BTB
Warlord
- Joined
- Nov 24, 2006
- Messages
- 119
It's like Expansionist x 2.
Now, I've always been a bigger fan of Vanilla civ than of Conquests, because I felt that it watered down the game with a lot of extra crap that wasn't very appealing. What actually got me to give it another try was knowing that it did a lot of actual bugfixing (like changing the way corruption was handled).
So I loaded it up and played as the Vikings. Regent difficulty... not too high or too low. I wanted to play the game on the "default" difficulty. Right away, I knew the game was mine.
Seafaring civs get +1 to naval movement, a lessened chance of sinking at sea, and extra commerce on coastal cities. That last one is the important part, primarily because unlike Commercial or Industrious, the bonus applies for cities of ALL sizes.
The benefit that this gives early on doesn't seem like much until you realize how hard it beats back the Despot penalty to resources. Set the science slider to 100% and you can run away with the tech race in the early game... at least on lower difficulty levels.
The map was a random map, and I quickly discovered that I had drawn a 60% land archipelago map. My strategy became very clearly apparent: longboats full of Viking hordes would be sent to rape and pillage my nearest neighbors (the French), afterwhich global conquest was not too much farther away. My tech anvantage from the coastal cities allowed me to send in longboats full of swordsmen at a time when France barely had spearmen to defend. That didn't strike me as TOO odd, and I didn't expect the early lead to last.
I was wrong. Korea came next, and I knew things were bad when their cities, still defended with warriors and spearmen, were falling to my medieval infantry and beserks. I cut a bloody swath across the entire map, and with the sefaring trait's naval bonuses there was no way that any of the rival civs could keep up with my raping and pillaging.
The war eventually ended when I wiped Korea out and I settled down for awhile. I owned half the map, so I started to build some infrastructure. Except that I was tired at this point and needed sleep, so I just kept building. Rather than losing my tech lead at that point, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. Here, I had built the Great Library because I was worried that the rest of the world was mroe advanced, and the game ended with me building spaceship parts while everyone else was researching steel.
Now, a part of this may be that the AI is just horribly Godawful at playing 60% land arch maps. I've noticed that the cities they built were all... well, crappily placed. Still, I can't help but attruibte a large part of that victory to the civ traits of the Vikings... which just seems imbalancing to me.
Thoughts?
Now, I've always been a bigger fan of Vanilla civ than of Conquests, because I felt that it watered down the game with a lot of extra crap that wasn't very appealing. What actually got me to give it another try was knowing that it did a lot of actual bugfixing (like changing the way corruption was handled).
So I loaded it up and played as the Vikings. Regent difficulty... not too high or too low. I wanted to play the game on the "default" difficulty. Right away, I knew the game was mine.
Seafaring civs get +1 to naval movement, a lessened chance of sinking at sea, and extra commerce on coastal cities. That last one is the important part, primarily because unlike Commercial or Industrious, the bonus applies for cities of ALL sizes.
The benefit that this gives early on doesn't seem like much until you realize how hard it beats back the Despot penalty to resources. Set the science slider to 100% and you can run away with the tech race in the early game... at least on lower difficulty levels.
The map was a random map, and I quickly discovered that I had drawn a 60% land archipelago map. My strategy became very clearly apparent: longboats full of Viking hordes would be sent to rape and pillage my nearest neighbors (the French), afterwhich global conquest was not too much farther away. My tech anvantage from the coastal cities allowed me to send in longboats full of swordsmen at a time when France barely had spearmen to defend. That didn't strike me as TOO odd, and I didn't expect the early lead to last.
I was wrong. Korea came next, and I knew things were bad when their cities, still defended with warriors and spearmen, were falling to my medieval infantry and beserks. I cut a bloody swath across the entire map, and with the sefaring trait's naval bonuses there was no way that any of the rival civs could keep up with my raping and pillaging.
The war eventually ended when I wiped Korea out and I settled down for awhile. I owned half the map, so I started to build some infrastructure. Except that I was tired at this point and needed sleep, so I just kept building. Rather than losing my tech lead at that point, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. Here, I had built the Great Library because I was worried that the rest of the world was mroe advanced, and the game ended with me building spaceship parts while everyone else was researching steel.
Now, a part of this may be that the AI is just horribly Godawful at playing 60% land arch maps. I've noticed that the cities they built were all... well, crappily placed. Still, I can't help but attruibte a large part of that victory to the civ traits of the Vikings... which just seems imbalancing to me.
Thoughts?
