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Sunday, November 15, 2015

Let's Play Civilization 5 as Wu Zetian of China

My first Immortal difficulty campaign as America went to hell fast for self-inflicted reasons.

I thought I can do a lot better so I started another campaign just as I was done with America - their publication will overlap as I want to keep all my series to one episode per day, and I don't particularly want to delay this one.

So here's the new campaign as Wu Zetian of China. We're playing on China map, and I hand-picked three opponents - Sejong of Korea, Oda Nobunaga of Japan, Genghis Khan as Mongolia. Other four opponents are Casimir III of Poland, Montezuma of the Aztecs, Napoleon of France, and Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon.

That's my second campaign on immortal difficulty, and I'd say it went a lot better than the first one. There were some challenges and minor mistakes, but nothing on the scale of America campaign.


If you want to follow the series, here's the playlist to which episodes will be published, or simply follow my channel.

Mods used are nearly the same:
As for modding changes:
  • This time More Luxuries is working, as it was incompatible with Great Plains Plus map used in America campaign.
  • I wasn't totally convinced about Reform and Rule mod, but I didn't find a good replacement. I'm open to suggestions, but I don't want to go back to vanilla.
  • It turns out Race for Religions massively nerfs religions by moving all the good stuff to reformation beliefs, so religions are pointless if you don't take whole piety tree. I didn't realize that in my America campaign when I had no shot at religion game anyway, but I'm pretty sure I won't be using this mod in the future. Religions are already very weak, they don't deserve more nerfing. And it already overlaps with New Beliefs Pack (which adds more options without nerfing religions), so there's no reason to use both.
  • Promotions Pack - it has really good promotions for mounted units (+1 movement per level), and decent promotions for archers (they can get up to +2 range on very high levels, so by the time Archers become Gatling Guns they remain useful) and siege units (similar to archers, except they rarely get very far with levels), but it's really miserable for all other unit types, especially to Swordsmen-line units who never get anything good, and Pikemen and Tanks who both get far worse upgrades than mounted units. I'm seriously considering writing my own mod here.
Another minor thing - during America campaign I figured out how to make custom thumbnails for youtube videos. So now depending on game I might use that feature a lot. Civ5 really needs it, otherwise youtube just chooses diplomacy pics, which is fairly poor idea.

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