My wife appears to be enjoying Civ incorrectly

[Egbert]

Financial & Philosophical are probably my favourites. I keep playing Elizabeth recently. I quite like Spiritual too, for constant civic-flipping.
As I like playing small, buildery empires, Organised is not so useful to me.

Me too. I can't help myself, I always pick Elizabeth.
And I like smallish buildery empires.

Lizzy

[Elok]

My rating of Charismatic isn't based on a real college try, mind you; every single freaking time I try to play as Hannibal (or other such leader), the computer lands me with an abysmal starting position. No joke, I've done it at least twenty times and every time I was in the jungle, the arctic, right next to a huge desert, on a pitiful little island, no horses, copper or iron, no luxuries...graaaah! Of course, that was before I learned about the "balanced" resources setting and the ability to regenerate the map on the first turn. Maybe I'll give Hannibal another try when I'm done with my current game. Experience spam sounds fun.

[Solomwi]

I've always been at something of a loss when it comes to great generals. As Warlords, they're fun and all, especially with the extra movement and boosted experience, but not in an enormously game-changing way, plus I have to take care not to treat them as expendable like my other troops. The boosted troop production in one city option never held much appeal either, since when I'm at war I have a whole bunch of cities cranking reinforcements. I guess the great instructor deal could be big fun if you were charismatic with vassalage, theocracy, barracks/stable/etc. in a city with West Point; I haven't tried it and I'm not going to do the math, but what would that city's units start at, level five or so?

Anyway, how do you use the GGs?

Similar to DaShi, I'll use the first to make a Medic III unit, then start plunking them down as instructors. I try to spread them around, as the returns on +2 XP start diminishing quickly, but my HE/WP city will typically get enough to crank out level 4 or 5 units. I'll also stack them in my Red Cross city until it's putting out level 3 units (Medic/Woodsman III infantry or mech heals as well as a Medic III unit, and I can attach a general to one to get it to Medic III/Woodsman III for 40% healing). I may also stack some in a coastal city to boost my navy. At some point relatively late, I start adding them to combat units for the fun of it.

[-Jrabbit]

Give me Creative or Financial for my first trait.
With either of those, I'm don't really care what my 2nd trait is.

[Dinner]

As I recall Victoria had the best combo of traits but the British UU kind of sucked so in MP I'd usually ask if we could play unrestricted leaders so I could use the good leader but match it up with a civ which had the best UU and UB for the map type.

[Ming]

Creative... Industrial... Financial... Organized... Spiritual... Aggressive... Whatever. Each combination can walk you down a different path to victory. And that's one of the things I like about the game. I will admit I'm a big fan of Creative for MP games since it does come down to a cultural war for key squares some times... but what the heck. All the different combinations make the games interesting and different. I still love playing random leaders for MP games. It makes you play each game just a little differently.

[Medex]

Holy crap you guys are actually talking about Civ.

btw..the OP was hilarious.. three cheers for the wife.

[Ming]

Holy crap you guys are actually talking about Civ.

Yeah... it is nice to see a Civ thread in the OTF every once and a while to remind us that many of us came to this site because of Civ or some other similar game.

btw..the OP was hilarious.. three cheers for the wife.

Yeah... it was hilarious. But I wouldn't be surprised if my wife wouldn't do the exact same thing... and for similar reasons

[dannubis]

Give me Creative or Financial for my first trait.
With either of those, I'm don't really care what my 2nd trait is.

This

[Solomwi]

Elok, I let my wife read the OP. She cackled, got a gleam in her eye and said that might convince her to take up the game. I've since hidden the discs.

[Elok]

Well, my wife FINALLY beat her first game today, with a space race victory in 203X. The computer told her she'd governed as skillfully as Ethelred the Unready. Sadly, she didn't seem at all put out by this information...

[Felch]

IIRC, Unready referred to the quality of his advisors. Sounds like Elok is the one who should be ashamed.

[MikeH]

[Arrian]

My wife's main problem was always that she has no idea how to prepare for war. Or even defend her empire from attack. She's a decent "builder" player. Back when we had spare time (before the baby, before her job got more demanding), she was making some progress in that department, but was still pretty bad at it. Typical question from her: "ok, I guess I need to attack [AI empire]. How many units do I need? X?" response: "Not if you want to take more than 1 city. You need double that. Where is your military pump city? You don't have one. Ok. Do you have a city with a barracks?" and so on.

Many games would end the moment somebody picked a fight w/her. Some games were "temporarily" turned over to general Arrian (who would fight off the AI invasion, counterattack and enlarge her empire as well as fixing all the things he believed she was doing wrong). Rarely, if ever, did she take back over. She lost interest, probably because once I took control, her empire became MY empire, set up and run my way.

-Arrian

[Elok]

IIRC, Unready referred to the quality of his advisors. Sounds like Elok is the one who should be ashamed.

It's not the adviser's fault if the ruler only listens to the advice about one-eighth of the time. So there.

She now says that, having beaten Civ once, she's done with it. Only time will tell. Like Arrian's wife, she took a somewhat lackadaisical approach to war--she promoted almost at random, didn't bother checking who had barracks, sent troops as they were built instead of massing them, didn't soften up with bombardment before assault...she won anyway just because of technological superiority due to Settler level.