Games.

[sauce1977]

When I get a chance to play some games, I go for the strategy games as of late. My buddy introduced me to Settlers of Catan. It's a quest to be the dominant civilization, and the first player to 10 points wins. You accumulate points over the turns via building settlements and cities, plus bonus points for things like having the longest road, or the

Comments

[fsfwannabe]

I picked up Civ V about a month ago. Really not all that thrilled with it compared to earlier versions. I like the map system more, but the mechanics leave a lot to be desired.

[sauce1977]

What mechanics are bothering you?

The only issue I get is when I have a giant map with a lot of nations, by the end of the game it can slow down a bit between turns.

[fsfwannabe]

without unit stacking, troop movement is ridiculously bad. Plus I miss annexation of fringe cities of weaker territories. The city-state idea is also annoying, anything that forces territory gain by attacking is not great.

Plus, it seems like diplomacy is brutal even on the easiest levels. I move a scout through someone's territory and they step up their aggression against me.

[sauce1977]

I read about troop stacking, and tbh, that doesn't seem fair or realistic. I kinda like having 13 different mans in a horde loping through the countryside to make someone else's doom

[fsfwannabe]

The problem with how they changed troop stacking is that it takes a lot of coordination to not end up with a unit pretty much stopped dead for a couple of turns depending on how the engine resolves which piece moves first through a place.

My issue with the city-states is that it bogs down movement in the game and it's suicidal to 'annex' the.'

I haven't done a warless run since CivIII. I tend to prefer playing a very expansion heavy game, which I feel like V has nerfed, but I think it's more a matter there of me not knowing the nuances yet. Am trying to find player guides for the Nook so I can tackle a lot of the stuff I need to figure out at work.

I think I may have to pick up the expansion when I get a chance and maybe see what sort of modifications there are. I kind of have had the feeling I'm either playing it wrong or missing something in my games. Considering that I have the entire Civ series available on disc here I'm surprised that's the case, but I also need to sit down and play more I think.

[sauce1977]

I literally never set my guys on autopilot for multiple turns with regard to moving. Either the AI will move someone in the way of the path, or they'll move the wrong guy, like you said. I move them one by one, and that doesn't really bother me. Plus, because AI does things randomly, it gives me a chance to take a better flank or a different approach if I can see them doing something silly before I get there.

The Gods & Kings expansion is superboss. Just absolutely amazing work, imo. The espionage alone is intriguing enough. I'm still learning how to do it well - the CPU seems to be way better at rigging elections in city states and stealing tech from me than I am with them.

The mods are awesome too. I think I saw a mod for making the game into Game of Thrones, shit like that is pretty impressive. I'm more of a vanilla guy with the game but I recognize fertile and quality mod work.

[sauce1977]

BTW I just got passed in total score by the Iroquois, so I'm going to have to either build up a couple more cities and jump ahead or start pwning some civnoobs. I feel like if I keep playing Ghandi with Darius's Persians, that the Iroquois are going to leap past me by a great margin, so keeping up with Hiawatha is going to force me to abandon peace, for sure.

[sauce1977]

Oh yeah, now that I remember more about the city-states, they get ornery if you're not buds and you move through their land, but that slowly resets to zero (to 20 if you've unlocked the Patronage tree). But the damage done by trespassing isn't permanent.

Never, EVER take over the city states. If you conquer one of them, word spreads to all of them, and they effectively put you on a shitlist and make ally plans next to impossible. So if you're gonna do that, you better go for all-out war, and you better have every resource you could possibly need while you're waging your aggressive campaign.

[sauce1977]

Also, I think my other gripe is the difficulty settings. Honestly, on easier levels, it is enough of a match when it's you vs 10-12 other civs. If I read correctly, on the higher difficulties, your civ keeps getting more happiness and other combat penalties, while the AI gets easy setting and more bonuses. It would have been way better if you were all punished equally, either by scarcer resources, happiness penalties, combat effectiveness, or all of the above.

One thing you can do is mod the game. Either via Steam or just a PC copy from Amazon, all the mods out there can help to make it a wholly different experience. It's a pretty active community, mod-wise.

[fsfwannabe]

It's a typical workaround to limited ability to program AI, in every Civ iteration they've basically made it that as you went up in difficulty happiness was harder to come by (since it affects how fast you can build cities and to what size). On CivII and CivIII I got to where I could play the fourth level at an acceptable level, but I never pushed it too high in IV, mostly because I never really got into the nuances of the changes they made post-III (plus, I played the fuck out of II and III, I wouldn't say I was burnt out on Civ, but IV/V has been a shift from a very familiar formula).

[sauce1977]

Yeah, the happiness factor becomes really tough to come by when you go up in difficulty. You have to time your cities and your moves just right or you'll end up in a tailspin.