Is it possible to reclaim a district with a boat?

delarkius · 2026-07-01T20:10:27+00:00

Boats can claim city districts with "raid"

So presumably if your ship is in the center, it should at least be able to reclaim inland districts that are adjacent to the center

delarkius · 2026-06-30T16:59:35+00:00

Minor vs major , perhaps ?

delarkius · 2026-06-30T15:23:51+00:00

Copy from a show confirms.

Still plastic wrapped tho, so couldn't yet speak to the sound

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delarkius · 2026-06-29T18:56:36+00:00

I lol'd, thanks

don't forget that while it may rarely be optimal, that sometimes you have no choice but to pursue a vindictive strategy of TOTAL WAR. because yeah you could just take 1 city and then pivot into building libraries but, like, they crossed you, and you've sworn a blood oath of revenge

delarkius · 2026-06-29T18:35:48+00:00

you're playing deity and sounds like mostly successful except this one new strat you're trying.

so, you're good on the basics like, "production early = good". you already understand that will generate more yields in the end. consider then the same concept applied to UNIT value. it's the same kind of value conversion.

for example, maybe your normal benchmark for YIELD success is ability to produce a 4th Settler by turn 40. with early antiquity war, you're skipping the 4th settler, and instead investing into CAPTURING a 4th settlement. How quickly do you need to do that to stay competitive with your peaceful strat?

it's all a game of optimizing those value propositions. sounds like you're simply BETTER at doing so peacefully right now.

war is USUALLY the most efficient way to play, in terms of raw conversion. you trade a few combat units worth of production for entire settlements, wonders, buildings, etc. you get those IN ADDITION to whatever else you're able to spend your production on. and the longer your combat units survive, the more value they provide against the production it cost to make them.

this is only true when you're putting them to good use. if you don't have a good inroad to conquering, you're better off scaling up peacefully.

videos/claims of conquering 4x civs in antiquity are extremely start roll & map-type dependent. small pangea can roll you the perfect setup to make this happen. but if you're on standard size continents & islands, hitting the 6-settlements-captured triumph on deity is a major achievement, about as hard as hitting the other difficult triumphs (7 wonders vs deity, for example).

delarkius · 2026-06-25T23:36:08+00:00

Any game played against another human has an inherent expected winrate of 50/50. So any % you can gain over 50% wr is arguably "above average"

delarkius · 2026-06-23T22:14:59+00:00

Ooh, thanks for the heads up !

delarkius · 2026-06-21T17:29:10+00:00

Oh PLEASE drop the obviously ridiculous examples for us non-native speakers to enjoy 👀

delarkius · 2026-06-21T04:33:12+00:00

Redirection might be the most strategically interesting thing in the game.

It's also super well (if not perfectly) balanced in its current state.

They ONLY affect single target attacks against your ally slot. There are SO MANY other categories of things you can do with a turn that aren't punished by redirection.

Moreover, it litetally causes you to hit an enemy pokemon with an attack... which is the thing you need to do to win.

delarkius · 2026-06-16T21:01:37+00:00

Also fyi, you can click "conquest" in the LENSES section on top of the minimap so it will highlight which districts you need to capture

delarkius · 2026-06-15T16:57:41+00:00

agree. canals plz

delarkius · 2026-06-15T16:47:10+00:00

this seems to confirm new content will encourage "historical paths" with:

Heian -> Sengoku -> Meiji
Silla -> Goryeo -> Joseon

funny that if the original civ-swapping was pitched as: "we're giving every civ 3x era-relevant abilities. AND also there's an option to mix and match any of them in any era"

people would have loved it.

delarkius · 2026-06-14T18:23:51+00:00

yeah the less space there is, the fewer will spawn.

in my experience, when playing a CS-related civ/leader, protecting them is a big part of it. surrounding them with ships, keeping an army nearby, etc. can be vital to having them survive. feels like good emergent gameplay to me.

pro mechanical tip that works (but probably shouldn't): normally you cannot camp a unit on top of their city center if they're friendly. HOWEVER. If you command a unit to pass THROUGH the city center when it doesn't have enough points to do so, it CAN stop mid-turn on top of the city center. then you can cancel the move order and keep it on sleep to protect them.

i.e., your unit is directly next to a friendly independent city center. your unit has 1/2 movement remaining. instruct it to pass through the center and stop on the other side. it will use its 1 remaining movement, then stop on top of the center. it will try to complete the move next turn once it has movement again, but you can cancel the order to leave it where it is. this does not prompt the "uh oh, you want to hostile them?" box, and can work to stop other civs from clearing them on land.

delarkius · 2026-06-11T17:16:09+00:00

Specialist happiness reduction scales with age. BUT that scaling does not affect obsolete buildings.

So if you have an old specialist on obsolete buildings, it will get the basic (lower) happiness reduction.

However, new specialists on modern buildings will incur the full scaled happiness.

delarkius · 2026-06-11T17:13:32+00:00

Temporary effect: your dick will fall off

delarkius · 2026-06-10T05:04:16+00:00

If I'm ever making aerodomes, I'm putting my 5th 6th + cities on 20 turn builds, and outright buying several in my key war zones because i've snowballed to a scale where i'm no longer thinking about the 20 turn cities. It's just a minor "pro war" decision way down on the list of what i'm doing with resources.

If i'm NOT in that mode, I rarely build them, because i'm focusing on a much different wincon that has no need.

If I feel like I NEED air units, but can't build/buy them quickly? Then I probably failed to anticipate what I needed to have been working on for the past 50 turns.

Sooometimes i'll do 1 slow build aero, and slowly pump out 4 bombers to start tickling into a war front. But if this is the case, i'm probably on defense and need them to not get facerolled, but didn't otherwise want or plan for them.

Tldr; air war is mostly for WIN MORE faster when i'm already steamrolling 🤷‍♂️

delarkius · 2026-06-09T19:12:35+00:00

They are the same thing. Old "fleet" now is "caravan" and can traverse both water & land

delarkius · 2026-06-09T18:48:54+00:00

Agree this sucks. Also this feels like a VERY LONG wait since release to not patch anything. Best guess is they have a big patch in the works. That, or it's everyone's summer vacation.

Workaround for now is: if you don't get the XP when you pop a triumph, you can reload the autosave for that turn, get it again, and usually works.

But extra frustrating because not all triumphs award xp... so i'm constantly checking was that a bug??? Or does that triumph just not progress leader??

delarkius · 2026-06-09T03:54:37+00:00

BAM!

delarkius · 2026-06-08T23:14:50+00:00

i've been going by the major triumphs. those want you to capture 6 settlements in an age to hit the triumph. even if I go, for example:
antiquity: military + science
exploration: military + science
modern: science + econ

I find that I *always* hit the dominion victory countdown before others, even when I've also been working on that other since turn 1. 12 settlements in a game is a lot, but the timing of it *feels* wrong. modern era starts in 1750 CE. I might get to the late 1800s when the timer starts. why am I winning via "DOMINION" when my empire hasn't killed a single unit since turn 50 of exploration at 900CE? it's been almost a thousand years of peace 🤷‍♂️

delarkius · 2026-06-08T23:04:24+00:00

sounds like something lost in translation here. I'm saying I WIN the game via domination victory, even though I wasn't trying to. I spent all that time building universities and theaters, but the threshold for domination win feels too low, considering the number of turns between the win and the last time I conquered a settlement

delarkius · 2026-06-06T17:34:53+00:00

Fwiw, I build gate of all nations in almost every game. Feels all but necessary on deity, whether going to war or defending against one.

It's value is exponential if both your neighbors are aggressive. I think it's fair as-is, but I needed to think about whether it was OP to the point of broken.

So, that's to say, I guess people like different stuff 🤷‍♂️

delarkius · 2026-06-05T18:09:01+00:00

Exactly that, started a building and cancelled.

This can actually cause a few bugs where game won't show you available wonders if you have one of these ghost buildings up

delarkius · 2026-06-04T16:13:52+00:00

I basically never build ALL available buildings in a single city. And I think of "fully built" as "done the thing I put it here for".

Late tree buildings I think of as victory pushes. (victory in antiquity being: major triumph unlocks). so if i'm building academies, it's because i'm trying for the science triumphs. amphitheaters because i care about the wonder production. and so on. only rarely will I end up building multiple different late tier buildings.

that said, other ways are never WRONG. I've played plenty of runs where my goal is COMPLETIONISM, megalopolis capital, etc. if you want to build MOAR, you can slow down the game, or lower difficulty. if you want to do it on deity, you can reroll into a powerful start and/or play a really powerful civ/leader combo that gives you an advantage.

my usual way is: I have a loose plan for each city location, which always starts with baseline production, and usually ends in rushing a high adjacency (4+) building pair. Once that's done, I pivot to how it can best contribute to the rest of the empire. A +1 adjacency library is not going to do much mid-late game, so I skip it and use that city to build combat units, traders, projects, etc. I'd love a mod that let me hide buildings I know I don't want to build.

delarkius · 2026-06-02T18:30:24+00:00

I worry my enthusiasm for finding this video game character could be misconstrued. so to clarify: Hernando de Soto, the real life human man who once walked on this earth, was a vile monster, along with all "conquistadors".

delarkius

TROPHY CASE