Time to revise our strategies, now with v152!

[xGBox]

I think there are some things we need to take note from the changes in the recent patch. I've taken the liberty of sorting it out:

AI related (for single player):
1. AI have improved city attack
2. AI are more willing to trade cities for peace
3. AI will stay at war longer
4. AI have better invasion
5. AI Civic values have been tweaked
6. AI turn optimizations

Civic related (important to know!):
1. Slavery: No Upkeep
2. Emancipation: Low Upkeep
3. Environmentalism: Medium Upkeep
4. Free Speech: Low Upkeep

Great Person related:
Slower Great People of the Name Generation

Improvement related:
1. Cottages no longer grow during anarchy
2. Forests give 0.5 health

Score related:
1. Score from land doesn't count until you own the land for 20 turns

Tech related:
1. Tech cost rebalancing
2. Increased late-game tech costs
3. Environmentalism moved to Medicine
4. Increased industrial era tech costs
5. In addition to tradeable techs, techs that are not allowed to be traded to you are also shown, provided that you can research them yourself at the moment

Unit related:
1. Firepower in combat is now based on max strength
2. Praetorians: Changed from 40 to 45 hammers
3. Jaguars: Changed from 40 to 35 hammers

Comments on the changes are always welcome and we need some thinkers to see what strategies we might need to revise or (or even make?) from these new changes.

 

[eg577]

Although I'll wait for Arathorn to post his official findings about the firepower change, I'm going to bet that removing/decreasing the slipperly slope effect is going to be the most noticeable change. I know it used to be that I could boldly start wars against riflemen having only macemen and trusty cats. Now though I'm not sure if I want to be so fearless.

It is clear they are trying to equalize the underused/overused civics a little more. Slaverly still seems pretty useless to me. At least now you can switch to it for no cost.

"In addition to tradeable techs, techs that are not allowed to be traded to you are also shown, provided that you can research them yourself at the moment"

Does this only apply to mods/scenarios or something? I thought the only requirement for a tech to be tradeable was that you could research it yourself at the moment. Perhaps this refers to the advisor bug/feature of not updating tradeable techs during the middle of a turn.

I'm curious what exploit the land score change addressed. On that note you forgot to list that one of the changes was closing the 'gift crappy cities to the AI' exploit.

 

[Kaleb]

AI related (for single player):
1. AI have improved city attack
3. AI will stay at war longer
4. AI have better invasion

ooh goody! I'll try and see if I can work out how exactly this impacts on the game. by improved city attack I take it this means bringing and using siege weapons to the attack for collateral damage etc...? (something the AI was dreadful at in Civ3)

6. AI turn optimizations

What exactly does that mean?

Great Person related:
Slower Great People of the Name Generation

sorry, also not sure what that means...

Improvement related:
2. Forests give 0.5 health

so is that opposed to 3 forest creating 1 health? basically gives more reason for keeping some forests about and is a general health bonus. will make a significant difference in the early parts of high-difficulty games I think. when you have more resources/buildings in the later game you can chop them down I guess.

Score related:
1. Score from land doesn't count until you own the land for 20 turns

does that also apply in the calculations for a domination victory?? if so I'm not so keen on it because it will just mean waiting about for your victory condition to kick in once you have already achieved it. 20 turns is a long time in the later game.

Tech related:
1. Tech cost rebalancing
2. Increased late-game tech costs

4. Increased industrial era tech costs

Great. I don't have a game yet where I have produced significant numbers of both musketmen and rifles,normally one or the other. I think the mistake they made in balancing these techs before is not factoring in the big impacts all the new civics you get in the middle/industrial era have on science production.

3. Environmentalism: Medium Upkeep
3. Environmentalism moved to Medicine

hmm, might need to look at this civic again and how I can use it. I think it will be useful more as a way of negating the negative health effects of the industrial buildings that you'll begin building in this era, rather than using it as a way to further grow stagnant cities. ie. rather than having to spend a good number of turns building aqueducts, hospitals, recycling centres etc, you can focus on building military etc.

why medicine though? I think Fission would have been more appropriate as a lot of the modern environmentalist movement came about as a result of protests against the potentially planet-destroying impact of nuclear technology.

Unit related:
1. Firepower in combat is now based on max strength

good, so I can still use my half-strength rifleman to attack a longbow and have a good chance of winning??

I suppose it will be a double-edged sword of both making tough defenses harder to crack but also making it easy to sustain a continued attack.

overall I think it's a good change because it reduces the exponential effect on combat odds of small amounts of damage. I prefer proportional reductions personally as it's easier to plan and understand how you will attack or defend a city. will throw a lot of the 'jump point' calculations out of the window though won't it??

 

[zalasur]

Sweet! Large maps are now playable on my system!

(Grins evilly)

Also, what exactly does this mean?

Great Person related:
Slower Great People of the Name Generation

 

[Smirk]

I'm curious what exploit the land score change addressed. On that note you forgot to list that one of the changes was closing the 'gift crappy cities to the AI' exploit.

The one where, since score is not averaged over all turns, you could place a ton of cities the hypothetical last turn and acheive domination with an highly escalated score.

I hope this wouldn't affect domination as appending 20 turns onto any victory condition isn't going to make it funner or fairer. If this is the case then it will also bring domination scores closer to other victory conditions, some of the scores are 2 to 3 times more for domination just because inherent in this victory is a ton of land and population score.

 

[Artanis]

"In addition to tradeable techs, techs that are not allowed to be traded to you are also shown, provided that you can research them yourself at the moment"

Does this only apply to mods/scenarios or something? I thought the only requirement for a tech to be tradeable was that you could research it yourself at the moment. Perhaps this refers to the advisor bug/feature of not updating tradeable techs during the middle of a turn.

Yeah, I assume it refers to that bug/feature, in that it'll now show you the enable techs even if you still can't trade for them yet.


Note: I am 200 miles away from my computer, and thus cannot actually play to test this, so this is speculation on my part.



Aaaaaaaanyways, I'm happy to see the changes to forests, both directly and via the changes to Environmentalism. I was starting to get sick of reading the words "chop-rush" four thousand times in every single strategy-related post. Now people have a reason to at least pretend to think twice before chopping every stick of wood in sight

 

[Quantum7]

Yeah, I assume it refers to that bug/feature, in that it'll now show you the enable techs even if you still can't trade for them yet.


Note: I am 200 miles away from my computer, and thus cannot actually play to test this, so this is speculation on my part.

Aaaaaaaanyways, I'm happy to see the changes to forests, both directly and via the changes to Environmentalism. I was starting to get sick of reading the words "chop-rush" four thousand times in every single strategy-related post. Now people have a reason to at least pretend to think twice before chopping every stick of wood in sight

I'm suspecting the main difference will be that more diverse things will be chop-rushed. Instead of settlers, i.e. chop-rushing a library / forge / wonder / millitary will become alot more essential.

Which probably is good as it means more choice.

I'm curious to see how relevant health will be though; even with i.e. an optimal number of 6 cities instead of 8, you can probably claim enough resources for health not to be relevant (assuming prince difficulty).

 

[DaviddesJ]

Aaaaaaaanyways, I'm happy to see the changes to forests, both directly and via the changes to Environmentalism. I was starting to get sick of reading the words "chop-rush" four thousand times in every single strategy-related post. Now people have a reason to at least pretend to think twice before chopping every stick of wood in sight

I don't see much difference. 0.4 vs 0.5 health isn't enough of a change to matter. Environmentalism civic cost change is also negligible. Earlier Environmentalism is somewhat significant; State Property is still likely better in almost all cases, but sometimes you might get Environmentalism well before State Property. Still, I can't see saving forests for that reason, except for specialized strategies.

I'm suspecting the main difference will be that more diverse things will be chop-rushed. Instead of settlers, i.e. chop-rushing a library / forge / wonder / millitary will become alot more essential.

I don't see any reason for that. Why do you think so? (I don't particularly think that rushing settlers was important in 1.09, except for the first one or two. Often you can build a high-food city and turn it into a settler factory, and you want the forest chops for the other things you mention, except forge which I don't think ranks up with the others.)

 

[DaviddesJ]

why medicine though? I think Fission would have been more appropriate as a lot of the modern environmentalist movement came about as a result of protests against the potentially planet-destroying impact of nuclear technology.

They wanted to make Environmentalism more useful. Fission, like Ecology, comes way too late to be useful.

 

[Zombie69]

Another one :

Don't try to abuse the production overflow bug, it doesn't work anymore.

 

[Quantum7]

I don't see any reason for that. Why do you think so? (I don't particularly think that rushing settlers was important in 1.09, except for the first one or two. Often you can build a high-food city and turn it into a settler factory, and you want the forest chops for the other things you mention, except forge which I don't think ranks up with the others.)

Generally my first city would chop-rush a minimum of 4 workers & 2 settlers. After that I'd rush whatever is most important (often a wonder or more workers, sometimes (mostly later on) a building and often at some point a few more settlers (as you can have both a settler 'pump' and chop-rush yet another one ).

My idea is that the extra upkeep for more cities will cause me to produce slightly less settlers during the time I'm going for CoL (as the costs pretty much double as long as you're using low maintenance civ's). Instead of chopping settlers, I'll be forced to chop science-oriented things to get to CoL faster (to expand further again). Will have to try it in practice though.

 

[Zombie69]

What does that have to do with health and environmentalism?

 

[EL_OSO]

I thought Police State was changed too. It used to be a reduction in war weariness and now it is NO war weariness.

 

[xGBox]

I thought Police State was changed too. It used to be a reduction in war weariness and now it is NO war weariness.

If you check the Civilopedia, Police State gives -50% war weariness; It hasn't been changed.

 

[EL_OSO]

If you check the Civilopedia, Police State gives -50% war weariness; It hasn't been changed.

So something is goofy in the civic screen then. Mine says no unhappy faces for war. I doubted what you said until I looked in the civicinfo.xml and it's listed there as -50.

 

[LeoV]

I noticed the same thing with 1.09 -- after switching to Police State, the civic hover-over said "NO war " but in reality, my war-weariness was at -50%. When I didn't have police state, the hover text said "-50% war ". Funky.

 

[LeoV]

The "actual" combat odds display is AWESOME and appears to be accurate.

Regarding new combat system: a Horse Archer with 17HP (1.0 modified strength) shows as weaker than a warrior with 100HP (1.0 modified strength). This shows that damage still has an effect on combat performance, just more linear and less exponential it was earlier. At 80-90% HP you can still be in excellent fighting shape, which is great for an invading army.

 

[CiverDan]

This means that you just need 1 medic in you stack as you roll your army on to maintain the offensive. assuming you has sufficient forces to begin with.

 

[Sandman2012]

What exactly is "firepower" as compared to actual "strength?"

 

[Blazer6]

I really like the beginning civics costs being displayed and taxing so much more compared to older versions. A current version settler game is costing more than an old version noble game.
I never liked keeping so high a research percentage on older Civ games. It tells me money making buildings are low priority.