ed
Mmmmmmmmidunno
Massive expansion works for some enemy AI and not for some others. It works for some players and doesn't work for some others. Difficulty levels with more aggressive AI and AI that explicitly expands will consume all of that land
if they have the economy to handle it. Infinite City Spam was a big problem for previous Civ games and Vanilla Civ V. It being less of a glaring problem in post patch Civ V is an overall plus.
I've yet to see massive expansion happen :/
Most of the games I've played, I quit by the end of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, because at that point, my victory is already laid out before me, while the AI continue to flounder(Prince player). There are huge gaps in between my cultural borders and those of everybody else. I don't expand, because the game favors tiny empires, and the AI, the AI don't seem to be able to grow past 4-5 cities at most until the industrial era hits, at which point they decide to city-spam.
The AI seems to chase war for the sake of war, rather than to use war as a method of expansion; they'll declare war on you despite being a good 15 tiles away from your borders and having space to drop two cities in between you and them. Land is simply there, but land is meaningless. I can attain any victory more easily as a smaller empire, conquest included, because new cities are more of a burden than a boon.
This is by design. If you want a cultural victory then you need to grow tall, not wide.
Well, duh, but that doesn't seem like sound design to me. I'm not going to bring history into this, because that inevitably ends with facepalming whenever someone tries to force history into a Civ discussion, but cultural victories are the exclusivity of smaller empires....kind of the opposite of what you'd think it should be. At the very least, I don't like the fact that there's solely one route to cultural victories.
And that may be because conquest and expansion are linked?
It's different from other Civilization games, where conquering your continent, or conquering your nearest neighbor didn't prevent you from aiming at a certain victory, and that's my complaint. It's rigid, and leaves little wiggle room at all. War is only useful for defending, because the opportunity cost of conquering a nearby Civ isn't worth the trade-off if you're chasing a victory.
Diplomacy is sketchy and requires you to learn behavior for the various AI and pay attention to how they act, who they friend with, who they denounce, and your relationship with luxuries and supplies if the two of you share a border.
I regularly play on Emperor and Immortal and can navigate the diplomatic waters without too much trouble.
I recall the diplomacy being lamented heavily pre-Gods and Kings on CivFanatics, and I really haven't gone back there in a while. The AI are still unpredictable as far as I can tell, and will still backstab you even if you bend over backwards to appease them. A common meme I see is that you can make Gandhi your best friend, but that he will still nuke you by endgame.
What I'm lamenting here is how useless the AI are when it comes to building allies. Sure, you can learn how to skirt around them and avoid issues, but that's a weakness of the game's diplomatic system, than anything.
Seems like your problem is that you want to be able to play the game in any fashion and be able to win the game in any fashion. You can't. This is by design, otherwise there's not high end game play. There would be no variety if I could play the game the exact same way over and over again and just arbitrarily choose the way I want to win. (Oh I have X amount of cities, and Y amount of Gold I think I'll click on Diplomatic Victory this time).
I can sort of agree that to an extent, I do. I'm used to being able to carve a certain victory type out of a situation with enough war and land, which isn't the case in Civ V. But like you said, that's more of an issue that I have with the design philosophy than anything else.
Farms can be built on tiles without a water source.
Right, I was thinking more specifically about being able to build them on hills. I love me some Terrace Farms
I have close to 500 hours. I love City States and the way you can use them to fuck with the world.
With the addition of G&K Civ V is probably the best in the series.