Civilization V: The TBA Royal Rumble (with prize!)

[BluPhoenix]

blu, just curious, if I had attacked you the first time my guys were surrounding all of your boarders, would you have had trouble fending it off? It was only due to a comment rtil made about me attacking you that I didn't end up doing it.

no. the city's ranged attack and garrisoned composite bowman would have continuously knocked single targeted units down to next to no health- the problem was that your units lacked technology to assist them. your spearmen had 7 strength, and my knights had 20, longswordmen had 21. it's basically running marines into roaches and hydras.

[psi43]

7 barbarian camps raided and I got 1 unit from it. You're so lucky . I wanted to beat you and rtil but - hands down - you've improved a lot since we last played (sadly for me). I thought rtil would be the big threat but no. Please live with the fact that you are now one of my eternal enemies.

[BluPhoenix]

i will find some way to live with this

[rtil]

you also should have seige units if you plan on attacking a city

[psi43]

you also should have seige units if you plan on attacking a city

I had 3 of them heading towards him when I was about to attack. I didn't want to eliminate him, just take at least one of his major cities though. As I said though, the thing that fucked me the most was the lack of luck I got from barbarian encampments. If I had more luck, I would've wandered out quicklier and blu wouldn't have gotten that far. Then you would've beaten me theoretically because I would've went right after taking out blu before I went left - and you were left of blu. I feel like playing Germans is always a huge gamble but it can pay off in a huge way, it didn't this time though.

[BluPhoenix]

i don't know what extra spearmen would have done except fill longswordsman xp gauges.

you were also attacking
a. across a river
b. in rough territory against woods/jungle veterans
c. in a territory that gave american troops religion-based combat bonuses

you shouldn't leave everything to luck

[rtil]

hey guys, apparantly on july 2nd, civ V added this:

New Mode - Pitboss - Your game can now run in a server mode, which allows players to connect, take their turn, disconnect, and come back later. Email notifications and steam notifications are built into the system. Once the system has received a healthy amount of feedback from the community, we will also include a stand-alone Pitboss server that does not require a steam account to run.

since our games usually don't end in one session, we should make the people who host these games the people who tend to leave their computer (and steam) on all the time, which would allow us to utilize pitboss when we can't all log on at the same time and play for hours.

[bd648]

that'd be useful as hell

[Gilthwixt]

So who's getting/has gotten Brave New World? And are we going to attempt to start over or...?

[rtil]

i have brave new world. i'm almost through my first game, trying out as much new stuff as possible. so far it's really great. sure makes getting gold a lot easier with trade routes. culture is far more interesting now as well

[rtil]

a little overview of BNW incoming as i've finished my first BNW game. for a point of reference i played on king, random large map as indonesia. i set all the AI to the new civs so i could see them.

the first new thing you'll notice is probably the reworked social policies. two new ones called Exploration and Aesthetics have been added. exploration is for archaeology and tourism, aesthetics is for culture, so piety has been reworked , although i still think piety is weak. autocracy, order and freedom have been moved in to the Ideologies area - something that unlocks after your first 3 factories or getting in to the modern era. it has many of the same social policies you're familiar with in each branch, but in a 3-tier system. tier 2 requires a minimum of two tier 1 policies, and tier 3 requires a minimum of two tier 2 policies. when you pick an ideology, your people can react to this negatively depending on a few things, but i'll get in to that later.

the second new thing is trade routes. trade routes are created by building a physical unit from a city - either a land-based caravan or a sea-based cargo ship. they are able to travel a certain distance from the host city to establish a trade route. the radius may be increased with trade-related buildings. trade routes basically generate GPT, SPT and help spread religious influence. but mostly GPT. by the end of my game i was getting about 250 GPT from trade routes. trade routes can be pillaged so if they are in a vulnerable war-torn area you will probably have to rebuild them and send them to safer places.

then you won't see anything new for quite a while as most of the changes come from the late game. the next new BNW feature you'll probably notice is Great Works. when a Great Writer, Artist or Musician appears, they can create a great work which can be placed inside of a building such as an Opera House, Museum, etc. many wonders have slots for these, too. if you don't have any slots, you can use them on a golden age or keep them around until you can use them. at first, this does not do much except generate culture for you (which goes up by 1PT each era that goes by since it was made). but later on it generates tourism for you. this is where the culture victory comes in to play - the ultimate goal of culture victory is to generate more tourism than everyone else generates culture. you can keep track of this on the culture tab, and it shows you if your cultural influence is rising against their culture, as well as any modifiers that boost or hurt your tourism (sharing/conflicting ideologies, religions, open borders, etc). when your tourism overtakes their culture, you become "influential" in their lands, and you get a message like this:

and you have essentially beaten that player - although i can imagine they could hypothetically regain their culture lead over your tourism much like recapturing a capital. but it would probably be very hard to do.

great works are not the only thing that generate tourism. once you research Archaeology, you can build Archaeologists, who can dig up Archaeological Sites, which begin appearing after the research. these sites contain ancient relics of long lost battles that actually did happen in your game, as well as remnants of ancient barbarian camps. things like old weapons, pottery shards, etc. these can be put in the same slots for great artworks, and generate +2 culture and +2 tourism to start. Also, if you fully branch out the Exploration social policy, you will discover Hidden Archaeological Sites, which just give you access to more exclusive artifacts. you can send archaelogists anywhere in the world to dig up stuff, and they will destroy tile improvements. so that's kind of funny if you're doing it to someone you don't like.

then there's the World Congress, which starts when everyone's met eachother. i think the first person who met everyone gets to be the founder, which grants you additional delegates. delegates are determined by other factors including your city state allies. every 30-so turns, the world congress meets to vote on issues brought forth by the civs with the most delegates. these can be a range of different things. trade embargoes on luxury resources or entire civs, attempting to put in to place a world religion, a world ideology, or events like the World's Fair. they all do unique things and events generally have benefits for the top 3 participating civs. the ultimate goal is to become the world leader and gain a diplomatic victory. this is triggered when Globalization is researched and the World Congress becomes the UN. at that point a vote for World Leader happens every 12 turns. you need a lot of votes to get it so if people don't like you it may never happen unless you beat them in to submission. since the World Congress continually convenes, this makes the late game constantly changing. although eventually someone tends to get way more delegates than everyone else and can vote in their own resolutions singlehandedly. despite that, i think the World Congress is a great addition and i enjoyed the dynamic it brought to the game.

spies can also be turned in to diplomats, which will give you information on how a civ will lean with their delegates on upcoming resolutions, and give you the chance to try and bargain for more votes if you think your resolution will fail, or a resolution you want to pass or fail looks like it won't be getting enough yeas or nays. i suppose this could also be used to get votes for world leader and trigger the diplo victory.

there are a lot of new civs, wonders and buildings. i'm not gonna talk about them all. but i'll touch on Indonesia since i played as them. Their UA is that on each new continent (read as: landmass) they settle on (limit 3), the first city founded there gets 2 of a luxury resource on that city unique to Indonesia (like a city-state with Jewelry or Porcelain). the resources are Nutmeg, Cloves and Pepper. the city cannot be razed by anyone, and, of course, one can be traded away and you'll still get the happiness benefit. their UU is the Kris Swordsman, it replaces the Swordsman and has a "mystical" sword that grants the unit a random promotion after its first battle. this is a fun and sometimes OP ability. i once had a Kris that got a promotion that gave it the combat bonus radius of a Great General. it lived throughout the whole game upgraded to an Infantry unit. another one i had got a 50% bonus to flanking. it's a really cool UU that is like rolling a dice every time you use it. however, there is a chance you can get a negative promotion but i'm not sure how often this is possible. their UB is the Candi, it replaces the Garden. it grants the 25% bonus to GP, but also gives +2 faith and an additional +1 faith for each religion that has at least 1 follower in the host city. generally i think Indonesia is good, but i wouldn't recommend them if it is a pangea type map as you won't be able to take advantage of their UA.

anyway, i highly recommend BNW. before this expansion, i would leave Culture and Diplomacy victories off, because they were so anti-climactic and boring. now both of these victory options are not only interesting, but have the potential to last much longer and more interesting games. also the AI seems slightly less insane. they don't really start getting pissed/overjoyed for no reason until you actually start drifting from them policy/politics wise. or of course if you are going to war all the time. but my first couple thousand years everyone was neutral towards me as i was simply growing my empire and not bothering anyone. but it's probably too early to judge off one game.

tl;dr BNW is good!

[Gilthwixt]

Blah blah blah wall of text

Indonesian Kris Swordsmen

SOLD. It's not The Philippines but it'll do.

Edit: There's one thing that's always bothered me about Civ in general that I was hoping they'd fix with the new trade units. Can my cities now import/export food to each other? It seems kind of silly to me that each city is responsible for it's own food (and thus population limit) when in reality, at least in the US, we're shipping most of our food to the coast from farms farther inland. According to the game's mechanics, desert cities with huge populations shouldn't be possible, but they are.

[rtil]

Can my cities now import/export food to each other?

yes! this is really great for cities where you may have gotten a shitty start. you can send up to what i have seen as much as 7 fpt with a national trade route. you can also send production later on. i think food requires a granary, and production requires a workshop.

[BluPhoenix]

Can my cities now import/export food to each other?

yes! this is really great for cities where you may have gotten a shitty start. you can send up to what i have seen as much as 7 fpt with a national trade route. you can also send production later on. i think food requires a granary, and production requires a workshop.

that is SUCH a good idea holy shit