[R&F] Rise and Fall General Discussion Thread

[Thormodr]

I found a good dedicationfor peaceful players in normal age was getting points for building industrial era buildings... made getting the next golden age very easy...

Yes. Heartbeat of Steam is great for peacemongering.

 

[sonicmyst]

Of course I also stress about all the excess points I get after I already crossed the threshold for golden age. I hate wasting all those points, and I'm pretty sure they don't carry over.

I think the formula for threshold is flat formula. +12 points minimum for dark ages, +5 for each golden age you accumulated before, -5 for every dark age, and +1 for every city. So it is actually a non-issue if you have excess era points since the threshold in the next era is calculated based on the above fixed rules.

 

[leandrombraz]

I still didn't get a dark age =( though the game I'm playing now have all it need to go wrong, so I might get some.

 

[Craig_Sutter]

I think civ/leader combos with uu, ui, ub and/or ud set in different eas have gotten a slight advantage... for example, playing cree, the UI and UU are likely to be built in Ancient era... the English UB meseum comes in different era than Redcoat and their unique privateer (cannot recall if those units are in the same era), so they can get a boost in era points in 2 or 3? different eras.

Wonder if any civ/leader can get boosts in 3 eras.

 

[rattatatouille]

Wonder if any civ/leader can get boosts in 3 eras.

Norway gets their Longship in Ancient, the Stave Church in Classical, and the Berserk in Medieval.

 

[Leyrann]

I’ve played 2-3 games now and a bunch of half play then restart games and I’ve yet to be in a dark age, no matter what difficulty (including deity). I know others have but it seems like I just get normal age without even trying. I’d like to experience a dark age to see it but it seems too easy to get normal. I’m playing as Georgia so a dark age would be great to have a possible heroic age and really use the bonus

Wait until you come across the "swarmed with barbarians and getting declared a surprise war upon" ancient era. That's a guarenteed dark age.

I found a good dedicationfor peaceful players in normal age was getting points for building industrial era buildings... made getting the next golden age very easy...

Not always. I actually didn't choose it when I got into an Industrial Dark Era, as I simply didn't have the technologies yet to unlock those buildings. Traders also only gave me 5 era points, but eh, I doubt I had that many Industrial Eras down when the Modern Era started... I was probably in the process of building like 6 of them at that point though, but Heroic Age meant no Era Points.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Yes. Heartbeat of Steam is great for peacemongering.

The "finishing trade routes" one is pretty good, esp if you're running internal ones that take only five or six turns.

 

[K4wa]

As Georgia, having founded a religion which is majority in all of my cities and having converted a city-state to my religion, my envoys still count as one. Am i missing something here?

 

[Katakanja]

As Georgia, having founded a religion which is majority in all of my cities and having converted a city-state to my religion, my envoys still count as one. Am i missing something here?

It's not retroactive, so the envoys already present wont be doubled. If you are talking specifically about new envoys since you converted it, then it sounds like a bug.

 

[TomKQT]

I am still in my first game and besides the normal ancient era I've had 4 golden ages, nothing else. Playing as Zulu, so no special bonuses for ages. And especially the last golden age was with a huuuuuuge overflow of era points.
Is this normal? Is it so easy?

So, I finished the game and it was:

Ancient Normal -> Classical Golden -> Medieval Golden -> Renaissance Golden -> Industrial Golden -> Modern Golden (victory)

And I cannot even say how huge numbers of era points I wasted, for example going to modern was with 352 / 294 era points...

I won cultural victory at 1848. I had just 4 technologies left to research and already multiple future civic researched, the world era was far behind me. I had time to build districts I really didn't want and useless wonders, I won cultural unplanned, I just had so many great works and everything (but just one park and no seaside resorts, I wasn't focusing on culture)

Quite ironic that I hope I will get something else than golden ages in my second game

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

The ease of gaining golden age after golden age makes both Georgia and the Taj Mahal seem pretty weak.

 

[UWHabs]

The ease of gaining golden age after golden age makes both Georgia and the Taj Mahal seem pretty weak.

It definitely is a bit easy, but my 2nd game I only had 2 of 4 eras golden (normal->golden->dark->heroic). Especially in a golden age, if you're not conquering other civs to get points, or building wonders, it can be a real challenge.

To me, I think they need to raise the "per-city" threshold a little more, since I think it's in the massive empires that you have the most chance to go way over the limits. My first game with the Cree, I went into the industrial era something like 100 points more than I needed. A lot of that was from conquering, and for some reason I kept getting the "city converted while at war" bonuses, even if it didn't quite feel right (like, I would conquer one of their cities, and then the bonus would pop up telling me a different city of theirs converted).

 

[TomeTraveler]

Wonder if any civ/leader can get boosts in 3 eras.

Even with uniques that are in different eras according to the tech/civic trees, it's easy to gain them "early" by building them before the game officially reaches their designated eras, and given that they are uniques you'll likely prefer to build them early rather than late.

 

[Katakanja]

The ease of gaining golden age after golden age makes both Georgia and the Taj Mahal seem pretty weak.

I won't be surprised if the first patch ups the thresholds a little. Golden ages feel a little too easy to get and I have yet to actually fall into a dark age that I haven't actively tried to cause, just to try out the special policies

 

[Becephalus]

Stick with Civ 2 - it's probably more your style.

The AI still makes mistakes, but it's far less important when playing against
25+ civs on ludicrous (200x100) maps at > epic pace. It might not suit you, your
rig, or your level of patience, but I haven't seen anybody claiming they can win
consistently with a high score at Emperor level or higher.

I guess some people need the adulation, but bragging about winning on small maps
against a few civs is like cheering yourself for beating a 5 year old at
tic-tac-toe.

I will try that as one last go for this game. And for the record, while I think 2 was the high point, 3 was playable, 4 was excellent, and I think 5 made a lot of needed changes even if it was in some ways a step backward.

But I kind of feel 6 is wandering off into the wilderness of "more for the sake of more" instead of more for better, and just feel it is now a flabby unbalanced game the AI sucks at and doesn't understand. Not that it ever really did, but it has gotten worse not better over time. The not switching to "armies" instead of units when they went to 1upt just kills me. It is such an obvious fix to the AI issues and more realistic at this level of abstraction.

 

[Mojo85]

I still don’t understand religious combat. I attack someone and it’s a minor defeat for me, he turns around and battle bolts me and it’s a major victory for me....wat

 

[Mojo85]

Also playing as Georgia and going religious. Just converted Norway’s capital and had an emergency declared on me. Only participant is....Norway...yea game I think if they could defend against that they would have by now but sure I’ll take the extra gold and religious pressure!

 

[Thormodr]

Also playing as Georgia and going religious. Just converted Norway’s capital and had an emergency declared on me. Only participant is....Norway...yea game I think if they could defend against that they would have by now but sure I’ll take the extra gold and religious pressure!

Yeah. Religious emergencies need to be reworked, somehow.

 

[Katakanja]

emergencies need to be reworked, somehow.

I feel like emergencies in general were a mistake. Judging from the majority of people's comments on them, they don't seem to work anything like the way Firaxis intended for them to function based on how they were described prior to release. Its really easy to determine which ones can be manipulated to earn the player lump sums of gold, and which ones should just be outright rejected to save on hassle. It seems to be a roulette wheel as to whether the AI will actually bother to join in and help out, they cause all sorts of weird diplomatic consequences on top of the pre-existing tics the AI has from vanilla. They don't even appear to work very well as a way to unite the AI against a human player who's running away with the game if that was Firaxis's intent too.

On one hand I think I'd be totally ok with it if they just outright said "Sorry guys, this mechanic really didn't work out how we hoped it would" and removed them from the game, on the other they did advertise them as a feature of the expansion so we are kind of stuck with them now...

 

[Mojo85]

I like them, they add a new wrinkle to the game and a late game challenge to a part of the game that really need a spice up. They could use work but I wouldn’t scrap them