Yes, it's stated multiple times in the manual. Seriously, am I the only Qt3 member who completely reads a game's manual before actually playing the game? It strikes me as somewhat of a lost art.Originally Posted by djotefsoup
Yes. I read the whole manual after playing a complete game on chieftain difficulty.
Also, I've read a number of complaints about features missing from Civ V that actually aren't missing at all (I guess everyone expects things to be in exactly the same place they were in Civ IV).
A digital manual that I'm not going to print out is not going to get read. I try looking things up in the civopedia by keyword, but it's more interested in provided historical flavor text than details about mechanics. Every time I've gone from there to the manual (most recently, to try to get exactly what the differences were between the options in the advanced map setup), it's been less than helpful. Asking here or anywhere else has a much higher chance of success, and it gives me something to read during the CTD.
Speaking of which, I'm not sure if it's the heightened difficulty (upgrading to prince) or the number of starting civs (12), but my current playthrough is incredibly slow in both DX9 and 10/11. It was running perfectly well for the first two games, which I believe had fewer civs but not smaller maps, and lower difficulty. 12 is definitely too much for the engine to handle, even on a reasonably powerful quad core like my computer. It'd be interesting to get some detail on where between 8-12 things like saves, loads, and turn times start falling apart.
I thought excess luxury items give you one happiness. Five for the first and one each after so 3 Whales gets you 7 happiness?
Of course trading excess luxury gives you a much greater bonus of +5 happiness or "We Love the King Day".
Considering how useless manuals generally are these days (assuming there even is one), most of us probably figured it'd be a waste of time.
This was actually a pretty decent manual. The general information section is chock full of information on game mechanics, and the tables are quite good -- although there do appear to be a few errors in places (one section says that Taj Mahal starts a Golden Age and another section says that it increases Golden Age length by 50%).
Honestly, I probably wouldn't have read it cover-to-cover either, if I didn't have an iPad (bathroom and couch reading of PDFs for the win). Who wants to be sitting in front of your computer reading the manual when you could be playing the game instead.
Manuals being generally pretty terrible these days, the assumption that given how many tooltips and suggestions there are elsewhere, there would be one for specialists if they were important, less free time to actually read them than when I was into civ2 and having this and F1 2010 to juggle.
Also that these days (years) I'm pretty much of the opinion that unless you're trying to teach me to fly a 747 then if it's not explained through gameplay it's probably too obtuse a feature for its own good.
So, when looking at the prefs for a new game I noticed my default advanced options were for 20 city states along with the 12 civs. I cut it down to 6 c-s and the game is running well again, now with the full complement of opponents. So that might be a significant variable worth noting for anyone with slowdowns in loads and turn times, if it's something that isn't obvious to you.
I believe that's correct. In my last game I was struggling with happiness when a bunch of deals I had ended. And my happiness went up as all those extra luxury items came back.
That can't be true. Any luxury item after the first of each kind is not supposed to give you any extra happiness at all. Something else must have happened in your game.
Waay late to this, but I recall sailing past Japan and discovering Mt. Fuji, for what it's worth.
Not to pick on you but I am really baffled this statement. In Civ IV you could found a city next to marble spend a few turns building a quarry and suddenly your capital city/wonder citiy, located thousands of miles starts building the Great Library at double speed. In Civ V you get a modest 25% boost if you have city near a resource like marble. In Civ V you need to build city near specific things to unlock buildings like circus, forges, stables. Even mountains have used Machu Picchu, and observatories. More importantly no longer can you build unlimited horseman, cavalry etc with a single resource. If you have two horse resource you can build 2 units. Now I don't have a strong opinion about which is better from a game play perspective.
I do know that compared Civ V, Civ IV is "abstracting it" or "dumbing it down". Oh and as for people not caring about people in other cities, you might want to read up on the causes of the civil war, and the civil rights movement....
Just checked, and this is definitely not true. If you saw "+1 extra happiness per luxury resource" in the popup, that's due to a commerce policy (Protectionism) and not related to having multiple luxury resources of one kind.
But here's another nice little UI trick I just found: click on the small icon in the top left of the screen, just below the status bar, and you can choose between current research progress (the default), a sortable city list, and a unit list!
I found Krakatoa in the ocean!
Thanks for the clarification!
Cool, so there are natural wonders on the Earth map, but they're rare, I'm guessing.
It actually tells you how many there are (8 or 10 I think, on the huge map) - I've found Krakatoa, Mt Fuji and the Great Barrier Reef (which counts as 2 apparently).
Ha, that's the first thing that I learned to do (well, first thing I "discovered" in a regular game, beyond the tutorials) because I wanted to be able to jump around between my units in a very easy way and see which had moves left, etc. I use it all the time.
While I've been harping on Civ 5 for removing flavor, I gotta say I think natural wonders are a nice flavor addition. With their inclusion and City States exploring early is much more rewarding (whereas before its main practical value was farming unit XP and/or having your units mauled to death by tigers.)
It's also been a really good thing for making the Ottoman's bonus more useful - I built one trireme and used it to press-gang an entire fleet and cover a lot of the coast.
Thanks for the clarification.
The 12 hour clock bugged me so much that I modified it to be a 24 hour clock, but I noticed somebody else had already beat me to it. Oh well, at least I learned a little about the mod tools while doing it.
Some formulas I have managed to dig up.
City Unhappiness: +1 for every population, +2 for every city (strictly linear). The Forbidden Palace and a perk from the Order Tree are additive, reducing the unhappiness per city to zero. Occupied cities (annexed cities without a courthouse, even those undergoing razing) add their population again to unhappiness, and there is also an extra unhappiness penalty based on number of annexed cities, but in general any annexed city should have a court housed built pronto and most annexed cities should start as puppets until the Civ is in a position to take the extra unhappiness and build a courthouse.
Trade Routes: Capital Population does not matter. gold=(city population)*1.25. Add 1 if Arabia, change multiplier to 1.5 if you have Machu Pichu. This means the granary pays for itself on extra population alone. Also, this means population is not only good for research, but gold as well. Example, city has population 8. Connecting it to the capital creates a gold income of 10. If the Civ was Arabia, than gold would be 11. The nation builds Machu Pichu. The city not generates 12 gold. Arabia would generate 13.
Unit Maintenance: I have not found a straight calculation on this one, and if anyone does, please share it. However, it appears all unit types count the same (worker, great persons, military units, etc.), odd number of units do not cost more maintanence (e.g. 5 units have the same maintenance costs as 4 units), and maintenance costs rise as the game progresses. The last one means on a per unit basis, not that as the game progresses a Civ has more units and thus more maintenance costs.
If anyone can figure out what determines City Strength, I would be appreciative as well. The manual says city size is the base factor, plus city improvements and garrisoned forces. However, it does not say if that is based on culture or population or if tech levels help any, etc.
Thanks for the details. I added a pointer to your post since it's pretty long, so please keep editing if you find anything new!
Maintenance rising over time has been in previous Civs, it's called "inflation" by the game and varies by difficulty level as per the handicaps XML file. I had not been sure about its exact effects, though.
I don't think everything costs the same. More specifically, I think units from different tech levels have different costs (which would explain maintenance getting more expensive as the game progresses), as I'm pretty sure I've seen unit maintenance go up when I've upgraded some units.
This is only true on lower difficulties. As I recall, you get the +1 on Chieftan, but not on Warlord.
Similarly, someone mentioned the Unhappiness being +1 per population and +2 per city, but that's on Prince and above. It's only +1 per city if you're playing Chiefan or below.
There were enough new systems in Civ V that I started over from the bottom - I've played on Settler through King so far.
My strategy of never building settlers and only conquering city states is going... pretty well. The main challenge I have is keeping happiness up while I build courthouses. Besides that, conquering them is easy with my samurai :)
Added a note about puppet states:
"Puppet states act as regular cities in in terms of gold output. You can build road or harbor connections for trade routes, and a puppet's net output of gold (positive or negative!) is added to your empire. If a puppet state pursues ruinous building projects, you will have to pay for their maintenance!"
I was confused why my net gold income was swinging wildly, and sure enough I was paying for all the crap that my puppet states were building! That's a serious downside to puppet states -- if you have precarious finances you'll want to annex or raze them.
edit: HOWEVER, puppets do not increase the cultural cost of new social policies! So there's another advantage to them, too...
Last edited by Chris Nahr; 10-03-2010 at 03:07 AM.
Also added a note that the cost of social policies increases per city, depending on the map size. Thanks to Greatatlantic!
And a question. Can anyone confirm or deny that units get forcibly disbanded when you're running a deficit on empty coffers? The economic adviser said this would happen but I've never actually seen it, and the AI seems to keep huge armies around with -38 GPT or something insane like that.
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