Sulla's first Civ V walkthrough

Sulla, thx for your superb write ups about Civ 5 which are helping me improve quickly noting that I hadn't played Civ in over a decade since Civ 2. The recently posted Chinese Immortal game is full of great advice, especially how to make lots of little cities that aren't a drain on happiness.

.. neilkaz ..
 
It's an interesting review, however I'm a bit puzzled regarding the city-state paragraphs. He talks about how powerful things are like the maritime ally food bonus, vs. making granaries and watermills yet neglects to mention the amount of gold it takes to ally a city-state. So he should at least acknowledge the trade-off. Maybe he did crunch the numbers and find that gold is best spent allying the maritime city-state but it isn't clear to me *shrug*

1000 gold puts you anywhere from 30 to 60 points above "Allied" with a city-state depending on your initial standing, social policies and the game speed, I think. Let's assume 45 for the sake of argument, and let's also assume that it decays at 1 point per turn even though in practice, if you're bribing city-states you will likely have reduced this to 0.75 or less through policies and/or civ traits.

So, 45 turns of Allied bonuses from city-states, and 30 points of Friend bonuses, for 1000 gold. Fair?

Consider Allied Maritime city-states, since they're widely considered to be the "best". "Allied" means, if I recall rightly, +2 food to all cities, +4 to the capital. "Friend" means +1/+2. This is equivalent to a free Granary for 45 turns (+Watermill in the capital, but never mind), since every city can in principle build one. It is therefore equivalent to 1 gold/turn per city. There are no +1 food structures (unless you run a Lighthouse in cities only working one Sea tile, which is kind of a waste unless you've got some prime real estate that can't be worked otherwise), so let's just call the "Friend" portion of that 1000-gold deal as extending the 1 gold/turn per city by an additional 15 turns.

Effectively then, 1000 gold buys you the equivalent of 1 gold/turn per city for 60 turns. By this metric, you recoup your cost if you have 17 or more cities, which is typically a ridiculous number without careful city micro-management and policy selection. Teching Patronage gives 15 more turns of Allied status, effectively reducing this to 13 cities, which is still kind of bad if you consider things in terms of Granary cost.

However.

Unless you suck at managing happiness, Granaries are a profitable investment. You will want one in each city. It's more reasonable to place the Maritime food bonus on par with Watermills, which can only be built in riverside cities and which are less palatable on account of costing 2 gold per turn to maintain. In this case, straightforwardly a mere 8 or 9-city empire (6-7 with Patronage) begins to profit from having invested in an alliance with one Maritime city-state. All the more since not every luxury resource you want is going to be nicely located within range of a river tile, and so not every city can build a Watermill.

Add in the fact that it's good practice to throw another 1000 gold at a city-state *before* you fall out of Allied status, which buys another say 90-120 turns of the best goodies, after the initial investment, you really do begin to see profitable returns from the arrangement. And, since this effectively amounts to a "free" citizen in every city for every Maritime city-state you are allied with, if you can utilize those free citizens in a productive way in most of your cities, all the better.

IMO the only real issue with the city-state system is that it's too easy to exploit. Throwing gold their way shouldn't be sufficient. There should be more "quests" to gain favor with city-states and it should severely damage relationships with one or the other city-state if you have dealings with both and they are calling for their mutual destruction.
 
Let me share my findings. Difficulty emperor, Egypt. 6 cities founded till turn 70. No happiness problems, as each city had 2 lux resources in radius. Capital on size 9 building wonders. 3 maritime city-states allied by money, quests and road connection between capitals. Another cultural befriended by quest. Trading posts, wherever possible and only libraries and burial tombs, no other buildings anywhere. Income more than 100 per turn. Additianal resources sold to artificial idiocy. Other cities working on wonders or scouts for repeat disbands. Social policy Liberalism 4 adopted. Attacked by Rome at turn 90. I had no military. On first turn of war I bought swordsman and archer. They thrown on me 5 units including their special unit. They performed suicide attackes on my city and then were cleaned out by swordmans, which I could just buy every three turns. So why should I bother to build them? On turn 100 demographics shows I´m first in everything but military and approval. And the average is two or three times worst than my empire.
 
Unless you suck at managing happiness, Granaries are a profitable investment. You will want one in each city. It's more reasonable to place the Maritime food bonus on par with Watermills, which can only be built in riverside cities and which are less palatable on account of costing 2 gold per turn to maintain. In this case, straightforwardly a mere 8 or 9-city empire (6-7 with Patronage) begins to profit from having invested in an alliance with one Maritime city-state. All the more since not every luxury resource you want is going to be nicely located within range of a river tile, and so not every city can build a Watermill.

True in terms of maintenance, but there's the hammer cost of the Granary to consider as well. 1000 gold to a Maritime CS gets you the food in every city. If you have a 7 city empire and need to build a granary in every city, that's 100 hammers in every city. 700 hammers is pretty tough to get compared to 1000 gold. Even worse in a bigger empire ...
 
100 hammers is only 5 turns of 20 hammers each! How hard up are you on hammers that you can't assemble 20 for a mid-sized city?
 
Pretty hard up in the beginning game, actually. It takes a while to get 20 hammers. And pretty hard up on the small low-production cities. So there are quite a few cases where it's hard to build a granary.

On the other hand, the food from Maritime CS benefit even the smallest, laziest, least productive city.
 
Sulla's last game is contrived and shows the severe balance issues in the game.

Bake size-4 cities, add maritime CS food, stir and win.

If that's the way the game is meant to be played then count me out.

In most games we would call Sulla's play an "exploit", would we not?
 
Possibly, but there's nothing inherently unnatural about it. Afterall, plenty of people have cities that don't grow too large. Concerns about happiness helps ensure that. Also, use of maritime city-states are considered part of the game. If having them together is overpowered, that's a problem in the balance department. Sure a player could abstain from the strategy, but it would still need to be addressed.
 
That is why I haven't called it a exploit :D But it is strange that , after civ IV being quite effective in quenching ICS, we have a civ V that brings it back while advertizing the exact oposite :p

This is a serious issue that needs to be adressed ... even if, as Sullla said, a lot of us already played this game and it was called civ III at the time ;) And I'm pretty sure that pretty much no one would pay what we paid for a civ III with leaders that curse you in their mother language :D
 
Definition of "exploit" from wiki:

An exploit, in video games, is the use of a bug or design flaw by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game's designers.

Seems to fit :)

EDIT: By no means do I intend to label Sulla a "cheat" ... I just think it ironic that Civ V plays best when it's played as NOT intended.
 
Depends of what you want to say with "manner not intended by the game's designers" . They surely intended things to be like they are ( happiness constricting empire pop and buildings that give happyness costing cash ), they just didn't thinked the whole thing until the last consequences ...
 
You know, I bought the game about 10 days ago, & had about 5 days of really hard-core playing on it-but the truth is that I haven't actually played the game again since then, & am having much, much more fun with my Civ4 games & my Civ4 modding. For some reason, I'm just not finding Civ5 that engaging-& its not simply an "oh, well they haven't got this from Civ4" thing. I really can't quite put my finger on the problem, but I do feel like a lot of what Sullla says has a ring of truth with me (especially how imbalanced the City-States are). The question now becomes-will the developers be willing to sort out the *genuine* criticisms of the game from the whining (which there is plenty of too)-& *fix* those problems-or will they simply lump it all together as whining, & leave the game as the unfinished mess it currently is?
 
Actually, Civ5 city spam is much worse than in Civ3. While it's true that lots of cities capped at size 12 were generally the way to go in Civ3, there was a limit beyond which more cities didn't contribute much. You'd hit the boundaries of corruption, and every extra city would just be a single merchant or scientist specialist (or whatever). But Civ5 has no corruption at all, and thus EVERY city makes you stronger. I'm playing another Immortal game where most of my land is choked by tundra, and it literally doesn't matter. All of the cities are fed by maritime food. They just need a library for the specialist slots, and everything else is covered by the center tile. The surrounding terrain doesn't matter one bit. The AI has no answer for this strategy - you keep adding more cities without stopping until you have a giant edge in all of the Demographics, and then you can pick your victory condition. All you need is space with which to operate (which the AI doesn't always give you, naturally).

Of course, the problem is that this strategy isn't very interesting. It's actually quite boring, since you're just doing the same thing over and over again. I actually hate the Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) strategy. But if you're trying to play this game to win, and not cheese-rushing the AI, it is the best one to use. It's a major reason why I view the design of this game as being so flawed, because Civ5 is supposed to be all about small empires and the game actually promotes the most hardcore ICS tactics since Civ2.
 
To be fair I did that a lot in civ4 as well. You had to expand in civ4 to be competitive. So what's the difference in this game? (I admit I haven't bought it yet, so that's a real question).

I'd like to see a review from a more casual player. No offense Sulla. Your skill level looks to be way above mine. I'd like to see a civ5 review from someone who plays Noble or prince in civ4 regularly. As that's what I'd normally play in civ4. Obviously hardcore stat players will find many holes in this game, but will the average civ4 player find holes in this game?
 
To be fair I did that a lot in civ4 as well. You had to expand in civ4 to be competitive. So what's the difference in this game? (I admit I haven't bought it yet, so that's a real question).

I'd like to see a review from a more casual player. No offense Sulla. Your skill level looks to be way above mine. I'd like to see a civ5 review from someone who plays Noble or prince in civ4 regularly. As that's what I'd normally play in civ4. Obviously hardcore stat players will find many holes in this game, but will the average civ4 player find holes in this game?

It's really easy to dig yourself into a hole without knowing why. If you like easy military victories over the AI it is a nice self-esteem exercise, I guess. But if you're an empire-builder type it is slow and boring - unless, a la Sulla, you game the system to get around the annoying artificial game limitations.
 
Definition of "exploit" from wiki:

An exploit, in video games, is the use of a bug or design flaw by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game's designers.

Seems to fit :)

It seems that most people are playing Civ5 in a manner not intended by the game's designers. I think there is a very narrow path they expected us play (and what was advertised pre-release). If you house rule out slingshots, maritimes, horses, stonehenge, small-city culture, trading luxuries and cities, etc. - what are we left with?
 
To be fair I did that a lot in civ4 as well. You had to expand in civ4 to be competitive. So what's the difference in this game? (I admit I haven't bought it yet, so that's a real question).

I'd like to see a review from a more casual player. No offense Sulla. Your skill level looks to be way above mine. I'd like to see a civ5 review from someone who plays Noble or prince in civ4 regularly. As that's what I'd normally play in civ4. Obviously hardcore stat players will find many holes in this game, but will the average civ4 player find holes in this game?

In playing Civ4 for 5 years, I could never break above Prince unless the map was stacked in my favor. My first real game of Civ5 on Prince was so overpowered (culture, gold, city-states and military) and ridiculously easy that I would say to play Civ5 competitively (ala Civ4), take your Civ4 level and add +2.
 
In playing Civ4 for 5 years, I could never break above Prince unless the map was stacked in my favor. My first real game of Civ5 on Prince was so overpowered (culture, gold, city-states and military) and ridiculously easy that I would say to play Civ5 competitively (ala Civ4), take your Civ4 level and add +2.

Well, I don't think that's quite accurate. Civ5 is absurdly easy at Emperor and there is quite a jump from there to Immortal. In contrast Civ4 provides a fairly smooth grade up in difficulty until you hit Deity.
 
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