Sid Meier's Civilization Series (Main Titles)

Christina leads Sweden

Nobel Peace: 3 Nobel Peace Prize competitions in World Congress when Sweden is playing. Additional Great Scientist and Great Engineer points from Universities and Factories. Gains Favor when acquiring a Great Person.

Open Air Museum: One per city; provides loyalty; provides additional culture and tourism for each terrain type a Swedish city has been settled.

Carolean: Renaissance Anti-Calvary; additional strength for unused movement; faster than similar units.

Minerva of the North: Buildings with at least 3 Great Works slots and Wonders with at least 2 will be automatically themed when filled. Plus Queen's Bibliotheque can be built in a Government Plaza for additional slots for Great Works.

Edited by tclittle on Jan 15th 2019 at 9:14:44 AM

"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."

So, really focused on peace and diplomacy, with a defensive UU. Absolutely crap in the early game, but if you survive it intact, you've got a nice leg up for diplomatic and cultural victories.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I remember it was a problem in Civ V and continues to be a problem here that the AI makes decisions off of what it can extrapolate about the other AI, but not what it can extrapolate about the player.

In V it was pretty bad: it usually (but not always) took into account visible military but almost never took into account economy or production, took stock of who had what resources but not who was trading with who (even bankrupting themselves sometimes by declaring war on trade partners), it ignored defensive treaties and alliances, never thought about how the player would react to certain actions - like settling - in the way it does for other AI, etc.

Which I always thought was odd, because it was somewhat smarter and more strategic about such things in Civ IV - and of course, games like Galactic Civilizations showed that AI can take into account those things without much trouble ages ago. What's worse, in V you couldn't tell AI certain things you can in both this one and the one preceding it, so you can't jog its knowledge any.

The result was that the AI was suicidally fearless, often declaring war inevitably once it had a problem with you regardless of whether it made sense, and was bad at preparing for the consequences of its actions when the player was concerned. It's definitely still the case in this one, but at least we don't have much "the AI declares war from halfway across the map in the Ancient Era, and gives up before their two units even reach you halfway" like we did in Civ VI's early days.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 15th 2019 at 2:53:22 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Heh, now the AI might declare war from halfway across the map and completely forget about it until you fight one of their units 50 turns later, at which point the leader wakes up and goes, "What? We're at war? Crap, I forgot. Sue for peace."

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Gandhi just wanted the thrill of declaring a war, not any of the actual consequences that come with it.

You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!

I've been at war with the Aztecs for about half the game now. We're basically on opposite thirds of the map and never interact. I'm not suing for peace, he started it out of the blue and I've been slowly working on punishing him.

One thing though, I've been struggling with this game. It's like after playing Civ for nearly twenty years this is the game I barely understand. From placing districts vs. working resources, to amnesties, to tourism, it's like nothing in the game makes any sense. I'm not even certain on how I'm going to try to win because I have not been focused on anything but trying to learn the game.

"But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you." - O'Brien, 1984

I blind-bought Civ VI a long time ago on impulse because I like "city building" games, but I've tried, like, way too many times to get into it to no avail. The eccentricities of it (maybe they're specific to VI?) just drive me off after a single game every time. Hearing that another expansion was coming soon, I tried yet again...with the same results.

Just off the top of my head:

Religion, specifically that I find the only way to not lose to an opponent trying for a religion victory is be forced into religion yourself, or be forced to warmonger.

The tech tree is very silly; advancing far down a line into like the Middle Ages without ever having figured out the wheel.

The process of raising an army, and taking cities once walls come into play is just...very tedious.

The game in general just feels needlessly clunky and inconsistently complex. Note I don't say "too complex" but rather you've got situations where you can micromanage what tiles your citizens work on...while other stuff that seems like it should be way more relevant is downplayed or oversimplified (like Civics/culture IMO).

I see so many people passionate about the series. I wish it was more of my cup of tea.

Was it really smarter or just appeared smarter because the game was simpler? One thing that is genuinely crippling for the AI is the 1 unit per tile system. That suddenly made the combat side of the game much more complex to the AI who now need to also be able to simultaneously coordinate a tactical combat taking account individual units and geography. The result is that the AI is hopeless in that front, meaning that a competent player can hold of an army much larger than their own without that much effort.

That is actually not silly at all! I mean, it is silly to have a linear tree and dividing things into clear "ages", but having middle age-like technology without ever developing the wheel is actually a thing that happened here in America. The Inca, Mayans, Aztecs, etc were very advanced in lot of things, like government and city planing but did never, in fact, develop the wheel (well, apparently they did, but only for toys so it doesn't count). If anything, the fact that wheel is a prerequisite for "engendering" and "aqueducts" is what is silly.

Edited by Heatth on Jan 16th 2019 at 2:11:51 PM

While you definitely need a religion to play the religion game, I've never been at risk of actually losing to a religious victory from an AI civ. To each their own, I guess, but going to war to resist the spread of a religion is certainly historically accurate. You could say the same thing if an opponent is going for a culture or science victory. If you can't rush to beat them at it, you have to fight them.

Also historically accurate. The devs wanted cities to be much tougher in VI than in previous games, and they did a good job of it. A city that builds encampments and walls should be hard to crack. It doesn't help that the AI is so braindead at war, but that's neither here nor there. A properly defended city at equal tech levels and resources is almost impregnable, but can be worn down over time.

• Hint: Take whatever opportunities you can to damage walls. They don't regenerate naturally like health, and as long as you inflict damage at least once every three turns, the city can't repair them. ^note The city can build new tiers of walls while under attack, but that's a limited trick. City ranged strikes are by far the most dangerous part of any siege, and once you disable them (by reducing the walls' strength to 0), the city is much more vulnerable.
• Hint: If there's an encampment controlling your approach and you can't ignore it, capture it with a melee unit. It'll be pillaged until repaired and can't exercise a zone of control.
• Hint: Opponents can improve a city's defensive strength by assigning their military governor to it. If that happens, attack a different city that isn't bolstered.
• Hint: Use policies and governments that increase your military's effectiveness.
• Hint: If you go up against a civ with the Defender of the Faith belief, which gives a huge combat strength boost, send an Apostle to convert your target city either before or during the fight. It negates their bonus.
• Hint: If you can improve your diplomatic visibility with opponents, such as by using spies, you can gain a combat advantage (+3 per level of gossip you have over your opponent).

In terms of missing complexity, the ability to queue production and/or have more aspects of your civilization automated would be nice. We are getting production queues in the next expansion, so that's a nice quality of life change. I find that many of the screens and reports that are available in the UI are too busy, horribly difficult to use, or both. From memory:

• The city list doesn't let you sort or filter.
• There's no search by city name feature.
• There's no ability to view a list of your cities with all stats in a single row.
• You can't select cities from the list view.
• The military unit list is hidden in the unit stats panel and only tells you the name and type, not its health, combat strength, or any other useful information.
• The military unit list doesn't stay open so you can click through your units rapidly.
• The diplomatic screen returns to the front page when you visit a different leader, so you can't just click through it to see your relationship, gossip, alliance details, etc. with each.
• The turn click flow is horribly designed.
  • If you queue up unit movement commands, trying to click on the reminder icons for city production can get stuck, and if you click on the "move unit" prompt after your last active unit has an action queued, it sometimes acts as if you've pressed the Next Turn button even if there were other things requiring your attention.
  • Unit action buttons don't update while their movement is queued until you reselect them.
  • Pop-up interfaces like the promotion window cancel during queued movement, making you have to open them again.
  • If you have a prompt to spend envoys, but don't want to this turn, sometimes exiting the screen makes it go away and sometimes it doesn't.
  • Combat animations can take a ridiculously long time to complete for certain unit types (*cough* aircraft) and the UI is very stubborn about letting you do other things while they are queued.

In short, whoever designed the UI for this game needs to be guillotined.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 16th 2019 at 12:30:44 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

the reports are also hideously large for something that takes up just a line of text

The lack of queued production baffles me. What even was the point?

You know, that's a very good point. A lot about how the players' assets are handled, and thus the kind of things the AI would have to take into account, are different between IV and V. And a lot of the things that would anger the player and other AI - again, like settling - changed diplomatic characteristics as well.

Though only thing I remember definitely being smarter is that the AI took into account whether its enemies had defensive pacts and alliances in IV and either planned or (more often) backed off accordingly, whereas it didn't and tended to just barge into war in V. Though since that tended to make the game a lot easier, maybe it (like the exact values in asset trading) was removed on purpose.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 17th 2019 at 11:34:18 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

It's amazing what a little tweak to the GlobalDefines.xml will do to a game of Civ V. All I did was increase the "MIN_CITY_RANGE" from 3 to 4, and bam! Suddenly the AI is placing cities nearly intelligently, all of them have enough room to grow, and when it's time to conquer, I realize I won't have to burn any trash cities. And unlike game mods it doesn't disable cheevos, so that's neat.

Also, there's something satisfying about winning a Diplomatic Victory with Alexander when every surviving civ despises you for conquering your home continent, but they can't do anything about it because you've been allied with literally every city-state on the planet for the past four hundred turns.

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

Maybe make a thread on the official forums asking the devs to change the Defines in the new expansion?

Edited by Druplesnubb on Jan 18th 2019 at 1:31:53 PM

Related, I always try to stay in good with city states because of the bonuses, but the AI loves to conquer them. The early game in most of my plays is punctuated every five or ten turns by "An unmet city-state has been defeated". Those are actually quite handy, because they let me all but eliminate warmonger penalties when I go on the offensive.

• Protectorate wars can be declared instantly (no five turn denounce delay) and without up-front penalties. The city capture penalty during one is relatively small, too.
• City-State Emergency wars come with no warmonger penalties at all.
• If you can arrange for the last opponent city you capture (in any war type) to be a former city-state, you can liberate it and ignore the extreme warmonger penalty for eliminating them.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 18th 2019 at 8:07:23 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Interestingly, there seems to be an early-game strategy of doing the exact opposite: expand not through creating settlers and founding cities, but through the conquest of city states.

Haven't tried it out yet, so can't tell how effective the strategy really is.

Spiral out, keep going.

Yeah, conquering city states is a good strategy, since they tend to be weak early on. Better pluck city states with crappy suzerian bonuses.

I'm still playing Civ V - even if anything about Civ VI interested me, 2K is on my shit list for what they've pulled with the launcher updates to the last game. I'm more inclined to pirate their game than give them my money, but as I said I don't actually want to play Civ VI.

Anyway, I'm sure there are players out there who would argue that my changes are unreasonable, that a smaller min_distance allows more strategy by letting you plop down a city to quickly grab a vital resource, or that I'm ruining their playstyle. And for people like me who do want to hard-code more space between cities, it's easy enough to edit the file to change it. I mean, I was able to do it for goodness' sake.

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

I'd like it if the AI would settle cities more than the minimum distance apart. Sometimes they barely give each city ten hexes to grow into, and it's annoying because my only choice if I want a sensible layout is to capture them, raze them, and build my own.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

and then you get a war mongering penalty

New theme music also a box

I keep getting random crashes apparently caused by game files getting corrupted. After I check CIV VI files for integrity the issue goes away, but after a couple of playthroughs it comes back.

Other Steam games located on the same hard drive work flawlessly, so I can't tell if it's just a software problem or is it that my HDD will soon kick the bucket. Did anyone have similar problem?

Spiral out, keep going.

I had the strangest dream last night that they added a civ whose thing was building Maypoles so they could dance around them,I didn't catch what they were called though

New theme music also a box

I really hope that the AI capturing a city-state that I'm the suzerain of grants diplomatic grievances in this forthcoming expansion. I'm tired of having to (a) hope that an emergency gets declared, (b) preemptively declare a Protectorate War, then not be able to gain any territory from it w/o warmonger penalties, (c) declare a Formal War and eat warmonger penalties until I recoup some of them for liberating the city-state.

Alternatively, you should be able to declare a Protectorate War for a small number of turns after a city-state is captured.

I have yet to figure out under what conditions the capture of a city-state triggers an emergency and how the game decides which civilizations are offered the chance to participate.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 21st 2019 at 4:26:50 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Here's today's hint◊. This is the first time I've seen r/civ completely stumped.

Orange trees and flowered, European-style hedges?

The hedges don't match, but it could be Versailles. Maybe Louie XIV as an alternate French ruler?

Actually, looking at it again, that's totally Versailles. You can see the arches in the background.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 21st 2019 at 10:50:19 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

> alternate French ruler?

I could see them choosing Marie Antoinette as a civ leader

New theme music also a box