Finished my first game - taking it easy on Chieftan, small map, space victory. Some more things that are different...

Happiness has been completely overhauled. Previously, your happiness was a function of cities, and having an unhappy city was bad, bad, bad, so a great deal of the game devolved to micromanaging city happiness, and a lot of towns ended up with a cookie-cutter build (you pretty much had to have X happiness-causing structures to support Y population). In more recent Civs, luxury goods were one way to get extra head room - each good produced one happy person in every city in your empire, so an empire with a few luxury goods was in good shape. Civ 4, with its automated management of specialists, required less micromanagement in this respect.

In Civ 5, your happiness is no longer a local function - your empire has a single happiness score. It's increased by structures, by certain policies, by luxury goods (worth a bit more than a coliseum each, with a bonus equal to the number you have), and by the occasional oddball effect such as the presence of a Natural Wonder (I found the Great Barrier Reef, Old Faithful, and Mt. Fuji... ironically on a different continent than the Japanese civilization, heh.) Unhappiness is caused by number of cities, population, and especially in conquered cities, which are tremendously unhappy places until they build a courthouse... which is expensive and most conquered cities will take quite a while to build.

It's worth noting that the last couple of Civ games clamped down ferociously on the number of cities you could have before your economy took a tremendous hit. Civ 5 seems to be a lot more lenient in that regard.

Luxury resources are about what they always were, in the sense that getting one is enough for the whole empire and multiples are mainly useful for trading away. Strategic resources are an entirely different kettle of fish. Each resource site yields a certain "amount" of that resource, which can be used to construct the necessary units, or occasionally city upgrades. This means that getting access to multiple resource sites can be very important when it comes to letting you build the units you want. Initially I had only four iron available, and quickly expended it on two swordsmen and two catapults; I was quite distressed to find that I could no longer build either unit!

There aren't that many strategic resources, however. There's plenty of horse to go around, so the stuff that's in short supply is iron, coal, aluminum, oil, and uranium. In past Civ games, having access to Coal was vital in order to get to build railroads; that's no longer necessary, but you still need a plentiful supply of coal, because you need one for each factory you build (and 50% to production is a biiiiig bonus). Uranium is mostly notable for nukes, nuclear plants, and the occasional Giant Death Robot. There are a whole group of units that use iron, aluminum, or oil...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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