Win Rate Data - Please post your games' results here!

[Wodhann]

I've been thinking of a system for someone else (or maybe me again, if nobody else wants to) to take over this without having to resort to my complicated previous one and this is what I've come up with.

Basically each person posts using the following template:

• Civilization
• Victory Type
• Outcome
  • Expected Easy Victory - The difficulty chosen antecipated an easy victory and an easy victory was achieved.
  • Expected Challenging Victory - The difficulty chosen antecipated a worthy challenge and a challenging victory was achieved.
  • Expected Defeat - Lost a game when they were fully aware they chose a higher difficulty than they were used to.
  • Unexpected Easy Victory - Stomped the adversaries in a difficulty level that was expected to be a much bigger challenge.
  • Unexpected Challenging Victory - Either a difficulty level that was expected to be easy turned out to be challenging, or they won in a difficulty level they thought to be impossible to win considering their own skill level.
  • Unexpected Defeat - A game that was expected to be a victory ended up in defeat.
• Description

Tallying the results is then a mere matter of adding points to each of these 6 categories for each civilization. Simple.

PS: Although, victory type would have to be disregarded in the stats table unless you want like 24 different outcomes for each civ.

 

[merill]

• Civilization
• Victory Type
• Outcome
  • Expected Easy Victory - The difficulty chosen antecipated an easy victory and an easy victory was achieved.
  • Expected Challenging Victory - The difficulty chosen antecipated a worthy challenge and a challenging victory was achieved.
  • Expected Defeat - Lost a game when they were fully aware they chose a higher difficulty than they were used to.
  • Unexpected Easy Victory - Stomped the adversaries in a difficulty level that was expected to be a much bigger challenge.
  • Unexpected Challenging Victory - Either a difficulty level that was expected to be easy turned out to be challenging, or they won in a difficulty level they thought to be impossible to win considering their own skill level.
  • Unexpected Defeat - A game that was expected to be a victory ended up in defeat.
• Description

Maybe consider adding 'Unexpected Victory : won in a difficulty level they thought to be impossible to win considering their own skill'
and let Unexpected Challenging Victory - A difficulty level that was expected to be easy turned out to be challenging

 

[tu_79]

Ask what you want to analyse. I think with that template you get to know if a Civ is harder or easier from the point of view of the player.

Now check this:

• Civilization:
• Difficulty level:
• Outcome: Victory type (5), defeat, ragequit
• Challenged?: None, Very little, Fine, Hard, Impossible.

You can show several things by sorting them in tables. So you may know if people who use to play in King find the game challenging (while those playing Immortal may not), or if domination victories are considered easy, or how easy is to achieve a victory type with a civ in any difficulty level.

Many players start their games without a victory type in mind, so I think it doesn't make sense to ask that.

 

[Wodhann]

Many players start their games without a victory type in mind, so I think it doesn't make sense to ask that.

Yes, but people generally have an expectation of the difficulty level they're going to play with, regardless of victory type. For example, myself, I expect to win Settler games and lose Deity games.

Expectation is important for balance because generally it indicates if something is off or not. Not saying that games themselves should be predictable, but if you easily win a game that was supposed to be difficult, something must be wrong there in some level.

 

[tu_79]

Yes, but people generally have an expectation of the difficulty level they're going to play with, regardless of victory type. For example, myself, I expect to win Settler games and lose Deity games.

Expectation is important for balance because generally it indicates if something is off or not. Not saying that games themselves should be predictable, but if you easily win a game that was supposed to be difficult, something must be wrong there in some level.

Here I was talking about asking the initially chosen victory type. Sometimes I pick Zulus and think I'm going to try domination, but many times, just pick a random civ and see what happens. So, why to ask this?

The other issue, as I reasoned before, dilutes in the statitistic mean. Most players will chose the difficulty they think will give a moderate challenge. Some will try a very hard challenge while others may try something easier, just to test things. But in great numbers, what rests is the mean, so you'll get that chosen difficulty approximately matches a moderate challenge expectation. Now you can compare this mean, with the mean of real challenge outcome, and the result won't be different from what you wanted to measure.

If a player finds something too shocking, like a somewhat too easy win, I believe (s)he will post it anyway. (If willing to answer this questionary, then it's an active forum user). If a player who tries a domination game ends winning from culture too often, sooner or later (s)he will complain.

 

[Der_Zorn_gottes]

Dutch/Tectonics/Deity/Huge/Marathon

Diplo Victory (probably)


What a game. It was a dog-eat-dog continent. I crippled Assyria, Shoshone killed China, and finished Assyria, Japan killled Greece and Poland.
After all said and done, Shoshone and Japan were the big two, Portgal and me were fine, and the Zulu were insignificant. So all was fine. But the turn before I entered Rennaisance I threw a fit when I read "an unknow civilizatin has entered the atomic age".
Ok, I am fine with being behind in tech on Deity, but two full ages?! I was close to just conceding at this time, but I was just building polders everywhere and enjoyed the game, so I played on. A little later the mother of ruanways found us - Egypt (how they managed to find us only in the modern age will remain a mystery).
That's when I noticed that I was dominating the World congress just with religious authority and the one true faith belief. Turns out, of the surviving civs, only Portugal was interested in CS and had Statecraft policies. Portugal was my neighbour, weaker than Shoshone an Japan... what if I...
I attacked. We were on opposing sides of a large bay, but she had several cities on my side (another reason to attacke her anyway). She send reinforcments there piecemeal, and I could defeat a large chunk of her army that way. Navy was another story - she surged in techs, and all of sudden my wooden ships were fighting ironclads and cruisers. But I had more, and admirals, and Sea Beggars did their thing. After having naval superiority, the rest of the war was academic. This gave me the Summer Palace. I made a point of searching for her very last city to exterminate her, both to free her allied CS and to eliminate the most serious rival in the congress.
After that I was in total command of the World Congress. My neighbours were grumpy, but remained at peace.
In the end, I had 44 votes, the UN buildt, and would suggest world ideology next turn. However, the game keeps crashing every turn now, so I cannot continue. Diplo victory is predetermined now. Culture won't happen because I passed travel ban, and I doubt that an AI could conquer me in the remaining time. So I consider it won. I'm quite happy I could pull this off.

 

[seandamnit]

Not sure if we're continuing with a new format or not, for now I'll post the normal way:

Civilization: Zulu
Game Settings: Epic Pace / Pangaea Map / Standard Size
Relative Rank: Easier (Immortal)
Outcome: Loss! (Culture)
Version: 6/26

I know you like hearing about the losses...

Normally play Deity in the base game, but I'm easing in to this patch with a few Immortal games. This is my first loss, and I didn't see it coming. Pacal was my western neighbor, and unfortunately built the Great Wall. I hate the Great Wall, so I decided to conquer to the East and would take on Pacal after Dynamite. Maintained great relations with him so he wouldn't DoW on me while I was on the other side of the world. I had conquered 3 Civs and was working on #4 when suddenly I'm staring at the loss screen...Pacal got a sneaky culture win! This was turn 410 (epic pace). I knew he was 10 techs ahead of me at the time, and that was a problem, but had no idea you could win a Culture Victory so early...he was in Modern Era.

It seems that I simply didn't notice that no other civ focused on culture (or maybe my conquering slowed down their culture pool significantly?). And while I do recall getting the screen informing me that Pacal was influential with me, I don't recall getting any sort of warning that he close to a cultural victory. To be fair though, with all the unit spam, trade deals, etc going on, it can be easy to miss.

 

[Gidoza]

Hello all! I just finished another game - had lots of fun, but especially I learned alot, found game bugs, and I think I've observed some meaningful balance notes that ought to be considered here (the bugs will go straight to GitHub - the balance notes, Gazebo just let me know where you want me to put those - if here is good enough or if I need a new thread for each).

I'll just tell the game's story and then explain the stuff I noted.


I played this game in the July 1st version of Vox Populi with Events turned on.

Civilization: Persia
Victory Type: Domination - though Diplomacy was not far off as a potential
Relative Rank: - This game was a complete and total pushover, mainly because of the map layout (an important note for this game); however, I was playing on Emperor, which is very compatible for me
Map Type: Standard Communitas with 10 Civs and 18 City-States
Turn: 317



The Story

I started in a Capital that had a couple good production spots that were useful for early-game military production, but was otherwise the ultimate Farming state for the remainder of the game (in fact, its production was so horrible later on that it had most buildings not constructed). Among the resources, my Capital had Ivory, which proved useful in the early game for combat as the Elephants were very dominant. I constructed a single early expansion near my Capital next to a Natural Wonder (the one that gives 6 Gold and 3 Production), for another very strong Production city that also allowed me excellent early-game unit maintenance support. My starting Policy was Authority, and my starting Pantheon was God of War.

I went hyper-aggressive early-game against the Danes with pretty much only Immortals and Elephants (about 5 Immortals, 2 Elephants), plus around 3 Archers. They got hopelessly crushed, followed by Japan who was likewise on my starting island - I proceeded to colonize the whole island, and then explore my surroundings with boats.

What I discovered was that I was in an ocean-locked area of the world, and that the only other civilization I could reach by water at the time was Rome: as I needed to get Culture and Science sooner or later, I fought with Rome until they capitulated, and I left them reasonably strong so they could be a useful ally (they in fact were a strong support for me for the rest of the game).

What remained before, during, and after the war with Rome was the following: as I said, I was ocean-locked into a large section of the map, and could not explore beyond the ocean borders without Great Admirals or Caravels - leaving 6 other civilizations to account for basically the other half of the entire map. In my corner of the realm? Of the 18 City-States that existed on this map, 13 of them were in my section - and most of these were unmet by Rome, leaving me to have a complete monopoly on City-State control.

Here's what's interesting: between Pledges of Protection and Quests (including killing barbarians), I barely needed to lift a finger to be the ally of every single one of these City-States and remain so for the remainder of the game. Quests alone were sufficient to provide me with all the influence I needed to maintain my allegiances with all of them save very minor investments: within the course of the *entire game*, my unit donations to City-States did not exceed 10 units, and I don't even think I even produced as many as 5 Diplomatic units to be used for Influence - and most of those went to other City-States in the other map sections to secure my dominance there. Any Great Diplomats I ever earned constructed Embassies. Obviously, when my Authority tree was finished, I took Statecraft to secure my alliances even further, and upon discovering all other civilizations in the world, I immediately could dominate any vote I liked (and usually have control of ALL THREE resolutions...) for the entire game.

For reference, I did get a religion - and half the reason I warred with Rome is because Rome had a religion as well and I really needed that population to get my Religious National Wonder (there simply wasn't enough population on my side of the map to go around for there to be enough). In fact, it took me till about year 1600 for me to get that Wonder up as I engaged in a Missionary War to push myself over the edge - an important detail, because it tells me how much the new adjustments to pressure really affect Religion spread, forcing Missionary power alot more. For the record: my eventual religious set ended up being Apostolic Tradition (Golden Age points for Persia's UA), Stupas (more GA points for UA - though I have a comment on this later), Scholarship (when I took this, my science sucked, and I jumped from 29 to 81 points per turn on the spot), Zealotry, and finally Global Commandments (yay more GA points).

The rest of the game was basically just a set of wars with the remaining Civs, starting with Morocco, who built Chicken Pizza and incurred my wrath, and Egypt just happened to ask me to declare war on them anyways - only for me to discover that Spain and the Inca (interesting combination...) had Defensive Pacts with Morocco. Korea was a neutral the whole time, and Austria had been wiped out before I ever found any of the other Civs. The 3vs3 war was a complete slaughter in our favor, I took two more Vassals in the form of Morocco and the Inca, and gradually cleaned house very fast - mainly with ranged attack ships - and finished the game, all with a continuous Golden Age after I had acquired Chicken Pizza. I should add...that the combination of Great Lighthouse, Imperialism (my last Social Policy pick, before Autocracy), Persia's UA bonus during Golden Ages, and Treasure Fleet...make ships completely stupidly awesome. Ironclads with 9 movement and Cruisers with 8 are completely insane.


Anyways, the following are the balance notes and conclusions I have drawn out of this game, which might be worthy of consideration. Please bear in mind that this was my first time playing with Persia.


1. Immortals seem a tad strong: they presently have 2 points above a Spearman, though I think pushing it back to just 1 point would be sufficient. With their fast +10 healing (it isn't double healing - it's +10), they're just crazy strong and can just tank a city within the city's borders, no problem at all: also, the healing ability carries over to later units like Pikemen, so a horde of Immortals made for an AMAZING investment that helped in future wars thru unit upgrades. I thought it was the easiest early-game set of wars I had ever had.

2. The new Quests system is awesome, but I feel that it offers too much influence: it's offering so much influence that any kind of *active* form of acquiring City-States is completely pointless: I don't need to donate troops or build Diplomatic units. Rather, I just ignore life and magically get allies. Yes, I realize that I had uncontested grasp over the City-States in this game, but nevertheless, Influence should not be this easy to attain: I would rather think that the Influence from doing Quests should be in the range of 15-30 points, and thus would be something that merely *sustains* an alliance if you have one, or otherwise *encourages* further investment if you don't: but by itself, shouldn't hold the whole weight of the matter. To compensate, however, we could make the direct prizes of completing a Quest offer a little bit better bonus.

3. I'm still not too impressed with Pledges of Protection, as they offer too many benefits with little consequences. Sure, you need to be in the top 60% to make a Pledge - and the only consequence of losing your rank is that you can't re-pledge again for 20 turns. Big deal? When I went on a building spree, that was really my priority: 20 turns of getting a little less Influence than usual from Quests just isn't going to hurt me, and Quests had made me allies with all of them beforehand anyways. I don't really think this is a meaningful system. Rather, a small ding of influence would make sense (maybe only 15-20) if protection is revoked; also, it would make sense to only be able to give protection if you *actually have military nearby to protect the City-State*. It's somewhat silly to say you're "protecting" someone when you don't actually have any military there. What I *did* do with Barbarian Hordes in mind was keep one or two units within the sphere of influence or just a single tile outside the sphere of some City-States that I was worried about - and it seems to me like this kind of behavior would be uniquely consistent with an actual Pledge of Protection.

4. Stupas' requirement for Archaeology to get the Tourism boost makes sense, else it would be too powerful early on; however, the Golden Age Points on the Stupas are pretty underwhelming to wait that long for, and it wouldn't be overpowered if they offered the GAP naturally.

5. While I very much like the new system of how Religious Pressure spreads, I think it's a tad weak: Pressure Wars were quite fun in Vanilla. Although this isn't exactly my point. My point is that this puts alot of extra "pressure" on the need to build Missionaries, who already have a hard enough time converting cities without pressure, and thus the possibility of spreading religion is consequently de-valued. My conclusions would be to slightly decrease the cost of Missionaries, or cut back a little on the Pressure penalties for various reasons (especially water). Furthermore, while I get that Inquisitors are supposed to be possible - these Inquisitors are way way way more effective than any inquisitions history would offer! To take a city of 28 population of another religion and reduce it to 0 instantly seems like overkill, and actually makes the whole idea of spreading religion kind of lame. I'd rather see slightly cheaper Inquisitors that require more than one shot to get things done...seems too magical otherwise. :/

6. The event "A New Banking System" just seemed to me...crazy strong. I don't recall all the options, but I remember that they were all frighteningly powerful, but a free Social Policy really beats all the rest. I just felt like I was being offered more free victory out of this.



That's it for my report on this game. Again, I have a buglist/observations list/typo list that I wrote down and submit to GitHub.


Thanks, and cheers, all!
-Gidoza

 

[Gidoza]

One more finished game here that I think points to something important.


Civilization: England
Victory Type: Culture - though Diplomacy/Science were not far off
Relative Rank: Emperor (appropriate level for me), and I guess it wasn't a difficult game, but I couldn't have known that throughout the game
Map Type: Standard Communitas with 10 Civs and 18 City-States
Turn: 361


The Story

The actual intention I had going into this game was not to take it too seriously and to just test out certain Pantheons for balance purposes (in particular, whatever the one is that is all about defence and requires Barracks/Walls/something else for Faith). As it turns out, other players picked every single Pantheon I was initially interested in testing, so...

I started in a pretty typical coastal area with grasslands and plains, and a couple luxuries, the main one being Jade. I took Progress as my starting Social Policy. As I explored, I notice a pretty massive mountain range west of my Capital. Within the mountain range were additional Jade sources (for a definite monopoly), and a ridiculous number of Sheep; the mountainous area was so absurdly placed as well that it could only be regarded as the ultimate zone for defence (one-unit passageways just about everywhere). Consequently, the 1st expansion city I settled was a city that had tons of mountains everywhere, not a single flat tile, a few empty Hills, a Deer, an Iron, a Silver, and 14 Sheep (I'm serious - 14 Sheep). My 3rd city wasn't that far off from this, but more diverse in the resource department - and then my 4th and 5th cities were making the best of mountains and the remaining Jade.

Immediately after settling my first expansion, even though I had no Natural Wonders around, I took the Pantheon that gives bonuses for Natural Wonders and Mountains (God of Nature? Forget right now...), just to see how much I could really gain from merely Mountains. Well, let's say that my Culture and Faith were both crazy strong - I got the first Religion and was #1 in Faith for the whole game, and also #1 in Culture for the whole game alongside the Jade Monopoly I acquired a few turns later. It was alarming just how much Culture/Faith this Pantheon really generated.

Of course, since my cities were in the middle of the Mountains and I wasn't Inca, they weren't big cities, but their production was super high and I had decent Culture. I was feeling lazy and just wanted to build buildings, so that's literally all I did - I built buildings and offered some basic defences for my nearly-impenetrable city fortress in the mountains. This amounted to a Spearman per city, which lasted somewhere into the early 19th Century: everyone around me was warring (particularly Askia, who never befriended me), but my puny civilization never got into a war or fought anything over the course of the entire game, save the last 5 turns or so, against a beaten Civ with less cities who decided to declare on me for no reason and got crushed because of my insane production.

So yeah, I just sat on my 5 cities, building buildings all game, and did nothing. Took Progress, Piety, Rationalism, and finally Order; in my Religion, I opted for Stupas (maybe that's wrong - it was the one that gives a Food bonus), Mosques, and my Reformation Belief was the one that gave Tourism bonuses for each building made with Faith. I had no religion bonuses that depended on pop, spreading, or cities following my Faith, so I didn't care if it was spread around or not. And I sat there generating Tourism.

Meanwhile, my Spies would steal techs (yay England), until it was too hard to do so, and I sent them to go shift around with City-States. Regarding City-States - there were very often almost no Civs that were allies of any City-States for the whole game, except when a Great Diplomat was used against them directly: it's almost as though the AI never built diplomatic units. I would target City-States allied by an AI, and just suicide-coup them all (as my new Spies start as Veterans), keeping a few allies throughout the game, without building Diplomatic units. When enough essential buildings for production were made, I started cranking out Diplomats/Ambassadors (remember, I only have 5 cities), and between these and Coups, I was allied with every City-State in the game within only 20 turns (1750's-1800's range). I had never been interested in Diplomatic power and never aimed for it: and suddenly I had twice as many votes as anyone else, effortlessly.

So with the unexpected super votes, I gave myself Passport systems and other Resolutions I liked for more Culture, dominated Culture/Science even more...and simply crushed everyone with Tourism in the end. Game over.


Some significant notes about this...

1. Never even used England's UU and it didn't matter - built 3 that were upgraded to Battleships later in the game.

2. England strikes me as being a Diplomatic/Science/War Civ (because of Spies and the UA), yet I had Culture victory simply because of my surroundings with Pantheon and my Monopoly on Jade, which gave me Culture power I never would have expected with England.

3. AIs don't seem to be really aggressive with Diplomatic units. Surely all the AIs who had up to 6 times as many cities as I did should have been able to manage building more Diplo units than me and take permanent control of even *one* City-State each, but they couldn't even manage this much: the AIs could keep control of NONE AT ALL.

4. Distinctive lack of AI response to the fact that I was winning in every possible department: Culture, Diplomacy, and leading in Science. The only Civ that dared to attack me was the smallest one, who got crushed in 5 turns when I had no military. Surely Askia or the Mayans with their thousands of military strength could have sought to do something about the situation? Weird passivity.

5. I started building Spaceship parts in the endgame. Yeah - wasn't taking me long to build them. With my Engineers, I'd have easily finished the last part the instant I had the tech for it. Not a terribly interesting race...I'll have to insist on some of my ideas for dealing with the space race if Giant Death Robots or Stealth units ever have a chance of being used in the game. :/

6. Battleships are...still just too insanely crazy powerful. 2 Iron would be an appropriate cost for them, I think.



That's some of my thoughts from another game. Bugs found were reported on GitHub.

Thanks for reading, and cheers again!
-Gidoza

 

[Der_Zorn_gottes]

Consequently, the 1st expansion city I settled was a city that had tons of mountains everywhere, not a single flat tile, a few empty Hills, a Deer, an Iron, a Silver, and 14 Sheep (I'm serious - 14 Sheep). My 3rd city wasn't that far off from this, but more diverse in the resource department - and then my 4th and 5th cities were making the best of mountains and the remaining Jade.

Immediately after settling my first expansion, even though I had no Natural Wonders around, I took the Pantheon that gives bonuses for Natural Wonders and Mountains (God of Nature? Forget right now...), just to see how much I could really gain from merely Mountains. Well, let's say that my Culture and Faith were both crazy strong - I got the first Religion and was #1 in Faith for the whole game, and also #1 in Culture for the whole game alongside the Jade Monopoly I acquired a few turns later. It was alarming just how much Culture/Faith this Pantheon really generated.
-Gidoza

With that many sheep, it would be interesting how much god of the open sky would have benefited you.

 

[Der_Zorn_gottes]

Rome/Tectonics/Deity/Huge/Marathon

Conquest victory

I saw the first AI capitol on turn 3, just 6 tiles away from mine. And that was not an anomaly - there were 6 civs cramped together on a rather small continent, of which a significant part was desert.
That was fine with me though, I wanted to have a conquest game anyway, as as Rome...
There was no point in even building a settler - so little settleable land, AI would beat me there anyway.
I wanted to do a Legion rush, but alas had no iron. So it was ye ole 3-archers attack again. That netted me at least 2 irons. All in all, I cleared 5 civs in classic age, paused briefly to handle the resulting unhappiness, and ejected the last one from my continent in the medievals. Then it was island hopping using my advanced military through the rest for victory.

I started with honour, and constant fighting against deity AIs resulted in so much science from kills that I was tech leader quite soon (allthough the Iroquise somehow beelined to modern first. Didn't do them much good, they were conquered 20 turns later).
Culture from kills/conquests (I took supporting beliefs, god of war and hero worship too) meant that I kept up with social policies despite my huge city count.

I went honour/progress/piety(filler only, because two filled ancient trees do not allow the opening of an industrial one)/exploration. Very powerful combination for warring, but the available GPs are lacking.

 

[Gidoza]

With that many sheep, it would be interesting how much god of the open sky would have benefited you.

Sadly someone else took that Pantheon first. However, my overall analysis is that despite looks, it probably would have been an inferior choice: I'd get more Faith (which I didn't even need); I'd get more Gold (always had lots, so also don't care); but since there'd be no flat ground anywhere, I wouldn't have any culture, which was my boon for this game.

I'm actually going to address that Pantheon amongst all the others in a new thread I'll make later today.

 

[Horvath Broncos]

Two games in diety/shuffle/epic/huge with 16 civs.

Two miserable losses.

First game with Carthage. The shuffle map gave a archipelago type map and I was excited but very soon I realized I had very few places to settle. I was blocked by Korea on the north and had tundra and snow to the south. Korea even tried to settle on my own island so I had to start an early war with him. That went fine no problem. I settled what I could which was four pretty nice coastal cities, but I failed to get religion and wasn't able to fix my production which sucked. In the medieval era I was falling behind the tech leader Russia by more than 10 techs so I knew my only way to come back was to take Sejong's holy city and enchace his religion. I failed. He took his capital back time after time until it was in 1 pop so I decided to call it quits. At that point I was 12 techs behind Russia without my own religion and knew Mongolia which already wiped out India and Spain was going to come from east very soon and destroy me because I lost almost all my navy in the Korean war. I rage quit at that point.

Second game with Ethiopia. Everything looked good up until turn 150. I had four great cities on my way to getting religion and a decent military. My neighbours were William and Enrico so I thought I was safe. In five turns I was in war with both of them. Venice bought city state with it's merchant very close to my two most important cities. He had like bazillion spearman. William I could have handled but both of them was just too much. I lost my two most important cities. GG.

What I got from these games was that jump from immortal to diety is absolutely huge. Need to focus on military even more while still settling as much as I can.

 

[seandamnit]

Civilization: Sweden
Game Settings: Epic Pace / Fractal Map / Standard Size
Relative Rank: Easier (Immortal)
Outcome: Victory! (Culture through domination)
Version: 6/26

First time I opened with Progress instead of Authority. Found it to be significantly better, even though I found myself in early and constant war throughout the whole game. Started on a continent with Brazil to the north and Spain to the northeast, and a Mt. Kilimanjaro 7 or 8 tiles to the north between Brazil and I. Rushed that quick. Sweden's extra movement to siege units plus the extra movement on hills made quick work of Spain. Brazil, despite being ahead of me tech-wise and having built the Great Wall also fell quick, because they were woefully undefended. Both were down before I made contact with the other continent.

When I did find the other continent, it was clear that the other civs had been in constant war. Assyria was wiped out by Inca and Japan, and the lands around India and Rome were littered with citadels. The Inca were ahead in almost every metric, but must have not focused on military techs, because I had the more advanced units. Tore right through them, liberating an inconsequential Assyrian city on the way...because I am a just God. Preparing to fight Gandhi, I was DoW'd by Rome and Japan. My small military and very spread out boarders made this problematic, but lucky for me I had the Great Wall from my Brazil conquest and hadn't researched Dynamite yet. I had to defend for a long time before pushing and wiping out Japan. Once Japan was taken care of, I set my sights on Gandhi, who had built a TON of units. Defended for what felt like forever before pushing and wiping out every single city, which eliminated the largest culture pool in the game. I could have taken Rome, but found it faster to send a single Musician tourism bomb to secure the win. Turn 520 (epic spead)

Some thoughts on balance:
--Sweden's Great General UA that heals all units and gives them XP is very very powerful. I'd consider nerfing the amount of healing, or at least the XP. Though it was fun to have no more upgrades left for my artillery at the end!

--I never seem to reach information era in my domination games. This may change when I start playing Deity again, which I haven't experienced yet in this patch.

--AI seems to spend too many resources conquering city states rather than defending themselves. Also when you liberate a city state, it kicks all hostile units out of the territory (I don't know if this is the same in the base game). I exploited this by allowing a hotly contested city state to be flipped dozens of times...the AI would send a wave a units and take the city, I would take out as many of these units as I could, and a simple cannon shot + melee could liberate the city, sending all remaining units outside of the boarders unable to immediately counterattack me. The whole time this is happening I'm taking out their actual cities mostly uncontested.

--Every game I've played so far, I've found myself swimming in money. I can't spend it fast enough - and tend to rush a ton of buildings or spam diplomats. This is usually without external trade routes, which I only really use for city state quests.

 

[Der_Zorn_gottes]

Assyria/Tectonics/Deity/Huge/Marathon

Loss

I tries a peaceful approach with Assyria.
There was a nasty surprise when the Inca pink dotted the hell out me - their first settlement was over 15 tiles away from their cap. I figured I would just conquer that isolated city later and enjoy my free tech, but he kept sending settlers there, eventually creating a second core right next to me. Unfortunately, he was so far ahead in power, that there was nothing I could do. At least he liked me.
This left me trapped on a smallish peninsula. I could fit in a few cities, but nothing special. Since I couldn't expand peacefully anyway, I attacked all nearby city states. This at least gave me some cities and techs, so I was competitive techwise in the medieval.
Then I expanded overseas, where I scirmished briefly with the Turks. Neither of us made any process in the war, and after peace we became friends. It felt a bit like Suleiman said: "Ok, kid, you have proven yourself. You're alright"

However, the longer the game went, the further I fell behind. None of my cities was very good, I was constantly unhappy, had no culture, no religion, no production, no monopoly, no fun. The only thing I had was the love of my friends. The AI gifted me thousands of gold, and even voted me to be head of congress (where I voted for someone else because I figured I had no chance at all).

I even conquered some cities from the Aztecs (well, I sniped them after the Ottomans have dealt with most of the Aztec army), but that only increased the unhappiness. Seeing no possible way to win, I resigned from this nightmare.

 

[Gidoza]

Played a game as Spain, victory type Diplomacy, around turn 350, on Emperor (appropriate level for me) - game was harder than usual, because of this...


Was testing old God-King (before most recent patch). The Pantheon indeed helped out anyone to whom I spread my Religion, and since everything clumped into the Capital for bonuses, this means that later in the game, everyone's Capital was getting some +200 of a bunch of yields. While I was a small Empire early-on and this put me ahead of everyone (because super yields are more useful on a smaller Empire), as soon as I spread my religion to Venice, Venice magically pulled ahead of everybody in everything...I had to struggle to kill him before he just took off. Suffice it to say, Science was advanced for everyone with the heightened bonuses and there were Stealth Fighters flying around in the 1930's. Won by Diplomacy mostly by accident, because I had the Tenets and abilities to make strong use of City-States even though I never really tried to ally them, and my religious influence gave me lots of votes. Phew!

 

[SpankmyMetroid]

Won a game as 'Merica, large random map (ended up being pangaea-ish), standard speed, emperor (preferred difficulty with the CBP) T270 culture victory. Aggro cultural victory was my goal. In terms of policies, I picked Authority -> Aesthetics -> Industry. My last few games playing wide/aggressive I picked liberty and ended up not doing so well, and I wanted to make industry work since I LOVE GOOOOOOLD (and America's UA needs a lot of it to be able to snipe land).

I noticed since before the 7/15 patch the AI bonuses from difficulty seem to have been scaled down somewhat... where I used to have significant unhappiness in the early game (almost exclusively from crime) because the AI's cities were simply better than mine in most aspects so the global average tended to be higher than mine. This time, unhappiness was much less punishing so I barely had to limit growth when expanding. I don't know if this makes it too easy but it's definitely less frustrating... might bump up to immortal next time.

Religion was the utmost key factor here. I was able to forward settle my neighbor Byzantium and grab Uluru to be able to get one of the earlier religions. As someone else mentioned regarding NW priority, Byz didn't settle right by it but it was going to eventually be in workable range, I just used my UA to buy the land for it cheaply first. I ended up getting Stupas (an obvious choice for tourism, they give 4 each after researching architecture) and Pagodas (for the extra art slot so I could spam archaeologists without worrying about museums later, though they also gave +2 to all yields for every religion with at least one follower, which ended up being huge in the early game). Combined with my pantheon giving faith for mines, I was able to quickly snowball to 100+ faith in the medieval era which only got better later on as I kept spamming more cities and building the faith buildings, and soon I was able to pump out a missionary pretty much every turn. This was important since my founder belief gave me tourism for spreading religion to foreign cities... so I made a pretty decent dent in the tourism gap in the midgame by spamming my secular neighbor (the Ottomans, who ended up being the tech leader and closest thing I had to a rival in the game). Combined with my founder (+tourism when spreading to foreign cities) and reformation (mother***ing sacred sites) I was at a couple hundred tourism by the beginning of the modern era, and used a few GM's to clean up a couple of turns after I got my ideology. It's a shame the game ended so early since only the Ottomans got a chance to pick an ideology before me and I never got a chance to convert the world to glorious Order. Maybe I'll keep playing.

Notable things that happened:

My neighbor Byzantium made a demand of me early on then DOW's when I declined, so that's working. Though she was pretty easily beaten... seems like the combat pathfinding didn't work as well as it used to (I saw a lot of units come into my territory and just mill around while I took shots at them with ranged units. No pillaging, no attacking, and half hearted retreating). Speaking of which, Byz had a whole lot of sass for the rest of the game when I left her with a small city. Both times she insulted me and I told her she'd pay caused her to DOW even though she had no chance of winning. Is this normal behavior on the AI's part (the suicidal pride?).

The AI "sneak attacked" me twice in the game, once as mentioned above where Byzantium made a trade demand and DOW's me right after and once where Ramham just DOW'd me out of nowhere. Both times I had plenty of time to move around troops to defend my frontier cities they wanted to attack (maybe?). My point is the AI did not prepare enough when launching a sneak attack... they should have had a large number of troops right near my borders but took too much time moving things around. Related to combat AI, Ramham launched an entirely ground assault on my coastal desert frontier city, which I was able to easily repel with a few purchased Dromon. I didn't see any naval units from him at all despite having two close cities (not great ones, but still) on the coast. Might be worth looking into army composition when looking at AI goal logic... a civ that wants to take a coastal city should definitely use coastal units.

Military score was drastically reduced in this patch. I love it, as I always though it factored in way too highly for game score! I think it's also good for the AI since their score would be buffed by the free promotions they get on units (I think that's how it worked) causing them to have an inflated score... this would make them think their army is much stronger than it actually is and make bad choices accordingly.

Event balancing needs to be looked at. I'll make a post in the main thread but at one point I had 30 excess happiness just from events which let me do literally whatever I want for a huge chunk of the game in terms of selling off luxes or settling very wide. The baths event (which gives you +1 happiness in every city but makes baths cost 1 more gold maintenance... a no brainer) needs to have a cap for wide empires IMO since I got 18 or something just from that, then another event that happened earlier (I can't remember but maybe it was from wartime morale?) gave me +1 for each city again. Coupled with the lack of unhappiness from the AI's having better cities than you, I only dipped into small unhappiness a few times in the game which is rare for wide players and even rarer for my playstyle (I tend to gobble up land ASAP).

Despite warmongering quite a bit, as usual in CBP nobody calls me out for it. I don't eliminate players but I usually take all but their worst city, and I did this for my two closest neighbors (at that point I was getting lazy and had natural barriers of mountains and jungle to my west and north, which would have been hard to move troops in). I ended up being friendly with about half the world anyway, I guess just from not stepping on their toes in any other ways (except through city states accidentally). I think warmonger score should be a higher factor into civ dislike, since a person who is warmongering a lot is probably going to end up snowballing (which is what exactly happened), so they need some artificial challenge from negative diplomacy. Nothing as bad as non-modded civ, please, but some middle ground maybe?

AI Wonder priority seemed to drop heavily (or they're not getting techs/policies as quickly as they used to, which is my guess). I was able to hard build a bunch of early wonders (Petra and Great Lighthouse, in my half decent 2nd city, not my capital) which should really not be doable for wide players, especially on a 10 player map on emperor. I missed out on most in the medieval (was able to GE rush a few) but snowballed into tech and culture and was able to grab about half from then on from the tech leader.

Uniques: America's Smithsonian (+5 science/culture to all museums) + Order's Socialist Realism (FREE museum in every city, +2 culture for museums) = G F G . An extra 300 science and 500 culture with one policy. Murica is a comrade to socialism
On the other hand, their Minutemen seemed to come and go so quickly... In hindsight they would have been great to travel up north through the jungle and beat up Brazil, but I really didn't need to warmonger anymore by that point. I feel like a UU buff that affects units that need resources (iron/horses) is better for the wide-focused empires (since they're much more likely to have gotten them through settling multiple cities... the bulk of my army this game were horse and iron units). Minutemen units fit in context, I know, but that's just my two cents.

 

[Der_Zorn_gottes]

2 for the G....

Ottomans/Tectonics/Deity/Huge/Marathon

Loss

This map was so lush that I think I had accidentally set resources to abundant in the setup. They were everywhere. Well, everywhere except at my capital. I never got it going (probably because I was working two mines for earth mother). Amusingly, an AI settled a spot nearby with mostly mountains inside cityrange and outgrew my cap in a couple of turns. Heh.
Fortunately, Napoleon put me out of my misery (though I guess I could have held if I used my money for units instead of research pacts).

China/Tectonics/Deity/Huge/Marathon

Land was all right, and there was plenty of it. Unfortunately, I did not found, and so my empire was a battleground for competing religions. Even though at least one clearly prevailed in the end, it resulted in a hefty religious unhappiness for a long time. This led to my empire being unhappy during the whole Medieval and Renaissance ages. In the end, I fell way behind in terms of science and culture. When the second AI entered the modern age being more then 10 techs ahead, I saw no way to steal victory here.



Currently, I win if I go honour and attack neighbors early. Peaceful play will take some more practice.

 

[tu_79]

Rome, domination victory in turn 297. Prince. Standard. Planet simulator in random (2 big continents, one medium and one small, no islands)

This has been too easy, but long and exhausting. With many mountains, warfare was quite easy for my legions. So I ate one by one my neighbours, and only stopped a little before the 3rd civ to develop my cities. No happiness issues. No angry neighbours.

Legions are amazing taking cities by themselves. I sure had some horsemen for combat, and only used a siege unit for capitals. Never needed ranged units, until I arrived to a well protected Brazil (jungles) with the Great Wall. Her ranged and siege units did hurt, but she was the only one that was difficult to conquer.
Korea was always the tech leader, but I was always second, and first in policies, just by taking cities and killing armies. This is fun.
I was drowning in GG and GA. I had some nice domestic trade routes for one corner to the other of every continent, with a village every two tiles
I couldn't spend everything in units.

 

[Der_Zorn_gottes]

Siam/Random(Continents)Deity/Huge/Marathon

Loss

it started quite all right, with Attila as my southern neighbour. I rushed him with archers, and since he lacked those and the terrain was very kind to me, I quickly got his cap. Unfortunately, conquering his cap erazed his pantheon from it and in the end, I couldn't found.
Still, I got myself two very good Pantheons, and a lot of land to expand to. Even managed to ally some nearby city states early.
Rome attacked, but I managed to beat them back due to the noble sacrifice of an allied city state. It was liberated a bit later.
That's about when my luck ended. Not having a religion of my own, my empire became the battleground of two competing religions, and I was sitting on 30 unhappiness from religious diversions, that I just couldn't help.
Rome, which I had at the ropes but couldn't finish due to happiness regained his strength. In the end I found myself in deep constant unhappiness next to a neighbour who didn't like me and was moving ahead in terms of tech and power. No to mention other, even more powerful civs on other continents.
I saw the writing on the wall and conceded. A shame really, the map and the start were really nice. If only I could have founded...