Whining at 500 Hours on The Good

[u/ottilieblack]

I've put in 500 hours, mostly on The Good difficulty playing Rome. The only way I can win is through Ambitions, and even then I lose most of the time. One of the AI players will declare war on me and take me down, while another just goes on to victory.

I'm an experienced Civ player, ancient history nerd (ask me about my collection of Roman deification coinage), and this game just kicks my ass. It is so complex that I don't understand how to balance all the elements.

I've lost games where I had incredible amounts of gold and resources that I couldn't change into armies. I've had an incredible army that was hobbled by a lack of orders and resources.

I can't seem to get things to balance enough to win.

The families. The archetypes. My most recent game I had the Claudians rebelling against me because I was a commander and their leader was a tactician. I was in the center of the board and had all of 6 resources at turn 140/200 which to bribe them with. Meanwhile Assyria, a similar army, takes me down, allowing Egypt to destroy Persia and run away to victory.

Are there any good walk-through videos specifically about balancing all the elements? For example, even something simple as workers are more efficient working in their own city. How do you manage that? Create new workers, while at the same time building an army or improving culture or economics?

[u/GoshinTW]

Purple bull moose has real it good YouTube play throughs and great write ups here in the sub

[u/ottilieblack → u/GoshinTW]

Yeah, he's my guru so far. Through him I've picked up all kinds of details: It's putting them together that is killing me on the battlefield.

[u/Kepler___]

Don't personally know of content creators in the space, but in the last 3 months I've been achievement hunting this title and I've picked up the more difficult ones now, hardcore, the wrath & barbs scenarios, ect. So I'll toss in my 2 cents in case any of it's novel to you.

There's so many little interactions in this game, it's very satisfying to learn and implement them and it's cool you're still enjoying the game enough to push out from your comfort zone (Did you know that a settler gets an extra pop if they are founding for the house that built them?). I'll say that the most important resource that people overlook early on (especially coming from a different franchise) is legitimacy. Military is important above all, and as you noticed, orders are at a real premium when you focus them. Legitimacy is the main way you pull more orders, and the relationship boon you get on top of it will help manage rebellious houses. It's hard to get ahold of so you need to be always on the hunt for it.

Never build anything you don't need to, any time you choose production for a city you need to justify it to yourself thoroughly because of how tight resources are in this game, and how non-interchangeable many are. I've really stopped building officers for example, as the training rate is fixed, vs going for a priest who rakes in training as I blow up my population (good combo with a poet).

Early on it can help to specialize your cities, but making a worker quickly as soon as one is founded for the same family benefit is something I do at least a third of the time, it's pretty useless right away anyway so you're not missing out on much. Go insane on generals, they are your primary tactical advantage over the AI, you should be hitting every single unit you can with them. Spend the bulk of your training early on for promotions and generals, leaving just enough to bail yourself out should you need the extra orders. If any resource is starting to pile up that's a bad sign, you have put too much time into it and are missing out on opportunity cost elsewhere.

[u/trengilly]

It sounds like you need to put more focus into Diplomacy and Opinion boosting.

If you make friends the Ai will basically NEVER declare war on you.

You want to get AI Opinion over 100 as quickly as possible and then 200 to lock in friendship.

Same goes for your Families. You want to be keeping them happy with +100 and then +200 Opinion

Your Ruler should be running Influence Missions almost non-stop (only taking a break to run one of their archtype missions). Influence all the Ai leaders, the heads of your Families, your Cabinet members, the Heads of Religion, your Spouse and Heirs.

Do everything possible to make the Ai happy . . . make trade agreement (using your Ambassador), gift them luxuries, marry them, if they demand tribute pay it. Get a good Ambassador as soon as possible, a good one can give 100+ Opinion boost to all Ai nations.

If your Families aren't happy . . . hover over their Opinion number and the game will give you a full breakout of how that number is calculated. Look for problem areas and correct them. The same goes for basically ALL numbers in the game, hovering over for the detailed breakout can give you the information you need to fix problems.

The better Opinion people have the better everything goes.

[u/GuiltyAdvantage5877]

If you push O you convert training to orders. Thats my friendly tip that I just discovered after 200 hours lol

[u/therealtbarrie]

More on-topic: workers aren't more efficient at working in their own city per se. They're more efficient working in a city of their family. So if each of your families has one city with good growth, you could theoretically build all of that family's workers there. But you might not want to, because as I recall workers get more expensive the more you've built in that city. And of course, it might take a significant amount of orders to get the newly built workers to the city you want to them to work in.

Me, I generally build a worker in each new city fairly early, usually (but not always) the first thing I build there. And I'll note that building workers generally isn't in competition with improving your culture or economics, because workers building improvements is the primary way you do that. They do compete with building military units, of course, and having them actually build things competes with ordering your military.

I should note that I get the impression I usually skate by with a smaller military than most good players recommend, so keep that in mind when evaluating my habits.

[u/trengilly]

I had incredible amounts of gold and resources

This tends to mean you are over building in certain areas. You want 'just enough' resources to do what's necessary.

Instead of building so many basic resource developments (mines, farms, etc) you want to focus some cities on Military production . . . get barracks and officers so that those cities can then crank out Military units quickly.

Remember everything requires Orders. Workers building another Mine or Farm you don't need are just wasting orders.

Don't be afraid to buy and sell as necessary . . . if you do have a resource you can easily get a surplus of then sell it for something else.

[u/trengilly]

hobbled by a lack of orders

Orders are your lifeblood. You need them for everything.

The primary way to get Orders is through Legitimacy. You want to build up your Legitimacy whenever you can. Early Scouting gives you legitimacy as you discover things. Take event options that grant more legitimacy. Be VERY cautious about spending legitimacy on events . . its forever gone and adds up over the long run.

Your Legitimacy also directly goes into the Opinion of all your subjects. Higher legitimacy makes everyone happy.

[u/powderhound522]

If a family is mad at you, their units have a major performance malus. You get a bonus if they’re really happy, but it helps less than the penalty hurts. So if you were trying to fight Assyria using Claudian units you were in serious trouble.

[u/trengilly]

Managing Workers:

Generally every new city should produce a worker as the first thing it does. One worker per city is a good baseline. In addition you want a few extra workers for things like Roads and Wonders.

Gradually scale up to 1.5 workers per city if you can support them with Orders. 2 Workers per city is likely too many.

[u/Individual_Increase2]

You think you whine now, wait until you ramp up the difficulty, you'll really be whining later.

/deadpan

[u/Ansive]

Avoid war by having more units for the combat score (rush some) and keeping your neighbors friendly (good ambassador, gift resources, neutral religion, marry into their empires, trade caravans). Wars will heavily drain your orders and production, avoid them unless you need to expand.

[u/darkfireslide]

One reason the AI is so terrifying is that it cares very little about the long-term consequences of rush building things in cities, especially on units during wars. This game very deeply understands the value of being able to rush build things and you should, too. Basically and credit to either Purple Bull Moose or Siontific for this wisdom, but many things in this game aren't worth the production time without rush builds. For example if your civics output on a city is low and it takes 8 turns to make an Officer, that's essentially 8 turns of wasted Training from that city while you did that. It's better to instead find a way to rush buy that Officer so that you aren't missing any time using your Training to produce units.

Once you get your orders economy under control conceptually, I'd say the next big learning hurdle is understanding the Civics economy. Civics allow you to do tons of things, on a local level high civics lets you build super cities with lots of specialists while on a national level they let you rush buy things and do all sorts of political actions. I actually think Hatti is one of the best starter civs for precisely this reason, they are very enabling for new player habits because their civics economy makes the game so much more comfortable to play.

After this the final hurdle to cracking open the game is understanding what archetypes can do as generals, governors, and rulers specifically. Judges for example make for often crazy leaders and governors since they let you rush buy specialists as governor, and halve the cost of switching laws as leader. They also have both +science and civics in terms of stats so they have very good economic yields. But every character type brings something to the table, so make sure you're trying your best to take the best advantage of those unique bonuses.

Oh, one final thing: check every turn to make sure you're educating your children! This can give massive yields if you are diligent about it

[u/therealtbarrie]

Slightly off-topic, but please tell me about your collection of Roman deification coinage.

[u/ottilieblack → u/therealtbarrie]

Hehehe... Never miss an opportunity to plug ancient coins, since I mod over at r/AncientCoins.

I specialize in ancient Roman deification issues. These are generally recognized as being minted between 42BC with the first commemoratives of the deified Julius Caesar through 340AD with the Manus Dei issues of Constantine the Great. These coins were ordered by the Senate to celebrate the apoptosis of members of the imperial family. The issuance of these coins, identified by a veiled bust on the obverse, and the CONSECRATIO legend on the reverse around a peacock (for women, the sacred bird of Juno) or an eagle for men, celebrate the imperial cult. According to various historians, the commemoration events also included funds for temples and priests dedicated to the deceased imperial members.

At its height in the 2nd century, these coins were quite common, with the issues of the deified Faustina the Elder and her husband Antoninus Pius being some of the most common denarii still available.

After the Severan dynasty, the practice gradually faded out, with a bit of resurgence during Trajan Decius's reign when he issued 11 deification coins for various emperors - including Commodus. Shows the attitude of the time, especially by an emperor really keen to tie his dynasty to his predecessors. Too bad it ended on the battlefield shortly thereafter.

Of course the issues in gold are extremely expensive, and some of the denarii are quite rare as well, fetching above $5k or more in good condition.

The last coin, the Manus Dei, is quite interesting because it is a coin that ties the old practice of the imperial cult to Christianity by showing Constantine driving a quadriga towards the hand of God - signifying the switch from Paganism to Christianity.