Honor's Code

I continued playing the same game. After wiping Germany and finally restoring my Civ I learned a couple of things. I think what I was supposed to do was to either raze the German cities or set up puppets. Then after I set up puppets, one by one, annex the cities. If you build a Courthouse building in the occupied city, then it eliminates the unhappiness. Because happiness is a Civ wide trait, you let your other ‘happy’ cities outweigh the unhappiness in the one annexed city until the Courthouse if built. Then you annex the next city. While under puppet rule, you still get all the resources, you can’t control what they build. The game is down to myself (as Japan), George (USA), and Darius (Persia). Darius ended up building the Apollo program in 1973. He’s well ahead of me now. Because he has built Apollo, he can start to build the Spaceship for a Science victory. If this game works like past versions of Civ, the only way to stop him is to take his capital. I’m going to try a risky str...

I decided to try my first game. This won’t be a play by play of each turn, just some cool stuff from my playtime. I chose the Warlord difficulty which is one below the ‘Normal’ difficulty of Prince. Small map, Continents, 5 other Civs. I chose to play as Japan. Japan’s special skill is called Bushido, and their special units are the Samurai, and the Zero. The Samurai is a good unit in the early to mid part of the game, and I’m hoping the Zero is a nice advantage during the latter stages. Bushido allows your units to fight at full strength, even when damaged, and it sounded very appealing to me. I knew with a Continents map there would be a couple of large land masses and a couple of smaller ones. Each large landmass would have 2 to 3 Civs, and several City-States. One land mass would be a small island nation. I wound up on a large landmass with 2 other Civs, George (USA) and Bismark (Germany). I took over the eastern part of the continent, while Germany took the west. This hemmed in...

I spent a little time last night trying out my new toy, Civilization V. I won’t call this a review, merely my impressions from my first play session. The first thing I figured out was my old strategies were not going to work. In previous versions of Civ, a core part of my strategy was micromanaging my science rates, and stacks of doom. A stack of doom is basically a whole lot of units moving together, something I brought over from my Risk days. You can’t manually control the science rate any more. It is simply a function of your population. Only one combat unit can occupy a space, so you can’t make stacks of doom anymore. This also means you can only station one unit in a city for defense, but don’t think for a minute that it makes cities easy pickings. Cities are units in and of themselves, and it is very difficult to take them out. You basically have to lay siege to them and bombard them with archers, trebuchets, or cannon. Cities fight back and bombard you units as you are attack...

Raiding has pretty much ground to a halt in Devolve. We are struggling to fill raids and most people are really bored with the content available. So for the foreseeable future I’ll be posting about Warrior/Paladin changes in the Beta and occasionally other topics that  pique my interest. Expect some Civilization posts in September when that launches. I’m a Civ player from waaaaay back. I started playing with CivII. The one with the FMV (Full Motion Video) advisors. These guys were played by actors. My favorite was the drunk War Advisor (starts at 43 seconds into the video). If you didn’t play CivII, here’s a taste of what you missed. I was totally hooked. I went on to play Civ III, and CivIV, plus some Alpha Centari, but these guys never made it into another version. I kept hoping they would bring them back. Of course that didn’t stop me from having already preordered CivV. So expect a post or two about it when it comes out. This does mean I won’t have the cash to buy S...