Brant Guillory, Decmber 16, 2012
Brant’s kicking off an extended Civ V AAR, with commentary on his game, and tips & tricks as he goes along.
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I’ve been playing every version of Civilization, starting with the first one back when I was in college. And I lost more than a few nights to the “just one more turn” bug. Civ III was my favorite for a long time, but Civ V is rapidly overtaking it, with the mixture of social policies, faith, and city-states really combining to keep my interest.
I’m chronicling this play-through with Carthage, and I’m also trying a few new things just to see how it goes, so expect to see a few “huh?” moments as I puzzle my way through some of these decisions. Expect this AAR to run for quite a while, with about 10 screenies with commentary for each article.
And while I’m no Civ expert, I’m pretty experienced, so you’re going to get a lot of “this worked for me” but it’s entirely likely you’ll find someone, somewhere who vehemently disagrees. But, hey – we wouldn’t be Grogs without some complaining, right?
The setup.
I’m playing as Carthage, which I’ve only played one time before. I wanted to trample folks with elephants, but I also like the idea of free harbors in each city. I’m also playing on a huge map with small continents, which should play to the harbors’ strength in connecting trade routes. I’m also playing at “quick” pace, in the hopes of finishing the AAR before 2014.
Even with a huge map, I’m only playing with 9 opponents and 16 city-states. This should give us all a lot of space to explore and noodle around.
The start.
I’ve got tundra around me, and some green stuff to the south, so I suspect I’m up against the northern edge of the map. Lots of silver, stone, and marble nearby, which will play a big role in which technologies I start to research.
Founding the first city.
I’m a fan of the production queue. It takes one thing off of my mind, and it also helps keep me on track for longer-term strategies. I end up starting and stopping a lot throughout the course of a complete game, and this lets me stay on track if I don’t get to play for a day or two – no going back and recreating a near-term strategy. I also like to get some scouts out as soon as possible. I want to know what’s over every hill in sight. Normally, I build a few warriors between the scouts in case I run into the inevitable barbarians a bit too close, but this time I’m going to get a monument built a bit earlier to get the culture numbers cranking up.
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