Thoughts on Italy's civics and UP?

[danpat]

Many thoughts from many 600AD Italian playthrough:

1. What improvement to build on Milano tile?(1N of Firenze)
Watermill? Farm? Cottage?
Related with no.2

2. Which civic?
Well republic seems good, but its industrial era penalty(-5) disturbs me... I need high core population so either farm or cottage is needed but republic nerf both so that's another thing to concern...

The specialist-specialized civics of Republic-Meritocracy-Egalitarism-CentralPlan looks good but you should be communist, so it feels weird. This civics benefit watermills the most so I think Milano will best be watermill in this case.

AH. To think of central planning, Korea is designed as specialist-heavy civ, but trying to maximize it using central plan makes Korea communist lol... DPRK not best Korea XD. As South Korean(the capitalist Korea) it feels weird.

Now back to Italy's civic, considering its lack of cottage-able flat land, will it still be wise to use nationhood? I won't benefit much from 1 hammer to town, and I'll rather use conquest, but conquest after nationalism gives you stability penalty


3. Obsolete Italian UP?
Italian UP is very good, giving you free specialist until renaissance. But . . . Well... Though 1100's Italy is not the exact same Italy of 2021, but it still exists, right?
And playing as modern Italy which have no UP feels a bit awkward.
Considering 1700AD scenario, it seems Italy was actually intended to be conquered, but it seems to be no conquest-event in 600AD. And also, considering Italian UHV3 condition, you don't need to but will likely play till at least industrial era so...
I think that UPs of countries which are not designed to collapse, shouldn't get obsolete.



4. From no.2. : Nationhood
Is it wise to use Nationhood even if you have too few cottages? For countries like Korea, Japan, Italy?
If it is, then for what purpose? I actually 'don't know how to conscript' so maybe I'm underrating it too much.



5. 1700AD's Milano not good
There is 2 Great wonders intended for Firenze and Venezia: Santa Maria del Fiore and San Marco Basilica. If I remember it correct, both are placed in 1700AD Milano, and at least one of them requires it to be coastal.
And Milano, is not coastal.
It looks quite dumb lol.

 

[mrrandomplayer]

The Italian UP expiring has always made me sad, but I think the justification is that if you're going for the 3rd UHV goal and conquering lots of cities, having a free specialist in each of them is extremely good with a big empire (look at how late and expensive the State of Liberty wonder is). At least the UB is still relevant into the late game.

An idea I just had that could still give Italy a UP but not make it scale in a problematic way is to have the free specialist apply to only cities in Italy's core (or Italian cities in general) but not expire. So if you conquer the Mediterranean or build a big empire, those cities wouldn't get the OP extra specialist, but the core cities would still get the nice bonus. I'm not sure how easy/difficult this is to implement, but if the idea works well in practice, I could see 'localizing' the UP rather than making it expire could work for other civs with expiring UPs (the Moors come to mind, I always find it frustrating that the food goes away but it would be really strong on other parts of the map).