Counter point, I have been able to build on my advantages age over age, while actually having interesting things to do on most of the turns from beginning to end. No offense intended, but I do have to wonder if, had you put more effort (whatever more means here, I truly do not me any disrespect) you would have found ways to leverage your efforts in earlier ages. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have managed to navigate happiness penalties even when I am 3-4 settlements over the soft cap. Anyhow, I am sorry you didn't enjoy your time with the game, as I am halfway through the Exploration Age on game two and still having an absolute blast.
Cheers!
G
I can see your point in assuming as most people do not spend the time to try and figure things out. I did attempt multiple things for Happiness including a full on change in strategy. Usually I love to aggressively expand and get as many natural wonders as I can possibly find and as many resources as I can find then fill in the empire gaps as I can. When this created issues my last playthrough I did the following
- 1 City with 4-5 towns (Soft cap was up around 6-8)
- Adjusting towns and specializing them
- City had to have multiple happiness wonders and all happiness buildings
- Adjusting placement of farms/fishing boats/upgrades based on bonuses
- Adjusting cultural or scientific buildings by district
- Validating I had Civ specific upgrades for bonuses in the same district
- Ensuring I had the correct buildings in place to ensure citizen happiness
- Making sure I did purple specialist upgrades
- Resource allotment by City
- Trade Routes between nations
- City State alliances
- Opening more of the tech tree before doing tree upgrades to II or III
- Ensuring all hostile Barbarians or whatever they are called now were removed from my map
- Ensuring my Commanders were updated with multiple upgrades and stationed in cities and towns
- Constantly renewing diplomatic agreements or attempting to calm aggressive or mad leaders
What angered me most was the upgrade in between ages. As soon as I moved to the next age so did everyone else with full on military upgrades at that, this to me was the biggest turn off. for one the end of Age reset is that first, feels very artificial and external, rather than something organic to the playthrough. It's the hand of the developer reaching over your shoulder and telling you it's time to stop playing and move on to a different game (because the next Age is literally a different game). This was one thing that was a great advantage in all Civ games to this point. It made Science and research a must do so that you could stay ahead and make other empires fear you. Second, it's another huge opportunity for the game's quirks and inconsistencies to screw you over and destroy any immersion you had. You know that huge fleet that was sweeping all before it on the high seas? It's been teleported to an inland lake next to that town that was gifted to you in a peace deal deep in enemy territory that you forgot you even had.
I understand for example what they were trying to do with having Ben Franklin be the leader of Greece in the Antiquity age as America was not founded until the 1600s as colonies, before becoming a nation in 1776. I also get what they were attempting to do with Crisis mode, but the implementation of it wont change. Crisis mode should not force negative happiness when you are under the settlement cap and have no way to stunt growth like in previous Civs, have all cities with positive happiness, and no world changing events happening. IE Civ 5 I can tell a city to stop growing. Crisis mode should be reserved for Volcanic Eruptions, Hurricanes, River flooding, Severe storms, Excessive time spent over the cap etc.
I wont even go into the lack of setup options in this game. Map choices are non existent at this point, I cant even count how many different options Civ 5 had for maps and choices including pre designed maps. All of that is gone now in Civ 7. All of the play options in previous Civs gone as well. Granted the developers have addressed this and say they will fix it.
To me this game felt like a bad mobile version of Civilization with the broken UI and Civlopedia. This created several database errors where my options in storyline mode literally were just option numbers 16058 and 19578 or something like that. I have no idea what options I picked simply because there was no descriptions on these. The last 2 issues as well as map options easily fixable and the developers have commented saying they will do so. But the Basic core mechanics of things like the jarring age changes, Crisis mode for no reason, and everyone having the same technology and upgrades post age ending will not be changed.
