SolsticeZero
Banned
If anyone was looking to pick this up on Steam, I have a spare Steam key (100% legal. I got two copies) that I'm willing to trade for something of equal value (hint hint New Vegas).
Najaf said:Here are some shots from my latest game using the ICS. (Infinite city strategy) Sulla over on realms beyond gave me the idea in a recent playthrough he typed up. He does an infinitely better job describing the how-to in this strategy, so if you are interested, read up on his site.
The basic idea is to use filler cities and cap their growth. You take advantage of the order social policy tree and net the invaluable +5 hammer. When combined with magical maritime food and a few wonders and other social policies, your simple filler cities look like the ones bellow; very capable of turning 25+ beakers per turn.
That is 1031 beakers per turn, and 305 gold per turn while not in a golden age. If anyone wants to poke around in the save, PM me and I can email it to you so you can see how I got to be in this state.
jepense said:At an average population of 8 (?) I wouldn't call them just fillers. That is already a decent size for a city. You don't need to specifically pick their locations since you only work a couple of tiles, but that's pretty much the case for big cities as well as long as you have Maritime food. Do you also run Freedom to cut the unhappiness from specialists? Since just a colosseum alone won't support the population of 8. I bet you also built the Statue of liberty?
After playing around with this approach myself, I also think it is currently the easiest way build a commanding lead. It's not overpowered in the sense that you can quite easily pull 1000 beakers from just a dozen cities with proper specialization, but this kind of an empire is simpler to set up. It just takes so long to grow cities beyond 15-20, that it is more difficult to develop super cities than lots of small ones. I don't really mind that one can go either way, though.
Maritime states should be toned down, or the AI should really try to prevent the player from allying with them. It would be more reasonable if maritime states provided a set number of apples which was then split equally to all your cities (capital could still get double). Communism should give 5 hammers per city since it isn't that easy to get, but maritime food is just so easy to obtain and stacks so well that it can easily give the player an obscene advantage, especially with large empires.
I have a feeling it'll drop about the same time as the DLC next week.rhfb said:Anyone know what the ETA is on the patch? Waiting to start a new game until then (still have games with saves to play if I want)
Najaf said:The maritime food caused the population to get that high. Read the playthrough I linked above regarding the wonders/policies. As people are playing more with this, it is just getting worse. Here is a screengrab off of civfanatics of a spacerace victory in less than 200 turns. He is putting out +2000 beakers per turn and built the entire spaceship in 11 turns. The maritime food and ICS are truly broken elements in the game as it stands. He did that without communism or any of the advanced social policies.
EDIT: And regarding war, he used the cities to crossfire attackers and would simply rushbuy units when the AI came at him.
I thought ICS usually meant a strategy where you build as many very small cities you can and don't even try to make the cities grow. This is because the city tile is automatically worked and thus you get free food, production, and gold. The screen you posted is not ICS in that sense since all the cities are big. I don't think past civ games have put a cap on the number of cities you can have, but they have made having big cities a stronger strategy than lots of small ones. Having lots of big cities should be ok in principle, since it's not about exploiting ICS, but a sign of a strong economy. However, I fully agree that being able to produce that many big cities so quickly due to exploiting maritimes shows that maritime food is overpowered. It is ICS in the sense that the cities are as close as possible. That again is a result of maritime food, since the cities need not work any land to prosper.Najaf said:The maritime food caused the population to get that high. Read the playthrough I linked above regarding the wonders/policies. As people are playing more with this, it is just getting worse. Here is a screengrab of a spacerace victory in less than 200 turns. He is putting out +2000 beakers per turn and built the entire spaceship in 11 turns. The maritime food and ICS are truly broken elements in the game as it stands. He did that without communism or any of the advanced social policies.
EDIT: And regarding war, he used the cities to crossfire attackers and would simply rushbuy units when the AI came at him.
jepense said:I thought ICS usually meant a strategy where you build as many very small cities you can and don't even try to make the cities grow. This is because the city tile is automatically worked and thus you get free food, production, and gold. The screen you posted is not ICS in that sense since all the cities are big. I don't think past civ games have put a cap on the number of cities you can have, but they have made having big cities a stronger strategy than lots of small ones. Having lots of big cities should be ok in principle, since it's not about exploiting ICS, but a sign of a strong economy. However, I fully agree that being able to produce that many big cities so quickly due to exploiting maritimes shows that maritime food is overpowered. It is ICS in the sense that the cities are as close as possible. That again is a result of maritime food, since the cities need not work any land to prosper.
I haven't read what was going on with regarding happiness here, so I won't comment on whether happiness is broken as well. If it is, a simple fix could be a progressively increasing happiness penalty from new cities?
Archie said:The big patch just hit. I'm gonna give it a whirl this weekend.
alske said:Any word on if the patch addresses some of the performance issues the game can have?
If you didn't disable it for a particular game, it will check for updates each time you try to launch the game (if the update hadn't already started) and download the update.Totakeke said:Does steam update the game automatically?
From Steam.BigJonsson said:Where can I get the update?
It may have already updated if you've had Steam running in the background.BigJonsson said:It doesn't seem to be updating =/
Weird. Steam won't usually even let you launch a game without allowing it to update first. Maybe try restarting Steam?BigJonsson said:Still says version 1.0.0.2 =/
And nothing in the downloads
fallout said:Weird. Steam won't usually even let you launch a game without allowing it to update first. Maybe try restarting Steam?
Najaf said:Full patch notes:
Najaf said:Whoops. Must have copy and pasted an older list somehow.
coopolon said:Yah, I actually just saw the same list on Joystiq. It appears they added a few things to the patch after they released the original notes. I'm happy they did, there are actually quite a few significant things like the city state buildings.
snack said:I'm new to the CIV series. Any tips for a beginner? lol
Ookami-kun said:Just a question - in order to get that All Victories achievement, do you need to do it in a single game or in different games? Because I realized that some victories are disabled when you obtain another victory (e.g. you can't do Science Victory once you've done other victories).
Sober said:Good news is I think the AI finally figured out how to fight a war. I was playing on prince, so you expect the AI to still be acting like they had brain damage but they actually gave me a run for my money, considering most of the time they have a much larger army than mine and just let it get steamrolled by 3 or 4 of my units.
aidan said:Different games.
Might as well. Doing Pangaea on Prince, so contact is required with the AI, but they are still slightly dumb.sdornan said:Any impressions of the new patch?
sdornan said:Any impressions of the new patch?
JayDubya said:AIs will only buy resources from you at 150 gold max... ouch.
Palmer_v1 said:AI definitely seems better about defending a city now. No more moving garrisoned archers out for no apparent reason. They still never seem to use catapults, trebs, or other artillery units though. I also haven't seen them screen their cities with units to fight invaders before they're at the city walls.
They also seem to have devalued luxury resources. Used to be able to sell them to the Ai for 300 gold easily, but now I can barely get 130 gold. They're also still complete assholes about 1:1 trading of surplus luxuries. One Ai had 3 whales, and wouldn't trade to me for less than 3 of my luxuries. This was while I had been relatively peaceful. It was this kind of bullshit that led to me testing out their new combat AI.
Now who has all the whales mothafucker!?
The major AI patch is supposed to be coming later in the year.Tabris said:The AI is still off. They had surrounded one of my cities with archers and while I was taking it's cities, I just left those units as they never moved out 1 archer with a spearman/swordsman to take my city which was at 0 defense for like 10 turns.