A few random observations

[Arrian]

I'm waiting for that postman. Or rather for Amazon to get off its collective ass and SHIP MY ****ING ORDER!!!

-Arrian

[jkelly]

Arrian,

Me too. No shipping notice yet.

...Except for the Bonus CD. Any day now I'll be able to listen to C3C's theme music.

[GhengisFarb™]

Mine just passed through Memphis so it should be here tomorrow.

[Arrian]

Yesterday Amazon's web site listed my order as "not yet shipped."

Today it lists as an "item to be shipped soon."



-Arrian

[Stuie]

Just noticed - Plagues are "off" by default in the epic game. Haven't noticed any volcanoes yet either.

To the editor!!!

[Dominae]

Re: Re: A few random observations

Originally posted by Dominae
A Volcano produces 3 Shields without improvement. That's actually pretty strong in the early-game.

I was misinformed; a Volcano produces 2 Shields in Despotism, and 3 Shields in any other government. It is not possible to improve this Shield output, or the Food/Commerce ouput either.

4-Shield Volcanos is something to keep in mind for the AU mod.


Dominae

[Jon Miller]

I haver seen volcanoes

in fact, I have seen a game with dozens

JM

[Catt]

A Few More Random Observations

I finished one epic game as Mayans on emperor – one game certainly makes me qualified to make judgments about the game . Despite only one game under the belt, I thought I’d share a few things that haven’t been talked about much on the forum and invite feedback.

Luxury Scarcity. See this thread for details. I think this will have significant effect over the long-term. Unless numerous civs are eliminated very early, it will be difficult to secure 6-8 unique sources of luxuries through REXing and trade. Careful trade micromanagement (looking for tradeable luxuries each turn), increased, and dispersed, warfare to seize foreign luxury sources, or learning to live with fewer luxuries may be the order of the day.

Corruption. [Edit: Now that alexman has weighed in and highlighted the problems (see this thread), my observations are moot.]

Bombardment Issues. There are several threads on different bombardment issues, the most-talked about being the change in targeting on cities. But there are a few other changes to bombardment worth mentioning.

Naval Bombardment: AI naval units seem to bombard only cities if targeting land (versus other naval units) – gone seem to be the days of AI navies relentlessly destroying terrain improvements. And the damage taken is a bit quirky – I repeatedly had air units (and some naval units) lose hit points to AI naval bombardment attacks, even though land defenders went unscathed by numerous bombardments. I don’t know if this change is by design or as a result of the “increased damage to units at port” feature implemented for the WWII scenario.

Air Bombardment: AI air units also target cities. With the increased range of air units, I expected that strategic and luxury resources would be favored targets of AI bombers. Instead, AI planes repeatedly flew sorties against well-defended cities instead of exposed, single-source luxuries. In PTW, resource bombing would have been far more common. Interestingly, a few undefended artillery units, though not subject to lethal air attacks, would draw the bombers in. End a turn with several spent artilleries on a mediocre irrigated desert tile, and AI bombers will make runs until the tile is cratered; once cratered, AI bombers will attack the nearby city, entirely bypassing any higher value tiles, including undefended resource tiles.

Tile Damage: Once all improvements are destroyed by bombardment, the tile suffers “damage” which shows up as craters. You can road a cratered tile, but need to expend worker turns to clear the damage before irrigating or mining.

Specialists. Specialists are much more useful and worthwhile, especially in mid- to high-corrupt cities, but even in core cities as well. I really enjoy the increased utility of most of the specialists. There is a downside, however. Precisely because of their utility, specialists demand more micromanagement than they did before, if you want to get the most out of them. In the later game, each time population grows or shrinks, or tile improvements change, it is worthwhile (and time-consuming) to cycle through the various specialist options. The city’s growth may make a policeman more worthwhile than the taxman you were using last turn. I’ve found the policeman to be especially useful though that may in part be due to the corruption bugs in C3C. I am not convinced that civil engineers work as advertised (see C3C bugs thread for report). You can make something significant from careful use of specialists – but if you hate micromanagement, you still have the option to ignore specialists and let the city governor control populations. Also, and worth a big , is the fact that specialist’s display their impact in the city view screen – so you can cycle through entertainers, taxmen, scientists, policemen, and civil engineers and see the effect straightaway.

Ruins. City ruins no longer preserve the road (or railroad) tile improvement that comes from a city. Ruins are now unroaded, unimproved tiles.

Slave Units. Enslaved units cost no upkeep. Big deal, right? Well, those artillery units that you capture are now identified as “enslaved” units and come free of maintenance.

AIs Rush Wonders. There was some skepticism that in PTW the AI didn’t use great leaders to rush great wonders. My game replay showed 3 scientific leaders generated (not by me ) – in two cases a great wonder was completed by the Ai civ that got a SGL on the very next turn; in the third case, no wonders were available for rushing. Though not conclusive, it struck me as pretty strong evidence that the AI will use SGLs for wonder-rushing.

Continental Rally Point. What a simple yet welcome improvement! In the age of railroads, a CRP, available with only a click or two, is a godsend (particularly since city-specific rally points were erased if an improvement was built in the city; when newly available improvements were built in multiple cities, multiple rally points had to be reactivated; no more!).

The above is worth precisely what you paid for it (nothing!) – especially considering it comes from the depth of experience one can only acquire by playing a single game of C3C ( ) – but since I hadn’t seen some of this mentioned elsewhere, I thought I’d post.

Catt

[Jaybe]

CLEAR Continental Rally Point not only clears any continental rally point, but also clears ALL rally points on the continent.

Civil Engineers do not change the shield display. OTOH, the number of shields they add are displayed on the Civil Engineer. It also is applied to the build time. Note that Civil Engineers can only be applied to improvements/wonders, not to units (when building a unit, zero shields will be displayed on the CE).

Bombardments hitting vulnerable units in port or on airfields in a city are really cool (barring AI ineptitude)!

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Catt
[ Ruins. City ruins no longer preserve the road (or railroad) tile improvement that comes from a city. Ruins are now unroaded, unimproved tiles.

This one caught me by surprised. I abandon a camp and paid no atention to the tile. Late I sent a worker over to see what could be done and found no road!

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Jaybe
[b]
Civil Engineers do not change the shield display. OTOH, the number of shields they add are displayed on the Civil Engineer. It also is applied to the build time. Note that Civil Engineers can only be applied to improvements/wonders, not to units (when building a unit, zero shields will be displayed on the CE).

That point about the not to units is one to watch, thanks.

[Catt]

Originally posted by Jaybe
Civil Engineers do not change the shield display. OTOH, the number of shields they add are displayed on the Civil Engineer. It also is applied to the build time. Note that Civil Engineers can only be applied to improvements/wonders, not to units (when building a unit, zero shields will be displayed on the CE).

Weird that the tax and science shows up both on the city output display and the specilist itself but that the CE shields show only on the specialist -- but you're absolutely right, they do affect build times (don't know how I missed that).

Catt

[pikesfan]

Re: Re: Re: A few random observations

Originally posted by Dominae
I was misinformed; a Volcano produces 2 Shields in Despotism, and 3 Shields in any other government. It is not possible to improve this Shield output, or the Food/Commerce ouput either.

But how many people mine volcanoes in real life? I could see that in the modern age, people (such as the Icelanders) tap the geothermal resources. Maybe a fourth shield could be added in the post-Industrial age to represent this geothermal energy.

[Arrian]

Some other random observations:

Harbor cost is now down to 60 (30 for seafaring civs).

Republic, IMO, may be a stronger late-game goverment than it used to me, because of the support rules: 1/3/4, IIRC. So once you get a bunch of cities over size 6, you're in business. I have a game in which I've got ~175 military units, but my civ gets ~150 of them for free, so I'm paying ~50gpt in upkeep. If I were a Democracy, it would be 175 gpt, unless Demo got unit support and I missed that somehow.

Resource/Luxury distribution sure is different. In my current game, my 5-civ continent had 4 luxuries, and the American island (8 cities) has 2. Can you say TARGET? Iron and Horses appear to be less common. Haven't really looked too closely at the others, but are resources just scarcer in general?

I love the new specialists. They help make up for the current corruption issues. Oh, and thanks for pointing out the "not when building units" rule. I was wondering why in some cities they didn't seem to work.

The Dromon animation is cool.

-Arrian

[Thoth]

I'm not sure resources are any rarer, but the distribution seems to have changed. It seems more common to either have multiples or none at all.

I think Demo will need to have some unit support added to make it competetive with Republic in the late game. 1/2/3 free units (town/city/metro)?