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I'm apparently late but yeah, Qin would have been my vote.
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Apr 17, 2016 07:51
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Honestly most of these civs seem overpowered, overcomplicated, dull, or all three (looking at you, Canada). The great thing about a lot of the standard civs is that they're built with multiple approaches in mind. Civs like Russia, Poland, China, and Persia have powerful units and abilities, but they don't lock you into a single playstyle or development path. You can build tall or wide, you can be peaceful or aggressive, you can pursue lots of different policies and techs and you can do it all without worrying that you're playing that civ "wrong." There are admittedly some base game civs that do have clear best paths and some paths (like rationalism) are pretty much always best and that doesn't mean you can't have still have fun with the system, but a lot of these mod civs seem to be built for a very specific style of play and for all their weirdness probably aren't as replayable as the base civs. Like, take the abilities that only trigger if you take the Honor path. What's the point of having a cool branching policy system if you have to always take the same branch to get your bonuses? Anyway, most of these civs don't sound like they'd actually be that fun to play, but I'm sure there will be some fun elements to show off down the line.
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Apr 17, 2016 13:14
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On the other hand, if you're the type to always go for what seems like the optimal strategy and tend to have a hard time breaking from that mold, having civilizations optimized for certain playstyles can help you adopt a different strategy and experience the full scope of what the game has to offer.
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Apr 17, 2016 15:14
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Duckbag posted:Honestly most of these civs seem overpowered, overcomplicated, dull, or all three (looking at you, Canada). I get where you're coming from and you're not wrong, but I think what appeals to me more than anything with modded civs in general is the creativity of their abilities. Obviously their design isn't up to the standard of the ones made by professionals so I'm not expecting that, but civs like the Legion, MSF and the Sioux provide gimmicks and gameplay styles (even if, to your point, "styles" basically should be singular) that you simply don't get anything like when playing vanilla. The Sioux are actually the mod that got me into modding this game in general, as the idea of a whole new version of an existing resource that the entire civ was built around sounded like The Raddest poo poo to me and, again, is something no vanilla civ does anything like. That being said, if the civs don't appeal to you remember that there'll be other mods this game, and we're gonna branch out to some pretty radically game-changing stuff later.
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Apr 17, 2016 19:08
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Part 1 - The Good, The Bad And The- Oh. Oh wow Colonialist Legacies - Canadian Dominion (v. 2) Metal Gear Solid -- Militaires Sans Frontieres Civilization (v. 17) Health & Plague for BNW (v. 19) Global Warming Congress (v. 2) Here's the list of mods we'll be using, and it's actually not as intimidating as it looks. All of the new concepts are introduced piecemeal (Global Warming won't even show up period until the industrial era), and a lot of them such as Faster Aircraft Animations etc are just quality of life improvements I use that won't even be visible.  Aaand here's the setup we'll be using, with the 10 civs obviously all being the ones in the vote. It's nothing too wild, Pangea Plus is a DLC map type (from the Explorers Pack) that's basically an improved version of Pangea, and Emporer is the 3rd-highest difficulty, which should give us a good challenge. We're playing on Pangea because a few of the civs in this game's special abilities/units (Legion, Goths to name a couple) are so geared for the early game that it'd be a drat shame if they got isolated on an island alone. Plus I don't want to run the risk of being stuck on an island alone myself like those poor Portuguese.  I like the art they chose for this screen. Most of the ingame portraits are nice in general, although when you're playing with a mix of vanilla and mod civs their JPEGs on the diplomacy screen are a bit off-putting compared to the full models and animations.  Here's our start, and it's... frustrating. The terrain is perfectly fine, arguably great even with 2 different luxuries very close, but what kills me is the placement of that mountain, namely the fact that it is precisely 3 tiles away. This not only means that to settle near it (which would give us the ability to make an Observatory in the city later on, which give a huge Science bonus) we would need to waste a turn moving to it, but it also means that if we settle in place we won't even be able to build 2 extremely strong wonders in Machu Picchu and Neuschwanstein, both of which require the city to be at most 2 tiles away. This isn't even mentioning the pros and cons of settling on the coast that we've spawned on, which is a whole 'nother story. I move my warrior onto to hill to see if there's anything else around the mountain worth settling nearer, but no dice. After much diliberation I grit my teeth and settle in place.  Here's our city screen, and not much is (or will be) changed here mod-wise, and the tiles immediately around our capital are kinda mediocre so far, though it'll improve as soon as it expands to that marble, oranges etc. We should get a decent amount of money with which to buy tiles rolling in once we get our social policies too (more on that later!), so despite it not being particularly amazing right off the bat we'll be fine. Anyway there's nothing new in the units/buildings quite yet either, so I get started on a scout as is my wont and send my warrior to scout the more-easily-navigable terrain west. On that note, didn't somebody want me to rename my capital if Ying Zheng won? Oh, right;  Fuckin' nerds. Meanwhile, some of you may have noticed our first  NEW MECHANIC, which is: Health! I'll explain more of it as we go as there's not a lot to it quite yet, but basically the idea is that it's an empire-wide psuedo-resource akin to happiness, and if we don't keep an eye on it we'll be at risk of our cities contracting plagues. Health is lowered and raised by things such as certain tiles, techs, buildings etc, as well as more miscellaneous things like international trade routes. Once we get to the mid-late game we'll see this mechanic get going in earnest.  Very quickly my Warrior finds a ruin containing this, which is greatly appreciated. I don't generally rush people even in domination games as I'm not very good at it, but this certainly opens up that option depending on how things play out.  We can already see a really solid expand spot too in the same area. This is your primary reason for scouting in the early game, always always always be on the lookout for possible city spots during your initial scouting.  Not too far from our capital, our warrior finds this little ditty! Natural wonders are amazing to find this early, and while I wasn't intending to go all too hard into religion this game, this may singlehandedly change that. The Happiness boost could be useful too since maintaining happiness is obviously a problem when taking over cities, not to mention the aforementioned boosts from settling near a mountain. At the same time our scout finishes building and I send him through the forest northeast, and get started on a monument.  It isn't long before he runs into trouble, and while I'd really like to find our closest neighbor quickly I'll probably have him wrap around to take care of this camp. My Scout quietly sneaks by eastward an-   Uh... huh.
Monicro fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Apr 30, 2016 |
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Apr 17, 2016 19:22
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Is that what I think it is?
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Apr 17, 2016 19:37
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King Doom posted:Is that what I think it is? Yep. I'll explain it proper next update (coming soon! I already have most of it done), but that ladies and gentlefolk is the fountain of youth, which is the best natural wonder in the game by, uh, a lot.
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Apr 17, 2016 19:40
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Welp, I can hazard a guess as to our next city site...
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Apr 17, 2016 19:45
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Shame you're not playing Spain
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Apr 17, 2016 23:38
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Well, it's not like this wasn't going to be a hugely imbalanced game anyway.
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Apr 18, 2016 01:06
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Oh ho, a nice discovery there! Also thanks for the rename!
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Apr 18, 2016 01:49
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Two natural wonders this early is amazing and I never get to settle the Fountain of Youth, so I'm looking forward to it. Settling near Kailash should be enough to get you to a religion and if you grab One With Nature, the pantheon belief that gives you +4 faith per natural wonder, you'll be just drowning in faith in the early game. I'm not actually sure how good One With Nature is though. The faith bonus doesn't really scale at all because you'll probably never get a chance to settle any more nat wonders after those first two and you also run into he problem of what you can actually do with faith. Early game all you can really use it for spreading your religion and building unique buildings or getting holy warriors (if you picked one of those bonuses). Late game though you can use it to rush out Great units which can be a fantastic strategy if you build for it, but often seems a little underwhelming if you've been spending the whole game building up your religion and suddenly realize there's not that much you can actually do with it. So the issue I have is that there are lots of great pantheons for building up faith, but most of them have hardly any payoff at all in the early game except for rushing a religion and it means giving up some really incredible unique bonuses like faster border growth or improved tile yields that can benefit you the whole game. Still I'm not seeing any other obvious best pantheon in your starting area (except maybe Sun God or Goddess of the Hunt for a little extra food), so getting One With Nature and cruising to an early religion is probably your best bet.
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Apr 18, 2016 11:23
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Yesss, nice one. Also, thanks for the kind shout-outs! 
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Apr 18, 2016 17:09
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Yessss more Civ let's plays, I am a happy camper. This looks like it's going to be fun. I'm still hoping for lightsabers though.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:56
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Monicro posted:I like the art they chose for this screen. So do I, except what's up with his hand in the art? It looks really strange. ... Wow, that Fountain of Youth placement...
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Apr 19, 2016 01:23
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Part 2 - Making Friends, Sorta, Vaguely Welcome back! Last time, we found this: This friends, is the fountain of youth, another natural wonder and by far the best one in the game. In addition to giving a passive +6 happiness when it's in our border (believe it or not that's actually a nerf courtesy of one of the mods we're using, in vanilla it's 10) and even a +2 health boost from the health mod, any unit that spends a turn next to it heals at double rate FOR THE REST OF THE GAME. Not to mention that due to the passive nature of it's abilities, we don't even need to assign a citizen to it, which is a really obnoxious thing about wonders that don't give out food. Needless to say it's Pretty Good, and making it our property has instantly become our top priority. That warrior is apparently equally transfixed with it as us, and abandons the camp to get a closer look. No one else spawns inside it, so our scout happily cleans it up.  This is not received well.  A turn later we finish up Pottery, and I'd like to direct your attention to the bottom of it, particularly how it says "Empire" health. City Health vs Empire Health are actually different (similar to local vs global happiness), and basically the latter magnifies the former, whether positive or negative. More general things like Techs, Tourism etc affect Empire Health, and buildings and stuff (such as granaries!) affect City Health.    I actually forgot to do it, but time for a Monicro Protip: if you get a ruin or whatever that gives you a lump sum of culture which makes you able to afford a policy, it won't give you the popup until next turn. However, if you click on the culture counter you can adopt it the same turn! It's a pretty inconsequential exploit on it's own, but there's a ton of little things like that you can do in the early game (a few of which you'll see this update!) and put together they add up.  Here's the first thing that we've seen courtesy of the NQ balance mod, and one of my favorite aspects of any mod I'm currently using: unlike vanilla where not taking Tradition or Liberty as your first policy is effectively suicide, NQ overhauls Honor and Piety to make them equally viable as the former two as your opener! I only use bits and pieces of NQ as a lot of it I feel makes aspects of the game less interesting in the name of competitive balance or just straight up things I don't think are good ideas, but this basically singlehandedly made me start using it. Needless to say, we're going HONOR!   We get started on our settler for the fountain right after our monument is built, and here's another trick that you can use for settlers: Growth is actually *paused* while building them, meaning that while the city can't grow, they can't starve either. Thus there's literally no reason not to lock in all your production tiles when building them, as seen here!  There appears to be a full-on mountain range west of our capital, and the terrain in general isn't exactly easy to navigate. We can see 2 more spots ripe for settling, but hopefully no one lives around here as moving an army through here would be-  WELP, hi Vlad! They'd be pretty good as our first target in a vacuum as they have a unique Pikeman (appropriately), which would become available right as our own uniques (Horseman and Composite Bowman replacements) become obselete, but with this terrain I doubt it'll be in the cards. The good news is he'd have a hard time sneaking up on us as well!  Also worth noting is that "Pious" honorific means he's going Piety, which may be worth keeping in mind.   Here are the opening policies adopting Honor makes available, and we don't even have the tech that lets us make Barracks yet so let's go for Warrior Code! I always neglect building units this early so the 2 extra warriors are greatly appreciated.  NO, go away! (the AI does this constantly early on, to the point where I'm not convinced they don't rush Writing purely to do it. Even worse, a lot of the time it's just their way of saying "hey where do you live, these catapults are gifts I promise!")  Miraculously, our Scout-Archer reveals that the fountain is not only NOT about to be absorbed by a city-state, but the tile he's standing on would make for a fantastic city. You can't see it due to the map but there's even another sheep and another fish within 3 tiles.  Here's a trick for taking out barb camps early if you just want them dead and don't care about the XP: In a 1-on-1 fight and your warrior at level 0, you can just wail on it and you'll get the instaheal before you get yourself killed! Handy!  And here's Vladdy's borders, confirming they're right on the other side of the Terrain Of Doom. Oh well, we'll probably target whoever winds up being north of us.  Oh, speak of the devil! This is indeed a considerably softer target (especially considering that the terrain between me and here is literally flat desert), though the production bonus she gets from cities adjacent to desert is a bit worrying. Her "The Great" honorific denotes she's going Honor, which is actually pretty good for us! It'll obviously make her harder to deal with, but her early strengths encourage going Liberty so it actually hampers her a bit, I feel. Our scoutarcher sneaks by her borders northward and...  Welp, good luck with that Tandi!  Here's the policy picking Warrior Code unlocked, and while that policy has rendered our entire army free for the moment the happiness and culture boost should be useful.  Ah, whose borders are these?  Why it's our runner-up! As his introduction implies he's extremely diplomacy-centric, and I'm thankful that he's a Vlad The Impaler away from me as his bonus for mounted units (all neutral tiles they walk on become his territory for a couple turns) would be a goddamn nightmare to deal with if he was next door.  Jeez, the person in the thread who said it's a shame I'm not playing Spain wasn't kidding. This is behind Canada and will certainly be scooped up by him, mind, but I don't think I've ever seen 3 natural wonders this early. Our settler finishes up and I send him toward that spot we were looking at earlier, and one of our warriors gets shoved out of place by Tandi's settler. The spot seems... Pretty garbage? I'm not complaining!  Woo! Pantheons are starting to fly off the board so this will be handy, I'll get a Shrine going to get the last couple points we need.  Boom!  I'm using this shot in order to prove that yes, buying Literally The Fountain Of Youth costs me less than a flat desert tile. Whatever algorithm decides tile costs is weird. Oh, hi! I'm glad you're probably far away from me or boy would I be panic-building units right now! (He gets a couple extra combat units starting out, which makes for a meatheaded-but-effective rushing civ) Hilariously, his "Consul" honorific means that he's going Liberty. As a civ that can only settle 1 city. Well, I won't judge.  Hi ladies! Unlike Snake I hope you're NOT too far, as not only do their bonuses encourage turtling up and building tons of defensive buildings, having to fight Viet Cong would be... disconcerting.  OH NO!  This is the first we've seen of the Plagues aspect of Health & Plagues, and it's a neat mechanic. Cities with Plagues get a little biohazard icon, and in addition to the kind of penalties you would expect (less population growth, etc), units adjacent to plagued cities take damage and get a nerf to their fighting ability, and citizens can actually even die. Luckily a once-over of the map shows that it's not in any city we can see, so we should be safe. One of our Warrior Code units pokes around south and finds our first city-state! Could prove to be a very handy one too, Mercantile city-states give you happiness for befriending them and a unique luxury for even more when allied, which I imagine will be quite handy when we have a ton of revolting cities to deal with.  Yeesh, this terrain is merciless. Unless it clears up north of Tandi it's looking like movement might be a pain in general for this game.  Near Vilnius our warrior finds the scout of another contestant! I have no strong feelings on them geographically, s-  Holy poo poo dude, wait till I stop shaking his hand for chrissake! (I swear to god both these things happened on the same turn. I've seen the AI be pretty aggressive about asking this, but that's a new one)  Tandi comes up to us with a much more pleasant offer, but I'm going to turn it down. People find it rude when you declare friendship with someone one moment and brutally murder them the next.  Ugghhhhh. The reason I sent my warrior down here was to check if I could theoretically send a navy through the bottom of the map, and this all but confirms that I can't. The "Attack the NCR first, go counter-clockwise" plan is looking more and more likely.   Could be worse! I'd really like to get our food going more, and this is a good sign considering we havent even improved those citrus/deer tiles yet.  Aaand Tandi keeps pumping out garbo cities for whatever reason. All the better to burn down!  If the world congress was up and running I'd be all over this, but unfortunately it is not and so there's basically no reason to accept it. Sorry Lester!  No real obvious choice here (There's no way we're getting Great Library at this point), so let's actually go Iron Working. Getting Colossus in our capital would be amazing for reasons I'll explain when/if we get it. Meanwhile up the coast, our Scoutarcher (Scarcher? S. Archer?) discover's Snake's capital, and with it the knowledge that, um;  He's not loving around. To Be Continued! Monicro fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Apr 22, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 04:34
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Speedball posted:Yesss, nice one. Of course! Your 2 Civ LPs actually partially inspired me to do this one 
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Apr 19, 2016 04:53
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Hooray I got a shout out
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Apr 19, 2016 05:13
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Those civs. 
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Apr 19, 2016 06:29
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Funny you should point out that MSF is going Liberty. Because Vice Virtuoso, the mod author, thought of that too. Instead of getting a free settler in Liberty, Snake gets a free SIEGE ENGINE with the promotion that lets it fire over rough terrain. That's probably how he got that catapult so early.
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Apr 19, 2016 08:21
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big boss even has his own source of conflict diamonds
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Apr 20, 2016 17:46
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I've recently been watching Civ LP's on youtube so I'm really looking forward to this. As has been said, Fountain of Youth and Mt. Kailash both easily obtainable is an amazingly hilarious start. A basically guaranteed religion and the greatest wonder/ability in the game and we're not even out of the Ancient Era yet. Poor, poor Vilinus, stuck in one of the worst places I've seen. On the plus side, nobody's going to mess with them.
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Apr 20, 2016 18:12
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The bear rears its two heads! 
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Apr 20, 2016 18:31
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Part 3 - Sharpening our knives Welcome back! last time we met a bunch of the other players and discovered that Snake wants blood. Onward!  ! As you might expect there's a handful of new pantheons and buffs/nerfs to existing ones (even a couple health-related ones, Health & Plagues does a good job imo of integrating itself in the game to avoid feeling tacked on), but if you're familiar with what the rest of the pantheon bonuses are like they're nothing exactly wild in comparison so let's just check out the main ones we're looking at!  Here are the obvious choices considering the terrain around us, and while we'd indeed be swimming in faith I'm not sure faith (or having our own religion) is actually worth much for us this game. There's at least 3 Civs that we know of going Piety, which with the buffed version means beliefs are gonna be soaring off the board pretty soon, not to mention that we've built like, 1 Shrine to this point and even Mt. Kailash itsn't in a very good spot and we'd basically be settling there just for it. Plus, it's not impossible but maintaining your own religion is a pain in the rear end in Domination games considering all the Holy Cities you're taking over and land you're spanning.  For all these reasons, I think I'm gonna go with this one. One plus if we don't get to found our own religion is that I'll get to show off the little metagame that results in trying to finesse which religion your cities do get, which can actually be more fun than it sounds. Feel free to debate this in the thread though, there are obviously arguments for still going for a religion and I'd love to hear them!  In more exciting news, our scoutarcher skirts Mother Base's borders and confirms their Not loving Around status. Also you what what, I'm tired of calling this unit Scoutarcher. His name is now "Sterling" Archer, codename Duchess. Yes, all 11 of them. This is great thank you for the idea Glowing Red Sign  I've been avoiding this policy but that doesnt mean it's bad by any stretch of the imagination, it's really good actually! Hopefully we can get Discipline as well before we start fighting, if we did we'd be in really good shape.  Well this is a considerably more tempting offer. His army and mine-with-10-turns-notice would crush Tandi, but... I think I'm gonna turn it down. I'm like, 15-20 turns away from being able to attack her by myself, and I'd rather Snake have as few puppet cities as possible when we have to attack him. We'll kill her soon, I promise!  Back home, barb camps keep spawning in this little trash area west of Wukong  That's something I hate about bigger maps, there's so much room that barbarians basically never stop being a problem. This is risky, but with Iron Working 14 turns away... screw it, let's get greedy!!    Yeeeep, religions are definitely starting to come off the board. I didn't screencap it, but most of these got a reformation belief the next turn. NQ Piety is no joke.  Yesssss, perfect timing with us trying to build 2 wonders basically back-to-back among other more general prep, and we're gonna see if we can sneak out a settler somewhere in there as well.  Speaking of settlers, we settle a 3rd city and it is instantly being assailed by barbs. C'est la vie.  This guy is particularly cramping my style, as I swear not only every time I try to move my worker over to the new city he comes over to block it's path, but he also refuses to actually come within range of my city to shoot it. I dunno if that's a fluke or a product of the smart AI mod or what, but it's pretty frustrating!    Yes! Temple of Artemis is an amazing wonder and it replacing Temple of Zeus as the Honor-exclusive wonder alone is a fairly significant part of Honor's buff. This means that all the cities we capture are going to back up-and-running for us much, much quicker than normal.  We also finished Ironworking a turn later, which not only means that we can get started on colossus but...  We can now make Decisions! What are Decisions you may ask?  Decisions are a mechanic added by Sukritact's Events and Decisions mod, which is heavily inspired by the mechanic(s) of the same name in Europa Universalis 4. If you've played that game you basically know what we're dealing with here, but if you haven't, basically Decisions are a set of choices you can make that give various bonuses but come with a price, such as that one you can see we're able to do right now, which gives you a lump sum of gold in exchange for some culture and a magistrate. Magistrates are a new resource that you can't get anywhere on the map but are given via a new National Wonder in the Judicial Court, unlocked at Mathematics. Each civ has a handful of unique ones related to their real-life history, and what's really cool about it is several mod civs including the Sioux and Canada (not Qin though  ) are actually compatible with their own unique ones!There are also Events, which are fairly self-evident and to avoid overloading you with words I'll explain those when we get our first one. Long story short, A Neat Mod and we'll be keeping an eye on what decisions are available to us as the game progresses.   Going back to the game, our production is humming along quite well. Snake has a terrifying lead, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  The bright side of being assailed on all sides by barbs is we indeed get Discipline! The flat combat bonus is all well and good but the real meat of it comes in the XP boost, if we can keep our units alive (which we'll at least be trying to, considering the fountain of youth), we could have some pretty ridiculous units on our hands down the line.  Roaming Bison! Horse Island! The Sioux are getting all the fun. The Premier tech of the very early game, finally we can start getting libraries u-  JESUS CHRIST (I actually accepted it, as they're far enough from me that being attacked isn't a concern and getting to see their capital as well could be useful)     Well well, what's this? If it's from a city-state returning it and having a friend way out here would be handy, and if it's from a civ, well, yoink!  We still really need to get roads going at some point, hopefully before too long we'll at least have a route from Wukong to Jiangzhou.  Well that's... unexpected.  YES YES YES YES Okay, so, here's the deal on Colossus and why it's one of the best wonders in the game. First off, you effectively get a 100% free full trade route with the cargo ship and trade route slot, plus it gives us some extra gold for every foreign trade route going to the city. Pretty solid right now, right? But think about late game, when 1 trade route is bringing in ~20-25 gold per turn? Plus one has to imagine that a handful of players will have trade routes going to your capital by that point in the game, so add another +4 or +6 to that, and I haven't even mentioned that it also gives you a flat +5 gold AND a great merchant point just because. All of these put together means that by lategame, this one wonder is probably giving you upwards of 30 gold per turn by itself. It doesn't suck. Not long now. Just a couple of techs, some iron and we'll be ready.    Turns out that worker belonged to the Sioux! There's literally no reason not to take other civs' workers unless you REALLY wanna be friends with them, soooooo mine now!  Here is Tech #1 of 3 that we need, and this unlocks the lesser of the Qin's unique units, the Rui Shi. It only has 3 movement to a normal Horseman's 4, but can act as a worker during peacetime. It won't be a huge aspect of this offensive, but the mobility will definitely be an asset.  Meanwhile up north for those curious, Snake is being almost cartoonishly menacing to Sitting Bull as seen here but still hasn't done anything yet.  Surprisingly, we actually manage to fill out Honor before firing a shot! This is good. This is very good.  Aaaand Tech #2 of 3. We won't be building Terracotta Army, but obviously the colosseums will be useful, and most importantly, that unique composite bowman:  This, friends, is the Qin Nu, the greater of our 2 uniques. They're a unique composite bowman but effectively work as a siege unit, and a GODDAMN GOOD ONE. They have an equal bonus vs cities as catapults but can actually defend themselves, which would be pretty good on it's own considering how trash catapults are, but most importantly they START with logistics (a high-level promotion that lets you attack twice per turn). This is meant to be balanced out by them being forced to set up prior to firing (which requires 1 movement), but if you can get 2 or 3 of these in place and firing there is basically little stopping them. You could debate all day about how broken the Qin's unique-stealing ability is, but this unit alone makes it pretty ridiculous by proxy. It's like if Atilla had a random chance of also having minutemen.   We've slipped a bit in production and Snake is still scarily dominant, but by far the most important thing to note here is that Tandi is dead last. This should not be a long war.  Tech #3 falls. We won't have any use for catapults, but obviously we'll be needing courthouses. I'll be trying to fit in the Judicial Court somewhere as well (it doesn't matter where you build it).  The last settler I imagine we'll make this game sets up shop in the middle of the terrain of doom, and I swear this is true even though there's definitely no actual city in that screencap. This city will likely be a loving TITAN of production later on, and is about as defensible as it gets if Vlad (who lives just northwest) gets any funny ideas.  Run Duchess, Run!!!  Oh yes. Just a few more turns now.  I'll resist the urge to start pumping out units nonstop and work on a bit more needed infrastructure while we wait, we're already bleeding money a bit and it's only gonna get worse as Tandi is currently our only trade route partner.  Probablly not the best idea to start a 30+ turn wonder right before a war, but boy oh boy would this be some city if I got it. gently caress it, we lucked out last time let's try it! A turn or two later:  Oh, uhhh. Hi Tandi. Hmm. HeylookoverthereATTACK! Next Time! Actual, Real Fighting! Monicro fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Apr 22, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 23:39
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Thanks for the update! Can't wait to see the fighting get started. To that end, I'd like to request you name our first Great General Ouki (or Wang Jian if you prefer his traditional name). 
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Apr 21, 2016 05:06
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You can't name Great Generals. They come with their own, randomly. That said, there's a lot of famous ancient Chinese generals already in the name pool.
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Apr 21, 2016 06:07
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Actually NQ lets you rename units whenever, so I can do that! I've played a bit ahead of where we are in the thread though, so it should show up in like, 2-3 updates?
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Apr 21, 2016 10:42
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Thanks! And out of curiosity, if we conquered Mother Base, what would our UA give us for the "Unique Building"?
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Apr 21, 2016 14:46
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I'm surprised AI Snake is not stuffing a nearby city-state full of troops at this point.
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Apr 21, 2016 18:05
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Danann posted:I'm surprised AI Snake is not stuffing a nearby city-state full of troops at this point. It was difficult for Vice to program AI Snake to park his troops near city-states to get salvage like a normal human player would so he instead programmed him to passively get salvage over time. Sucks, I know, but that's how it is.
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Apr 21, 2016 20:45
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TravelLog posted:Thanks! And out of curiosity, if we conquered Mother Base, what would our UA give us for the "Unique Building"? Presumably it'll just give us both of his unique units. It's fairly unlikely to materialize though, I doubt we'll have Giant Death Robots
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Apr 22, 2016 00:26
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Giant Death Robots are more like a bonus you get for hitting the end of the tech tree and having lots of spare Uranium rather than something you should be purposefully relying upon. Or for taking territory you don't want to irradiate with a nuke. That said, tanks are awesome once you hit them in the game.
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Apr 22, 2016 03:27
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Plus even if you do get to the end of the tech tree while fighting, XCOM Squads are way better all things considered.
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Apr 22, 2016 03:39
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Don't the MSF's Metal Gears unlock much earlier on the tech tree than normal Giant Death Robots? If so, then there is a chance we'll get to see them used.
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Apr 22, 2016 03:41
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Montegoraon posted:Don't the MSF's Metal Gears unlock much earlier on the tech tree than normal Giant Death Robots? If so, then there is a chance we'll get to see them used. Yeah, but he also needs to level up his palace to 21 which takes work and he only gets one of them. I'm not sure how reliably the AI MSF can get one.
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Apr 22, 2016 04:00
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Monicro posted:Presumably it'll just give us both of his unique units. It's fairly unlikely to materialize though, I doubt we'll have Giant Death Robots The bonus copies unique units as well? I thought it just copied buildings. Speaking of, does stealing buildings let you build unique structures in your cities, or does it just upgrade the ones you currently have?
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Apr 22, 2016 04:29
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kvx687 posted:The bonus copies unique units as well? I thought it just copied buildings. Speaking of, does stealing buildings let you build unique structures in your cities, or does it just upgrade the ones you currently have? The latter, as far as I can tell. Weirdly the former seems to be (effectively) the case for units however, so I dunno it's sorta weird. I don't think this mod was coded perfectly 
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Apr 22, 2016 04:56
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kvx687 posted:The bonus copies unique units as well? I thought it just copied buildings. Speaking of, does stealing buildings let you build unique structures in your cities, or does it just upgrade the ones you currently have? It's an interesting question, because as I understand it (Vice Virtuoso went on about it in Speedballs LP once) is that all buildings fall into a class for example, a Bank, would fall into the bank class, and each class contains all the unique buildings, with civs being flagged to their unique buildings within a class - so I wonder what would happen if someone were to get access to two unique buildings of the same class?
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Apr 22, 2016 05:05
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Giant Death Robots are just the icing on a very tall cake. Earlier in the tree you can get Modern Armor, and they're all but the pinnacle unit in the endgame, provided you have the aluminum to make a decent number of them.
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Apr 22, 2016 07:19
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I was gonna wait for a new page, but meh. 4 updates in one page isn't that bad!! Part 4 - I can't think of a name but lots of stuff happens Welcome back! Last time, we did some stuff.  Finally, we can embark our units. The use of that is a bit limited in a Pangea map, but not being utterly cut off from the sea outside of triremes will probably come in handy.  Up north, the Sioux/MSF cold war rages on (I love that sentence I love this game). Not sure why Snake hasn't pulled the trigger, one has to imagine he has a huge advantage. Wait, wasn't something gonna happen this update? Oh, ohRIGHT  WAR! I've lined my army up for a decapitation strike on Shady Sands, but the Hub is so pitifully defended (10 city strength is pretty impressively bad, I think the absolute minimum it can get is like 9?) that we can just tear it down on our way. Even with it's terrible defense in mind though, you can already see the power of the Qin Nu: that projected damage is from one if it's 2 attacks.  Do you all remember our starting Warrior, the one we sent to scout west on literally turn 1? This is him, and his 117-turn odyssey has finally wrapped him all the way back around to the other side of the NCR's empire. Go, harass the poo poo out of them! We believe in you!  We're bleeding money hard, but we really need to get a road from our capital going for mobility purposes. Hopefully the money from establishing the city connection will help us out economically.  Just a turn later, the Hub's walls are leveled! Charge!!    She assuredly has more units waiting to ambush in the fog, but this is going exceedingly well. I have a Rui Shi somewhere offscreen as well, so my number of units that can actually take the city isn't as bad as it looks either. (Also worth noting is that rather poorly timed declaration of friendship; he doesn't have enough time to help out or anything, but he's not gonna be particularly happy about this)   Not the time, game! Regardless, entering the Medieval Era unlocks Patronage and Aesthetics, and (much like Commerce and Exploration) they both receive pretty sizeable buffs in order for them to compete with Rationalism, much like Honor and Piety for Tradition/Liberty. We're actually gonna open up Tradition, though I'm not sure if we'll complete it once Commerce/Exploration/Rationalism become available.  She indeed sends out some more units, but our swordsman swoops in on their flank to keep their fire off the Qin Nu firing squad. Shady Sands' defense isn't a whole lot better than the Hub, so another volley is let loose, and...  Success!  Eight to go! The conquest spawns another great General as you can see; Great Generals spawn borderline obnoxiously commonly in early wars.  Unfortunately, I sent literally my entire army toward Shady Sands and I'm paying for it back home. Even worse, not only was that marble tile giving us a bit of gold but it being there means our workers can't even finish the road, leaving us with a half-finished road doing nothing but killing our economy even more until we can get rid of this guy. Wait, I know what we can do!  More taxes!  We use the extra cash to buy another Qin Nu in Wukong. This mod can really help you out of some jams, like this one. The war's going well enough otherwise that we can also build this. As you might have noticed Magistrates are effectively vouchers for enacting Decisions, in addition to whatever cost each individual one has. This isn't the only way to get them, but building it early more or less means it'll never be an issue.  Tandi knows she's on the ropes, and is offering me an actually-not-bad city in exchange for her life. I'd like to, but I'm planning to press north after this (not instantly, but once we can regroup and stuff, maybe get a road up to Shady Sands) and her last city is directly between me and Snake, which would give him a pretty sizeable positional advantage and we're already at a disadvantage against him in general.  Sorry!   Yeahhh, that'll happen. However we still have yet to build a bunch of colosseums and stuff and Shady Sands will be out of revolt soon, so we have it under control.  There stands her last city, and as said it's actually not a bad one to take over. It's surrounded by jungle, but we're roughly halfway to Universities so that's not as much of a liability as it would've been earlier (ie, when she built it )That Spearmen in Boneyard scouts east through the jungle to find any NCR stragglers, and discovers...  A second mythical wonder, somehow! (Mythical natural wonders are way, way rarer than the real ones) Obviously Tandi's long since discovered it though, so our actual use for it is limited. I love that we're gotten probably the most absurd natural wonder luck I've ever gotten in this game and no actual way to capitalize on most of it (I know, I know, Mt. Kailash was by choice but shhh), it's extremely good, and cool.  Wait, why on earth did she settle all those garbage cities and not up here? If she had put one on this hill it would've been great! Oh well.   Perfect timing, friends! This influx of gold finally puts us back in the black, and while relying on trade for our economy obviously isn't a very good idea longterm this is a much-needed band-aid for the problem. Our army surrounds Dayglow, and just a few turns later:  Dead!  How generic of you! Later! And like that, her uniques are taken under our wing. Unfortunately we haven't built any Caravansaries (the building their unique building replaces) so we don't get any Outposts, but if the mechanic indeed works the way it appears to we should be able to convert any Great War Infantry we make to Desert Rangers once we unlock those. With the NCR gone, that means one thing: time to get prepped for the MSF campaign. They'll be a significantly harder nut to crack and are much farther from our base of operations to boot, but we can do it. The important thing though (and one of the first things I learned about domination games) is that we take care to regroup and reload before doing so, if we just bumrush him with the remaining units strewn throughout what was once the NCR it's going to go very, very badly for us.  You know what, sure! This conquest has put me in a good mood, and you appear to have fumbled your economy more than a bit so maybe you're trying to kiss up to people all of a sudden.  Medieval Era! Plagues are at a peak during this era, the tech we got to it via (guilds) means we can build Macchu Picchu in Jiangzhou if we so please. I'm not sure I wanna keep pressing our luck with wonders though. Anyway, now that we have a minute let's take a look at Shady Sands!  Yikes, reduced to just a granary. It's gonna stay on Gold Focus as long as it's puppeted too, so we should probably annex it proper as soon as we get our happiness back in order. As an aside, is anyone wondering what happened to our Original Warrior Friend? No? Well I'll tell you anyway:  He's fine. He's just fine   This is a good way to tell if other civs secretly don't like you even if they're not acting like it: They won't give you as fair a deal in trade if they're pissed. Lester is understandably a bit miffed at us for murdering his buddy for literally no reason, but oh well, i'm sure someone else will give us fair value.  Meanwhile, a Wallachian missionary sneaks in and convinces the newly-conquered citizens of Shady Sands to look to god in these times of strife. Let's check out what it gives me!  Oooh Mosques, neat! It's not a great religion for us to have as it'll help pressure any city-states nearby into following it and thus triggering Papal Primacy for him, but Mosques are really solid.  Our spearman pokes around looking for any city-states or even one of the civs we haven't found yet, and holy poo poo, this would've been a phenomenal spot to settle andformetotakeover. gently caress you, Tandi   Oh yeah, here's something I've forgotten to mention so far and some of you have probably noticed: For some reason, Health & Plagues makes additional resources such as cattle, fish etc a strategic resource,  For those keeping score, after we bottomed out at something like -10 Happiness and -11 Gold Per Turn, we're officially back in business. Wars can be tricky to simultaeneously win AND keep your civ running, but it's definitely doable.  Out west, Duchess is still on the hunt for those last 3 civs and finds something promising north of Vietnam. There's no actual real reason to be searching for them as we find them all once someone founds the World Congress anyway, but hey, scouting is fun!  Canada keeps steadily pressing his lands into Vietnamese territory, and still holds an unsteady peace with Vlad. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see one or both of them ask me to team up on him sometime soon.  I'm actually not sure I've ever gotten this wonder in single player, at least on the higher difficulties. The AI prioritizes it to an absurd degree.  Yikes, this cabal has spawned right between our capital and Nanzheng, and we can't make the same mistake as last time, we're gonna need to clear it out. In better news they seem to have captured someone's Missionary, which we can take for ourselves and have full control over where it spreads whatever religion it has (Missionaries always retain their original religion no matter who's actually in control of the unit).  Getting a Great Merchant this early is almost entirely courtesy of Colossus. It good.  Ah, Civil Service, the tech that really signals the start of the mid-game. Our cities (Nanzheng in particular) should really start to take off now, and Pikemen are in my opinion one of the most pivotal combat units in the entire game.  Our spearman is making an attempt at recon on Mother Base, and at least confirms they don't have any sort of navy (which wouldn't matter much obviously, but having Galleass or whatever lined up along the coast shooting inland can actually be quite obnoxious depending on the terrain). I do have to wonder what he's up to though, he still has yet to use that huge army on anyone and him being at -11 GPT indicates he's probably made even more since then. I suppose he could be trying to just turtle up and go for a Science victory or something? I dunno.  Ohhhhh. Oh that explains it. Monicro fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Apr 23, 2016 |
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Apr 23, 2016 01:11
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