Sid Meier's Civilization Series (Main Titles)

I'd much rather play as Tokugawa Ieyasu if I was doing a Japan-based run. Guy set up the longest running shogunate in Japanese history - you don't do that unless you're a pretty peerless leader.

Honestly I'm kind of sick of the whole focus on the warring states period. I'd rather play as Prince Shotoku, although admittedly for some biased reasons.

The whole system of shogunates itself is essentially a long line of military dictators usurping control of the country, which the people finally revolted against in the Meiji Restoration. In that sense, you could say that the Tokugawa were the worst dictatorship, in that they finally made things so bad that the people wanted to violently install a hereditary monarchy in its place.

The Shogunate already was a hereditary monarchy. The Meiji Restoration installed a constitutional hereditary monarchy, with the main power in the hands of oligarchs rather than the monarch.

edited 9th Jul '16 5:06:26 AM by Druplesnubb

Well, sort of, but I think it's complicated by the fact that the Emperor has always been technically present, just not given any political power. Which was originally usurped by people marrying their clan into the royal family to keep power as regents, and later that was usurped by military leaders (shoguns) not allowing those bloodline regents to actually do anything through use of military force. Everyone's been consistently ruling "in the name of the emperor." The shogunates changed hands purely through military force, so the voice of the Meiji Restoration was all about letting the actual emperor make decisions for the first time in almost a thousand years.

I mean, actual power ended up in the hands of oligarchs like you'd expect, but the idea was essentially to free the country from military dictatorship and restore power to the rightful ruler, the emperor.

Also, technically Japan had been a Constitutional Monarchy since 720 AD, when Prince Shotoku wrote a constitution outlining the principles of virtuous governance. Which doesn't exactly read like a modern legal document, but clearly outlines the way that the emperor and other government officials are meant to behave, including a line about how no one individual, even the emperor, was to be given the authority to make solitary decisions on "important matters". And was technically never abolished, so it's still valid except where contradicted by later constitutions.

edited 9th Jul '16 5:32:48 AM by Clarste

"Baba Yetu" composer Christoper Tin will be composing the theme for Civ VI,◊ a new piece titled "Sogno di Volare" ("The Dream of Flight"). Geoff Knorr, Roland Rizzo, and Phil Boucher will compose the rest of the soundtrack.

Looking forward to that even though I'm ambivalent about the new game (the Civ mood takes me infrequently and the old games are as good as the new for the most part). I like Tin's music enough to buy his albums separately.

I got my email through from Mr. Tin during the weekend, there. Nice news he's back in the Civ fold.

Are there any decent online guides, preferably written rather than on You Tube, on how to play the game with all dlc attached? I'm blundering through to Time victories when I'd much rather win on Space and Culture ones. Help a fat balding bearded old man out, won't ya?

Depends on what kind of victory you're going for. Science (building the spaceship) is arguably the most difficult to go for in BNW, because the necessary techs to win a Culture or Diplomatic victory arrive much, much sooner, and the Unstable Equilibrium inherent to the game means that there will usually be a dominant civilization in at least one of those areas long before the Information Era. Further, the dominant civ in culture and/or economy is usually also dominant in science due to synergistic effects.

My core strategy (when playing unmodded) is to build the minimum military possible for as much of the game as possible and focus on going tall. The Great Library is always the first Wonder I rush to, although if you're playing at higher difficulties you have to get insanely lucky with early tech boosts to reach it before the AI. Next up is the Parthenon for the early culture boost. Then it's build, build, build, developing the strongest cities possible and keeping the Great People coming. Getting an early religion helps as well because you can pick Cathedrals, Pagodas, or Monasteries as one of your beliefs for even more Culture. ^note Pro tip: Let your opponents spread their religion to your cities so you can buy their bonus buildings; they stay after you convert your cities back to your own religion.

Save some cash so that if a neighboring civ decides to pick you off due to your weak military you can respond quickly. A large army is always a drag on your economy in the early game, and it's hard enough for early game units to take cities (unless you're facing Attila... shudder) that you will have some ability to trade space for time. If you play to defeat your opponent's army without worrying about capturing cities, you can sometimes win favorable surrender terms that involve acquiring one or more of their cities anyway; this earns you no warmonger points so the other civs will remain friendly.

City-State allies are invaluable as well, so always try to do their quests whenever possible. A fun trick is to leave a Barbarian camp up next to one and kill the units it spawns by the state's border, gaining Influence each time. If you can reach the second tier of the World Congress with a significant number of City-States allied with you, you can dominate the votes and get almost anything you want passed. I always focus on Cultural policies, such as the Culture boost to World Wonders.

Once you have access to Archaeologists, spam the little fedora-clad dudes and beat your opponents to the invaluable artifacts. With a network of Museums and all the Cultural-themed Wonders, you can build up an overwhelming mass of synergy bonuses that will have everyone buying your blue jeans and listening to your pop music in no time.

edited 12th Jul '16 7:14:02 AM by Fighteer

For me it's the Temple of Artemis I have to build first,gotta get that early growth!

@Tam - the following are some good guides I've found:

• An overview of all available civs (assuming all DLC are on, of course). The guy who wrote it also wrote in-depth guides on each and every civ as well; the listing for them are available at the end of that guide.
• A specialized guide to Scientific Victory.
• A specialized guide to Cultural Victory.

And in case you're interested in other victory types as well, Diplomatic and Domination.

edited 12th Jul '16 5:23:31 AM by DarkDestruction

Thanks folks. Interesting stuff to read.

edit

I'm going to get better at the base game then add a mod that lets me do stuff I did in AC, like building ocean cities.

edited 12th Jul '16 5:31:38 AM by TamH70

For the record, a Diplomatic victory is essentially an Economic victory since it relies on buying the votes of all the city-states. Cultural is probably the easiest victory to get though.

With Freedom ideology doubling down on that. It's ability to passively earn influence with city-states via trade routes makes it very useful to get (and keep) City-States on your side without having to expend a ton of gold.

Freedom, Autocracy, and Order are indeed focused on various win conditions, but the Freedom vs. Order decision is based primarily on how wide your empire is. If you have a small number of cities, Freedom gives you much stronger benefits vs. Order.

Won another game as this guy:

Do the Pachacuti!

I was playing Autocracy, which seemed to work nice, had a massive army, which stopped anyone invading me in the 500 game turns before the ending, and didn't declare war on anyone either.

edited 14th Jul '16 6:37:43 AM by TamH70

You can't have had Monty as a neighbour then. Being vastly outmatched has never stopped him before.

Monty never showed up. I had Augustus Caesar, Theodora, Casimir the Great, "Watch out Gandhi might drop the A-Bomb", Catherine the Great, Songhai (sp?) and some others I don't remember, but not "that prick Montezuma, he's a Douuuchheebaaggg!"

Sorry, it's hard getting Brentalfloss's "Civilization with lyrics" out of my head.

There's a meme that the new Civilization VI will add Georgia.

That's because there's a video of the Firaxis office which shows a blurry poster in the background, which devoted fans have figured out shows a bunch of famous leader portraits for the art team to base their designs around (paintings, sculptures, etc). Importantly, they seem to be listed in alphabetical order by civ, and there's an unknown one between Germany and Greece.

Here's a chart of their current guesses: [1]◊

Edit: The cat at the end is a civit; people are guessing it's a pun on "Civ it!", ie: instructions for the art team.

edited 14th Jul '16 10:39:50 PM by Clarste

Wow, talk about dedication. If that poster "leak" is true, then it seems we're looking at a big do-over of all civilization leaders (except for Gandhi).

It isn't Civ without a nuke happy Gandhi.

Goddammit they used Saladin as leader of Arabia >:(

Well, they could have used El Aurans instead.

Edit: my bad, image didn't load properly, I didn't see that Henri (with a I goddamn, not a Y) had been picked.

Well, I maintain that next to Victoria is someone from the 16th century.

Also, I hope you'll get special pick-up lines whenever Henri meets a female leader, because keeping it in his pants was far beyond his abilities. Then again, he was first married to the equally free Marguerite de Valois. His nickname (aside from "Good King Henri" because he was that cool) was "Le Vert-Galant". That means "still doing it despite being past his prime" (green gallant).

edited 16th Jul '16 5:16:53 PM by Julep

Is the guy in the lower left corner really Henry IV? He's completely wrong in the alphabetical order andI don't think the pictures quite match up. France should be between England and Germany.