Sulla's walkthrough

[Fidel]

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/americanempire.html

depressive stuff...he is right on literally everything.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

[Dinner]

That review is spot on. The game has serious issues right now.

[binTravkin]

They could have worked on it for 2 more months.
That would be a win since it would be much more ready for release and people would still buy it for Xmas.
Currently it's not that much value.

[Stuie]

For my money, most of the issues the game has are with the AI. Teach the AI to handle the new concepts better and it's going to be an outstanding game. I don't agree with many of his game design complaints - build times, stacking limits for civilan units, lack of instance intelligence regarding every Civ everywhere, etc. - those things make the game more interesting for me. But to each his own.

Couple quibbles with Sulla's walkthrough:

Caravels have a natural +2 sight as their default ability. Playing as the Americans, I had another +1 sight.

No - the American +1 sight special ability only applies to land units.

Once your cities hit size 10 in this game, they pretty much stop growing altogether.

This has not been my experience. Without trying TOO hard my cities are in the low-teens. I'm sure I could micro them much higher.

[pdxsean]

For my money, most of the issues the game has are with the AI. Teach the AI to handle the new concepts better and it's going to be an outstanding game. I don't agree with many of his game design complaints - build times, stacking limits for civilan units, lack of instance intelligence regarding every Civ everywhere, etc. - those things make the game more interesting for me. But to each his own.

I agree with this. The more I play, the more discouraged I am by the AI. They are incompetent militarily and only seem to manage their empires through weight of numbers. Some of the balance issues allow the AI to do some really crazy stuff.

I love the build times but I suspect that these very build times, along with the lack of serious unhappiness penalty, are what allows the steamrolling we see. If your standing army is destroyed, it's impossible to stop an invader by building more units. If the invader has no penalty for taking town after town... well it's obvious where that leads.

[Fidel]

Perhaps bring back conscription at the expense of population and allow AI to hit panic button?
I cannot post it in the appropriate thread, Robert has closed it.

[MxM]

For my money, most of the issues the game has are with the AI.

Well, interface could have been better, but you can live "trough" current interface. But AI is not good enough in terms of tactical combat.

At the same time I can not say that AI is very bad in terms of expansion. Of course if one just steamroll over inferior tactical AI, there is no problem to win game on higher difficulty, but try to not declare war each time you can - the game will become more challenging. And yeah, AI giving WAY too much Cities for peace at the moment.