So I've been playing a new game on v99 as Austria Hungary which has been pretty fun and more historical (in some ways) than I expected. I'm not quite done yet, but wanted to give a progress update at the very least to discuss what I was seeing which I think shows the mod is largely in a very good place.
My main takeaways/feedback:
Some Austria-game-specific notes
Final notes:
- I managed to get a fairly historical Austrian experience. I settled Wien and the city Scholtoi on the black sea, but my third settler got eaten by Vikings when they went on the water oh well. Flipped Venedig turn 2, so already had a fairly good chunk of IRL AH. Those three have since then been my core cities that I have always controlled.
- My first war ended up basically being the Italian Wars with France, and it ended with a white peace pushing them off of Venice and making them go away.
- The second War was a dogpile on Germany that saw the continent unite to tear apart Bismarck, kinda "Thirty Years War" esque complete with towns burning and violence across Central Europe. England was the big winner, with Amsterdam and Berlin as their prizes. Russia took Hannover but razed it, and almost immediately collapsed after that. Turkey got Königsberg and I snagged Weimar from Germany when it was hanging by a thread after a joint English-Turkish siege. Weimar is probably City #2 in the Empire these days and an important industrial center.
- Third war ended up being a Turkish attack that led to an invasion of my Black Sea city and an attempted Siege of Vienna, but I pushed that back and took Split off of the Turks.
- My fourth war, again the Turks but this time it was an Austrian-English-Spanish coalition against perfidious Suleiman which led to a vicious back and forth over Athens and Constantinople with Selanik as the last Turkish European holdout because it had the strongest defenses. I secured two key chokepoints at the Bosporus with citadels, and after Selanik finally fell and I had complete control of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans peace was signed. And then Turkey collapsed almost immediately after that with their remnant independent city of Ankara acting as a buffer between me and my good buddy Arabia.
- My fifth war was started while I was engaged with Turkey by France, which led to a historically well timed and technologically well-timed Napoleonic Wars and an Austrian-English-Spanish coalition leading to the burning of Limoges, Quebec City, and Brest, with Paris going to England. Napoleon surprisingly managed to become stable again and lived in Detroit until Washington decided he was tired of Napoleon as his neighbor and ate Detroit.
- Now it's been about a century of peace and tense messages from good buddy Arabia telling me my other good buddy Lizzie is plotting against me.
My main takeaways/feedback:
- The mod is extremely well paced and much faster than the core Civ V experience, which is one of the reasons that I didn't care much for Civ 5 in the first place when it was released. The governed cities cap is a very smart innovation that I quite like, though there's a bit of frustration with not being able to click into the AI governed cities at all to examine, but I can understand that there might be a limitation and it's not game breaking at all. I think this is easily one of the coolest things you've done with the mod.
- The biggest issues I've faced are Happiness cutting into Civilian Loyalty and Territorial Loyalty. Happiness I was able to overcome with a lot of golden age gold snagging city states with luxuries that I hadn't released yet, though ideology and public opinion came into play and unfortunately ate up some of the excess happiness I had finally built up. Territorial loyalty feels hard to navigate, even with PiR's atlas on the other screen. I don't quite understand the behind the scenes values and try to use the descriptions as a guide. I don't think these are anything wrong with the mod, just pointing out my own challenges. I'm assuming it's the three Greek/Turkish cities I own that are really cutting into that now.
- Realizing I cannot blanket expand to many corners helped both loyalty and science progress, as well as getting plenty of gold to invest in research agreements. It's still overall slower than the base game, but playing any of the overseas RP realms it feels like being measured will need to be much more crucial.
- There is so much city razing. I’m thinking AI happiness is a huge factor with this happening, as I noticed often times fighting AI that they were suffering significant happiness penalties during combat. Either that or the generally close city placements. Regardless, I just noticed lots of flames from the AI.
- The New World did get colonized quite a bit! So, it was good to see that maybe I was just having an anomalous game as England in v97. Casualties to time include Cartagena de Indias, Quebec City, a little town in the Caribbean, a Brazilian town that the English burned (you can see that hole in the Brazilian coast on the minimap), and the Pirate stronghold.
- Canada showed up due to England's low Stability, which was neat! In my England game it was Argentina that spawned instead.
- England did make it to Australia, but Africa still remains untouched. I think an Industrial Era type conquistador event for Europeans to encourage a Scramble for Africa would be ideal, but I'm sure part of this is because most of the major European powers collapsed, and aside from the razed Ouarzazate, Arabia just didn't seem interested in expanding into North Africa.
- Also pictured: the Arab-Israeli War happened and Arabia let Israel be independent in the end. For now, at least. So there's a lot of historical conflict that makes sense in this version so far.
- England did settle Australia, and it looks like Japan raided Korea but wasn't able to take it because there were lots of razed improvements but Korea still stood.
- Above aside, it seems like Washington is reluctant to actually Manifest Destiny. I think perhaps adding a discount to Settlers to his power in this version would be wise to encourage him to put more cities down. I don't think I've seen him settle more than three, and Detroit is only his because Napoleon needed to go.
- I'm not really sure what China was doing this game because Qin REALLY spread out in weird areas, including hopping over the Himalayas to conquer India. Speaking of Gandhi, I don' t think he ever settled more than those two cities that China annexed because I didn't really observe ruins when I explored there. I think maybe coding a new power for India would be a good idea or nerfing that unhappiness from cities because it is pretty brutal on AI expansion.
- Russia arose from its civil war and respawned, and Portugal came back when Spain collapsed into civil war. I like to headcanon that Brazil was founded by Portuguese dissidents in this world.
- Inca seems to consistently last a long time, and part of that is that I don't think they really have any threats to deal with. I'm thinking I'll try an Inca game to see what is going on and how that could be improved. In fact, they even got that Central American city when Spain collapsed for free! Now they're crusading against Mexico City.
- Japan doesn't seem to have done much, though I have seen them attack Korea and Vijayapura in previous games.
- The biggest holes in the map with Cities seem to be Australia, North Asia, Western North America, and Africa. I don't see Australia or North Asia as an issue, as if Russia or China had been stronger the latter probably would have been more filled and Australia comes into play so late that I don't think there's a good solution that doesn't feel forced there. For North America, again I think part of that is just finding a way to encourage Washington to settle more westward. If you wanted to add a couple of cities to North America, you could try and maybe add Vancouver on Canada's spawn if the Minor Civ doesn't raze it. Otherwise you could add the historical Bear Flag Revolt as a "California" Minor Civ (or just make it part of Latin American cities). You could also add Salt Lake City to represent the Mormon settlers moving west, and maybe that would help encourage Washington to go conquer that way if you add a couple City States that he might think are easy targets. Regarding previous feedback of Africa, I just don't see what other good candidates for City States you could add anymore, except for maybe a Moroccan one in North Africa (which really should be more populated) and Ngazargamu at Lake Chad.
- When Brazil IS a player, both them and Inca and Spanish colonies seem to fill up South America quite nicely. When they aren't it does feel more bare. Latin American Cities could spawn something in Colombia and something in Chile.
- Speaking of Lake Chad, you can't actually get a settler there! At least I haven't found a way to. Despite the existence of the resources, the settler movement limitations made it impossible to take advantage of that Core stability spot on PiR's map. That would have been a bit cheesy to build for sure, but I did REALLYwant that cocoa and a city that wouldn't kill my stability. If this area is going to have resources, it should be settle-able so I think some sort of path needs to be made to possibly get there. But also adding Ngazargamu under African Cities would work. Other than that, the usual players make Africa lively enough with the harsh terrain and leaves enough areas settle-able or contestable that I think a good scramble for Africa is possible, it's just rare with the collapse bloat and the later timeframe. Portugal did found at least one city in the Zanzibar area though, so Portugal (if it lives or respawns) seems quite happy to go that direction.
- Religion felt almost non-existent. There were 5(!) available religions when i spawned in, but because of how religion works in V, I think the world was already "industrial" so no one could spawn it. Anyways, most of the world is Islamic, so Arabia is very happy about that.
- Speaking of Arabia: somehow they got Santiago de Cuba flipped to them when Spain collapsed? So Arabia is a colonial power this game.
Some Austria-game-specific notes
- I think this is a challenging start because you start smaller and behind other established European powers, but doable due to the terrain you have. The mountain chains are your friends for defense and trying to keep everyone around you happy through gifts, diplomacy, and joining wars against more hated enemies so you're not facing more than one opponent at a time is key to surviving early on, or you're dead.
- For a RP Victory I think maybe using Diplomatic Marriage for points on European City State allies would be a good one, and maybe Austria could get bonus stability for this to help counteract stability penalties. I forgot how much I liked Austria's power!
- I was a little surprised that Washington State/Cascadia was available for me to settle without a huge stability hit. That was fun, so I settled there. I changed the name of the city of course, because Woodburn wasn't very Austrian, so I referenced my favorite Austrian town with the new name (pictured at the bottom). I needed to do SOMETHING with that settler that couldn't go to Lake Chad. Sidenote: I really REALLY wanted where Mombassa got razed, but that Portuguese settler beat me to the area.
- Speaking of overseas, I think you should give a good stability modifier to Venezuela as a reference to the Klein Venedig colony authorized under Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. It would be a nice historical reference and give an Austrian player a bit of a chance to engage with the overseas.
- Another zone I don't quite understand which is red stability for Austria is Naples/Sicily. I think the historical connections of Austria to that area in several ways warrant it being at least a contested zone for them, but maybe I'm not understanding how core zones are scripted.
- I do feel like there could be a few more sea resources in the Mediterranean. They feel fairly sparse and might help cities in those areas grow more. I was just a little surprised my Mediterranean and Black Sea cities ended up smaller than I expected (well, Constantinople and Athens each traded hands about three times during the war with Turkey so those both got reduced to Size 1, so I expected that with those).
- France and Turkey behave very appropriately. They are the "badboys" of the continent. Unfortunately, I think this is why France tends to do poorly run by the AI. Turkey has much better terrain and is more insulated by its capital being in Ankara. Russia and Germany tend to also seem to be appropriately aggressive, but they are collapse-prone. Maybe this makes sense since these areas did suffer quite a bit from disunity (and in Russia's case the Russian Civil War) but Europe I see collapses into a stalemate of 2 or 3 powerful players and everyone else falls leaving independent cities in their wake. I don't quite think that is wrong, as it makes sense from a Civ standpoint and a great powers standpoint, but at a certain point it's just lost competition gamewise. Just a note, again. Though I think France needs SOMETHING to be more competitive because it's just in a tough spot (Netherlands and Portugal are even worse off, so maybe France shouldn't complain).
Final notes:
- Very fun and well-paced! Many of my issues seem to be aleviated or just due to previous game anomalies, so I think you guys have been doing a fantastic job with this mod. Let me know if there are any other countries you are particularly interested in having tested, otherwise I may go start an Inca game when I feel this one has basically concluded (which may be sooner rather than later). I won't win this one, but I am very satisfied with the journey it took.
- Are you still open to adding more playable civs? Maybe not as AI players but as player only civs, because there are a few I'd like to see that I have ideas for.
- EDIT: minor terrain note. This might be annoying to some players, but because I’ve read a lot about it, the jungle tile on South America separating North America and South America (the tile directly south east of the flat tile for Panama) should be mountains to represent the Darien Gap. Jungle is okay but that area today is one of the most dangerous and unnavigable places on earth and is the reason why there’s no direct road traffic from Colombia to Panama. Since the mod aims for realism and historicity, I believe there should be no land travel at all through there since any attempt at organizing military forces or construction through the Darien Gap would be a nightmare.
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