Civ 5: Wait, you won how?

[Paragon Fury]

Ok, so I just got done losing a rather tense game of Civ 5 where I was supposed to be comp-stomping the AI with my friend. And I want to know why/how we lost.

It had gotten off to a rocky start, with him constantly besieged by barbarians on one continent and me boxed in by enemies on another.

After finally fighting our way out of this, back into power and back into the lead, we find that the Arabs had gotten a free pass on their own island, with plenty of strategic resources and friendly City-States. We're still fighting our own battles when he starts to build the Spaceship for the Science win.

We get together as fast and possible, and launched an invasion that would've put D-Day to shame to take Mecca, since he already had the Cockpit, Stasis, Engine and 1 booster. After nuking our way in, and then having to nuke Mecca twice to soften it up and clear out the units, we capture Mecca, the capital for the Arabs, and now presumably having control of those four pieces of the Spaceship, denying them to him. He relocates his capital to some random island where he has two cities. We're set go about capturing the rest of his main island a couple of turns later when the game just suddenly ends, and it says the Arabs won a Science victory.

How? We took Mecca, and thus took his 4 pieces of the Spaceship. How did he have enough pieces to complete the ship - does taking the capital somehow not equate to him losing his pieces?

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

As far as I remember, the spaceship is built in the city that has the "wonder" for the launch site (forgot which one it is). So even if you take Mecca, he might have had his wonder on the tiny, forgotten island, which would allow him to finish the spaceship anyway.

I don't know, but that's what I'd bet my dignity on.

 

[Rastien]

As far as I remember, the spaceship is built in the city that has the "wonder" for the launch site (forgot which one it is). So even if you take Mecca, he might have had his wonder on the tiny, forgotten island, which would allow him to finish the spaceship anyway.

I don't know, but that's what I'd bet my dignity on.

This. You can destroy his capital but the parts might not have been being made there, then they simply transfere to the new capital upon completion.

 

[Laughing Man]

The simple answer is that the constructed spaceship parts cannot be destroyed, instead they are transferred to the new capital city at which point they can then continue to build the missing parts.

Yeah previous Civ games all you had to do was capture the capital at any part up to and after launch but before it reached Alpha Centauri and you could halt their scientific victory but it seems you can't do that in Civ 5

Once the enemy starts constructing spaceship parts the best course of action is to engage them in a war, grab as many allies as you can and hope that the enemy AI will switch from spaceship construction to military construction, you then need to set up a powerful easily resupplyable defensive position inside their territory, something for them to focus and throw unit after unit at whilst focusing as much of your powerhouse construction cities in to building whatever spaceship parts you have, assuming of course that you can't just steam roll all their cities before they are able to build the ship!

 

[Paragon Fury]

Thats kind of stupid.

So unless you catch the Science victory way early there pretty much isn't a way to stop it short of nuclear annihilation.

I mean, for fuck's sake, I just managed to punch through your defense and take your capital where you had all the parts - they shouldn't just magically teleport away.

 

[DazZ.]

Thats kind of stupid.

So unless you catch the Science victory way early there pretty much isn't a way to stop it short of nuclear annihilation.

I think it makes science victory viable, I mean otherwise the only way to win would be domination, or at least amassing a massive defence against whoever is going for domination, and I find that just gets dull.

I like cultural and science victories.

 

[Paragon Fury]

The thing is, you can stop Cultural/Diplomatic victories by taking the enemy capital, or the city the project is being built in.

But somehow, my smashing in, taking the city where ALL the parts of Science victory HAVE to be delivered to, and taking the parts that are there doesn't stop them from just building the remaining part(s) somewhere else and winning, even though I just took 3/5 of the Spaceship from them.

As far as I'm concerned, it should just give the person/team who took the capital all the parts that are currently there, and the person who lost the capital has to re-take or re-build the project.

Besides, if you're going for the Science win, as soon as you build that first part or the Apollo Program, you should know that people will be gunning for you and build an army - defending your capital until you bug out should be your top priority. Losing it should cause you to lose your progress.

 

[Shirastro]

Civ 5 is a pretty impressive pile of $hit anyway.
Such a debacle after civ 4.

 

[k7avenger]

Civ 5 is a pretty impressive pile of $hit anyway.
Such a debacle after civ 4.

Yep.

And for the unaware, just read this: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html
Bit of a long read, but it gets the point across.

 

[Laughing Man]

And for the unaware, just read this: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

For the most part he is right but their is one statement where he has missed the mark totally

Many of the buildings in Civ5 are actually worse than useless, doing virtually nothing while adding to the player's expenses. It's actually possible to cripple your empire with too much infrastructure in Civ5 if you load up on too many pointless buildings like gardens, stables, and so on. While this may be realistic in some senses, it's not at all fun and represents somewhat of a trap for newcomers. One of the secrets of high-level play in Civ5 is that you do better by *NOT* constructing most of the buildings in the game, which is surely a failure of design.

It was no secret that the designers wanted to stop the situation where players would spam cities and in turn spam every building that you could possibly build in them, they were aiming for the player to create tailor made specialist cities. Cities in which you built the required the buildings to capitalise on the strongest aspects of that city. I.e did you weant a major money, science, unit production or culture producing city. The gold cost for buildings is an ideal way of doing exactly that, in theory. What he should be focusing on is that in Civ 5 it is actually very possible to building spam in every city and still have the city produce enough cash to not only maintain the building upkeep but actually add to your empires overall profits. It requires a bit of management in the order you build the buildings in the right order but it is possible.

 

[Shirastro]

And for the unaware, just read this: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

For the most part he is right but their is one statement where he has missed the mark totally

Many of the buildings in Civ5 are actually worse than useless, doing virtually nothing while adding to the player's expenses. It's actually possible to cripple your empire with too much infrastructure in Civ5 if you load up on too many pointless buildings like gardens, stables, and so on. While this may be realistic in some senses, it's not at all fun and represents somewhat of a trap for newcomers. One of the secrets of high-level play in Civ5 is that you do better by *NOT* constructing most of the buildings in the game, which is surely a failure of design.

It was no secret that the designers wanted to stop the situation where players would spam cities and in turn spam every building that you could possibly build in them, they were aiming for the player to create tailor made specialist cities. Cities in which you built the required the buildings to capitalise on the strongest aspects of that city. I.e did you weant a major money, science, unit production or culture producing city. The gold cost for buildings is an ideal way of doing exactly that, in theory. What he should be focusing on is that in Civ 5 it is actually very possible to building spam in every city and still have the city produce enough cash to not only maintain the building upkeep but actually add to your empires overall profits. It requires a bit of management in the order you build the buildings in the right order but it is possible.

Except people were already doing that in Civ4, successfully and without Firaxis trying to force them into and fail.
Every good player of Civ 4 knows how to specialize his cities. How to make a GP farm, which cities are good for cottages, which one will be highly productive, and so on.

 

[k7avenger]

And for the unaware, just read this: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

For the most part he is right but their is one statement where he has missed the mark totally

Many of the buildings in Civ5 are actually worse than useless, doing virtually nothing while adding to the player's expenses. It's actually possible to cripple your empire with too much infrastructure in Civ5 if you load up on too many pointless buildings like gardens, stables, and so on. While this may be realistic in some senses, it's not at all fun and represents somewhat of a trap for newcomers. One of the secrets of high-level play in Civ5 is that you do better by *NOT* constructing most of the buildings in the game, which is surely a failure of design.

It was no secret that the designers wanted to stop the situation where players would spam cities and in turn spam every building that you could possibly build in them, they were aiming for the player to create tailor made specialist cities. Cities in which you built the required the buildings to capitalise on the strongest aspects of that city. I.e did you weant a major money, science, unit production or culture producing city. The gold cost for buildings is an ideal way of doing exactly that, in theory. What he should be focusing on is that in Civ 5 it is actually very possible to building spam in every city and still have the city produce enough cash to not only maintain the building upkeep but actually add to your empires overall profits. It requires a bit of management in the order you build the buildings in the right order but it is possible.

What you said is just plain wrong. For one, you could not spam cities in Civ 4. Maintenance costs would kill you, quite literally. You had to take it slow, at least in the beginning. Also, you forget that building the buildings in Civ 4, while they had no maintenance costs, meant that you weren't building units, wealth, science, or culture; an opportunity cost. And finally, founding another city increased the "beaker" cost of all technologies. Founding a city was making an investment that this temporary detriment to your civilization would eventually become a net benefit.

There is no cost to settle a new city in Civ 5 other than building the settler. Global happiness can quickly be rendered useless because the city spam encourages low populations in your cities. And thanks to social policies and city states, would you rather have 5 large cities getting +3 food and +5 production or 20 small cities getting +3 food and +5 production. That's right, over time, those little cities will out produce your big cities. Not on the individual city level mind you, but on the empire scale.