The Power of Great Wall

[Sidney Magal]

Game balance > realism. Always. That's why leaders live 6000+ years and units never die of age.

The leaders are really far off realism, but the units surviving (not in the early game when it takes 1000 years to move to the other side of the continent) and the case that people love of cavalries being upgraded to gunships are perfectly understandable if you consider the units as divisions rather than individuals. AFAIK, that is exactly what happened IRL. Some armies have centenary divisions and no one assumes it's the same guys who were there 200 years ago.

Sorry for the OT post guys.

 

[Mahi]

Game balance > realism. Always. That's why leaders live 6000+ years and units never die of age. Nothing that is COMPLETELY UNCONTROLLED by a player/civ should single-handedly decide the outcome of the game. Aryans are the most typical incidence of that with events, but not the only one.

Annoyance and help events like forge burned down or truffles are far less harmful and reasonable for inclusion in the game. Dying on turn 25-30 at random, having 10000+ hammers worth of units sink in the ocean w/o a battle, or forcibly declaring on a defensive pact alliance while giving them tanks and taking all the diplomatic penalties of the DoW are *not* examples of completely random occurrences that fit with this game.

Heh heh I guess you hated to play Sim City then

 

[BornInCantaloup]

Isn't the best part about the Great Wall that you can overwhelm your opponents with espionage points ?
Spies points are pretty hard to get early without the GWall.

Works especially well with Byzantium, Spain and Russia, I would guess, for their 2 move UU... although a UU isn't really needed.


Old pic brings back memories :

Spoiler :

3 GSpies = slaughter.

 

[Ataxerxes]

Isn't the best part about the Great Wall that you can overwhelm your opponents with espionage points ?
Spies points are pretty hard to get early without the GWall.

Works especially well with Byzantium, Spain and Russia, I would guess, for their 2 move UU... although a UU isn't really needed.

3 GSpies = slaughter.[/SPOILER]

That's another great feature of the Great Wall. I remember Mad Scientist saying that if the barbarians were all the GW did, it wasn't that good of a wonder. When I build the Great Wall, my first GP is usually a spy. Boy, does that help research!

 

[lasombra1984]

The leaders are really far off realism, but the units surviving (not in the early game when it takes 1000 years to move to the other side of the continent) and the case that people love of cavalries being upgraded to gunships are perfectly understandable if you consider the units as divisions rather than individuals. AFAIK, that is exactly what happened IRL. Some armies have centenary divisions and no one assumes it's the same guys who were there 200 years ago.

Sorry for the OT post guys.

I think that units is a "squad"... For example Combat 4 unit is elite squad that simply prepares recruits very good

 

[CHEESE!]

Personally, I'd prefer my first GP to be a Prophet or Merchant (the only two likely contenders) than a spy. The +5/6 gold is REALLY helpful in expansion. The hammers and food are handy too.

 

[lasombra1984]

Personally, I'd prefer my first GP to be a Prophet or Merchant (the only two likely contenders) than a spy. The +5/6 gold is REALLY helpful in expansion. The hammers and food are handy too.

Shrines, Civil Service-Guilds-Paper bulbing, or simply a LOT of gold is much more useful than +2 hammerss/+5 gold or +1 food/+6 gold

 

[Jerrymander]

Shrines, Civil Service-Guilds-Paper bulbing, or simply a LOT of gold is much more useful than +2 hammerss/+5 gold or +1 food/+6 gold

Not necessarily, since food is King in Civ, and production is Queen. An early settled Great Person (especially Merchant or Prophet) can be really powerful, because he will be active the entire game.

Generally, though, Shrine > settled GProphet.

 

[CHEESE!]

If I get a GP in 1500 BC, I'm heavily inclined to settle him. I generally don't found religions (except, occasionally, Confucianism or, more likely, Taoism) and the odds are high that it won't be well-spread anyway, because by Taoism the religious blocs are pretty well solid.

And, luckily, GMs come just about the time (assuming a coastal start) that Currency/CS is available. If, for some odd reason, I build the ToA, and I get a Merchant, I'll likely bulb Currency/CS. If he's really early, or quite late, I settle him in my money city (which is usually grassland and could use a food boost).

 

[capnvonbaron]

I'd vote GMs and GEs as my favorites. The GSpy is ok if you want to run an espionage gambit, which sometimes works just fine and can be entertaining. My inner bastard finds it very fun to steal all my neighbors' hard-earned techs and destroy their wonders two or three turns from completion

GEs are easy with a oracle->metal casting run, and a quick finish of pyramids and switch to rep makes for a powerful early game. If I don't have to spend hammers on wonders when I can just GE-rush them, I will. You can also turn a mean profit if you:
1) set a city to build a wonder if you can spare the hammers
2) pop a GE
3) wait until city one is almost done
4) abandon production and rush the wonder in another city.

You get fail cash for completing your wonder Expensive ones (like 'mids) can net several hundred gold -- and that can be a lifesaver in a REX-economy crash scenario.

GMs I love to settle... a coastal city with GLighthouse or shrine city + several settled GMs is just

 

[Anony1200]

One of my first victories on Prince,Normal Pangea. was when the Barbs tried to assualt my place,I had the great wall,so they just got bored and wandered off to conquer others.

Everyone else died and I got conquest victory.I was happy.

 

[Fezzik]

Great wall is obviously great on Raging Barbarians, especially on Marathon speed. You can send all 8 archers you had to build to protect your capital and axemen from your second city out to do something interesting. Kills the AI. Only downside is the AI gets city defender III and extra first strikes from all the attacks. Good luck taking their capital early.

Side note: Recently I popped a hut with my starting warrior and the 3 barbarians that popped out immediately walked across the visible map and captured my completely undefended capital. Dan Quayle, much?

 

[Notenoughtrebs]

The only possible explanation to this statement is that you are ignorant to the game mechanics.

With some starts/difficulties it is possible to play PERFECTLY and still lose. Events simply increase the frequency of that occurrence.

Actually the Aryans themselves can kill you. If they come at the earliest point allowed, you can easily die long before you can build the great wall, or anything more than a worker and part of a warrior.

If you're spewing obvious falsehoods like the quote it's clear you do not know how all of the events function. This argument has been done to death, and there is not a person in the world that has proved that certain events do not constitute fake difficulty and insta-loss. That's because they can't do it. You get hit by certain things at the wrong time, you simply lose.

I believe the MeinTeam plays only at high levels, where everything is at a knife edge and events can make a real difference to a carefully laid plan. For a completely serious player like that, events can be really irritating. That's why you can turn them off I guess.

But for many players (including myself) events and quests provide depth, flavour and challenge. And the number and power of good events outweighs the bad, I think. For example, you can get free golden ages, yet there is no event that cancels a golden age, and there would be if events were to be balanced. Events also favour the player over the AI. For example, the quests where you can get a Golden Age if you have the right Wonder. If possible i delay fulfilling the quest until I can get that Wonder. Does the AI do this? I don't know.

It's also a little specious to argue that the game has little randomness in it. Map generation has already been mentioned. Then there's the RNG. It can really ruin your day if your supermedic loses a battle at 99%. Then there's the way that the wrong GP pops up just when you need the other one. Then there are huts, barbs and animals generating randomly, resources popping up out of already-built mines, nuclear power plants melting down, not to mention who your neighbours happen to be etc etc.

Civilization is not chess. Randomness is part of the game.

 

[r_rolo1]

You are misunderstanding TMIT. He is not rambling about events in themselfes, but about the balance of them. It is is not a issue of how good/bad events there are ( and, in spite of you being right and the number of good events being bigger than the bad ones, the bad ones have far less prereqs, making them far more common in game. You will have far more cave ins, hurricanes and such than, for example, the national bank event ), it is a matter of not having events that break the game completely ... say, Bermuda triangle eating your invasion fleet completely, the dreaded vedic aryans events ( either killing you or a AI ), event spreading religion to a stubborn theo AI opening a AP win ( either for or against you ... seen them both ), the flight crash event ( that one does not look unbalanced... until there is a lot of people with flight ) ... TMIT complaint ( and in this I agree ) is that the events in general , in their current unbalanced state hurt the game more than the gameplay value they have if considered in a bloc.

P.S How could I forget the Infiltrator event giving insta war when playing with No espionage option ?

 

[Notenoughtrebs]

Some of the events are unbalanced, that is true. The Bermuda triangle one seems pretty grim, but I don't mind the vedic aryans because it comes early in the game and you can just start again if you get wiped.

Maybe the events need a little work, but if they were gone I would miss them.

 

[Jerrymander]

Side note: Recently I popped a hut with my starting warrior and the 3 barbarians that popped out immediately walked across the visible map and captured my completely undefended capital. Dan Quayle, much?

I thought Barbarians had a universal limit on when they could enter borders.

 

[r_rolo1]

Barbs from huts don't obey to that

 

[Ataxerxes]

Personally, I'd prefer my first GP to be a Prophet or Merchant (the only two likely contenders) than a spy. The +5/6 gold is REALLY helpful in expansion. The hammers and food are handy too.

Sorry to bump. I was trying to be humorous when I said it helped research. With the Espionage points against one Civ, you can steal 3-4 techs from him. That's the great feature of an early great spy. As a side benefit, the techs you steal don't count toward the tech trading limit.

After a Great Spy, I'd take a scientist (academy in main science city) or an Engineer for a key wonder.