the middle for additional border bonuses, but depending on your situation you can do one of the branches first.
- Industry seems balanced as well and is amazing for wide. I deliberately delayed some buildings until Mercantalism (improved rate to build seaports) but it ultimately was not too necessary given how stacked your production is already and bonuses to investment (great for newer cities though).
- Order is fine. Worker's faculties (+production to factories) like mercantalism came a little late to make a notable difference (delaying factories was definitely not worth it), and my cities were pretty much building every infrastructure available as soon as they were unlocked. People's army is still bugged despite what Gazebo said in github (grants a free military academy per city when it's supposed to give one in the capital). Cultural revolution seems a little weak (maybe because the rest of the 2nd tier policies are so good in contrast). Everything else is solid and impactful.
Happiness: Despite being overzealous in expansion, I didn't have to pay attention to happiness much throughout the game (my settling spots were careful, not one tile islands... okay, just ONE of those) and I didn't need to limit growth (in fact, encouraged it in WLTKD). There was a lot of excess happiness in my core cities that would absorb all of the unhappiness when satellite cities were built to keep me positive. Partly this was because I was able to easily keep up with infrastructure., but I did feel I was expanding too quickly at times without punishment, and the best areas of my surrounding continent were uncontested, despite not being first to astronomy. As mentioned earlier, happiness became a huge problem after researching penicillin (dropped from 14 to -42 in a single turn) despite the majority of my empire having all available infrastructure (most were converting hammers to research at the time). It got worse in a few turns and I took a break, knowing my ideology is probably about ti flip, to see if I could figure out why there was a sudden spike. Even a -20% poverty reduction order policy only gave 6 points, where I was still about -70.
Other things I noticed:
- AI did not seem to prioritize "easy" religious conversion. Well into the renaissance Portugal's southern religionless neighbor kept their pantheon, and I ended up sailing in and converting the majority of their cities to mine.
- It's very easy to figure out if a war is brokered against you (there'll be no option to negotiate for peace on the trade screen until the required 10 turns of war has passed). This is kind of cheesy in a few ways:
- It negates the advantage of a spy telling you that war was brokered,
- If you know that it was brokered, you have a decent sense that the AI won't be too aggressive towards you(they are not completely invested in the war against you as it wasn't there decision to initiate) so you can largely ignore them accordingly (or play hard towards them knowing their true forces are occupied in the wars they care about).
- It's not "reasoning" the AI has access to.
Is it possible to have brokered wars show the "negotiate peace" button?
- I mentioned this in another thread, but on certain maps (communitas is very guilty of this) there are lots of one tile rivers by the coast. Ecology was underwhelming, gave me very poor choices for hydro plants and locked me out of wind plants because of settling by a river. I'd like if there could be an option of one or the other, for consistency if nothing else (like with train stations/seaports, nuclear/solar plants) instead of being forced by terrain.
- On that note, this is my second game where oil and uranium were unusually scarce compared to other strategics. This may be a feature of communitas maps, which balance resources for the vanilla game, so it may not be the best in combination with VP, which has many more options to use strategic resources.
