Queries from a civ veteran, Civ V newb

Zeebie

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 22, 2011
Messages
7
Hi folks- I've been civ-ing since the original, but just started on Civ V. I'm having some trouble figuring a few things out and hoped you could help.

- Where are the graphs for tech, power, etc? How can I tell how I compare to other civs with tech and such things?

- I sometimes get different influence per cash and influence change rates with different city states. What governs this?

- I've noticed this strange thing where the game will alert me to something happening a turn before it does - "Cotton to Washington ended" or such. Am I missing something?

- What do I get from a city-state for being an ally vs just friends?

- Does the Civilopedia really not have game information (leader traits, etc) for the different civilizations?

Thanks for any help!
 
1: Unmodded, you can't, you can see who's first in and last in a terrible leaderboard but if I where you I'd just download infoaddict, which does exactly what you want it and more.

2: The value of the resource, the City state personality (you can check this if you click on the city state, it's personality will be Friendly or Hostile or Neutral and a couple more) and the buyout saturation, ie if 2 AI's have been consistently pumping money into a City state the effect of money will decrease.

3: No idea, whenever a trade agreement ends I can always sell the resources to someone else.

4: More of the City states special gifts, Maritime will give extra food to all your city's, Cultural more culture and military more units, if your their ally you'll also gain their natural resources that are being worked.

5: The Civilopedia is pretty useless if you have a smartphone with intornets I'd advise just using wiki or something like that.
 
- Where are the graphs for tech, power, etc? How can I tell how I compare to other civs with tech and such things?

- I sometimes get different influence per cash and influence change rates with different city states. What governs this?

There are no graphs until the end of the game...but if you want statistics to compare how you are doing, press 'F9' and the demographics will show up. There you can see how well you are doing compared to other civilizations. Literacy means # of techs and manufactured goods means production (per turn?). The rest are fairly obvious.

The different influence from city states comes from how friendly they are towards you. If you click on a city state, somewhere in the middle of the screen it will say if they are either friendly, irrational, or hostile.
If they are friendly- more influence from giving money to them, and the influence will decrease at a slower rate than a hostile one
If hostile- less influence from money, influence decreases at faster rate
If irrational - a random amount of influence from money, influence decreases at a random rate.
Hope I helped!
EDIT Ah...got ninja'd by Derpy Hooves
 
1: Unmodded, you can't, you can see who's first in and last in a terrible leaderboard but if I where you I'd just download infoaddict, which does exactly what you want it and more.

Unintuitively hidden within the bubble icon to the left of and above the advisor/diplomacy icons, you can get screens equivalent to most of the Civ IV info screens - click the icon for a drop-down menu of pages. These include the cities info, military info, demographics, and victory conditions screens. Most are much the same as the Civ IV equivalents. Unfortunately the victory conditions screen is the least informative by far - it will tell you how close the lead civ is to completing their victory condition ("Polynesia has completed 3 of 5 social policy branches" for instance) - domination shows how many civs still hold their capital, diplo shows only if someone has built the UN and how many votes you have (but not how many votes the lead civ has), cultural as above how many policy branches you've completed and how many the leader has. Science is the least informative of all, showing only how far you are along the tech tree towards Apollo Program, and if anyone else has completed it (but not their progress towards it).

One thing that is an improvement info-wise over previous games is that the occasional 'Ptolemy's list of the greatest X,Y,Z' will actually provide you with numerical values for each nation - such as military strength (not sure what the figures mean, it's not number of units), techs (number of techs achieved), happiness and gold (the actual value), production (average number of hammers per city), number of wonders completed (I think the actual value) and food (I think average food per city). But the identity of each wonder, tech etc. will remain forever a mystery, and the old "top five cities in the world" screen is gone completely, with its info on each's population, wonders etc.

4: More of the City states special gifts, Maritime will give extra food to all your city's, Cultural more culture and military more units, if your their ally you'll also gain their natural resources that are being worked.

Potentially most importantly, if that's your victory condition, allying gives you their vote in the UN and denies other civs ally status unless they outbid you (so, paying the same gold you would to gain ally status with a neutral civ probably won't displace the current ally) - multiple civs can be friends with a CS, and gain those bonuses, but only one can be an ally at a time.

Your ally city-states also automatically declare war on anyone you're at war with - this usually isn't important militarily, though if next to your territory they can do a good job of protecting your borders and on higher difficulties will actually leave their own borders to take the fight to the enemy (if close by). The most important feature, though, is that when a CS declares war, the enemy civ's influence with it degrades to the maximum negative value, and the enemy civ can't make any deals with it until peace is declared (it will only accept peace if you're no longer at war).

The AI often uses this to exploit opponents aiming for diplomatic victory, by either making it impossible to ally with CSes (by grabbing them early with its superior economy, declaring war on you, and never accepting peace), or by forcing you to invest more in getting their favour by causing massive influence decreases. If you're in a position where you have a diplomatic advantage, you can do the same thing - this is probably a good move in later-game 'bidding wars', where you can grab someone's ally and immediately declare war against them before they can get it back, denying them a UN vote either to claim a diplo victory yourself, or to deny them the final vote they need in order to prevent them getting one while you pursue your own victory condition. Remember that ally status degrades at the usual rate, so you'll need to periodically bribe them to keep them in line - the moment you lose ally status, the enemy can declare peace with that CS, which it will accept automatically (but will still have maximum negative influence with them).

- Does the Civilopedia really not have game information (leader traits, etc) for the different civilizations?

Checking the Civilopedia just now, yes it's all there - but it separates Civilizations and Leaders, so in the 'Civs and Leaders' section, the Leaders are arranged alphabetically in a separate column below the Civilizations. Since each Civ only has one leader, this is a bit pointless, but does actually allow more info to be included on civ and leader historical background. The civ traits are in the Leader rather than the Civilization entry.
 
Back
Top Bottom