Due to the overwhelming positive feedback I got from my #mce_temp_url#advice to the king of RTS, I feel the need to also lend my wisdom to the King of the land across the channel, Turn Based Strategy
That's right, it's time for Scottie to fix Civ V!
But what's that I am hearing? Civ V is fucking awesome? No arguments from me there, it's everything a Civ game should be, and from my early impressions, everything is very well balanced, except for one small detail.
In my first game, I had 5 cities by about 1850 or so, and had ~16 excess hapiness. I then went on the offensive, and within the space of about 15 turns, I took 4 city states, and captured ~6 cities from one country, who promptly offered me 3 more as part of a peace deal. By the end of this, my unhappiness was at about 16, I left all of them as puppets, except for the 3 I was gifted. My main 5 cities pretty much completely shut down due to unhappiness that was occurring on a different continent!
But wait, I am sure that everyone will say that I simply expanded too quick, and yes, I am sure that if I had taken the 4 city states, and then waited for them to improve and built more happiness increasing buildings then the problem could have been minimsed. However, the above story was merely setting the scene for my complaint.
I then got frustrated at my shitty, unhappy empire, and started a new game.
Map - the small islands one
Size - Biggest
Length - Longest
Difficulty - 4/prince/the one where you and the A.I. produce at the same rate
Civ - Egypt
Now, in this game, I did not build a single settler, and I have built a single pikeman to deal with barbarians (my initial warrior got himself killed against barbarians earlier), and whilst I am still a fair way from victory, I am likely to win much before 2050, where as in my first game, which had the same map settings, I'll likely still have 80% of the world to conquer by 2050.
Having a single city and going for a cultural victory is OP, because of the changes they made to how the economy works, how the cultural victory works, as well as things like golden ages and the bonuses the capital gets, and also to the diplomacy (in Civ 5, people only attack you if you do something to piss them off, which is an incredibly change, but it has allowed this one imbalance).
I'll probably be uploading a faq describing a policy adoption order and a vague research order that will achieve this as a detailed faq, assuming VGCHartz still has those, I dunno.
So yeah, Sid Meiers, if you're reading this, I understand why you did all the changes, and I think the game is incredible. But you went a bit too far in making a small empire better.
