taw's blog: ravnica

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Let's Play Civilization 5 as Jarad of Golgari Swarm - in Polish

After my fun "Let's Play Civilization 5 as Poland in Polish" series I wanted to do one more series in Polish, and I also wanted to play one more Civ5 game on Ravnica, so I did both those things at once and started a Polish Golgari game.

Here's playlist, and here's the first episode:

As usual schedule is one episode per day, at exactly the same time of day.

There are a few minor changes compared with Izzet campaign:

It's in Polish. For now I plan to keep the channel something like 80% English and 20% Polish, and all Polish stuff will be very obviously marked as such - as you can see from flag above.
I'm playing on Standard sized map with 8 civilizations, not obvious 10 civilizations on large map as before. 10 guilds is better flavor, but standard game speed is sort of balanced around standard map size, and increasing map size strongly implies bumping game speed to epic speed (or domination becomes really hard), which together would make campaign twice as long. I feel standard map speed/size lead to just better flowing campaign, at least as default.
I downgraded EUI to older version. New version unfortunately breaks a lot of mods. For some reason EUI authors don't provide links for downloading previous working version, in spite of new version being known broken, which goes very much against basic etiquette of all things software. I hereby denounce them for that. Fortunately I had old version saved locally.
As a result a few mods which were broken in Izzet campaign are working fine now - in particular More Luxuries mod.
I removed "Race for Religion" mod, as I'm playing with "New Beliefs Pack" mod, and it was silly to have both.
I manually fixed XP From Forts mod so it doesn't have crazy requirement that citizen needs to work citadel/fort tile (like that wasn't underpowered enough) and now I'm playing with it. It's been modestly useful, but nothing crazy.

Here's all guild mods:

Here's all other mods:

Other things I want to do on the channel

Right now the channel is fairly busy with 1 Factorio and 4 Civilization 5 series. Even counting Polish Civilization 5 as something separate, that's still a bit less diversity than I planned. Then again, I really wanted to play more Civilization 5 after that America campaign, and it's like the most recordable game ever.

So I'm planning to do a few more series for games other than Civilization 5, and I also want to do some non-gaming content.

An awkward side effect of this is that it's going to be a huge number of videos being published every day. Initially I just told youtube to autoannounce every video on my twitter, facebook, and google+ feeds, but that's getting a bit silly at this point due to volume of such automated announcements.

On the other hand, it's not like I have a better idea. But you should totally subscribe if you like my videos.

Oh and if anybody has any idea how to get channel art to be something more sensible than my Google profile pic + random landscape, please tell me.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Let's Play Civilization 5 on Ravnica as Niv Mizzet of Izzet League

The first time I played Civilization 5 I thought it's OK game, but nothing special. Gradually my attitude changed to something like this:

Yo dawg, I heard you like civ5...

So without waiting for other series to finish getting published, here's another one! Just like my previous series (Poland in Polish, America on Great Plains map, and China on China map) it's just a tiny bit gimmicky: we're playing with all 10 guilds of Ravnica on a large fractal map.

Here's episode one. Episodes will be released one a day at same time.

The playlist where they'll all get published is here. Or you could just follow my channel on youtube.

The goal is to take all 10 guild halls, get voted Supreme Ruler of Ravnica, or build a spaceship to Innistrad or some other plane. Well, technically culture victory is also a possibility, but it never seemed even remotely viable in any of my previous campaigns, so I don't normally give that much thought.

Our guild is Izzet League, led by great dragon Niv-Mizzet. All 10 guilds seem to be extremely powerful, so they're sort of balanced against each other, but would be somewhat overpowered mixed with regular civs.

Our uniques are:

All science buildings are upkeep free, give +1 gold, and +2 happiness
Izzet Boilerworks - factory replacement which doesn't require coal, and gives +4 science and +50% science
Hypersonic Dragon - basically medieval Helicopter Gunship, a Knight replacement with strength 20, movement 5, bonus vs mounted units, and hover. It can't take cities, and doesn't upgrade to anything.

Sounds pretty strong? Just watch the series to see what other guilds get. Their uniques gave me more trouble than I had from uniques in any other campaign (my suffering in America campaign was mostly self-inflicted).

In the campaign I play mostly decently (unlike in that America campaign...). There's a good deal of unwarranted arrogance which sometimes backfires, but I totally blame all that on roleplaying an elder dragon.

The mods for guilds are:

Other mods used:

There were a few issues with these mods:

New version of Extended User Interface has some absolutely dreadful default behaviour with dialogs autoclosing, I wanted to roll back to old version but that's extremely unsafe with civ5 mods, and can easily result in corrupted campaign impossible to continue (my Germany campaign was lost this way). Fortunately after the campaign I figured out how to turn off silly behaviour.
I have two mods changing religions - Race for Religions, and New Beliefs Pack. I planned to just go for one of them, but somehow I messed it up and it's another campaign with both. It was actually surprisingly good due to some other choices I made, but I'll make sure to pick just one in the future.
I used different mod for unit promotions, and I'm still really tempted to just write my own. Unless you know of another I should give a shot first.
Units donated by militaristic city states with 0xp feel worthless. Is there any mod that lets them have higher XP? I tried one that was supposed to give units 1xp/turn from just sitting in a citadel (until some maximum based on your tech), but it never worked.
Are there any mods which change puppet cities priorities to something more sensible (production focus instead of gold focus would be a good start)?
Are there any mods which fix priorities for tile expansions? The algorithm is completely ridiculous choosing featureless ocean tiles and tundra leading nowhere over strategic/luxury resource tiles, which requires a lot of money, but also a lot of tile assignment babysitting, which is not part of the game I enjoy particularly much and prefer to leave automated 90% of the time.

In any case, I had tons of fun, and I'll definitely start another civ5 campaign soon.