Honor is best if you plan to go to war as soon as possible and finish the game before the modern era, Tradition is the best choice in almost all cases, if you're taking Liberty every time and not running into problems I assume you're playing on a lower difficulty. Even with an ideal start Piety is extremely hard to justify as a first choice.

>>1892033 Civ V is very fun. I highly recommend it.

>>1892064 >Tradition is the best choice You really think so? Why? >Lower difficulty I play on King (5). Its the highest I like playing at because the AI just gets too many freebies after that.

>>1892085 On higher difficulties you won't have the happiness to support a large number of cities without an unusually strong start and just by having more land you'll attract war so a smaller cluster of stronger cities works better and tradition gives you that.

>>1891822 iirc you need a lots of land with gold yields, a religion to counteract the happiness malus, and a target to rush midgame to take advantage of your higher production. Lategame i think you can match a fully bulbed tradition empire with 8-10 cities. Likely you won't have enough scout into to make an informed decision come the first social policy, though. >>1892033 Depends. Alpha Centauri is a good starting point as 4xs to this day are influenced by it (terraforming, narrative w/ faction leaders of contrasting personalities, philosophies, and gameplay styles complementing them, civics, worker units, etc.) If nothing else, I recommend it for the potential cruelty you can do among other things ie creating a deluge to sink cities whole, retiring your deceased into the recycling tanks, and eating colonists' brains out with tamed mindworms.

I had a copy pasta made for this, but I guess I can't find it. So here it goes again. There's a Civ5 mod called Acken's Minimalistic Balance which is aimed at (mostly) making AI changes for single player. The mod does the following major changes: >makes the AI much smarter The AI now plays to win, while still adhering to the leaders' different personalities. I've had a game where I went for a Diplomatic victory and the Swedish AI just started taking over every city state it could in order to stall me. I've had ultra unfriendly leaders go from War > Peace > Friendship > Joint War Declaration in 2 turns because another AI won a war and gained multiple cities as part of its peace treaty. At the same time, I've had friendly leaders be bros for the entire game as long as I didn't piss them off. It's a big change from the base game where the AI is generally just sitting there and waiting for you to take action. >melee unit and city combat strength rebalance Melee units are extremely deadly. An AI doom carpet will take an unprotected city in 2-3 turns with no casualties. You can no longer play tower defense and watch the AI suicide melee units into your archer/city range. The defensive strength of ranged units has been massively reduced (7>4, 18>11, etc), the melee combat strength of melee units and cavalry has seen some boosts, and cavalry get a lesser penalty for attacking cities. Early/mid game ranged units just get 1 shot by equivalent tier cavalry and iron melee units. Even barbarian horsemen will 1 shot your archers. It completely changes warfare, which in turns completely changes build order, unit production, maintenance, AI willingness to declare war, etc, etc. Melee ships are also changed: they can now attack and move by default. It does make ships a bit too strong though, so I'd recommend digging through the files and manually nerfing the melee ships by like 10% or so. >religion and ideologies rebalanced + tall nerf/wide buff Tradition is no longer the absolute best start in 95% of cases. Piety, Honour, and Liberty are now extremely viable; and as a bonus the AI no longer gets hobbled by picking those. Many tenets are buffed or changed, smoothing out the usefulness of the less desirable beliefs. On top of that, the tech and culture penalties for going wide are significantly lessened, making Liberty/Honour/Piety that much better. Overall, the game DOES get significantly more difficult, but it makes the Civ5 experience way better. I had to go from stomping the vanilla AI on immortal to struggling with the modded AI on King. I also had about 200 hours into the base game and was starting to get bored, but with this mod I'm now at 2600 hours. It basically turned Civ5 into a "forever game" for me, where I can always go back every few months or years and have a great time playing a few games. Kinda like HoMM3. There is one change the mod does that I modded out though: the mod changes the damage taken value by embarked units from 200% to 50%. It effectively makes embarked units able to beat melee ships 1v1. I changed that back to it's vanilla 50% value. The AI will still gladly suicide its units by embarking them near your cities, but that beats having 2 triremes struggling to destroy a horseman on a raft.

>>1892107 >>1892227 Didn't consider higher difficulties. Also forgot happiness which is odd since I run into that problem constantly.

>>1893125 >Also forgot happiness which is odd since I run into that problem constantly. Try reading anons out of context, you'll think they are robots.

Also the great war bomber is cancer. Why did they add it?

>reason to not pick liberty Sure, maybe you're looking to win above immortal. Liberty is super shitty in vanilla Civ V, to the point that it's kind of sad. You really need to get the right civ with a god-like unique building to truly make up for the loss of momentum against Tradition just staying in the same fucking spot and massively outpacing you on tech and culture. Luckily, your greatest advantage is the fact that you'll hopefully get all the hills and in the time they can get one archer out, you might get two or three simply because you have more pops to use stuff, as long as you build the local happiness stuff. Other trees are kind of... even worse as openers, as they both don't help your momentum get started, and they don't accelerate it either. >>1892239 I really like Lekmod, which is the competitive mod for Civ V. They worked through some of the shittier civ's abilities to get them up to speed, while still keeping everyone unique and exciting. I dislike that they add a ton of other resources and civs, however, as I quite like the charisma behind the leaders' dialogue and interactions with AI.

>>1891822 I dunno if you play singleplayer (I cannot stand playing Civ 5 unmodded vs AIs) but Liberty was massively nerfed in BNW and even for wide Tradition has some serious strong points, although TraLiberty is a working strat. I am assuming you are playing with Brave New World active, even though just Gods & Kings (no BNW) is the best version of Civ 5. Tradition's benefits are pretty straightforward: First, you get a ton of extra global happiness from Monarchy and Aristocracy. If you run the math it beats what Liberty offers you happiness-wise pretty handily and that happiness lead will earn you one or more golden ages on its own. It also low-key saves you a lot of gold costs in the earlygame. You get free Monuments and Aqueducts in your first 4 cities (no maintenance cost) and you get free unit maintenance on garrisoned military and you get 1 gold for every 2 population in your capital which also grows much faster thanks to Landed Elite and the Tradition finisher. The population also boosts your science and to top it off the internal city connection gold that you get from each of your cities goes up by 1 for every 7 population in your capital so even for a wide playstyle a Tradition finisher will give you a high gold payout. This means that the gold starvation Liberty players often face in the earlygame doesn't happen as Tradition. Because of the free monuments, a Tradition opener can actually skip building a monument and instead build 2 scouts to explore the map better in the early game and obtain ruins rewards. One thing worth noting about BNW is that while Liberty got nerfed hard, Liberty's opener is actually more powerful because BNW drastically reduced social policy costs when it also started reducing all the sources of bonus culture so any flat source of culture has a bigger impact now. This also means that any civilization bonuses and religious beliefs that give you extra social policies will be more rewarding. Liberty is mainly strong for going wide and for warmongering since the +1 production from Republic and cityspam really pays off there. The faster workers from Citizenship is also underrated though and Meritocracy tends to slowly more than pay for itself in reduced social policy costs. Because of this Liberty is low-key strong for culturemaxing. Doing tall as Liberty is often dumb but you can use the Liberty finisher to pop a great prophet to obtain a religion if you are fast enough and skip the need for expensive religious buildings that way. Liberty is stronger on the production front thanks to Republic and faster cities and faster workers but the free aqueducts from Tradition tend to make up for a lot of production and the fact that Liberty got nerfed in BNW so that its golden age increments you golden age cost and its finisher increments your great person cost makes Liberty much weaker for no good reason. BNW is actually really biased towards Tradition and I say that as one of the few people who love to play Liberty even in multiplayer. >>1892064 Honor is fucking cancer for the most part. All you really want out of Honor is the Warrior Code social policy for warmongering, because Citadels and generals determine wars. Discipline is largely trash because good players tend not to do most of their fighting with melee combat. Military Tradition has its uses for leveling ranged units (going from 2xp per attack to 3 is significant) but for melee units, since the math rounds numbers down, you actually get less than half and it still takes quite a few turns for units to level up. Sometimes if you're swimming in barbarians you take the Honor opener just so you can pop barbarians left and right instead of getting your ass raped. >>1892033 Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is the GOAT but Civ 4 has an amazing mod scene. Civ 5 is alright modded. Everything after Civ 5 (including Beyond Earth) is straight cancer. Civ 5 itself was basically a huge decline in the quality of Civ games but the multiplayer is still reasonably fun and the mods redeem it from being a huge pile of trash in singleplayer (unmodded Civ5 singleplayer is unplayable if you ask me). Civ 1 & 2 are pretty cool. I liked Civ 3 and Call to Power, for all that we used to shit on it back in the day, is still better than Civ 5 and later games. >>1905213 Lekmod went overboard and they're all off on some discord cancer if you actually want to play games with the No Quitters league that loves Lekmod so much. Civ 5's lobby system is properly fucked and it's quietly localized to your Steam download region (all of NA is on one lobby now though, unlike before) so you may have to close Civ 5, edit your Steam's download region settings, then restart Steam and Civ 5 in order to get in a good lobby region.

>>1909630 Yeah, I think I played one match with the No Quitters like... 6 years ago? 7? It was all through steam chat back then. I didn't feel like fitting into a new group at the time (or ever) so that was that. Not that there's no propensity for groups made by compfags to be composed mostly of fags eventually anyway, it's kind of inevitable for groups of this size and inevitably this kind of group brings in some really pretentious fags. I mostly played lekmod single player or with a group of personal friends, which was fun as everyone there could play at immortal and have an about 50/50 of winning, so it was relatively competitive between everyone and fun. I'll still vouch for the mod because it is, despite the faggy community, well done and doesn't bring drastic changes as something like vox populi would.

>>1909630 Beyond Earth was trash. I thought it was just a really bad attempt at Alpha Centauri and it felt like "kill whitey in space". I rather have 6 than Beyond Earth. 7 looks insanely cancerous gameplay wise despite the graphics being good this time.

>>1910486 NQ league always struck me as kinda pretentious. They just had that douchy redditor-ish attitude where they think they're hot shit because they're circlejerking. Nowadays NQ steam chat is dead though. It's just Discord. Lekmod does quite a lot of drastic changes nowadays though. 6 years ago it was closer to a rebalance. Now it looks like one of those mods where people make new civs and shit. >>1910670 Luigi Mangione (the guy famous for killing a healthcare CEO - Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare) actually used to work for Firaxis as the guy who caught and fixed UI bugs. Civ 7 actually has an obscene number of UI bugs to the point that people seriously needed to know who the fuck was in charge of fixing that shit, so that was interesting. Seriously though, Civ 7 is Civ designed by people who do not understand Civ or gameplay design in general. I'm not sure how Firaxis has fallen off so far in its ability to hire competent talent but it's not good. Did HR just take over Firaxis's hiring completely? Because Civ 7 looks like it was made by the sort of people HR would hire if you leave it completely in the hands of HR.

>>1910743 Wait, Luigi only worked with Firaxis from 2016 to 2017. Still, it looks like they replaced him with nothing.

>>1910743 >Luigi Mangione (the guy famous for killing a healthcare CEO - Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare) actually used to work for Firaxis as the guy who caught and fixed UI bugs Holy kek, he is the guy lmao > Civ 7 looks like it was made by the sort of people HR would hire if you leave it completely in the hands of HR Pretty much. first pic's the producer's linkedin who got laid off recently.

>>1911093 You reckon debugging is what sent him over the edge?

>>1911093 >Producer Maya... >IGDA Man that takes me back. Does anyone have the gamergate files on those? But yeah, that person does look like a HR-approved corporate idiot who worships corporate methodologies and does not understand how results are actually created. Someone who manages to look very professional completing milestones, setting tasks, and using modern industry software development frameworks and practices but loses sight of banal shit like "what does our target audience actually want?", "will this game be fun?", "how do we make sure this game actually runs well and won't have too many bugs?", "which of these tasks take up a large amount of time without delivering anything particularly valuable?", "hey, our audience is massively complaining about our design direction that we've publicly disclosed so far—should we course correct?", and so on. It's just hopelessly corporate game development. And it's very clear Civ 7 was made by people who don't play Civ and don't understand what makes it good either. They're beyond out of touch. They don't even understand how to playtest it. They don't even want to playtest it. As far as they're concerned Civ is just a boring game and all their changes are the "good stuff" that makes it fun. So naturally the project crashed and burned. Also: >Pitched LGBTQ story ideas for new visual novel content This one line explains so much about the bullshit infesting Civ 7. They incorporated a lot of visual novel type bullshit. >Luigi Mangione - the UI bugfixing intern >Holy kek, he is the guy lmao Yep! It's a corporate classic to prize deliverables instead of bugs (you can always fix those with patches, rite?) so they threw it to the intern and then basically shrugged and ignored it when they were out of an intern to clean it up since it was never really on their development schedule. Civ 7's enormous failures are just a natural consequence of this. Although Civ 5's UI also has some seriously retarded sides to it. >>1911971 Nah. This was moral fury. He was pissed off at healthcare companies making it their business model to try to let people die rather than pay for anything expensive if they could get away with it. Making healthcare a for profit enterprise has some really fucking nasty effects, especially when the people on top are the usual "fuck you, got mine" types. Whatever sent him over the edge, it wasn't working for Firaxis, not unless he had a coworker who died of getting fucked by the healthcare company.

>>1911093 >Using Jira I thought everyone hated that software cause of how horrible it is. >>1911093 >>1911971 >>1912107 >tfw Civ 7 could have been decent if Luigi was still debugging and reporting bugs. What could have been?

>>1912477 >I thought everyone hated that software cause of how horrible it is. But it's very enterprise-y and corporate! It may be shit, but it really is the kind of shit HR loves to see. >>tfw Civ 7 could have been decent if Luigi was still debugging and reporting bugs. >What could have been? Well, the UI could've been decent. (And man was there a lot wrong with the Civ 7 UI, ranging from bugs to missing essential features.) The rest of the game would still be a disaster, unfortunately.

Something that always made me laugh in the novelization of Alpha Centauri is that Sister Miriam Godwinson and Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang supposedly get married. Fitting that the two souless creatures (Miriam a ginger potato nigger and Yang a bug man chink) get together.

>>1912632 No one reads those things. SMAC's own writing is great (not SMAX's though - Alien Crossfire is ass), but the novelizations no one cares for.

>>1912642 It's still hilarious.

>>1912826 That it is.

Only fun part of Civ 5 are various special scenarios like colonisation of Africa and America. The regular is OK, but weaker than IV.

>>1891822 I may as well give a quick rundown of social policy trees in Civ 5: Tradition: Pretty much the strongest tree. Even for wide empires, the gold and happiness from Tradition are massive along with the ability to faith purchase great engineers. In the early game, the free monuments are huge because you can skip building any and get 2 scouts to start finding ruins and shit instead. It's the standard opening tree in virtually all multiplayer games. If you have big civ/religion sources of culture, it's possible to do Tradition opener into Liberty into finishing Tradition, but you'll need to build monuments and likely aqueducts (you can skip building them if you're happiness capped...) this way, so much of Tradition is wasted. Liberty: If you aren't doing Tradition, you're doing Liberty. Liberty has a good production boost (but the free buildings of Tradition are not to be underestimated) and can get extra cities up faster (ie. more turns to grow and build). Production adds up and the worker speed improvement is low-key strong. But, the free Golden Age is no longer free in BNW (it now pushes back your GA happiness cost, when you would've gotten from happiness anyway) and the happiness gained is needed but not enough (Tradition gives more). The finisher is underwhelming because it pushes back your Great Person counter and if you pick Great Prophet it pushes back the Engineer/Merchant/Scientist counters anyway. Still decent for wide empires and especially powerful for warmongering where the speed of production and early cities will make a difference. If you are tall, Liberty is still workable, esp. if you pop a Great Prophet for a religion while skipping all faith buildings, but you may need to turn that early game lead into a wonder to keep up with Tradition. Honor: This is the obligatory warmongering tree designed by game designers who detest warmongering. Most of Honor is fucking trash but there is 1 critically important SP in Honor for wars: Warrior Code. It gives you a Great General and +50% GG generation. That's it. Wars are often won and lost by the amount of great generals, so this SP is huge for wars. Opener is also sometimes used when you have barbs crawling up your ass so you can have a decent earlygame and it's needed for Warrior Code anyway. The rest is middling to trash. Piety: Surprisingly fucking strong since G&K. Better on wide empires but with enough faith generation and great prophet tiles tall works too. Reformation beliefs are game-changing power-houses and more faith generation lets you buy more great persons or whatever you got with your reformation belief. Jesuit Education, To the Glory of God, and Religious Fervor (now that a patch no longer causes faith costs to scale out of control) are all game-changers. Sacred Sites is too, but only for culture victories if you have at least 2 (3 if Byzantine) faith-purchased buildings. You can fill out Piety if you want, especially if your civ or religion gives you lots of culture and faith. Patronage: Fucking trash for the most part, but the opener and Philanthropy are decent (but not necessary) for allying up with city states. You could combine the Consulates social policy with the Papal Primacy founder belief for a resting state that makes you always friendly with citystates following your religion but otherwise both the social policy and the founder belief are worthless. The rest is absolute cancer, except the finisher maybe, which you mostly do to give everyone else cancer with their citystate alliances (you don't get many useful Great Persons, but if you're playing as Sweden you can donate trash GPs to citystates for easy alliances). The opener is worth grabbing just to build the Forbidden Palace wonder btw, as the happiness bonus is massive (and the delegates are good too). Aesthetics: Fucking trash. Only get it if you are going for Culture Victory or playing as Persia and want all the golden ages (but Piety with To the Glory of God - or Sacred Sites for CV - works too). Commerce: Low-key good, including for wide. If you get Big Ben and Mercantilism and Order's Skyscrapers or Autocracy's Mobilization, money will do absolutely ridiculous things for you. Mostly you want Mercantilism and opener for Big Ben. Mercenary Army's Landsknechts are also good because they upgrade into 4 movement Lancers and can pillage without consuming movement, allowing them to rape another player's tiles and run off while healing and giving you money. You don't even know how devastating that shit is until you've raped a player out of his luxes and academy tiles with a bunch of pillagers, not even doing full war, just harassing a player into the ground. Entrepreneurship is okay once you can faith purchase Great Merchants with the finisher, but you usually want to max GSs, maybe get GEs, instead of getting any GMs with your precious GP points (they're the red-headed stepchildren of the GS/GE/GM trio that share cost scaling for some reason). Protectionism does fairly big (usually 20+) numbers for global empire happiness, especially if you go domination-heavy (more luxes from conquest) or are playing as Indonesia which gets 6 free unique luxes (so another +12 from Protectionism). But luxury bans from world congress can fuck it up. Exploration: Maritime Infrastructure is great if most of your empire are coastal cities. Opener is good if you have a navy. Naval tradition is good if you have 5+ coastal and are building all of those buildings (which you should anyway). The rest are weak to trash, but if you have enough territory you might be able to pop cultural renaissances from the Hidden Antiquity Sites from the finisher to make up for the culture you wasted on that trash. Not really worth it though. Rationalism: OVERPOWERED. If you are not maxing rat you are retarded. Get everything. Always. The only acceptable delays are powerhouse ideological tenets that are up for grabs (especially if you have early adopter bonus) and maybe finishers. Ideology: Practically exists to shit on social policies and funnel you down this path, but if the good tenets have been taken it's ass. If you don't have high culture (wide empires do much better) or tourism and you're contemplating an unpopular ideology, the ideological pressure from all the civs following another ideology can rape your happiness and make it better to skip having any ideology (or you can take a popular ideology to try to pressure rape a civ with happiness penalties from tourism). Freedom is ridiculously strong for the Statue of Liberty wonder, Civil Society, and Universal Suffrage mainly. Order's wonder is the worst of the lot (but still worth taking for a free SP) and is strongest for Skyscrapers and Workers' Faculties tenets but it has lots of good tenets. Best for wide empires but still good for tall. Autocracy is great for Prora wonder (which makes up for ideological pressure) and warmongering, plus the Futurism L1 tenet is very strong for culture victory if you delayed normal generation and/or can faith purchase these great people (To the Glory of God reformation or Aesthetics finisher), and other than warmongering or culture victory you can just get a ton of happiness with shit like Fortified Borders and Militarism (and Prora) (but ideological pressure will also cost you happiness) and use Gunboat Diplomacy to take over all the citystates.

>>1917551 Fun fact: Commerce's Mercenary Army Landsknechts are even nastier with Zulus because they get the Ikanda's bonuses of +1 movement and +10% combat strength when defending against ranged attacks. Because Landsknechts do not obsolete but do upgrade, it's also pretty much the only way to get Ikanda bonuses in later eras.

>>1917551 Just to be clear, Tradition is the strongest opening tree. It's either Tradition or Liberty, really. Honor does not work as an opening tree and while you can dip Piety, it's not good as a full-blown opening tree and the Reformation belief vanishes uselessly if you obtain that social policy before you develop a religion.

>>1917549 Annoyingly, the special scenarios don't support multiplayer even if multiple sides are playable. Why is Civ 5 so half-baked?

>>1934124 Because it's made by talentless hacks who have difficulty recognizing what the important touches needed to make a game fun are. There's a reason the Civ series went downhill with Civ 5, and Civ 5 had a seriously fucking rough start too. Gods & Kings significantly improved on things and then the finisher of Brave New World mostly fucked shit up again.

>>1891822 Tradition is generally the best 95% of the time because this game strongly encourages building tall. Maybe once in a while you'll get some fringe case where liberty is better. >tfw civ V is 15 years old and considered retro

>>1963579 >Tradition is generally the best 95% of the time because this game strongly encourages building tall. Tradition is good for wide too, because it has way more gold and happiness and every 7 pop of capital growth makes for +1 gold for every city connected to your capital. Liberty does much better wide culture-wise though and it does pull ahead a bit in terms of production, although Tradition's free monuments and aqueducts tend to close much of that gap at first. >Maybe once in a while you'll get some fringe case where liberty is better. Liberty is better at early-game rushing enemy players because that extra +1 hammer and getting extra cities up earlier will let you crank out an invading force much faster than the Tradition player and then you can catch someone with their pants down before they're remotely built. Wide empires in general are better at cranking out armies and flooding an enemy player with them. >>tfw civ V is 15 years old and considered retro >tfw Civ V predates Civ VII by more years than SMAC predates Civ V. Why is everything so shit now? THIS. FUCKING. DECLINE.

>>1917551 >Piety: Surprisingly fucking strong since G&K. Better on wide empires but with enough faith generation and great prophet tiles tall works too. Reformation beliefs are game-changing power-houses and more faith generation lets you buy more great persons or whatever you got with your reformation belief. Jesuit Education, To the Glory of God, and Religious Fervor (now that a patch no longer causes faith costs to scale out of control) are all game-changers. Sacred Sites is too, but only for culture victories if you have at least 2 (3 if Byzantine) faith-purchased buildings. You can fill out Piety if you want, especially if your civ or religion gives you lots of culture and faith. If you're doing tall piety and picked a reformation belief that has you purchase tons of shit with faith you're probably going to want the Messiah enhancer belief for cheaper prophets so you can plant more prophet tiles and enhance your faith generation since you're trying to make a small amount of cities deliver a large amount of faith per turn, especially since prophet tiles deliver +3 gold and culture once you've finished piety. Do not use prophets to convert cities. Get missionaries for that. You're going to want all the prophet tiles you can get. Even without To the Glory of God or Religious Fervor, tall Piety is probably maxing Tradition and Rat and therefore wants to faith purchase engineers and scientists.

I just checked up on woke historic rewriting Civ 7 and got a happy surprise. Pic related.

Baba yetu yetu uliye~