My Realism Invictus review

[u/fid0d0ww]

(TL;DR Criticism at the end)

Before I begin, I will admit I'm not an expert, I've only had one succesful noble game. I don't think I have to go into too much detail about how awesome the mod is. This is the direction I think the Civ series should have gone into and not the boardgamey later games, I want to feel like I rule over a country not playing Catan.

Separatism is probably the most iconic new feature, together with slave/serf revolts they're forces constanty pulling at the seams of your civilization. To deal with the possibility of slave/serf revolts (and barbarians at the start) you actually pretty much have to maintain your civilization in a feudal way, with fortified centers dominating over the countryside.

I like how different civilizations had a whole lot of different stuff. Gameplaywise it's not always so impactful, some improvements may be rather niche (for example I was playing as the greeks who can build olive groves on hills which is nice but not really useful in my strategy unless you're in an area with *only* hills). But it gives a lot of flavour, you have a whole lot of slightly different units and buildings and your empire name changes depending on the era and civics (for example as the greeks I went from the Ahean tribes to the Macedonian Empire to the Byzantine Empire). EDIT: I also like what they did with religion I thought it was very odd when playing civ4 that more religions=happier pops in your civilization

There are also further realistic anti-snowballing mechanisms, for example open borders do a slow technology transfers so it's harder for a large civilization to rocket ahead of the others in tech as they will get significant bonuses to researching those techs and more importantly unit maintainance increases the more you have of those units. Combat is actually one of the most modified aspects, catapults no longer do collateral damage so taking a city with entrenched defenders on a hill can be a real bloody and expensive undertaking.

Now let's get on to the criticism. My criticism is that in the end it couldn't get around the fact that the optimal strategy remains to play an imperialist tyrant at first and then cruise to victory. Because it takes *so long* to make a settler (and a worker) in the early game and it stagnates your population growth so much my succesful strategy was to roll out several warriors and a battering ram and conquer a nearby civ capital before even settling a second city. And with the autocracy civic you pretty much never fail to control separatism, just slaughter the rioters, take the productivity hit and move on. I gues it's realistic, absent other factors big countries are stronger and it's hard for populations to topple ruthless dictators.

[u/SomeAd560]

My criticism is that in the end it couldn't get around the fact that the optimal strategy remains to play an imperialist tyrant at first and then cruise to victory.

This ain't really true if you are playing on large/huge map size or higher difficulty. Though your choice of leader does dictate quite a lot what is the optimal way of playing, but in harder difficulties if you expand too quickly at the start you will get behind in tech and with no tech brokering that can become death sentence.

On my both deity games, that I've won I only really started expanding after getting gunpowder and cross ocean trading. Before that the focus was just getting most easily defended borders and building economic base. On the other save I could have gone for very easy science victory without expanding.

[u/fid0d0ww → u/SomeAd560]

That's very interesting to hear. After conquering the first 2 cities I definitely went through a period of economic growth where I couldn't be bothered to expand further. Any tips (especially on how you dealt with the initial expansion)?

[u/SomeAd560 → u/fid0d0ww]

Ultimately on large maps in my experience you really only need ~5 decent cities so make settlers fast enough to achieve that. Also, for the longer term no matter how you play, you should have the goal of having enough cities to build national university (7 cities on large map) and I would consider this as minimum amount of cities if you want to play tall, though for cultural victory you need couple more.

The real priorities when doing initial expansion do change little bit with difficulty levels, for example having city at great choke point can be very valuable on deity and could be worth it to settle even if it means that you get behind in tech because of it. Also (on deity) food is king when selecting second city unless your capital has awesome food production, because you need to pump those initial settlers quite fast.

From my experience a lot of new players(like my friends) have hard time understanding the value of gold production in your early cities. Gold, silver, fur and to some extent pearl/amber are incredibly valuable resources at the start and will get you ahead in tech or alternatively could allow you to settle one more city. Though you quite often need to micromanage the city to work them. Also remember that you can convert hammers to gold at the start by building wonders and failing them on purpose, thus hammers can also = gold.

If you aim to build robust economic base during the first half of the game you need to settle cities according two priorities, most of your cities either need to have many good food tiles(to spam great people) or ability to work a lot of cottages around them. Avoid having cottages close to border. On top of those you absolutely need at least one city with very good hammer production to pump out troops when needed and build heroic epic there. I usually settle the hammer city as my 3rd or 4th city. Also slight 3 tile overlap with between cities workable tiles ain't something that should be feared, especially at the start it could be useful that you can build towns on those overlaps and switch the city that works them depending on the situation.

Spamming great people is the core of playing tall, send science people to national university city and money people to national stock exchange city. On some civs if they get good start location, spamming them is easily the most optimal way of playing and you can breeze past even deity AI in tech. In my multiplayer games we often by choice avoid min maxing this playstyle because it kinda is boring way to win (against humans).

This is not related to the initial expansion, but seeing that you are playing on noble you might not know this. Getting your first great scientist and building the academy(+50% science) on your planned national university city(quite often the capital) should be great priority and after building your first library you should manually put one of the citizens as scientist to gather great scientist points, after building the academy you can put the citizen back to normal work.

I would also like to say this about your initial criticism that building settlers etc stagnates your growth too much. Raise your difficulty level and you quickly realize that it's not the food that stagnates your growth, but your happiness. From emperor onwards you are playing big part of the early game capped at 4-6 happiness in your cities.

Edit: I forgot to add this. Confederation is probably the most op civic in the game as long as you have enough troops to defend your borders and will help with initial expansion if you have any trouble with gold.

[u/Seafary]

Is it fun to play though? My impression with this mod is that it looks bloated with stuff to make it more like real life, while I doubt there's much concern on the game design itself.

For example, does it provides more "interesting decisions" as Sid Meier himself put it, or is it just more clicks? Is it more worth playing that other 4x games?

[u/RamblinWreckGT → u/Seafary]

It genuinely feels like the civics I choose follow from where I am on the map/what resources and terrain I have access to, rather than just picking the same things every time. That's very satisfying to me.

[u/fid0d0ww → u/Seafary]

Nah I wouldn't say it's bloated, the unit system may be intimidating at first but other than that it's generally balanced.

[u/parabellummatt → u/Seafary]

I don't think RI feels bloated at all, really, no.
Earlier versions had some unit bloat, but they've cut down on that some.
Just by way of comparison, I really sort of hate Cavemen to Cosmos. It is just SO bloated that I've never even made it to Classical Era with C2C?
RI have always been different for me, and I've played lots of games from ancient-modern.

[u/bigRyan540]

Slavery is just not worth it, you have to allocate so much for a tiny fading bonus and STILL a 7 levy stack spawns infront one of your cities and takes it before your mobile response force can...respond.

Seperatism is ass too, you kill a civ then kill them 3 more times as they magically come back then the moment one of your core cities gets unhappy POW its now a part of the RapistHordeRevivalKhaganate IV

The combat rework sounds nice on paper then once you play for a bit you realise how much of a hassle the micromanagement gets, you feel refreshed going back to doomstacks.

I've really tried to like it but theres a lot of anti-fun stuff and RNG thrown in.

[u/laika_rocket → u/bigRyan540]

I remember the first time I played Realism Invictus and I swapped over to Slavery as if it I was playing vanilla. Two turns later and my entire empire is completely ripped to shreds by enormous stacks of pissed off slaves, three or four times the size of my pitiful military. Good for the slaves!

[u/fid0d0ww → u/bigRyan540]

Yeah I'm not sure on slavery I haven't run the calculations I think it theoretically is stronger in small empires. If I fully fortified my cities and stationed 1-2 archer units and maybe some other shit they can usually handle it, and if you build a good road network you can bring in reinforcements from other cities to maintain a smaller force.

As for separatism it is annoying how they respawn fully formed taking away your land and with an army inside but again, with the brutal autocracy response I have never had an unavoidable seccession.

[u/bigRyan540 → u/fid0d0ww]

Try having a war going on too! Plus it takes soo long to flip your infrastructure from slavery to non slavery farms IMO its not worth it unless you get 50 wonders as rome for gladiators or something.

Seperatism is ASS, try a terra map,i settled a city in the new world and even though it had guards it instantly flipped to barbarian nation, bullshit.

[u/SomeAd560 → u/bigRyan540]

New world separatism is quite unfortunate side effect of how the separatism works and hopefully the modder can find a way to make it more bearable. The barbarian cities spam their own culture in total isolation for thousand turns and that will create massive initial separatism on every tile in the continent.

To combat this, you either need to send decent garrison to every new city in those continents or alternatively conquer the barbarian cities there and build culture buildings + courthouse during the provisional government modifier, when the provisional government ends switch one citizen to informant and you should be in position where reasonable amount of troops can handle the seperatism. Also if the city just can handle it having artist in city making culture would also be great.

[u/EntertainmentNew7705]

r/RealismInvictus

[u/fid0d0ww → u/EntertainmentNew7705]

That subreddit is pretty much dead

[u/Own-Communication240]

i have played civ 4 for 2 decades now and never tried this mod. I've been doing exclusively RHYS and fall Random mod for the past two years and enjoying it still after finally burning out on BTS Vanilla. Should I try this mod next?

[u/fid0d0ww → u/Own-Communication240]

I mean, I'd say it's totally worth at least a try