It's impossible anyway, you can't site cities next to each other.
But you can site cities very close, which increases the density of the the city tile's improvements on the terrain. Civ V has utterly mediocre special resources so powerful city tiles help a lot.
Note that cities are actually a liability in combat, since units can't access their bonuses while garrisoned.
ICS wouldn't be good at all in multiplayer (assuming I could ever get a multiplayer game with more than 2 people) if 1 population cities weren't so good at defending. Seriously, a 1 pop city with no defense really should fall in 1 turn to a horse man or swordsman.
I always find it humorous how a moving settler is defenceless and gets captured, but as soon as they settle a city they can defend with high strength and HP. Apparently those settlers were carrying a catapult, but it was all packed up for the journey.
Pi-r8, why does everyone on Civfanatics call you Pi-r8 (luddite)?
(also, the ICS demonstration succession game has concluded. There are longwriteups heavily critical of design decisions. I see pi-r8 agrees on the excessively small battlefields...)
I would think the happiness problem with ICS would be solved rather easily by making happiness scale non-linearly with each new city while buildings and social policies remained linear. Not sure why it isn't like that now.
As for combat, tactical stack based combat is the answer, and has been since forever. In MoM and AoW it had the disadvantage of making early units useless and late units dominant, but in CIV that's exactly what you want to happen. Having a paladin beat 9 units of swordsmen singlehandedly is a bit eyebrow raising, having a tank or infantry unit do the same is only natural.
I saw a thread on Civ Fanatics about the diplomacy system that made a few interesting points.
Most importantly you have to mix things up a little with the other civs. Isolationism doesn't really work. Sign pacts of cooperation with everyone except the Civ you want to isolate, sign pacts of secrecy against them and then bribe someone else to go to war. The warring civ will get negative points with everyone else, especially if it manages to finish your target off which means it automatically becomes the next target itself and so forth.
Really helped my Pangea games.
Ferrus on
I would like to pause for a moment, to talk about my penis.
My penis is like a toddler. A toddler—who is a perfectly normal size for his age—on a long road trip to what he thinks is Disney World. My penis is excited because he hasn’t been to Disney World in a long, long time, but remembers a time when he used to go every day. So now the penis toddler is constantly fidgeting, whining “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Now? How about... now?”
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
Pi-r8, why does everyone on Civfanatics call you Pi-r8 (luddite)?
(also, the ICS demonstration succession game has concluded. There are longwriteups heavily critical of design decisions. I see pi-r8 agrees on the excessively small battlefields...)
I use luddite on some other forums, including the realms beyond forum where Sullla is an administrator. The idea for that game started there, so Sullla called me luddite and everyone else followed suit.
What do you think of the battlefield sizes, Ronya?
Motherfucker. I really should know better than to give Caesar open borders, but nooooooooo... son of a bitch took Kyoto and almost got two other cities, now I have to take back my capital and drive him off the continent.
Skeith on
0
KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
edited November 2010
Opening borders is always a mistake.
In my last game I had one little corner of coast line my borders hadn't expanded to, I opened to Monte so I could get through his lands to attack Caeser, then Monte runs a guy down and steals the corner.. wtf man? He still had heaps of land up near him that he could settle, but no, he really wanted those fish down there.
Pi-r8, why does everyone on Civfanatics call you Pi-r8 (luddite)?
(also, the ICS demonstration succession game has concluded. There are longwriteups heavily critical of design decisions. I see pi-r8 agrees on the excessively small battlefields...)
I use luddite on some other forums, including the realms beyond forum where Sullla is an administrator. The idea for that game started there, so Sullla called me luddite and everyone else followed suit.
What do you think of the battlefield sizes, Ronya?
I've pretty much given up on Civ 5 for now, pretty much because of ICS efficiency and AI inefficiency. When your decision making goes from "Should I make a settler now?" to "How many settlers should I make now?" I feel a lot of the depth has gone out. The addition of a bunch of non-intuitive micromanagement does not exactly help matters.
I've found great success in using Open Borders to ambush other Civs. This, of course, usually involves hiding several naval units at sea, and keeping other units garrisoned in my cities, which I make sure are all coastal. Open borders, usually getting plenty of gold or resources in return, and bring in my navy if they get clever. Once the navy bombards them, bring out my other military units and clean up.
Sort of a specific circumstance, but I've used this Open Borders strategy multiple times.
Pi-r8, why does everyone on Civfanatics call you Pi-r8 (luddite)?
(also, the ICS demonstration succession game has concluded. There are longwriteups heavily critical of design decisions. I see pi-r8 agrees on the excessively small battlefields...)
I use luddite on some other forums, including the realms beyond forum where Sullla is an administrator. The idea for that game started there, so Sullla called me luddite and everyone else followed suit.
What do you think of the battlefield sizes, Ronya?
They are indeed too small :P
I mean, really. It's not just 1upt coming into play here, they also seem to have shrunk the sizes of maps (IV's standard is 84x52=4368 tiles; anybody got a good grasp of the numbers on V's?). It certainly seems the case that the standard Earth map has less space to move around in. And they made cities occupy more tiles, too. It's a recipe for congestion.
And even the basic idea of 1upt doesn't prohibit units moving through each other... so units get 2 base movement. Great. Except that the road spaghetti vanished, too, and rough terrain nullifies the second movement point... :x
ronya on
0
KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
edited November 2010
I'm sure someone else has mentioned it before, but does anyone else find that research seems too fast and production seems too slow? Even in marathon games.
The weird thing is, I kind of think now that the game would work better with even faster research and slower production. Force army sizes down so that they actually fit with the map, by making it so that you only have time to build about 2 units in each era.
Your game already had the 5 turn infantry era, and I've certainly experienced similar in my games. Unless they introduce more requirements for the military techs, even faster teching will just have even more frequent eras with no units built.
The thing is, I want enough time in each era to play around with its units and stuff.
I've always had this dream for a civilization game where each era brought unique gameplay elements, requiring new strategies and sort of "re-setting" the power dynamics. So not only did the Ancient Era look different than the Medieval Era, the Medieval Era played very differently.
Also, man, 1UPT is good, I like it, but I can see how the changes they made to incorporate it have futzed things up.
Well you can change the overall game speed so that there's enough time for a proper war in each era. The problem comes more in the earlier eras, which give you plenty of time to build 10 horseman or catapults, which then get upgraded forever. Fighting with 10 horsemen against a sea of pikes isn't much fun.
As to whether IV is better... well. If you favor waging war, and often, V may be more to your taste. Considerable tactical management with an empire-managing addon, more or less.
I guess my opinion should be obvious by now, but I think Alpha Centauri is a much better game overall, with much deeper strategy and a lot more things you can do.
not really. Alpha Centauri does give a lot of different options for you to play around with, but it's not balanced at all and the AI is terrible. This guy won a transcendence victory in just 76 turns, by blasting the cracks in the game wide open.
Update 11/10/2010: The first batch of changes are now available! Here they are:
AI
Worker AI improvements .
Update to tactical AI pillaging code. Additionally, always check to make sure it’s not trying to pillage in an enemy dominance zone.
AI victory emphasis improvements (more efficient end-game when focusing on Science and Diplo victories).
AI should colonize other continents regularly.
AI will emphasize production of an Ocean going explorer unit when the time comes.
Adjust Napoleon to make him more likely to go for culture.
More aggressive second wave expansion (mostly off shore) after initial empire building and consolidation has occurred.
Optimization when finding routes (pathfinder improvement).
Multiple tweaks and bug fixes.
AI will now build ranged and mobile units more in line with the flavor settings.
Multiple defensive AI tweaks.
GAMEPLAY
Cities heal more quickly.
Only allow one upgrade per unit from a goody hut.
UI
Tweaked the single-player score list to hide the civs of unmet ai players.
DIPLO
AI's attitude towards you is now visible in the diplo screen and diplo drop-down.
Added info tooltip for an AI leader's mood. Lists things that are making an AI player happy/upset.
New diplo system: Declaration of Friendship (public declaration with diplomatic repercussions).
New diplo system: Denounce (public declaration with diplomatic repercussions).
New custom leader responses (Serious Expansion Warning, Aggressive Military, Luxury Exchange, Borders Exchange, Gift Request).
MODDING
Parent category counts now include counts of child categories.
Selecting/deselecting a category now automatically selects/deselects it's children and its parent.
Tweaked category name truncation to better fit names.
Hide categories w/ no children and a count of 0.
Added support for fallback languages (if mod is not translated, fall-back to English so text keys are not showing).
MISC
Fixed save format which causes saves to increase the memory footprint of the game drastically when loading frequently over the course of the game.
Diplo changes sound like they change interaction with the AI substantially. ICS is probably still optimal, though.
(I like how "goody hut" seems to have become official terminology)
Update 11/10/2010: The first batch of changes are now available! Here they are:
AI
Worker AI improvements .
Update to tactical AI pillaging code. Additionally, always check to make sure it’s not trying to pillage in an enemy dominance zone.
AI victory emphasis improvements (more efficient end-game when focusing on Science and Diplo victories).
AI should colonize other continents regularly.
AI will emphasize production of an Ocean going explorer unit when the time comes.
Adjust Napoleon to make him more likely to go for culture.
More aggressive second wave expansion (mostly off shore) after initial empire building and consolidation has occurred.
Optimization when finding routes (pathfinder improvement).
Multiple tweaks and bug fixes.
AI will now build ranged and mobile units more in line with the flavor settings.
Multiple defensive AI tweaks.
GAMEPLAY
Cities heal more quickly.
Only allow one upgrade per unit from a goody hut.
UI
Tweaked the single-player score list to hide the civs of unmet ai players.
DIPLO
AI's attitude towards you is now visible in the diplo screen and diplo drop-down.
Added info tooltip for an AI leader's mood. Lists things that are making an AI player happy/upset.
New diplo system: Declaration of Friendship (public declaration with diplomatic repercussions).
New diplo system: Denounce (public declaration with diplomatic repercussions).
New custom leader responses (Serious Expansion Warning, Aggressive Military, Luxury Exchange, Borders Exchange, Gift Request).
MODDING
Parent category counts now include counts of child categories.
Selecting/deselecting a category now automatically selects/deselects it's children and its parent.
Tweaked category name truncation to better fit names.
Hide categories w/ no children and a count of 0.
Added support for fallback languages (if mod is not translated, fall-back to English so text keys are not showing).
MISC
Fixed save format which causes saves to increase the memory footprint of the game drastically when loading frequently over the course of the game.
@Phobos: it would be neat if they fixed ICS by making non-ICS more viable, instead of making ICS play more difficult. More opportunity costs instead of more direct costs.
OR you could not do ICS? Maybe I'm just being ignorant here but if you hate ICS, don't do it?
I don't do it and I'm having fun. Granted i've not graduated to Diety or snything like that but still, I can't get behind the notion of doing something you hate just to win. Then again if you hate losing AS MUCH as ICS then you quit, this would explain why the thread died...
Problem is: The AI loves to do ICS too. Just look at how a usual Continents game goes. In the end, one AI controls 20+ cities, outteching and outproducing everyone else if they don't also spam cities.
I think one problem is the fact that the earliest buildings also happen to be the most cost-efficient and never become obsolete.
Ferrus on
I would like to pause for a moment, to talk about my penis.
My penis is like a toddler. A toddler—who is a perfectly normal size for his age—on a long road trip to what he thinks is Disney World. My penis is excited because he hasn’t been to Disney World in a long, long time, but remembers a time when he used to go every day. So now the penis toddler is constantly fidgeting, whining “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Now? How about... now?”
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
Straight up giving us a diplomacy tooltip like in Civ IV
Maybe I'll play some more of this!
Yeah, it looks like I should fire this up again once the patch drops.
I really don't know why I buy these at release, they're always better after a couple patches.
It's a dirty cycle. Enough people don't buy the needs-a-patch game and there wont BE a patch possibly. So you're supporting their lazines...I mean, their in progress hard work!
Xeddicus on
"For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men. Not women. Not beasts...this you can trust."
Posts
But you can site cities very close, which increases the density of the the city tile's improvements on the terrain. Civ V has utterly mediocre special resources so powerful city tiles help a lot.
Note that cities are actually a liability in combat, since units can't access their bonuses while garrisoned.
I always find it humorous how a moving settler is defenceless and gets captured, but as soon as they settle a city they can defend with high strength and HP. Apparently those settlers were carrying a catapult, but it was all packed up for the journey.
(also, the ICS demonstration succession game has concluded. There are long writeups heavily critical of design decisions. I see pi-r8 agrees on the excessively small battlefields...)
As for combat, tactical stack based combat is the answer, and has been since forever. In MoM and AoW it had the disadvantage of making early units useless and late units dominant, but in CIV that's exactly what you want to happen. Having a paladin beat 9 units of swordsmen singlehandedly is a bit eyebrow raising, having a tank or infantry unit do the same is only natural.
Most importantly you have to mix things up a little with the other civs. Isolationism doesn't really work. Sign pacts of cooperation with everyone except the Civ you want to isolate, sign pacts of secrecy against them and then bribe someone else to go to war. The warring civ will get negative points with everyone else, especially if it manages to finish your target off which means it automatically becomes the next target itself and so forth.
Really helped my Pangea games.
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
I use luddite on some other forums, including the realms beyond forum where Sullla is an administrator. The idea for that game started there, so Sullla called me luddite and everyone else followed suit.
What do you think of the battlefield sizes, Ronya?
In my last game I had one little corner of coast line my borders hadn't expanded to, I opened to Monte so I could get through his lands to attack Caeser, then Monte runs a guy down and steals the corner.. wtf man? He still had heaps of land up near him that he could settle, but no, he really wanted those fish down there.
He was next to die after Caeser.
I've pretty much given up on Civ 5 for now, pretty much because of ICS efficiency and AI inefficiency. When your decision making goes from "Should I make a settler now?" to "How many settlers should I make now?" I feel a lot of the depth has gone out. The addition of a bunch of non-intuitive micromanagement does not exactly help matters.
Sort of a specific circumstance, but I've used this Open Borders strategy multiple times.
Twitter 3DS: 0860 - 3257 - 2516
They are indeed too small :P
I mean, really. It's not just 1upt coming into play here, they also seem to have shrunk the sizes of maps (IV's standard is 84x52=4368 tiles; anybody got a good grasp of the numbers on V's?). It certainly seems the case that the standard Earth map has less space to move around in. And they made cities occupy more tiles, too. It's a recipe for congestion.
And even the basic idea of 1upt doesn't prohibit units moving through each other... so units get 2 base movement. Great. Except that the road spaghetti vanished, too, and rough terrain nullifies the second movement point... :x
I've always had this dream for a civilization game where each era brought unique gameplay elements, requiring new strategies and sort of "re-setting" the power dynamics. So not only did the Ancient Era look different than the Medieval Era, the Medieval Era played very differently.
Also, man, 1UPT is good, I like it, but I can see how the changes they made to incorporate it have futzed things up.
As to whether IV is better... well. If you favor waging war, and often, V may be more to your taste. Considerable tactical management with an empire-managing addon, more or less.
Still, I have to admit I had a lot of fun at first in V, using horsemen and crossbows to run amok.
Upcoming patch notes:
Diplo changes sound like they change interaction with the AI substantially. ICS is probably still optimal, though.
(I like how "goody hut" seems to have become official terminology)
Upcoming patch notes:
@Phobos: it would be neat if they fixed ICS by making non-ICS more viable, instead of making ICS play more difficult. More opportunity costs instead of more direct costs.
I don't do it and I'm having fun. Granted i've not graduated to Diety or snything like that but still, I can't get behind the notion of doing something you hate just to win. Then again if you hate losing AS MUCH as ICS then you quit, this would explain why the thread died...
I think one problem is the fact that the earliest buildings also happen to be the most cost-efficient and never become obsolete.
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
I played the game wrong though and got DoW by 4 civs at once while my army was off taking out someone else.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Straight up giving us a diplomacy tooltip like in Civ IV
Maybe I'll play some more of this!
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Well, the optimal way should be the fun way. Otherwise it isn't, uh, fun. IMO anyway.
Yeah, it looks like I should fire this up again once the patch drops.
I really don't know why I buy these at release, they're always better after a couple patches.
It's a dirty cycle. Enough people don't buy the needs-a-patch game and there wont BE a patch possibly. So you're supporting their lazines...I mean, their in progress hard work!
I bet they didn't fix multiplayer.
EDIT: Oh, and no proper saving.
Thoughts of a Part-Time Hobbyist - A Wargaming and RPG Blog