Just one did.

Just the one time.

They gave me their cities in return, save one that inexplicably fell into the sea as the bay expanded one night.

Very strange.

I've got to say that I really love the fact that cities can actually defend themselves. I love how my loan city managed to fend off about 10+ American troops long enough that they actually paid me to accept a peace treaty. I had like maybe 5 troops in total, and most of them were really far away from that particular city

Played for the first time yesterday in order to get smarter within the next two weeks. Still processing the experience. Very different than before. Does not appear to require a scratchpad. Will comment later.

That's rather impressive. Unless your city was heavily invested in the buildings that raise your defense score or the troops were attacking in series rather then en mass, 10 troops would have been able to easily capture the city in 2-3 turns (barring any extreme difference in unit tech levels).

I wonder how much gameplay would change if you couldn't stack dozens of wonders in one city. I guess I understand gameplay is leaned towards that, your most productive cities (which tend to be your first ones, simply due to population and hopefully good choices on land location) make the best builders, so then you end up with maybe 3 cities that largely just build wonders inbetween times you're upgrading their production facilities. I mean, I suppose there's nothing really preventing a place from having 6+ wonders all by itself, but sometimes it does feel a little off.

I think it had something to do with it still being fairly early in the game, and my city was a quite large population. I think population was 12 or so, and they mostly had spearmen and such. On the few attacks they did with their melee troops they did 1 damage and took 5+. Overall they just weren't very aggressive with the attack. I'm not sure if it was because they were trying to starve me out, or because the difficulty was only set to 2. They didn't even fire with their archers all the time, often just repositioning them. I wonder if the fact that they had 12ish units trying to attack a single city was messing with the AI's movement. Oh, I did have a trireme and a horseman in the city as well. My horseman wasn't allowed to attack though, which kind of sucked.

Your horseman was probably garrisoned. If the unit shield is on the left side, it's garrisoned. If the unit shield is on the right side, it isn't.

I just played a game last night (continents). with 8 AI total. Somehow I landed on a continent featuring myself and India. The remaining 6 AI were all on the other continent. Once I saw this, I cranked my production over to a metric crapton of Spearman and Iroquois Warriors (along with a few warriors as I was waiting for my 2nd city's production value to go up due to population increases). During this time, India expanded to about 5 cities total (kind of crazy early expansion for an AI). I positioned all my units for a hit on India's capital for two reasons. The first reason, and primary one, was that this was the highest defense city. I knew my casualty rate would be higher attacking it, hence why I massed a bunch of Iroquois Warriors and Spearmen, but some of my units would get valuable experience and India would draw back most of its military units to defend the city. The second reason is that the AI tends to be a lot more compromising in negotiating a peace treaty after you knock out its capital. After taking out their capital, they offered me a peace treaty that gave me all but one of their remaining cities (which happened to be tucked directly between my two cities borders touched). I took it and promptly ordered those cities razed (they were in poor positions, or suffered severe overlap with another city). You can't raze the capital, but it was positioned nicely so that there wasn't any overlapping with my cities and likely wouldn't overlap with other cities I would be building. After the peace treaty expired, I declared war on India and took the last city for razing.

Now I'm the only civilization on my continent leaving the other 6 AI to compete with each other.

So I guess you will be concentrating on your navy, huh?

No point, it's a combination of city building and research since I only enabled a scientific victory. A continent is a bit large to protect with an early navy and the other 6 civs will be mostly occupied with each other.

Is that a deep church bell I hear ringing in the distance?

So, I saw others talking about how Bushido from the Japanese is overpowerd? I'll tell you what is really overpowered: The Germans on a huge marathon map. I've literally built two units: a scout and a single archer, and yet I currently have about 15 units thanks to barbarians joining me. I've used my army to conquer England, a city-state (gaining me friendship with two other city-states) and just conquered one of Rome's 3 cities. No one else has more than a couple armies because it takes like 40 turns to create one unit, and I can generally get a unit every dozen or so turns from the barbs.

Only current problem is that I have about 11 unhappiness, but luckily I'm in the middle of improving on 3 luxury resources, so I hope I can get my people happy soon.

Oh, and I'm on the highest difficulty that doesn't give the AI bonuses (5 I think).

And yes, I made sure to have my conquered cities be puppet states, but there is just too much population to handle.

That's a situational benefit that is very strong in early eras but pitifully weak in later eras due to two factors. First, as the territory of civilizations expands there's less land for barbarians to spawn on. Second, barbarians don't "tech up" as quickly as the AI. Bushido is effective throughout the entire game.

Just build a navy any way you don't want some coalition or super power to try and crush you or such. Sure it might limit your victory lenght but even dediaation one cit to a navy could help a lot if you position your fleet as a deterrent and maybe even let you strike out if you need more land/resources.

That's true, it does drop off in effectiveness as time goes on due to more and more of the world being seen, but it is a tremendous advantage early on. It's kind of like Napoleon who has his advantage vanish entirely as soon as you research steam engine. Sure, it doesn't help you any more, but it has been a big boost up to that point.

Edit: Rawr! Game won't let me end my turn because one of my cities doesn't have anything building... because it is a newly acquired puppet state that is still under rebellion. Anyone know of a way to make the turn end regardless of any sort of 'may want to do this first' stuff? Or do I need to load up an autosave and hope it doesn't screw up again?

Some thoughts. I'm kinda wishing there was a way to directly give technology to other states, instead of research pacts. I've noticed that as you pull ahead in the tech game, it becomes actually rather easy to pull WAY ahead, especially if the AIs fight amongst themselves while you remain more or less unmolested. Advances lead to more advances both in production and research, which further allow leaps in research/production, plus, by being ahead of everyone in the tech cycle, it generally means you're able to also work on Wonders before anyone else can even access them, which puts you more in the lead. Finally, the AI seems to be kinda a bully, it'll pick on you if you're weak, but if it thinks you're strong, it'll leave you alone, though it will send you 'angry messages' via diplomacy every so often. Basically you tell them to STFU and they don't do anything.

My initial 1 era lead has grown rather substantially, one just entered the renaissance, the rest are medieval, i'm....Russia in the modern age. Hell I just finished the manhattan project, and can shortly begin making atom bombs, while my next highest foe is using crossbows.

Which is why I kinda want to just throw them all an era or so worth of free tech, to make things interesting. At this rate, I'll have super giant death robots before they even have firearms.

I'm wondering it this is because marathon slows everything down, but consequently can lead to bigger gaps.

Yeah, I've noticed this. I hit someone with three culture bombs and they kept getting mad at me, but despite their massive army sitting on my border, they didn't actually attack me because they were way behind me in technology. Of course, that is likely less 'the AI is a bully' than 'the AI is smart'. I mean, how often do you attack an obviously superior civilization. I mean, is it worse to take a bit of abuse in the form of culture bombs, or get totally smashed into oblivion by a stronger force?

I had the same sort of thing on my standard speed game. I was in future era while everyone else was just barely discovering gunpowder. Think it has more to do with playstyle than game speed.

Yeah, I've always found the AI diplomacy to very realistic: annoying, random, senseless, and a waste of time. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I think it has actually gotten quite good. The AI is actually willing to make trades that aren't mostly one sided. Like I was about to capture America's capitol once, and so they offered all of their other cities (About half a dozen) and money (few hundred gold) in exchange for a peace treaty. It was perhaps too generous of them, but it certainly worked. They got to keep their capitol for the entire 10 turns of the treaty, and then I went to war and took the capitol anyway (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

P.S. Anyone interested in multiplayer games?

Didn't need to. When I own the continent, I don't need to spend gold on strategically buying tiles. If I need a navy or army I just buy it up. The only egress onto my territory ended up by an opponent was when they slipped a settler through the one gap in my coastline of territory to establish a city. Once I achieved my science victory I went to town on the AI. I dropped nukes on their cities, then unleashed an army of Giant Death Robots to squash any remaining resistance. It also turned out that the map featured 3 continents rather than two. So it was 2 Civs, 3 Civs, 3 Civs per continent.

I have starting playing King on pangea. Much more of a challenge, getting killed a lot. In civ 4 I had trouble with Prince. Now prince is easy, need king for a challenge

I took to cheating, giving myself scads of gold which I then in turn donated to my enemies (a bit peeved at the 9999 transaction cap per exchange) in the hopes it would help boost their production, it sorta helped, but not enough to make me interested. I also decided that as soon as I could produce Giant Death Robots, I would just put everyone out of their misery. I feel a little bad, my nearest neighbor is the largest, but only at the level where its most powerful unit are swordsmen and elephant troops, which I kill with stealth bombers, helicopter gunships, rocket artillery. Then I send my death robots deep and cap cities (gunships make great city cappers too). In two rounds I've taken about 12 of the enemy cities, oneshotting all resistance. I tossed a nuke on their capital for giggles.

I figure my game will be over in about 50 turns or so, as I march through the world.

I'll definitely change some settings around next campaign, maybe start everyone's tech level a bit higher so at least by the time I'm rolling in death robots, my foes at least have tanks.

dang, i think my game got too big. Running around 607 turns, and lags really hard, or about 1 in 4 times, crash to desk top. Think the memory leak gets too big or just trying to process too many things. Unfortunate, as I just wiped out the persians and was halfway through nuking the chinese.

What difficulty setting are you on? That could have alot to do with it.

Yeah, civ 5 seems really different/easier than civ 4. Not sure if that's good or bad.

Can't say that for sure till you've beaten it on deity level. And when playing multiplayer, difficulty is entirely different. Play me and we'll see how easy the game is (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

P.S. The content I'm on looks suspiciously like Italy, except that it is an island instead of a peninsula.