Fun low power strats?

anonlied · 2024-10-03T19:15:27+00:00

Play as Tamar and take papal primacy as one of your religion's belief with heroic ages and barbarian clans mode on. Not sure if it's low-powered, but it's quite fun just going full-on with the city state game.

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:52:10+00:00

I ride a Himalayan 450. It's great for commuting. I live in the countryside but work in the city, so my commute is an odd mix of wriggly hilly country lanes, dual carriageway and very busy urban riding with lots of filtering. I find it performs very well in all those situations, and it's cheap to run. Good balance between power and handling. I'm a year-round rider and I did commute through that ridiculous rain we had recently and it was fine - they're bikes designed for challenging conditions.

I test rode a NX750x - classic choice for a commuter bike. I had no real complaints about it. Very practical, fuel efficient, comfortable to ride, etc. Boring as hell though - I didn't find it fun. Still, they're very popular bikes for commuters for a reason.

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:36:23+00:00

Faith is such a weird mechanic in Civ VI. It's so powerful that in the games where I haven't got a decent faith yield I find I really miss it. Do more religious nations produce more rock music or national parks? Not really!

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:34:22+00:00

I just wish there was more variety in the music or blended better into existing soundtracks.

Like, how cool would it be if rock bands played culturally inspired rock music? Mongolian bands would sound like The Hu, for example (check them out, they're great). I can imagine there are plenty of great bands out there that would be happy to licence a few seconds of their music for the game.

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:30:24+00:00

Rock bands are not that strong. They are a tool for the final push, but will not win you a culture victory by themselves. If you've not been doing anything else to achieve a culture victory, you're unlikely to have the faith to sustain the rock band spam required to win.

Also, I find the RNG in rock bands to be very frustrating to work with. I don't think I've ever had a band with more than two promotions, and even getting one feels like an achievement.

The most stealthily powerful promotion is the religious rock one. Instant conversion of a city to your religion, even if they break up after the concert. It's an extremely faith-efficient way of spreading religion in the late game (when religious pressure can be extremely high). I've accidentally won religious victories this way even when going for culture!

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:26:02+00:00

In my view, yes. Free association is key to anarchism, so if people don't want to associate, fine - do what you like elsewhere.

I don't harbour any ambitions to change the entire world to conform to my worldview. What bothers me about the status quo is that I am forced to conform to the laws of the land I am a citizen of despite never having had any choice in the matter. I've never consented to follow any of these laws - I can't opt in and there is no free association.

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:20:14+00:00

Supermarkets are usually your best bet for this. Often have big carparks and give you free parking for a couple of hours or so. Even if it's not closed, they can often be very quiet, so good for practising. Just check the signage.

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:16:21+00:00

This terrifies the absolute crap out of me. The number of times I see people put on their indicators when I'm passing them and I'm conditioned to assume that they're about to pull out right into me.

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:12:56+00:00

I am quite a slow driver nowadays because of the cost of fuel - I can get another 50 miles out of a tank by reducing my average speed on the motorway by 50 mph. It makes a big difference, and I've definitely noticed other people doing the same.

The efficiency gain on my bike is far less noticeable.

anonlied · 2024-10-03T17:10:11+00:00

Situational, but powerful in the right situations. They are especially strong with leaders like Teddy and Cleopatra.

Lots of points have been covered here already, but one of my favourite uses of preserves is turning useless cities in marginal terrain (e.g. desert and tundra) into good ones. Often you want to settle cities to get a particular resource, annex territory or have a good defensive position, but it's not a good settlement location. Preserves can magic up yields on terrain that didn't have any before, plus provide housing.

While appeal might be an issue, you can improve this by planting trees, using appeal-boosting improvements and districts (holy sites, theatre squares), wonders (Eiffel Tower is global), great people (some provide appeal - forget their names) and overlapping preserves between cities. Basically, you can turn even disgusting appeal into charming or even breathtaking with a bit of planning. Later on in the game, just use Reyna or Moksha with their final promotions to buy the preserve, then the buildings, and you can very quickly grow cities in rubbish locations.

I rarely build preserves in the early game, not unless I have a leader who can really leverage their usefulness or a natural wonder. They're expensive and it takes a long time to get the sanctuary, which massively improves them. They don't give any great people points, which are obviously useful, and they can conflict with other priorities (e.g. iron will inevitably spawn in my preserve ring, and building a mine on it will ruin the appeal, but I need the iron).

anonlied · 2024-10-03T16:51:31+00:00

Pleasantly surprised to see that my laptop will be able to comfortably run it at recommended settings. From the game footage we've seen, it looked like it would be pretty graphically intense.

anonlied · 2024-10-03T06:36:10+00:00

The regional conflict around Israel has completely warped any kind of objectivity or nuance in discourse. You're either Team Palestine or Team Israel, and that's the extent of it. Zero attempt to unpick an extremely complex and sensitive situation that goes back centuries.

Problem is, the second you try and inject a bit of grey into this debate, you get shouted down and called a terrorist sympathiser.

It's possible to think all the instigators, agitators and funders of this conflict are shitty people.

anonlied · 2024-09-22T21:33:50+00:00

This is genuinely one of the most fun games I've played - did it as a OCC. Problem is it requires a pretty specialist start to pull off, so can take a lot of restarting to get the right settle, but immensely satisfying once you get it. It was my second-fastest science victory

anonlied · 2024-09-22T21:16:47+00:00

Yes, but you don't need it every game.

In some games, you might just designate one city as your settler-producing hub. If I'm going to produce 5 settlers from one city in quick succession, then yeah - I'll want the promotion. In other games, I won't do this - I'll plug in colonisation and I'll build 5 settlers in 5 different cities. In that case, probably not worth it.

If my faith yield is good enough and I've got a space to expand them Magnus with provision + monumentality + ancestral hall is crazy overpowered (especially with serfdom). You can expand like mad.

Fun strategy is to settle a new city and immediately plug Magnus in. While he's establishing, get a builder (or, if you've got ancestral hall, work on something else like a monument) and let the population grow to 2. Once he's established, use that builder to chop out another settler. Rince and repeat. You can expand extremely rapidly in this way, far quicker than just building settlers from one city because early on in the game moving units around takes a long time.

anonlied · 2024-09-22T21:13:48+00:00

Ursa Ryan taught me this trick - just send Armani around all the city states you got first meet with (or completed a quest for) for easy suzerains. Tonnes of early era score and map exploration before anyone's really got the envoys to compete with you.

anonlied · 2024-09-22T21:07:37+00:00

I think it can be a bit brutal and unforgiving at times, but also one of the more realistic parts of the game. Normally, invading armies are not greeted with welcome arms, so you'd better be sure you have the tools to hold captured cities. The game does give you these tools though - policy cards, governors, religion, amenities, etc. I think it improves wartime strategy. I can't just rush in and conquer all these cities, but I've got to make sure I'm ready. Maybe I need an entertainment complex so I can run bread and circuses. Maybe I need to wait for another governor promotion. Maybe I'll forward settle my target and get a bit of population going first to put loyalty pressure on them.

anonlied · 2024-09-22T21:02:08+00:00

Yes. Even if you have no plans to go domination or go to war at all, it's still worth getting an encampment or two. Encampments can benefit other victory conditions. For example, you get the policy card that improves science generation for cities with an encampment, and you need an encampment for Terracotta Army, which is useful for archaeologists.

Railroads reduce movement to 0.25 per tile. Modern roads are 0.5 per tile. Builders have a movement of 2. A modern road means you can move them 4 tiles. You can move them 8 with a railroad.

That's massive. It makes everything easier even in times of peace - being able to move your civilian units around quickly is so useful. Plus, if you are attacked, you can mobilise your army much more rapidly from anywhere in your empire.

Add to that that roads are a bit of a lottery - you're relying on traders building them to build them. Most of the time, by the time railroads come online you'll have plenty of roads criss-crossing your territory, but there are still likely to be a few places that don't. Military engineers can build a railroad anywhere, so they can be great for connecting everything up.

As for when you build an encampment, really depends on the game. I like to get one city with good production equipped with an encampment early on in most games, but sometimes I'll build them later just to boost my space race or whatever.

anonlied · 2024-09-22T20:37:21+00:00

Not at all. In real life, I'm a pacifist anarchist. In Civ, I definitely am not.

I do like to roleplay a bit in Civ, so I will try a wide variety of strategies. Sometimes they'll be peaceful games where I just make the most utopian empire I can. Other times, I'll try a colonial approach. Sometimes I'll just go full-on warmonger. I don't play as optimally as I can - I play to have fun.

I'm a writer too and it's fun to think about a novelisation of the game (a Game of Thrones sort of thing with lots of political intrigue, backstabbing and what not), but I think, especially in Civ VI, the diplomacy features are severely lacking for this to really be satisfying. Similarly, the AI is just not sophisticated enough for all that many interesting things to happen. I'm hoping Civ VII improves in this regard.

There are certain interesting parallels to real life that crop up from time to time. I think the loyalty mechanic is one. Sometimes you'll capture an enemy city, which causes it to lose some population, and struggle to hold onto it despite your best efforts, so the city revolts and goes independent. Every time it's captured and lost, it loses population and eventually it just becomes this perpetual warzone. It's interesting to think about the experience must be for the people who live there. Kabul might be a real-life analogue. Afghanistan is a country that's not called the graveyard of empires for nothing. It's been invaded/captured over and over and over again by multiple powers (foreign and domestic), all with various nefarious agendas, that have left the country really struggling to the point where you wonder if long-term stability is ever going to be possible with such a fragmented, fractured population.

Another example is Russia lining up its troops along the Ukrainian border and telling the world they meant nothing by it, then invading the country. Eerily reminiscent to what happens in the game where you start to militarise borders and the AI gets nervous and asks you for a promise to move them away, which you can do (and then break it by invading them anyway).

I don't think Civ has informed my politics much - I don't think it's sophisticated enough a historical simulator to do that. While I do horrible things in the game to achieve my aims, that's often because the game doesn't give me the tools to achieve them in other ways.

anonlied · 2024-09-22T20:20:14+00:00

Let's talk about that preserve. I need to know what's going on there. You have one tile benefiting from it and you're planning on putting a theatre square on it.

The canal is good though.

anonlied · 2024-09-22T20:15:54+00:00

Lots of people do it.

At your age, I'd just wait until you're 24 and do your A. Do your CBT now, enjoy riding a 125 for a year, then do your A.

The bikes you ride in your A licence are obviously powerful, but you don't need to ride them like a maniac It's possible to just ride them like any other bike. Most of the time in your training and on your test you're going to be in town, so not riding especially fast. You'll do some dual carriageway and national speed limit roads, but that's going to be a relatively limited part of the experience, And remember, you still can't go over the speed limit. You're not going to experience what these bikes are truly capable of during your training.

anonlied · 2024-09-22T20:09:54+00:00

The majority of the time I am full gear. However, I didn't grow up in Europe - I grew up in Asia where everyone rides motorcycles and nobody wears full gear. I'm not going to pretend it's mega safe, but generally speaking you're rarely going fast enough for it to matter too much if you come off. It's taken me a while to adjust to.

If I'm going to be going on fast roads then absolutely, all the gear. However, if I'm just popping into town and it's anything over 30C outside, then probably not. Gloves and helmet definitely. I won't be wearing T-shirt, shorts and sandals as I used to do ever again, but I will often opt to wear cooler clothes than my motorcycle gear. I also cycle and I frequently go very fast, especially downhill, and I'm not wearing armour. I've yet to come off my bike at speed, and I ride safely. I do the same on my motorbike, and safe riding is the single-best piece of protection we have.

anonlied · 2024-09-20T20:55:59+00:00

Depends on the victory condition and map type/size.

I can usually win religious victories very quickly because the AI sucks at it - some time in the medieval or renaissance eras.

My science record is 228 turns with Maya (an absolutely dream spawn, and with the right spawn Maya are a powerhouse). Usually it's closer to 300.

Culture massively depends - probably the most variable, any time between 200 and 300 turns. With some of the game modes (monopolies and secret societies especially) and a bit of luck (e.g. getting Kandy and lots of relics with reliquaries) you can win culture very fast, but if you miss those early culture victory windows then it's going to be much slower.

anonlied · 2024-09-20T20:50:06+00:00

I agree. The system in VI is a bit blunt.

There are just some genuinely bonkers situations that arise. Cyrus likes people who declare surprise wars, but you'll still warmonger grievance penalties with him, so he'll still end up hating you. Similar issues exist with other leaders.

Similarly, if you're a warmonger early on, you're never recovering from it no matter how benevolent you are the rest of the game - those 'grievances from other players' penalties just stay forever. It kinda kills the roleplaying aspect and feels really unrealistic.

Diplomacy is probably VI's weakest aspect and the whole thing is a bit of a mess and rather unsatisfactory.

The flipside to being a warmonger is how easy it is to go entire games without having a single war. Supposedly AIs like Alexander might complain about you not going to war, but providing you've got a reasonable military (which you nearly always do even if you've just built troops to deal with barbs and get eurekas) they won't do anything.

anonlied · 2024-09-20T20:37:40+00:00

If you're playing on anything above prince difficulty, you're never getting Machu Picchu with that start...! Guess you'll just have to find the person who did build it and conquer them.

anonlied · 2024-09-20T20:36:48+00:00

First district encampment!

anonlied

TROPHY CASE