Civilization V

[Jan-Poo]

That's not exactly so. The game assigns to each unit a certain military value, so if a warrior is worth 5, a swordsman is worth 15 and so on. Then the game sums all of these values and gets a number that is supposed to represent a civ's military strength. This considers both quantity and quality of the army.

The AI most likely considers that, as it never happened to me that they would start a war against my 10 industrial units with their 40 medieval footmen. And upgrading always caused a boost in my military power statistic.

When a civ insults you most of the time it's just big talk without basis. They hate you so they tell you all kind of stuff, even if it doesn't make sense. An AI never begs for peace if they think they are stronger. If they think they are stronger they "graciously" offer a peace treaty with outrageous compensations.

Anyway I don't think that exp is considered at all in the calculation and that's a big fault. A siege weapon with the "attack twice" promotion is even worth more than two siege weapons and the same goes for an aircraft with attack twice and autorepair.

Additionally the AI only takes in account the relative military strength to decide whether the war is going in their or your favor and it doesn't matter if the bulk of their units are in a completely different continent and they have practically none on the war front.
You might even have slaughtered 20 enemy units with no losses, you might have even conquered three of his cities, if his military strength is higher he'd still think that the war is going good for him.
And that means he'll ask for a peace treaty with extremely unfavorable conditions for you, even if he's losing cities after cities and soldier after soldier.

In war you should always consider the skill of the general and not just the strength of his army, but the programmers must have been too lazy to create a code that counts losses and conquests from the start of the war and rather went with a simple comparison of two numbers.

[Metaler]

Quick question: is it true that G&K made navies a lot better? I remember they were awful in the vanilla game, and I've heard from some people on Something Awful's Let's Play forum that the expansion made naval combat a lot better in many ways...

[Vallen Chaos Valiant]

Originally Posted by Skane

This might seem silly, but... religion makes it "complicated" for me to declare war on someone when my Civilization's religion passively converts them.

They're just so friendly, so... chummy... that I feel like a douchebag clicking the Declare War button. I prefer it when they're hurling insults at you or laughing manically as they declare war on you. Makes it sweeter to steamroll over them until they enter Afraid status and grovel for mercy.

Natch.

Sid mentions in an interview that it is partly why he makes the AI to be defiant when you are about to wipe them out. He doesn't want the player to feel bad for winning the game, so he tries to make dying leaders more angry and insulting towards you as you strike the killing blow.

[Kyuu]

Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant

dying leaders more angry and insulting towards you as you strike the killing blow.

In that weakened position -- I'd be acting the same way actually.

"You gonna take my capital? Suck my balls!" XD

[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by Metaler

Quick question: is it true that G&K made navies a lot better? I remember they were awful in the vanilla game, and I've heard from some people on Something Awful's Let's Play forum that the expansion made naval combat a lot better in many ways...

It really depends on what do you mean by "better" and "awful".

-Naval combat has a lot more options now, ships are divided in melee and ranged, which means you can conquer coastal cities with your melee ships.
-Embarking your armies into the sea is a lot safer. Not only naval units can no longer instakill them (unless they're powerfyl enough) but you can stack your embarked units with your naval units.
-There are admirals now that work like generals but support naval units instead. They can be expended to insta-heal them.
-In the renaissance era you get privateers who can steal other naval units and gain gold from attacking coastal cities, so you can have fun being a pirate.
-Battleships now are the equivalent of artillery in the sea. They have two hexes range and they are strong against cities. They are extremely powerful.


In short if what you wanted was more options for your naval strategies, gods and kings offers a lot of that. But if you thought naval combat was too easy, now it's even easier.
-The AI for naval combat was made better in several way. Whenever they build an army to send to you, they make several naval units accompany them taking advantage of the new stacking rules.
-If the map has prevalence of sea, AI favors naval units a lot more now.
-I've often seen the AI using encircling tactics against other ships. They take a target and focus on it, and because of the encircling, they can't escape.
-AI Naval units pose a real threat to your coastal cities. you must make sure to defend them.

Unfortunately these tactics are still exploitable. If you build a concentrated fleet of 5 or six ranged ships and two melee you'd still be unstoppable. It doesn't matter if the AI has hundreds of ships throghout the world, they're almost never more than three in the same place and you can annihilate them.
Encircling tactics work well against single targets but not against fleets, they just expose themselves to your concentrated fire.
The AI doesn't seem to favor submarines, which you can use to destory the AI's fleet and other embarked units with almost no opposition.

Same old stuff, except you'll find that your fleet can conquer cities a lot easier now, not much for the melee naval units which don't really change much imho, but for the fact ranged naval attacks to cities actually do damage. I used to chip cities' health away 1 point at a time in the past, and it was still a convenient tactic due to higher mobility of ships.
Triremes on the other hand are a lot less useful now. You can't use them to attack land units and if you attack naval units you'll suffer damage too (like any melee land units) except you can't heal outside friendly territory! Prepare to lose a lot of them to barbarians if you're sending them into exploration.
The bright side of this, is that barbarian triremes won't bother you as much as they did before.

[erneiz_hyde]

So, I've been playing this like mad for several days now. I gradually step up the difficulty, starting from Prince and now with a bit of luck I can do decent in Emperor.

One game in Emperor was actually so successful I can't believe I actually did it. I never tried the Chu-Ko-Nu rush before so I went and played as China, Marathon speed, on a Huge Hemisphere map. To spice things up, I put 22 civs and 38 city states in there so it doesn't feel as lonely. It started as usual, your neighbors declaring war on you with waves of units, nothing I can't handle with a few archers.

I conquered a CS right next to me and that made some of my neighbors DoW on me. Anyways, things happened (I just have to say that Chu-Ko-Nus are simply awesome). Eventually I conquered half the continent until I stopped the spree.

Oh, and here's the other amazing thing: China's paper makers are ridiculously amazing. At that game, I eventually conquered the whole continent I started on and I had over 2000 gpt. I bought every single one of my units and almost never build them unless I run out of things to build. At this point I just can't lose because everyone else is still on riflemen while I had Giant Death Robots (and I had the Utopia Project and UN one turn before completion, and i had the last SS part idling in my capital).

Anyways, bored and with that much of gpt, I tried something VERY cheesy: I BOUGHT all of a civ's city before I nuked their capital. They never say no when I offer 2000 gpt and lots of luxuries for about 20 of their cities which they never get lol. Repeat this until eventually my PC stopped running the game because it doesn't have enough of...something. I don't know, the game just crashed and it happened every time I reload it

Sadly my games since hasn't been as successful. I'm starting to think that regardless of your chosen victory condition, going to war is really the only way to win in the higher difficulties. Oh, and despite the slow, marathon speed seems to make the war game easier too, since the enemy needs more time to replace their defeated soldiers, I just had to make sure they kill none of mine (and with Chu-Ko-Nus, that's easy). And the length of time my Chu-Ko-Nus remains useful is lengthened considerably (they don't suddenly send muskets at you after a long march to their capital).

Anyways, another thing I'd like to add: I F'in HATE jungles. And forests too in that matter, but I got more bad experience with jungles. They can seriously deter assaults made on cities early in the game. Whenever I see a enemy city riddled with forests and jungles I'll at least bring twice the number of units than planned or wait until at least artillery. marshes are still okay because despite the extra damage taken, I can still fire from 2 tiles away and that's vital.

[Jan-Poo]

Yeah forests and jungles are extremely annoying because they block your ranged unit's view. In one game I even used workers to cut down forests and free the view before launching a particularly difficult attack. You just need to protect them with strong defensive units while they fortify. They usually can resist 2-3 turns, and you can always switch them.

Huge maps tend to crash my game too and that's I generally avoid them. It's a pity but even high end PCs have problem dealing with that. It's fine as long as you don't uncover the whole map though, but then what's the point?

Ranged units with double attacks are obviously your most overpowered asset until you get bombers. China gets those for free, but you can only use them for one era until they become obsolete. You should always try to get that with your siege weapons. A rocket artillery with double attack, one range increment and autorepair is simply godly. Think carefully before taking upgrades VS cities or defensive bonuses. Unless it's a short game I rather go with 3 barrage or 3 accuracy for my siege weapons, it will pay in later eras.