Earthstrike
Member
Hey Frag, Just out of curiousity, do you play multiplayer at all?
A lot of people seem to be having trouble with the SP game, and I can tell you that getting good at MP is a great way to improve your single player game. A lot of people shy away from MP because of a preconceived notion that you have to dedicate an exorbitant amount of time to a session. Relative to other games this is true, however, most games take around 2 hours. Usually there is a person in a prime position for victory at that point, but if not than the game may go around 4 hours. You gain a much deeper understanding of the game at the MP level since you are playing against thinking humans instead of stupid a.i.s.
Anyways, a lot of people seem to like evaluations of civs and have asked others views about what the "best" ones are so I'll chip in my two cents.
I'm going to divide civs into two types here. Development civs, and war civs. This distinction merely highlights what a civ is optimal for.
Now before I begin, please remember that everything I write is from extensive experience in multiplayer and from a multiplayer point of view. Some things I highlight here may not seem important to the SP player because the a.i. cedes them so easily.
Best developmental civs:
Maya, Spain, and Poland.
Maya:
Maya has both a broken UB and UA. The pyramid gives two faith and two science. Going Liberty and getting a few cities out will give you 8 faith and 8 science a turn early game. This is obscenely powerful. The 8 faith a turn sets you up to meet the requirements for a prophet in about 25 turns by itself. You are guaranteed early pick of a pantheon. The 8 bonus science helps you hit theology particularly fast, letting you get free great people out early. Maya received a stealth buff in BNW in that it now has more options to choose from with its GP selection. Remember that a great engineer is practically a free world wonder of you choice, which could be hagia for an extremely fast tier 2 religion, or chichen, which allows you to chain golden ages easier (Since every GA now procs a limit increase for the next one). I don't want to delve to much into a specific way to play maya since they have tons of options available to them due to the vast amount of great people they have, but they are very strong at outbuilding, well, everyone.
Spain:
Spain is a high variance civ. You want to be able to work at least one natural wonder. Almost any natural wonder you work will be beneficial. If you pick up that early 500 gold bonus, you are purchasing a settler in your cap and you are planting it and buying that tile almost always, no questions asked. When you do this, you are also taking the one with nature pantheon, which gives +4 to natural wonders (which is then doubled to 8). If it's a faith based nat wonder, you're looking at meeting great prophet requirements in 6-8 turns. Production wonder? You can worker spam or go for a less sought after wonder. Tech? Tech lead is always great as it snowballs your empire's capacities. A lot of people have trouble seeing value with spain since people really like enjoying rushing the national college so they don't want to spam out cities. There is a lack of appreciation of how impactful the doubled wonder bonus truly is. This is all assuming you only work one natural wonder. If you get lucky and pick up two, then you're gonna be on fire.
Poland:
One pattern that is very noticeable in MP is that people who are ahead and winning games, almost always have a lead in total cultural policies taken. Poland gets them for free. He simply receives a lot of options for doing this. For one thing, he can pick up consulates in the patronage tree quickly after completing liberty to get the city state resting point at 30 (since you can pledge protection for 10). This means you will eventually be friends with every city state so long as you didn't piss any of them off. Getting collective rule first means you get dibs on any hotly contested land between you and your enemies. Finishing liberty first gets you dibs on whatever world wonder you want, and you can often strip people who are attempting to build it from them, greatly hurting them since they lost a huge hammer investment. Maybe you're playing a continents or islands map. You will get maritime infrastructure up really fast. Essentially, you get everything faster with poland.
War Civs:
Zulu, Germany
This is for BNW. In G&K the correct answer was huns. BNW gave a huge nerf to natural gold production. This makes maintaining an army and not losing gold/sci difficult if you are building the kind of army necessary to kill other humans that actually know how to defend. One thing that should be immediately noted about the civs I posted is that they have reduced unit maintenance. Any other civ that has a gold based war bonus (Songhai) is necessarily a strong war civ, however, the two civs I have chosen both also have great UU's. Pikemen has been part of the competitive meta for the majority of the game's existence. There low cost means you swarm your enemy with them, and that trading with them is completely acceptable. You can trade units 2 to 1 and be at production parity with the enemy. Trading units 2 to 1 is extremely hard for a defender to do when both players are competent. Zulu has the impi which has both ranged attack and melee. This makes combat much easier for you, and much harder for your opponent. You don't receive damage when you use a ranged attack. So you can spam the ranged attacks as necessary on enemy cities, yet still have units ready to melee attack the city. It's essentially being able to do the damage of a pure ranged unit attack, whilst maintaining some meat on the frontline.
A lot of people seem to be having trouble with the SP game, and I can tell you that getting good at MP is a great way to improve your single player game. A lot of people shy away from MP because of a preconceived notion that you have to dedicate an exorbitant amount of time to a session. Relative to other games this is true, however, most games take around 2 hours. Usually there is a person in a prime position for victory at that point, but if not than the game may go around 4 hours. You gain a much deeper understanding of the game at the MP level since you are playing against thinking humans instead of stupid a.i.s.
Anyways, a lot of people seem to like evaluations of civs and have asked others views about what the "best" ones are so I'll chip in my two cents.
I'm going to divide civs into two types here. Development civs, and war civs. This distinction merely highlights what a civ is optimal for.
Now before I begin, please remember that everything I write is from extensive experience in multiplayer and from a multiplayer point of view. Some things I highlight here may not seem important to the SP player because the a.i. cedes them so easily.
Best developmental civs:
Maya, Spain, and Poland.
Maya:
Maya has both a broken UB and UA. The pyramid gives two faith and two science. Going Liberty and getting a few cities out will give you 8 faith and 8 science a turn early game. This is obscenely powerful. The 8 faith a turn sets you up to meet the requirements for a prophet in about 25 turns by itself. You are guaranteed early pick of a pantheon. The 8 bonus science helps you hit theology particularly fast, letting you get free great people out early. Maya received a stealth buff in BNW in that it now has more options to choose from with its GP selection. Remember that a great engineer is practically a free world wonder of you choice, which could be hagia for an extremely fast tier 2 religion, or chichen, which allows you to chain golden ages easier (Since every GA now procs a limit increase for the next one). I don't want to delve to much into a specific way to play maya since they have tons of options available to them due to the vast amount of great people they have, but they are very strong at outbuilding, well, everyone.
Spain:
Spain is a high variance civ. You want to be able to work at least one natural wonder. Almost any natural wonder you work will be beneficial. If you pick up that early 500 gold bonus, you are purchasing a settler in your cap and you are planting it and buying that tile almost always, no questions asked. When you do this, you are also taking the one with nature pantheon, which gives +4 to natural wonders (which is then doubled to 8). If it's a faith based nat wonder, you're looking at meeting great prophet requirements in 6-8 turns. Production wonder? You can worker spam or go for a less sought after wonder. Tech? Tech lead is always great as it snowballs your empire's capacities. A lot of people have trouble seeing value with spain since people really like enjoying rushing the national college so they don't want to spam out cities. There is a lack of appreciation of how impactful the doubled wonder bonus truly is. This is all assuming you only work one natural wonder. If you get lucky and pick up two, then you're gonna be on fire.
Poland:
One pattern that is very noticeable in MP is that people who are ahead and winning games, almost always have a lead in total cultural policies taken. Poland gets them for free. He simply receives a lot of options for doing this. For one thing, he can pick up consulates in the patronage tree quickly after completing liberty to get the city state resting point at 30 (since you can pledge protection for 10). This means you will eventually be friends with every city state so long as you didn't piss any of them off. Getting collective rule first means you get dibs on any hotly contested land between you and your enemies. Finishing liberty first gets you dibs on whatever world wonder you want, and you can often strip people who are attempting to build it from them, greatly hurting them since they lost a huge hammer investment. Maybe you're playing a continents or islands map. You will get maritime infrastructure up really fast. Essentially, you get everything faster with poland.
War Civs:
Zulu, Germany
This is for BNW. In G&K the correct answer was huns. BNW gave a huge nerf to natural gold production. This makes maintaining an army and not losing gold/sci difficult if you are building the kind of army necessary to kill other humans that actually know how to defend. One thing that should be immediately noted about the civs I posted is that they have reduced unit maintenance. Any other civ that has a gold based war bonus (Songhai) is necessarily a strong war civ, however, the two civs I have chosen both also have great UU's. Pikemen has been part of the competitive meta for the majority of the game's existence. There low cost means you swarm your enemy with them, and that trading with them is completely acceptable. You can trade units 2 to 1 and be at production parity with the enemy. Trading units 2 to 1 is extremely hard for a defender to do when both players are competent. Zulu has the impi which has both ranged attack and melee. This makes combat much easier for you, and much harder for your opponent. You don't receive damage when you use a ranged attack. So you can spam the ranged attacks as necessary on enemy cities, yet still have units ready to melee attack the city. It's essentially being able to do the damage of a pure ranged unit attack, whilst maintaining some meat on the frontline.
