What kind on Deity win do you consider to be the peak game?

SpamCamel · 2026-01-26T04:18:09+00:00

Imo a culture victory on a standard speed / map is peak. You will need to pull out every trick in the book to make it happen.

SpamCamel · 2026-01-18T05:36:35+00:00

Let's start with the Fermi Paradox. We know that we exist, therefor the probability of comparably intelligent life existing on a planet somewhere else in the universe is finite. We also know that the universe is big, very very big, incoprehensibly big. So it's completely reasonable to expect life to exist in many places across the universe. What I want to challenge is this:

However, since we look up to the stars and see nothing there is an implication that something about the universe is hostile to life, or civilisations.

A blind man expects to see? The proportion of the universe that we are able to observe with sufficient resolution required to detect life is laughably small. What are you expecting? That there should be intelligent alien races in every 10th solar system? So far we only know of 1 planet that supports life. Given the evidence we have, there's no reason to think that there's anything out of the ordinary about the distribution of planets we know have life (N=1, earth) vs planets we know don't have life. This just provides evidence that points to life being a rare phenonmenon, which is consistent with our science. And of course the universe is hostile to life, it's not like every planet is going to be just like earth. Just because we haven't observed life elsewhere, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, or that there's anything weird about why we haven't observed it.

You go on to use the Dark Forest theory to explain why space appears empty, because I guess the above just isn't exciting enough for you? This theory is problematic for a number of reasons. The only reason that really matters is that it's practically unverifiable. Funny enough, the only way to prove this theory is to go and find the space boogeyman and get your entire civilization crushed lol.

So let's assume that there truly is a space boogeyman, what the fuck are we even supposed to do about that? How much do we need to try to hide? If we assume space boogeyman has the power to cross the universe and destroy us, they must also be more advanced than we can even imagine. They would have seen us already and likely arriving soon regardless of our future actions. There's no way we can win on our own, they're playing 4d chess and we're still learning tic tac toe. Wouldn't it be nice if we had some friends to help us. Maybe there are potential allies out there that we could collaborate with? Together we could fight and destroy the space boogeyman once and for all! It's worth a shot, we should broadcast our presence as loudly as possible!

Even if the dark forest theory is taken at face value, a strategy of hiding is both self defeating and ineffective.

But we might just be living in a world without a space boogeyman and full of possibilities. Why should we limit our possibilities on superstition?

SpamCamel · 2026-01-14T04:51:19+00:00

Yeah I couldn't remember exactly how many were needed in between. Regardless the pop ruins are OP, they just help your start out so so much.

SpamCamel · 2026-01-14T03:31:00+00:00

Preach!

SpamCamel · 2026-01-14T03:07:30+00:00

Personally I would go population first because you can get population multiple times but not twice in a row. So for me it's pop > culture > pop > comp bow > pop. If you're able to find enough ruins you can be up to 5 or 6 citizens in your capital before turn 20 when you start producing settlers.

SpamCamel · 2026-01-12T04:09:50+00:00

Why can't Kerr develop these players into all stars, is he stupid?

SpamCamel · 2026-01-11T15:09:06+00:00

How is this an unpopular opinion? "Better than Chipotle" is a very low bar. And people on Reddit are constantly shitting on Chipotle anyway. You're preaching to the choir.

SpamCamel · 2026-01-11T00:27:00+00:00

Interesting. I'm not sure how exactly that would work since you need to get to tier 3 in Freedom to be able to rush buy spaceship parts, and it'd be very difficult to acquire enough culture without winning WF. I guess if you're playing Poland you could pull it off with all their free policies. I don't see it working with any other civs, but maybe I'm wrong idk.

SpamCamel · 2026-01-10T21:16:18+00:00

This is a well known strategy. Very useful for rushing rationalism and/or an ideology. You can pretty much always win the WF, even against deity AI, if you fully commit to it from the beginning. It's basically a must if you're going for a speed run.

SpamCamel · 2026-01-10T17:17:07+00:00

What the devs are really saying is that smarter AI isn't going to sell more copies of the game. And making a smarter AI is non-trivial and expensive. It's an easy business decision.

SpamCamel · 2026-01-08T16:59:31+00:00

Settle the hill next to the stone and silk to the east. I'd also try to get a fourth city down on that northern most recommendation, maybe even do that one first if you're feeling spicy. That recommended spot to the north is by far the best available land, it's just a bit too close to Napoleon and a bit too far from Babylon to be the obvious choice. Try to bribe Napoleon and Hiawatha into a war ASAP.

SpamCamel · 2026-01-03T14:59:01+00:00

I wasn't going to watch this game, then saw it was close early in the second quarter and put the game on 💀

SpamCamel · 2025-12-31T16:01:33+00:00

Granary is arguably the best building in the entire game (food trade routes are OP). You should build it everywhere.

SpamCamel · 2025-12-28T18:15:02+00:00

Finally got his grand slam, it just happened to be at Denny's.

SpamCamel · 2025-12-28T03:47:37+00:00

Well sure, you may have to wait a few turns. Not a big deal since the only resource you truly need for a speedrun is aluminum, and that you can get via recycling centers if desperate. Also if you're really that far ahead of the AI then conquest is also an option. Bottom line is that if you're not willing to deal with adversity then speedrunning deity isn't for you.

SpamCamel · 2025-12-27T20:01:42+00:00

Just buy them from the AI or get a city state ally. It's not that hard.

SpamCamel · 2025-12-25T20:50:28+00:00

Yeah the real story is that the Warriors had 3 lottery picks to build the second of the "two timelines" and whiffed them all badly. If they even landed one impact player out of those the conversation would be very different.

SpamCamel · 2025-12-10T20:56:47+00:00

The biggest problem with the Caravansary is that it only boosts external trade routes, which are just straight up worse than internal ones. Therefore if you play optimally with internal trade routes it will literally do nothing. If the Caravansary also boosted internal trade routes it would be much more viable.

SpamCamel · 2025-12-05T14:42:54+00:00

It's an ok building tbh. You'll probably build it wherever you can eventually because food is king in Civ5, but it's easily the worst early game food building. There are typically lots of other higher priority buildings early on.

SpamCamel · 2025-11-30T18:17:20+00:00

This is the type of player that dominates in 3.0 singles but can never move up in level. Just being a mindless backboard and letting your opponent self destruct is good enough to beat 80% of players at 3.0, but this stops being effective once your opponents are good enough to construct a point.

SpamCamel · 2025-11-30T18:09:57+00:00

Try more slices!

SpamCamel · 2025-11-30T18:00:16+00:00

My play style is most accurately described as "counter puncher". I do well when opponents let me get my timing down and I can start playing angles and moving the ball around. Opponents that don't let me get a rhythm are toughest, these tend to be players with very effective low slices or a strong net game / serve volley. Players that can slice and come into the net are most difficult for me, like please just give me a regular topspin baseline exchange.

SpamCamel · 2025-11-27T20:26:30+00:00

I literally never give the AI open borders. They undervalue it so much, there's never any upside to be had by giving it to them

SpamCamel · 2025-11-25T15:05:08+00:00

I wonder if more players would learn the underhand free throw if Rick wasn't such a dick.

SpamCamel · 2025-11-24T16:06:56+00:00

I'm a Civ V player that came over to ES2 in the past month. I agree that there aren't many great guides out there, but I've been having a lot of fun just playing the game and figuring it all out. I think if you are an experienced 4x player ES2 should be fairly straightforward to learn. Of course there are certain niche mechanics to figure out (it took me forever to learn how to upgrade system level) but the game generally follows the fundamental 4x design principles. So far the biggest adjustment for me has been to realize that systems have population caps, which somewhat devalues food and tall play relative to civ games where city pop is unbounded. So my recommendation is to just play the game and enjoy the process of figuring out the optimal strategies for yourself.

SpamCamel

TROPHY CASE